A Time to Heal | Ecclesiastes 3:1-5featured

Friday evening we gathered near one another around the piano in the Stordahl home to proclaim together “Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me!” Joining our voices in song, we praised the God who changes not, whose compassion fails not throughout the seasons. Summer, winter, springtime, and harvest invite us to see God’s great faithfulness, mercy and love, that nature sings to as the sun, moon, and stars perfectly follow their courses aligned by His hand.

We also ate tacos!

This is how we began our Women’s Weekend retreat with the women of River City and friends. This song prepared us for how we would see the Lord in Ecclesiastes together that evening.

“We will open our Bibles in a little bit, but for now, I just want you to listen,” I began as I read Ecclesiastes 3:1-15.
What I want to highlight for us today is how to read this word, how to see God in this word, and how to apply this to life.

How to Read This Word

Ecclesiastes is a book of wisdom literature. When we want to know how to read Ecclesiastes, this is helpful to know and understand. Most of us are aware the Bible is split into the Old and New Testament. The Old Testament is before the time of Jesus. The New Testament is the life of and after the time of Jesus. Within the Old and New Testament, the books are ordered by different styles of literature.

*Genesis through Deuteronomy are books of Law.
Joshua – Esther are books of History.
Job – Song of Solomon are books of Poetry.
Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes specifically fall into the Poetry section but are considered books of Wisdom.
Isaiah – Malachi are Prophets with Isaiah – Daniel being Major Prophets and Hosea – Malachi being Minor Prophets.
Matthew – John are  books of the Gospel.
Acts is a book of History.
Romans – Jude are Epistles which means they are Letters.
Revelation: Prophecy/Apocalyptic

They are organized in different places, because they are different types of writing. This matters because it helps us to understand how we will read the book differently. I will read a letter differently than I will read a book of history. And I will look for different things when I am trying to understand how it is written. Ecclesiastes falls into the Poetry section. This tells us we will see things we would see in poetic writing like imagery, rhythmic structure, figures of speech, and emotional expression. Because it is one of the three wisdom books we will see characteristics like the word “wisdom” and “understanding,” appear more frequently. The wisdom books speak more of observations of life and human experience than on visions, prophecies or events that took place in Israel’s history like we would see in other books of the Old Testament. When we come to Ecclesiastes, we have some of the Old Testament before us, we are in the poetry books, and we have the prophets and New Testament after us.

We fall right in the middle of this book…the Bible.

It is important to remember that when we start to read Ecclesiastes and we read through subheadings like All is Vanity, Vanity of Wisdom, Vanity of Self-Indulgence, The Vanity of Living Wisely, The Vanity of Toil. Vanity means worthlessness. And we find verses like Ecclesiastes 1:14 “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” It means nothing. This talk of vanity is not false. But we have to read these as truths within their surroundings. We should see when we read from Ecclesiastes 1, that it falls into Ecclesiastes as a whole. This falls into the poetry section, which lands in the Old Testament, which comes before the New Testament, and makes one big book that points us to the story of Jesus Christ who came to redeem His people by living and dying and overcoming death. This whole book points us to Him. So when we read these words we want to understand them in their context in the book of Ecclesiastes. And also within their context in the Bible.

What that leads us to see in chapter 1:2-11 is the preacher who is talking to us lays out a pessimistic worldview. All is vanity: our work is vanity, life is vanity, everything we see, everything we hear, nothing is new, all is vanity. Verse 12-2:23 talks through, within this worldview a pessimistic daily life. The preacher explains how he sought out wisdom, and it was vanity. He sought out enjoyment, it too was vanity. We read these things, and we can see their truth. We read verses like 2:18, “I hated all my toil in which I toiled under the sun.” And we can feel that. There are days and sometimes seasons we feel that. But in the big picture, we know that is not the full story.

So when we come to things in the text that we don’t understand or feel painful or misleading–we are to feel them and count them as truth, but process them within the big picture of the whole Word of God.

How to See God in This Word

Now, in Ecclesiastes 2:24 we see a turning point. Verses 24-26 describe to us a believer’s life in contrast with what we were just reading about. We see enjoyment from the hand of God. Wisdom, knowledge, and joy. Taking us to chapter 3, the Word we are going to live under this weekend. Verses 1-22 describe to us a believer’s worldview.

Here we see God magnified. God has created seasons, order, and balance. God controls these rhythms and time. God is the creator of work. And he makes all things beautiful. God created time, and in us a wonder for all of time, and then placed us in one specific period of time. God gives us the gift of enjoyment; of food, drink, and work. God and His work are forever. He is more powerful than anyone or anything else. He reveals this for our right fear of Him.

We then view life differently when we know these things. We see the seasons as something God has full control over and delight in for His glory. We acknowledge God has formed the time and events of our lives. We see His hand as the assigner of our work and perfecter of its outcomes. We marvel over and fear Him. We cannot comprehend His greatness or His capacities. Yet He still cares to provide us with things to enjoy. In life when we experience seasons that ebb and flow here the preacher allows us to reflect on God being permanent, lasting, and sovereignly in control of human affairs.

How to Apply This to Life

After we have looked at how to properly view this text within the big picture of the Bible and we look at what the text reveals to us about God we are ready to move into what this text reveals to us, or how to live in light of what we see here. Do we live in the vanity the preacher talks about in this book? Or do we live in God’s hand? I think our answer to both questions can rightly be yes.

In original creation there was not death, killing, breaking down, weeping, mourning, casting away, losing, tearing down, or hate. But in the fall of Adam, when Adam first sinned these things were invited into the world and are now our reality. So now where we see birth there is death, where there is building up we experience breaking down, and in this world where there is great love there is also hate. We see these opposing affects laid out in Ecclesiastes over creation and destruction, human emotions, relationships, over our possessions, our speech, our affections, and even over national endeavors.

In Romans 8 this summer we read, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” It says “creation was subjected to futility”. In Romans 8:20 This word, futility is the same word the preacher uses in Ecclesiastes for vanity. When he says all is vanity and a striving after wind. Romans 8 then could read, creation was subjected to vanity. Worthlessness, pointlessness. We see in Romans 8 this leads to pain for all of creation. And this is where we live, our life falls in this place where when there is life there comes death, building up, tearing town, and these seasons. Yet, even when Romans 8 reminds us of the vanity of life, it also points us to the hope that the Spirit is with us in our weakness, and all things do work together for good for those who love God.

There is vanity in life. Yet God makes everything beautiful in it’s time. And in between He is lasting, He is our stability.

*If it seems helpful to you make these notes in your table of contents. To me this is helpful, not only for rightly understanding the writing, but also for navigating where things are found.