12.01.21
There Must be Something Better
To everything there is a season, and time to every purpose under heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1).
Previously, King Solomon had presented arguments saying that life is nothing but grasping after wind or soap bubbles. Life is monotonous, wisdom is vain, wealth is futile and death is certain. He is now going to spend the rest of the book dealing with those arguments in the light of God’s control.
In Ecclesiastes 3, Solomon will discover that God is sovereign. Although the world seems unpredictable, God is in control of it. In an apparently unjust world, God has created humans with an insatiable thirst for Him. In a word, only God can make sense out of life.
Solomon states his principle at the start: To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. The examples (2-8) provide goads to our thinking. All events, both the sublime and the mundane, fall under God’s control, even birth and death. The contrasts in the verses cancel each other out, and without God in the picture their net profit is zero!
Because we cannot control what happens in life, life seems vain. However, God has appointed a season for every event in life, and there is suitable time in God’s plan for every purpose under the heavens. We can respond to God’s sovereign control in one of two ways. If we are willing to depend upon God, there will be hope and stability. If not, we will have chaos and hostility toward God. Only submission to the sovereign God can bring meaning to life.
Once again he asks the key question of the book and of life: “What profit has he that works in that in which he labors?” (9)
Verse 11 is an important poignant verse: He has made everything beautiful in his time: also he has set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end. God’s original creation was said to be “very good.” So, anything bad or ugly in creation has to be attributed to sin. God has made the world beautiful, that is, with an ordered pattern. We cannot always see this order because we are sinful and limited creatures. It is as though we are looking at the tangled threads on the back of a beautiful tapestry God is weaving.
He has set the world in their heart. God created us with a sense of eternity in our hearts, with an insatiable thirst for eternal things. We have a compulsive, innate drive to know how God’s creation all fits together. For this purpose man has developed chemistry, geology, physics, biology, etc. This is why, in this life under the sun, leaving God out of the picture leads to frustration.
According to Henry Morris, verses 14, 15 present the principle of mass/energy conservation, considered by most scientists to be the most universal, best-proved law of science. Nothing is now either being created or annihilated. This is a bedrock of Creation and these verses alone disprove evolution.
Because God is in control, the best thing we can do is live joyfully within the boundaries established by Him. We may not understand life as much as we would like, but we still can accept life as God’s good gift to us. Life is not a curse to avoid, but a blessing to embrace.