Wake Up Call Part 3

This is a wakeup call for both people who would avoid the idea that God is sovereign, and those who (at least say) strongly affirm God’s sovereignty (Reformed).

Transition: Solomon gives us two realities in our lives and how God can both challenge us and encourage us.

Life Moves Beyond our Control, but God Orders things Precisely

Eccl 3:1-8

Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 ESV

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a 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 seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

In this passage we get a beautiful picture of the rhythms of life.

It’s been a famous folk song. … It’s quoted at funerals (even atheists)

The rhythms rumble through our life, we find them happening to us without our awareness of what is really going on, and the very fact that life keeps changing leaves us with no lasting success or feeling of deep satisfaction. --Gosbin

Illustration: Like waves in the ocean … we can see rhythms, but no discernable patterns

Isn’t that the problem with life? It is totally unpredictable.

Ill. One person survives cancer, another doesn’t.

Many of these “seasons” are sought out by us. We fight hard to experience the good/positive side of this list. But the problem arrises when the negative side hits.

Solomon saw this reality. This is why he concludes this section with, “What gain has the worker from his toil?”

But this is not the whole story. Look at what he says in verse 11, “He [God] has made everything beautiful in its time.”

Even though it seems like this life is random rhythms, God has in fact ordered all things to perfection.

“If there is any structure, it most likely lies in the fact that the list of opposites is made up of twenty-eight items in fourteen pairs; this means the list is comprised of multiples of seven, the number that symbolizes perfection in the Bible. It is a skillful way of again emphasizing the totality of things that are contained within any human life. .” -Gosbin

This idea is taken further in verse 14, “I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.”

What he is saying is that God sovereignly orders all things just the way they are. We call this God’s providence.

But this is where we might just feel like pawns in God’s little game. This might cause us to despair because, we are not in control and have no way of genuinely affecting what happens to us.

We call this fatalism

Life Would Lose Hope, but God Judges all things Perfectly

Eccl. 3:14-17

Ecclesiastes 3:14–15 ESV

I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.

Solomon, in this chapter, brings together both the big picture (the whole of life) and the individual parts (the seasons of life) and then begins to explain why our lack of control over either is the very thing that can give us hope.

What Solomon is proclaiming here is that God is in fact going to judge everything that happens in this life.

Most of this time this is viewed negatively. God is going to punish all the bad things that have been done. And this issues a challenge that what we do will be accounted for.

But it also should give us hope. “It gives my present actions meaning and weight, and it gives my experienced loses and injustices a voice in God’s presence.”

We can trust that God is “making everything beautiful in its time” (verse 11) and whatever he does “endures forever, nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken away from it” (verse 14).

This means that because God is infinite (seeing the beginning to the end) and I am not; I can experience the different seasons of my life knowing that they are a part of a bigger picture—which is promised to be “beautiful”.

This means I can rest when things are good—not fearing them going away.

This means I can endure and learn from the bad seasons—knowing that God is somehow using them for good.

Illustration: The struggle children have with discipline—the parents understand a bigger picture that is for their good.

We can fully trust God with every season of our lives.

We are told that God is perfectly just and “seeks what has been driven away” (v. 15)

This imagery is suggestive of shepherding, where a farmer deliberately seeks out the animal that has fled the fold and goes to find it and bring it back. In this case, it is all the events of human history that time has chased away into the past, and to us as if they are gone and lost forever. But not to God. He will dial back time and fetch the past into his present to bring it to account.

There’s two main ways we reject God’s sovereign order

We kick against it, we fight it

We fail to maximize each season

Conclusion

Illustration: Dr. William Leslie—Left the mission field in Congo frustrated and defeated after 17 years of ministry—thought he had failed---84 years later thriving churches found hidden in the jungle

Every moment of our lives has immense, eternal value whether we know it or not.

1 Cor. 15:57-58

1 Corinthians 15:57–58 ESV

But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

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