We Must Have the Wisdom to Know the Time
1For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: 2a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. 9What profit has he who works in that in which he labors? 10I have seen the burden which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with.
While we live, there is a season for everything and a time for every purpose. Each day is new to us, and what happens on that day is something we meet for the first time; but to God, the years of human life hold nothing new and nothing first. Ever since God created the world, one generation after another has come and gone within the limited space of this earth; so only the names and the ways of life differ, and in the end it is all repetition. People make what they think are new plans and seem to accomplish them, yet look closely and you find that someone in the past made the same plan and saw it through. Just as you may tear down a building someone else put up and raise a new one in its place, so someone in the future will tear down the building you put up, and yet another will rise where it stood. For all who come into this world with a span of time allotted by God, everything is happening for the first time; but to God, who watches it all, it is only repetition.
Look down from an airplane high in the sky, and you will see a beautiful, peaceful world made of tiny lights. From far away it looks so lovely and calm. When you were down below, though, you will have lived through countless struggles that made you weep and laugh. Perhaps you even pitied yourself, wondering what you had fought so desperately for in so small a world.
Solomon deeply envied people who, though they lacked much compared with one who had lived in wealth as he had, enjoyed joy of soul in God’s wisdom, knowledge, and joy. The reason was that they had not fought fiercely, as he had, for the worthless things of the world; they had looked down from on high and lived for the eternal Kingdom. He had thought everyone lived to satisfy their own desires. Only now did he learn that there are people who, within limited time, live for the sake of eternity.
They had been using a body destined to return to dust, working diligently to prepare for entering the eternal world. When Solomon realized this, he thought their lives beautiful beyond words. He had treated the world as a place merely to eat and drink and pass the time pleasing the flesh, but they had been using the world to prepare to enter the Kingdom of God. That was the deep truth he came to see.
Those who make the decision of faith and turn back quickly can enjoy, even on earth, the peace they will enjoy in heaven. A life lived by faith and a life lived without it differ as heaven differs from earth, because faith has heaven assured by God’s promise. If, like Solomon, you know you should serve God and yet cannot let go of the world, you will regret it when frost has settled white on your head.
Solomon said that there is a time for everything, and he urged us not to waste our time as he had, but to choose rightly when God gives us the opportunity. Because the world goes round and round, he said, we should not rush but judge calmly; and if we look carefully around us and help one another to walk the good way, we can lessen our regrets. From the moment of birth, not only humans but every living thing, animals and plants alike, cannot escape death. As people and animals leave descendants and plants leave seeds, people of faith must leave the gospel in every footstep. When farmers plant, it is with the time of plucking up in view. We are born into this world because we have a purpose to fulfill, and what came of that purpose becomes clear after death.
All things in heaven and on earth, created by God, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, have a beginning and an end. Every life has its anguish and challenges, its joys and sorrows, and at the last, happy or unhappy, an end it will certainly have. The problems we meet in life are not ones we choose, but the faith that runs through that life is ours to choose. So what determines where a person goes after death is not the problems they met in life but the faith flowing in their soul.
We are born with body and soul. If soul and body went back to the dust together, it would not matter how we lived. But if the spirit, the root of life, and the soul, the very being of a person, are judged by God and divided between heaven and hell, then we must live well now, according to God’s will. Only if we fill our lives with God’s grace, with faith in Christ, and with the fullness of the Holy Spirit will Christ the Judge commend us when we meet him. God sent people into this world under Satan’s rule because he wanted them, within their brief lives, to attain to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. If we grow wise in faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, God will help us to be sanctified.
How many days do you have left to live on earth? I am asking how much time you have left, as witnesses of Christ, to sow the seed of the gospel in other people’s hearts. If we sow the seed of the gospel diligently now, God will gather the harvest at the end, storing the wheat in the barns of heaven and throwing the weeds into the burning fire.
If we do not work, more souls will suffer eternal punishment, like weeds thrown into the fire. That is why we must redeem the time and labor. When Solomon says there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up, he is stressing that the times God has set do not change, and how important it is for us to live by the right time.
I hope you will ask yourself whether you have ever seen thistles and thorns grown thick over the hearts of those you love and looked the other way. We ought to set the fire of the Holy Spirit to the hearts of our families, burning off the thistles and thorns and turning them into good soil. We must ask whether we are still indifferent to those souls, or whether laziness has kept us standing idly by.
We must pray for the salvation of souls, in season and out of season. The gospel struggles to take root in a hardened heart, but if we give up without even sowing, God will rebuke us. If our hope is in heaven, we will not be able to bear keeping the gospel to ourselves. Suppose you think, like a coward, “I’m worse off than that person right now; I would be ashamed to share the word, and however I look at it, now is not the time.” Then you will see that soul fall into the fires of hell.
The word is not something we plant in another person’s heart but something we proclaim. If we believe that God will work and preach the word with confidence, God makes the seed we have sown take root and grow in its time. If we stay shut up in an unbelief of our own making, never speaking and missing the time, we may leave the seed of the gospel God entrusted to us to rot. Since the time is set by God, not by us, all we need do is fulfill our calling in the time we are given.
I hope you understand that if you have heard and know the gospel but do not share it because you are ashamed, or do not share it because it is a bother, that too is pride. If we do not proclaim Jesus, whose name is more precious than any other, God will not work for us either. In verses 2–8, Solomon says that as we go through life we must judge the times well and act accordingly. In human affairs as in nature, if we cannot rightly discern the appointed time, we will run into trouble. Everything in the world has its time because God has appointed it, and when each thing happens precisely in its season, that tells us God is the Creator. People try to set the times themselves, but every time, in human affairs and in nature alike, is in God’s hands.
Do you know that your life is not your own? Neither our birth nor our end goes according to our plans. We make plans because we want to live well, but things do not turn out as we wish. We want healthy lives, yet we fall ill; we put everything we own into a business, and it collapses. Just as we are about to give up on life, we find a reason to live, or we watch a powerful enemy fall without our lifting a hand. When we have given up, sure that we will never recover, something happy we never imagined comes our way, or we alone survive a terrible accident, as if by a miracle.
In this way, as we watch what happens in the time God has given us, we come to recognize his grace, and we learn that there is nothing we can do. So the people of the world, who do not know God’s will, ask why he made human beings at all if he was going to do with their lives as he pleased. But they say this because they do not know God’s providence.
God divides wheat from weeds by the faith that has received Christ, and because his holy wheat takes up his work, he wants to gather more wheat. Knowing before the foundation of the world that humanity would sin, God appointed the cross on which Christ would make atonement, and he planned to save those who believe in the grace of that atonement. Those who hold fast to their faith to the end, unmoved by circumstances, are the very ones God has chosen. Called by God, they do their utmost to the last moment never to betray him.
Those who do not believe in Christ complain that it is narrow to make salvation hinge on Christ. But God has given free will to all people equally, so receiving Christ or refusing him is their own choice, and they have no right to slander God. People may believe there is life after death, but unless they acknowledge that Christ is the key to heaven, they cannot enter it.
King Hezekiah fell mortally ill, but when he prayed earnestly to God, he was given fifteen more years. John the Baptist, on the other hand, rebuked Herod for the wrongs in his household and met a senseless death. When we see people like Hezekiah and John leave this world at times no one expected, we know that God is the Lord of life. God in his sovereignty has made all things in the world come to pass in their time. Wisdom, then, lies in considering now how we will live the life we have been given.
God has entrusted to you faith, time, wealth, health, and people, so that you can make the life you were given into a fine work of art. Whenever you said your materials were running short, he supplied more, and when you lacked wisdom, he taught you the right purpose and direction. He gave us the wisdom to paint our children as flower petals, but sometimes we grew too greedy and laid on colors we never wanted, and sometimes we copied someone else’s work and failed. When we had received much from God, we had only to share it with those who had little; instead we left it to rot and were rebuked.
Many times he corrected what had gone wrong in our lives, yet we often ruined them by comparing them with the work of others. Still God told us to lay down our greed and temper and begin again; he gave us the chance to come to faith, and he waited for us. We can thank God because he did not ask us to live like robots. He asked us to use our free will and think hard about how to make our lives beautiful.
To his people who understand his will and are bringing their work to completion, God gives still greater ability and helps them finish it well. Everyone receives the same time and grace, but how a life turns out depends on the heart with which it is lived. The calling of the saints is to guard with all their lives the salvation God has freely given them, and God’s will is that they proclaim that his Son came into this world and atoned for sin. If they live holy lives according to that will, God will boast of them before many and will use their names for honor. I hope you will be such holy saints, bearing a name that precious.
Ecclesiastes 3:4
4a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A single event in the world can be a cause for laughter to one person and a sorrow that brings tears to another. Human affairs are such that the same thing can grieve us or make us glad enough to dance, depending on our situation, like the mother in the old tale whose one son sold salt and the other sold umbrellas. When we watch a game, we are overjoyed if our team wins and worked up if it loses, as if disaster had struck; but in time this game too is just an amusement we met along the way of life. To someone so upset by a loss that they turn violent, the game must matter that much; but in God’s eyes they are only a fool who does not know what matters.
We must have the wisdom to discern whether what we face now is a spiritual matter or simply one of the things that happen in life. To have that wisdom, we must be born again in God; only then can we discern. Human wisdom cannot tell a time to keep from a time to cast away, or a time to build up from a time to break down. To judge rightly, we have to turn back the attacks of evil spirits by faith, refuse to be swayed by our feelings, and not be deceived by what people say. Only when we can see the world through the word of truth can we live by a good conscience. Even when the Holy Spirit guides us, we may not respond keenly at first, and sometimes our own thoughts are so strong that we ignore him. But as we mature through the word, we come to recognize the Holy Spirit at work, and so we gain the wisdom to judge spiritually.
1 Peter 2:4-5
4coming to him, a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God, precious. 5You also, as living stones, are built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Scripture describes Jesus as a living stone, a rock, a white stone, and in other ways. The Jews were called to be built up as a spiritual house, as Jesus is the living stone; but lacking wisdom, they judged him unfit to be a stone for building the temple and rejected him. Yet Jesus became the chief cornerstone of God’s house. To this day, many people think Jesus is worthless.
Jesus, who died powerless on the cross, looks so pitiful to them that they think he will be no help at all in life, and they cast him off without a second thought. But they must understand that a time is coming when they will regret their choice and plead for one more chance. If there are people around you who slander Christ or persecute the church, I hope you will meet them without fear and proclaim the truth boldly. To share the gospel, we must embrace people with love; but when we come under spiritual attack, we can collapse before we have even shared it. That is why you need to stand first on the rock of faith. We must love the soul even of an enemy, yet if we do not know the word, that enemy can defeat us spiritually. We must grow first.
God loved the Jews, yet he rebuked them when they fell into spiritual corruption; and Jesus told his disciples that if people persecuted them when they preached the gospel, they should shake off even the dust on their feet. This teaches us that we must love souls, but be clear about when to embrace and when to cast away.
The apostle Paul, too, staked his life to save souls, yet he said he had handed over to Satan those who divided and hindered the Kingdom of God. Only when we first learn to make such spiritual judgments can we tell a time to embrace from a time to refrain from embracing. If we fear people and try to please them, we will never find the time to share the gospel. The hearts of worldly people are like a cliff with no bottom in sight; if we try to win their hearts first and share the gospel afterward, the right moment will never come.
Sharing the gospel is not begging. It is proclaiming the holy word and freely giving people spiritual food so that their souls do not fall into hell. Though farmers have tended a tree with sweat and care, they will prune it without hesitation, cutting away needless branches to get better fruit. If they miss the time to cut, not only the fruit on the other branches but the whole tree may die; choosing the time well matters that much. Those who cannot tell the way of truth from the way of the world, and who trust in their own wisdom and knowledge, can only perish in the end. If you want to receive God’s grace in abundance, you must not miss the time to cut away every branch that reaches toward the world.
The Holy Spirit will show those who fight evil spirits by faith the right time to cut off the branches they do not need. Solomon, who did not walk with the Holy Spirit, regretted a life lived without distinguishing the times of the flesh from the times of the spirit. The Holy Spirit told him not to go any further into the world and said he must listen to the voice of a good conscience, but Solomon would not bend his will. Likewise, if you hear the words of the Holy Spirit and, like Solomon, refuse to open your heart, no one can help you.
In winter a tree looks dead, but in spring new shoots appear. Our life may be as cold as winter, but if we put our roots down deep toward Christ, God will make us live in the eternal heaven, where there is no worry or anxiety, no evil one, and no death. Those who have received Christ will turn a vain life into an opportunity to exalt God’s name, and, carrying out his will, they will bring dying souls to life. God is looking for such people and longs to bring them into glory.
Friends, we cannot stop the years from flowing by, but if we use them as soil for bearing fruit, we can become faithful servants of God. Though our life is a pilgrim’s, may you be saints who serve faithfully with all your heart, gather much fruit, and give glory to God.