Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Ecclesiastes chapter 3 beginning with verse 1. To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Time to be born and a time to die. Time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down. Time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to get and a time to lose. A time to keep and a time to cast away. A time to rend and a time to sow. time to keep silence, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate, a time of war, and a time of peace. May God bless to us His sacred and holy word this evening. When I was in seventh grade, I remember being Woodshop, and sometimes the Woodshop, teacher, I think it was 1966, would play the radio. So here I am, I’m in Woodshop doing something, I forget what I was doing at the time. And I hear this song comes on, and lo and behold, they’re singing Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 versus one day. And it took me by surprise. I thought, I didn’t think these guys would even read to, read the scriptures. I, you know, where did they come up with the wording? They took this right out of Ecclesiastes chapter 3. It shocked me at the time. And then a few years later, Time magazine used a catchy and effective commercial, if you would, using this song, I think it’s by the birds, a rock group, from Ecclesiastes Chapter 3. A song which told you there was a time to be born, a time to die, a time to weep, and the time to laugh and so forth. And they added the words, you know, turn, turn, turn as sort of a couplets between the phrases, the verses, sort of the backup accompaniment. Well, the message from Time magazine was this, we’ll keep you abreast of the times. You know, the important things that are essential to life, you know, we have them all here in our magazine. And you subscribe and then you turn. turn, turn to pages to get to these various phrases and all these circumstances, the births, the deaths, the laughs, the cries will be brought instantly and vividly to life for you. You’ll be well informed. That’s what they thought. Now, Solomon had much more in mind than either the birds were thinking about or Time magazine was thinking about when he… penned these words under inspiration of the Spirit of God. His purpose was not to explain the obvious that things happen. They’re ups and downs in life. Nor was it to inform you that you should do all the things that are listed necessarily in this passage of scripture. There’s something more to this. Something deeper. Something on a much grander scale than that. Most people who read these words seem to miss the whole point of the words. I want to talk about the seasons of life. You must recognize God’s predetermined, predetermined purpose in life. Do things just happen to you? When we talked about this earlier, and as we were going through Eclipse, I told you I think this before. One of my favorite pictures, I almost brought it tonight, but it was so small, I didn’t think everybody would see it, is of the comedian, W.C. Fields. And it shows him with his broken hat, a large bleeding gash on the side of his faith. His nose looks red like he’s been drinking, and he has a black eye. And the caption reads, things happened. I guess he’s coming home with flowers in his hand to give his wife, and he tells her, things happened. It gives you an impression with Field that’s just minding his own business, and a fight broke out, and he was caught up in it. Now, if you know anything about W.C. Fields, he was probably the one that instigated the fight in the first place. But do things just happen? How are you to understand that there is a time for everything? Are the events in your life related to one another in some fashion? Or do they just happen? We don’t have any rhyme or reason. Things happen. In other words, is there any meaning or purpose behind what happens? These are important questions. They touch on your everyday life. I think we need to know that answer to those questions. And Solomon provides it here. You know, a lot of people talk about the weather a great deal because the weather affects what you. do you know sometimes people say we’re going to do this or that the other weather you see that at the bottom weather permitting some people you know you Christian you ought to put dv lord willing you know the Latin for Lord willing down there but you know you can plan something a tornado come along and change all your plans you can plan something and get 24 inches of snow and there’s nothing you can do you you’re stuck in your home things of this nature happen Robert Burns said the best laid plans of mice of men go af agli or agli they go off astray or awry or awry is Solomon speaking of fate here when he talks about this the time what he’s doing here she’s bringing God into the events of your life up to this point we’ve only had sort of a little narrow maybe glimpse of God here or there hinted at but now it’s going to be more obvious and plain in this when personal tragedy strikes there’s a time to die there’s a time to weep there’s a time to mourn a time of loss a time of war is it just the rolling of the dice does it just happen to come up this way what we see here is that divine providence controls every aspect of your life to everything there is a season there is a fixed time according to God’s predestinated purpose, the counsel of his will. Merely to state there’s a time for everything implies purpose. There is a controlling power that sets the time for everything. Your life is scheduled. Can I put it that way by God? He’s not saying here that there’s some inevitable circle of the life and things just come around. Eventually the good times come or the bad times will come along, something of that nature. He wants us to see that these things are in the hands of a wise God who’s controlling everything. it takes place in your life. Well, we would classify as good or bad. His point is that God is on the throne. Look at chapter 3 in verses 10 and 11. He makes this a little more plainly plain for us here. He says, I have seen travail which God has given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made everything beautiful in his time. Also he has set the world in their heart. so that men can find out, no man can find out the work that God makeeth from beginning to end. It’s God that is in doing these things. Look at chapter 7 of Ecclesiastes in verse 14. In the day of prosperity, be joyful. But in the day of adversity, consider, God has set the one over again. the other to the end that man should find nothing after him. God has done this. The time to weep and a time to mourn. So everything depends upon God’s providence. There are appointed seasons. That God’s sovereignty transcends the whole life of every man. Because you’re not just talking here about Christians. We’re talking about the history of man here. What man thinks, and a lot of times is about what the natural man is thinking. Now, it’s true that human agency is involved in the events of verses 2 to 8, but in reality, and this is the point we have to understand, they are acts of God himself, regardless of the human agency involved. God directs men to carry out as well. I like this passage in Proverbs 2024. Man’s goings are of the Lord. How can a man then understand his own way? People do things and they don’t always understand why they do them. Because God is directing them to do it. And they have no clue. God’s secret will is being exercised in life of every human being. Even the what we call apparently free actions, really are directed by God’s providence for his own purposes and ends. His counsel shall stand. He will do all his will and pleasure. Now, you and I have maybe a monthly calendar. I’ve got a month at a time, and I put all kinds of doctor’s appointments, and I’ve got to get the car repaired on this date, and I have the times and all that on my calendar. And I schedule things. Here. we have God saying, I have it all scheduled. Everything’s scheduled in your life. As verse one seems to indicate to us very clearly, there is to everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose unto heaven. To everything. It’s not, well, God will just schedule the big things and you can’t care of little things in life. No. everything is scheduled by God. There’s a passage in Psalm 102.3. Thou shalt arise and have mercy upon Zion for the time to favor her. Yay, the set time has come. What do they mean by that? God’s secret will, his purpose, his time to do it is now. He’s going to do it. So divine providence controls your life. Human responsibility doesn’t do away with divine control of your life. Now, if you read the book of Proverbs, it’s very clear. I mean, the hand of the diligent is made fat, things like this are stated. If you work hard at your job, you know, kings will notice it. You’ll move up. Things of this nature. It seems like, well, if you really apply yourself, you should do well. Things of this nature are listed there. Diligence, discernment appear to be keys in controlling your future. However, if you read your future. through the book of Farber, you also noticed that he emphasizes humility. Because God usually rewards hard work and what you reap, you sow. You can’t have, be guaranteed. There’s no guarantee of that. God oversees all. Sometimes hard work ends in frustration. Sometimes the most careful plans you make fail. Events come along, you can’t overcome by hard work and careful planning. French Emperor Napoleon would have beaten Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo had it not rained that early in the morning, and he had to wait to land dried a bit before his cannon would be effective. Those days, they didn’t have so much an explosive shot as big balls, and they would bounce and knocked people down like bowling pants. That’s what happened. And they’d sent a wall of these metal balls at you. They had balls. That’s how you got injured. But he couldn’t get the guns going early. And every minute he lost, every hour he had to wait, the Prussians who had been beaten earlier at Lingya two days earlier, were making their way onto the front, getting closer and closer. And so right at the crucial moment of the battle, he has to send his excess troops over to hold off the Prussians, thus they cut in behind him and cut off his retreat route. And he lost the battle. Even Wellington admitted after it was a close-run thing. He said, it was about as close as you can get. His plans were ruined because it rained, and he couldn’t control the rain. So you must recognize God’s predetermined purposes in the events of life. Now, secondly, tonight, you cannot exercise control over the events of life. You’re not the captain of your own destiny. Some people are determined to live out their lives in a godless manner, and they think they can control their life. and every aspect of it. There’s talk about self-reliance, about controlling your own destiny. W.E. Henley threw down the gauntlet against the claims of God. And here’s what he wrote. He wrote this poem called Invictus, where you were the captain of your fate. It goes like this. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. under the bludgeonings of chance. My head is bloody but unbowed. It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. You know, I went to a funeral one time. I was doing the funeral. And here, the buddy of the guy I was doing the funeral. comes up to me afterwards and says, this was their motto, Invictus, was their motto for life. Guess what? The man that died couldn’t control the cancer he had and couldn’t control when he died. There was a time to be born and there was a time to die and all his thinking he was a captain of his fate went down to drain. This guy proudly still thinking, that’s our model, that’s how we live our life. I think what? Godlessness. is this. I challenge you to live out, you know, Henley’s Creed. As long as the sun shines, long as things are going good in your life, the time of laughter, time of joy and so forth, when good things are happening, you can be dancing. You can be rejoicing. I’m the captain of my faith. Ah, but when it’s the time to weep, a time to mourn, a time of war, a time of difficulty like that, I got news for you. You can’t control these things and is made very clear to you. You cannot. Martin Luther, with characteristic bluntness, gets to the heart of the matter. He says, all this is directed against the free will of man and against all human purposes and fancies, but especially against the notion, that it is in our power that determines seasons and hours and persons and measures in place, that we can settle how the affairs of this world shall go, how its great potent tense shall rise and fall, how joy and sadness building up and pulling down, war and peace shall succeed and take place, take the place of each other, how they shall begin and end. It is to impress on us the fact that ere the hour arrives, it is wasted effort for man to think, and their proposals are useless and in vain. In fine, we are taught that nothing comes to pass before the hour fixed for it by God. Most of the events that are listed here are simple enough to comprehend. So they really need no explanation, verse two, when he talks about, birth and death, we understand that clearly enough. Planting and uprooting, we get that. Killing, maybe there’s a time to kill your animals and time to keep them. A time for capital punishment when you have to take somebody’s life. Time of war, you might have to fight for your country, but there’s also a time of healing. A time to tear down and a time to build you know, the barn gets old and the wood’s rotting and it’s leaking and you just got to replace it. It’s time to tear that down and rebuild a new one. There’s time for weeping. There’s painful moments in life. There’s time for laughter. There’s joyful moments in life. There’s a time to mourn, maybe the death of a loved one. There’s a time to dance, maybe at a wedding. Something of that nature. The scatterers. of stones and the gathering of them. In verse 5, I’ll talk about just a moment. There’s a time to embrace. Maybe it’s a good relationship. A time to refrain from embracing. Maybe there are hard feelings. Maybe there’s division. A time to gain. Possessions and wealth. A time to lose. The market crashes and all the hard work you put into it, you lose everything. A time to keep your clothes. the car, and a time, of course, to cast aside. The clothes wear out. My brother used to kid me, because I’d drive the cars until they would die, and he’d help me fix them, usually. And so it was one of those things, you know, well, there is a time when it’s time to junk the car. You know, it’s just not worth putting any more money and effort into it. Is it time to, tear into men. You know, to mend close, sometimes you have to tear the stitches out. Replace a section of it or something of this nature. Re-stitch it. This happens. There’s a time to be silent and not cast our pearls before swine. There’s a time to speak up and admonish and instruct people. There’s a time to love and to hate. We ought to hate sin. We ought to hate those who hate God’s who are Paul’s gone. Sometimes we have to hate father and mother if we want to be Christ’s disciples. There’s a time to love. There’s a time of war, time of peace. These things, you know, touch you, uplift you, buffets you, disappoint you, and sometimes devastate you. The truth is, though, they happen to you, and they happen because of God’s providence in hand. That’s why. happen. So you are not the captain of your own destiny. The events of your life are interlocking with those of others. Now it’s natural as we look at these verses to think, well, this is speaking about my life, and it is speaking about your life. Well, when you think about it, is there a birth that does not affect the parents? The relatives? You know, grandma and grandpap and others who have are also affected by it? I remember when Raina had the twins, Rebecca and Sarah. I mean, it wasn’t just one doctor or a nurse that was in. We had three doctors in there and two different nurses, and I think there was a couple of people in there just looking, just viewing what was happening because you don’t get twins that often, and they wanted to see it. And so Raina said, after me and everybody’s brother was in here, you know. So you don’t Not just one person is affected by birth and so forth. The same could be said with regard to death. We look at the funeral home and we see how many people show up and there’s family there, there’s relatives, and so forth, and we could go on and on. Think about this. When you have a child, it affects business. You need diapers, whether you buy cloth ones, or whether you use the disposable ones. You have to have diapers. You’ve got to have a crib. You’ve got to have a car seat. In other words, it affects other people as well. People also possess a sense of national identity. The stones gathering and dispersed here, I think, has something perhaps to do with that. One of the ancient practices. practices, and you’ll see this in 2nd Kings, chapter 3, for example. When you defeat your enemy, sometimes they would pick stones up and cast them on the fields of their enemy so that they would put, every soldier had to pick up one stone and throw it on the field. And so as the soldiers went through the area, the next thing you know, the whole field is covered with stones, and you can’t just plow it up, you have to remove all those stones. They were basically destroying the land. so you can’t easily farm it. Conquering armies would ruin the fields of enemies. Jesus predicted that the Romans would tear down all the stones of the temple. Not one would be left upon another. Stones were gathered to build walls, to protect cities from invasion, to build watch towers, to use as weapons and catapults and slingshots and things of this nature. So you gather stones or you disperse them, depending on what you’re doing in war. While this is capable of individual application, maybe you have to rebuild your wall outside near your driveway or something. Whatever the case may be, if you have a stone wall, you may have to rebuild it because the weather, you know, pushes the stones out, and eventually it begins to collapse on you. But it’s also involved in wartime. that there was all these, you know, building and tearing down and things of this nature. This, you know, the planning uprooting may have natural implications. God says, I planted the Israelites in the land of Cayman. Then he uprooted them when he sent them off to Babylonian captivity. Love and hatred toward God’s people have arisen according to the purpose of God. God turned the hearts of Egyptians against the Israel. they would hate them. If you read Psalm 1.05, I think you’ll find that to be the case. In most cases, both the individual and the national application can be found in these verses. So that has a really wide dimension to it. When God punishes a nation for wickedness, the righteous often are dragged into it. Lot, in Sodom, in Gomorrah situation. Look at Jeremiah. Look at Daniel. When Israel was wicked, and he gets hauled off of the Babylonian captivity. Jeremiah gets hauled off. And Jeremiah gets hauled off and is brought under captivity for a period of time. And they let him go back to where he wanted to go. Because he had to go of his prophesying against the Israelites. You find your plant closing, the business. waning God’s judgment, maybe, bringing economic disaster upon a nation. It affects the righteous. Elijah comes along. He proclaims God’s judgment against the land. It’s not going to rain, except for by my word. And off he goes to hide at God’s request. And he’s by the Brook Cherath, and he gets the ravens who bring him the food to eat, and he drinks from the brook, but guess what? The famine became so severe that the brook dried up. Yes, you see, even the righteous are affected. So things don’t just happen. Psalm says, hey, there’s a time for everything, a season, and everything is involved, and it’s God’s hand it brings it to pass. Not fate. Now let me just give you three quick words here. and the first word is a word of comfort. Everything about you in this life is in perpetual change. It’s always changing. You know, all these fluctuations are under God’s absolute control. To everything, there is a fixed time, a predetermined purpose, known under God, all his works from the beginning of the world. Acts chapter 15, verse 18. God, right. times all events according to his excellent purpose and wisdom. And as a believer, we have to remember this. All the motions of Providence serve God’s purpose of grace toward you as a child of God. For we know that all things, time of birth and time of death, the weeping, the mourning, the morning, all these things are in God’s hands and work for the good of them. that love God and are called according to his purpose. It is the will of God who loves you to bring these things into your life as a believer. Your times are in his hands, as the psalmist says in Psalm 3115. Now that’s a happy thought in a world of misery and sorrow that we’re going through. We have to keep that in mind. That’s a word of comfort. Let me give you a word of purpose. There’s a time to be born. The Spirit of the Lord made me, and the breath of the Almighty have given me life. Job 33, 4. Why were you born? Why were you born now at this time, period, in history? Didn’t the Lord determine this? Are you working out the great end for which God placed you in this world? Because he brought you into this world in a story. certain time, to meet certain people, to bring the gospel of God to bear in certain people’s lives. You are to serve God. Maybe God has given you a time to be born so that you end up a godly a wife and are raising children in the fear of the Lord. Maybe it’s to bear witness for Christ to co-workers, friends, relatives, neighbors. But ask yourself, what of you? What are raising children? am I doing for God who timed my birth and placed me here for a reason? My third point is this. A word of warning. There’s a time to die. Are you prepared to die? You will die. The Bible says after the fall of Adam, there’s a time. Once, it’s a point of the man wants to die in the book of Hebrews. You’re going to die. Have you given any thought to your eternal destiny? You die and then what? where are you going to go? Where are you going to spend the rest of eternity? Now, for the Christian, when we die, we’re thinking, yeah, it’s a time to go home to be with the Lord. Thomas Goodwin was talked about one time about how, at first, he thought death was his enemy. He didn’t realize how precious it was. He says, this is a precious thing. I get to go home to be with my Lord. he said, I feared it, but here it’s really a good thing for him. But my friends, if you don’t know the Lord, then it’s a dreadful thing. Because you’re going to wake up, like the rich man in the story with Lazarus, lift up your eyes in hell, being tormented by the flames. That’s not the way to die. But it’s a fixed time. You can’t change the time. you can’t extend it. I don’t care how much money you have in the bank. I don’t know how many millions you got saved up. I don’t care if you’re a billionaire. You can’t buy another second for your life. You’re going to die when God says it’s time to die. This night, thy soul shall be required to you. It’s time. It’s a word of warning. A word of purpose and a word of comfort. Just from the first two verses here. May God bless us. As we think about these things. You see how Solomon’s bringing God into the picture? He’s left God out early on. Taking man and said, okay, go ahead. Try all this stuff. I already did it. Now God is being brought into the picture more fully, more extensively. And we see what kind of God he is. He controls all things. May God bless to us. His word this evening.