Ecclesiastes 3 Commentary
Humans live in time. Events are timed. Without time, nothing happens.
The Creator God created time for humans. Every purpose or function happens in time. Or, every purpose requires time.
Patience is born out of an understanding that there is a season for everything.
Time is creation’s sorting tool. It sequences events. Remove time from life, and everything is mixed up in one pot – your birth and your death and everything between exist in the same pot! They are active at the point!
But which human brain can imagine this picture! Timeless existence is impossible from our logical viewpoint!
Indeed, “no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end”. Our definitions are tightly restricted within the boundaries of our senses – the senses themselves being permanently chained to time.
What profit has the worker from that in which he labors?
Is work a “pastime” activity with results already determined? You answer this question based on your level of comfort with the facts presented on the table!
But always remember, humans were introduced to work in the Garden of perfection. The Creator God expected an output from human effort. But if you remove the goalkeeper from the opponent’s team, who wouldn’t accuse you of “fixing” the result of the game?
The Creator God isn’t absent from His creation, both in time and space.
Birth and death are predetermined activities. Do other activities have the same rigid definitions?
We always try to straighten what we cannot straighten. This is man’s occupation handed down from above. It feels like punishment!
The scripture pours scorn on human effort in the statement that there is a time for everything. The things about which we pray so fervently are actually things that we cannot straighten. By design, a man is born. Again, by design, a man must die. The timing of these events is totally out of men’s control.
Yet the LORD makes all things beautiful in its time. The saint is reminded of Romans 8, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
But who can fathom what the LORD has done from beginning to end? Who can understand that the LORD has set eternity in the hearts of men? Why do we want to live forever? Why are we obsessed with preservation? Who sits down to see that all this is from the LORD God?
This rigid design, what for?
The LORD “does it so that people will fear Him.” The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.
And so it remains, whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before. We are not independent of the past. The past defines the future. Or, what the LORD said or did defines what happens. God calls back the past.
There is a time for judgment. The LORD draws a line between righteousness and wickedness. It is an event rigidly defined in the same manner as birth and death.
Then the teacher hints at the fact that death is just one of the events. It’s not exactly the end. It is an event in the life of God’s creation. Just like time happens to both humans and animals, death happens to both. There should be more beyond the grave. But it remains a black box
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