A Series on Ecclesiastes - #03
Speaker Notes
Ecclesiastes 3 “Eternity in Our Hearts”
A Time for Everything
3.1 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
9 What do workers gain from their toil? 10 I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. 12 I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. 13 That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. 14 I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.
15 Whatever is has already been,
and what will be has been before;
and God will call the past to account.
16 And I saw something else under the sun:
In the place of judgment—wickedness was there,
in the place of justice—wickedness was there.
17 I said to myself,
“God will bring into judgment
both the righteous and the wicked,
for there will be a time for every activity,
a time to judge every deed.”
18 I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. 19 Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. 20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. 21 Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”
22 So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For who can bring them to see what will happen after them?
”The City of God against the Pagans” by Augustine, pages 528-529:
What godly ears could bear to hear the following argument? After a life passed in the midst of so many and such great calamities (if, indeed, it can be called a life at all, which is so much more like death: a death so grievous that the very love of it makes us dread the death which will release us from it), and after many great and frightful evils have at last been expiated and ended by means of true religion and wisdom, we achieve the vision of God. We are made blessed by the contemplation of incorporeal light and by participation in His changeless immortality, which we burn with love to attain. But then, our adversaries say, we must of necessity lose all this in due time, and those who lose it are cast down again from that eternity, truth and felicity to hellish mortality and wicked folly! They are caught in the toils of horrible miseries, in a state where God is lost, truth held in odium, and blessedness sought in filthy iniquities.
…
And this eternal revolution of fixed cycles, which remove and restore true misery and false blessedness in turn, occurs so that God may be able to know His own works. For, on the one hand, He cannot rest from creating, but, on the other, if He were always engaged in creating, He could not then know the infinite number of His creatures.
”The Four Cardinal Virtues” by Josef Pieper, pages 21-22:
Whoever looks only at himself and therefore does not permit the truth of real things to have its way can be neither just nor brave nor temperate - but above all he cannot be just. For the foremost requirement for the realization of justice is that man turn his eyes away from himself.
David is a Theologian and Ethicist.