Understanding the Times (Ecclesiastes 3:1-15)

The opening verses of Ecclesiastes 3 are well known as a folk song from the 1960s, although I suspect most people today will not know where they come from originally. Yet even those who do know where they are from might not be able to state what they mean. The words are true to life, some might say. But I suspect that the question we should ask is whether or not they describe true life rather than being merely true to life. After all, since the words come in contrasting pairs, perhaps the author is saying that life is meaningless, that no matter what you try to do, the opposite will also always occur. Or is he saying that life is full of variety, that we should not be presumptuous about anything remaining the same?

To whom do the times belong?

In verse 11, the author says that times belong to God, that he is involved in them. As we read the list of scenarios we can see that one thing the author is saying is that the ‘times’ are inescapable. Clearly this perspective could disturb people. We see in life that it does, and it is interesting that people are more likely to acknowledge the involvement of God in dark times rather than in pleasant times. Usually the acknowledgement of God is included in an expression of rebellion. But the rebellion is pointless because a person cannot get out of whatever his current time is until God allows the change. Many people are frightened at the prospect of a God whom they cannot escape from. In contrast, I would be disturbed if God at any time did not know where I was.

Another thing that the author is saying is that each time is short in the sense that none of them is permanent. No matter what it is, whether it is a seemingly lengthy time of enjoyment that passes so quickly, eventually it turns out to be short. The same is true for those who go through periods of difficulty. No matter how long it seems at the time, in reality the period is short. People can look back on times of illness, businessmen can look back on times of loss, yet no matter how difficult, the time was short even if it lasted for several years.

One verse that comes to mind in this regard is Paul’s exhortation that we should redeem the time (Eph. 5:16). Since each of the times is short, it means that we have to be quick about redeeming it, otherwise that moment will be gone for ever. Many people can look back and see that they did not redeem the time when it was there. Life is composed of lost opportunities.

In addition, the words of Paul stress our responsibility to deliver our times from another power who may be trying to misuse them. The devil will tempt us in different ways regarding those times. The times can be occasions of distraction from discovering what God wants us to do.

Yet although the times are all short, each of them is an opportunity for God to show his skill. This is the emphasis of verse 11: ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time.’ I assume by ‘beautiful’ the author means that in all of life there is a kind of balance overseen by God. The sovereignty that he describes is not exercised from a distance, as it were. Instead he depicts the involvement of God in every circumstance of life. He is there in the good times and the bad, during all the changes and opportunities, the profits and the losses.

It is good to have a God who is skilled and able to make all our ‘times’ beautiful. As we have observed, many of those ‘times’ are tragic and seem beyond recovery. We may think that nothing beneficial can come out of those situations, yet the skilful God can turn the ugliest circumstance or set of circumstances into something of great beauty. This is an Old Testament equivalent of what Paul says in Romans 8:28 about God being able to work everything together for good concerning those who love God.

This perspective explains the author’s rather startling conclusion that the appropriate response to all our times is joy. Does he mean that they should have joy in all of them or joy in some of them? We have to think about this a bit because there are plenty situations in which expressing joy would seem to be inappropriate. Yet while we may not be able to be joyful about all the details we can be joyful regarding what God can do about them. Is Solomon not asking us to have an outlook of expectation even when times are dark? It is an opportunity to marvel at the wisdom of God and helps us understand the comment of James that we should count it all joy when we fall into difficult trials and temptations.

Looking at this passage with New Testament eyes we can say that God is able to deal with the times because he has dealt with the main reason as to why there are unpleasant and difficult times. The reason is the presence of sin and its consequences in this world. Ecclesiastes does not tell us how God will deal with sin but we know how he did. He did so through his Son Jesus when he suffered on the cross. Because he did so, he can also function as the God who works sovereignly, skilfully, and sensitively in our circumstances. And that is the consolation offered to us as we live in a sceptical world that suspects that nothing can be done about all the problems.

So the times belong to the skilful sovereign God who is always near us? But that still leaves us wondering about the purpose of the times, and the author gives us an insight into that reason when he tells us that God 'has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.'

The endlessness of eternity

We can see from verse 11 that God gives a particular blessing to each person and that blessing is an awareness of eternity. Some translations give other renderings, but the word is usually translated as eternity. Of course, the aspect of eternity that we have is the eternity ahead. We cannot sense anything about the past eternity because we did not exist in it. But we have an awareness that we will exist in the future.

The ability to think about the eternity to come is part of our dignity as humans made in the image of God. Your neighbour’s cat does not think of eternity. The dolphins, the creatures that some scientists think are the most intelligent, have never thought of eternity. But we, because we are the image-bearers of God, are able to imitate him and consider what is ahead in eternity. We should never minimise our dignity of being created in the image of God by refusing to think about our eternal future.

C. S. Lewis once said, ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.’ This unsatisfied longing is an expression of having eternity in our hearts.

Lewis put it another way when he wrote that they are ‘only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.’ But they are part of God’s way of telling us that there is another world for which we should be longing.

In addition, we are aware, and cannot remove this awareness from ourselves, that eternity is our destiny. Despite the attempts of countless individuals to explain it away, people still want to believe in an after-life. Even although the Bible is ignored, people still look ahead to some form of existence after death. Their opinions, no matter how strange, indicate that eternity is written in their hearts. God has put it there and we cannot get rid of it.

Moreover, this awareness of eternity creates for us our greatest dilemma. Since we know we are going to exist there, we want to find out some details concerning it. Yet we cannot. Instead we have to depend upon God telling us what eternity will be like. And he has done so, in the Bible. In its pages he has provided all that we need to know about eternity.

Because of that information in the Bible, eternity becomes for us either our greatest delight or our greatest dread. It is our greatest possible delight because we can spend eternity in the perfect new universe that God will create. But it can be our greatest dread because we know that we could spend eternity in hell, the place of endless punishment. The fact is, every one of us at this moment is conscious that we are going to live forever, and that fact either fills us with delight or with dread.

Our place in eternity depends on the God we thought about earlier. Eternity is his space, which he has chosen to share to some extent with his creatures. We can share it with him or we can exist in it without his blessings and experiencing his judgment. Eternity should be our chief concern.

The challenge to live for eternity

I recall a common comment in the Christian circles in which I was converted. It was that I was exhorted to live with ‘eternity’s values in view’. What is the challenge for us? The first aspect is to accept our ignorance, particularly in that we cannot understand at present what God is doing with our ‘times’. The one thing that we do know about them all is that they will have consequences in eternity.

The second aspect of the challenge is to spend our lives living for God, for Jesus. Doing so will make the mundane things of life a source of joy (vv. 12-13). The amazing thing is that we can experience eternal life during our various times. Here we have in mind the quality of eternal life, which is knowing the company of God the Father and Jesus.

The third aspect of the challenge is to think about eternity every day. This, after all, is what your heart was made to do. When you do this, you will discover true pleasure, true longing, true love because thinking properly about eternity will cause you to think about Jesus and what he did in order for sinners to have a blessed eternity.