Our Seasons and God’s Sovereignty

Vanity Under the Sun

Mar 12

Written By Benjamin Vrbicek

March 12, 2023

Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek

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Scripture Reading

Ecclesiastes 3:1-22

1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

2 a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, 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 gain has the worker from his toil? 10 I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.12 I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man.

14 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. 15 That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.

16 Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness.17 I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work. 18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. 19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. 20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth? 22 So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?

Let’s pray again as we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”

So I was on a stage for a giant gathering of youth. It’s late fall, and we’re outdoors. I was in college. I had been volunteering with a youth group, and my buddy, the youth pastor, took the whole group to an event with many other youth groups. And my buddy knew the main speaker. The main speaker had this prop during his talk. It was a giant pole, like a tree trunk. I don’t remember what the speaker’s point was or why he had it. But I was on stage. And I was there with a few other guys, and our job was to hold that fat wooden pole and keep it from falling to the ground or toward the front row. I’m not sure I would have had a prop like that, but given that this speaker did, I felt like I had an important job, the job of not letting it fall on people.

But there was a problem. I wasn’t sure I could keep it from falling. It felt like it was leaning. I started to become very afraid. I tried to pull harder, but it still felt like the pole kept leaning away from me. So I pulled harder.

And I’m not sure if I figured it out right away or if I just started to run out of strength, but somewhere in these few minutes of exerting as much strength as I could to keep the stupid pole from landing on kids, I just sort of stopped pushing—or, at least, I let up a little. As I did, it actually got easier. So I slowly let up more. Then it got easier still.

You can probably figure out as I retell this story what I was slow to figure out in the moment. We were all pulling on this pole in opposite directions. And the harder we pushed, the harder it pushed back on us. Thankfully, we all figured it out together—or we all got tired together—and no pole fell and no kids were killed. But I can tell you that for me, the experience felt far more stressful than it needed to be.

There’s a lesson from Ecclesiastes somewhere in that story. The Preacher in this book has many truths he wants us to learn, lessons he also had to learn. One of them might go like this: if we don’t rest in the sovereignty and goodness of God over every season of our lives, then at best we’ll be restless and at worst we’ll go mad. The Preacher wants us to know that there are some things, no matter how hard you push against them, they won’t move. And here’s the important part: They won’t move because they are fixed by God.

But before we talk about all that, let me make a few reminders. Some of you are new to our church today, and others might have missed one or both of our two sermons from the book of Ecclesiastes. And even if you were here, for most of us the book is so foreign to us that a short review won’t hurt.

In the opening lines of the book we meet the author, or as he calls himself, the Qoheleth; that’s the Hebrew word. Our Bible version translates it as The Preacher. We’re told that the Preacher was a son of king David (1:1). This could be any son—a son, a grandson, or a great-great-great-grandson. But it would seem that the Preacher who most fits the description in the book of a wealthy, wise, self-indulgent prince is one of David’s immediate sons named Solomon.

So, perhaps Solomon is the Preacher, and Solomon wrote the book. Or perhaps it was not Solomon who wrote the book, but rather someone after Solomon who wrote the kind of book Solomon could have written, indeed should have written. I say that because Ecclesiastes is a book of repentance from one father to his son. At the end of the book, the Preacher uses the phrase “my son,” and then he follows that with his final bits of advice (12:10). This phrase “my son” casts the book in a fatherly sort of light. The phrase means, as someone put it to me recently, you might picture this book coming from Grandpa Solomon. He’s still on the throne, but he knows he’ll die soon. And he looks his son in the eyes, a son about to rule instead of him, and Grandpa Preacher says, “Boy, that ain’t it.” By which he means, you can try this and you can try that, you can try pleasure and fame and money and wisdom and property and fill your life full of all the things that we might want to fill our lives with, you can go as far in any direction you want to run, you can walk the world forever until your shoes are filled with blood (to quote Dustin Kensrue), but, boy, let me tell you from experience, that ain’t it, says the Preacher. To use the words from Pastor Greg’s wonderful sermon last week, we hear Solomon shout to us from the top of every ladder that could be rested against every building that isn’t God, and we hear Solomon shout from top of each ladder, “There’s nothing up there.”

That’s the review for us. This morning, the Preacher takes us further into his argument. As I said before, in chapter 3 he’s going to show us that we must rest in the sovereignty and goodness of God over every season in our lives, lest we become restless or maybe even go mad. So, we’ll talk about our seasons and then God’s sovereignty.

Our Seasons

The Preacher begins with a poem about seasons. It’s a poem made famous from the song by a band in the 60s called The Byrds. The lyrics from their hit “Turn! Turn! Turn!” come from Ecclesiastes 3. Let me reread these verses.

3 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

There are few ways we could go wrong as we look at these lyrics about seasons. We could go wrong by lifting them out of the chapter to make them mean whatever we want them to mean. Instead, we need to see these words in the context of this chapter, indeed in light of this book and the whole Bible.

Here’s another mistake we could make. We could take these words to simply be activities that we’re invited to pick and choose. We pick those we want more of. I want a little more laughter and a little more building up, not tearing down. Today I’d like to dance, but tomorrow, since it’s a Monday, maybe I’ll make war. You know, just pick and choose and curate the seasons the way you would like them.

This is not the way to receive this poem. The Preacher is saying that under the sun, the seasons will come, and the seasons will go, and you can only receive them. No more than you can stop the ice of winter or the scorch of summer, neither can you create the seasons of your life. You can’t make yourself born any more than you can resist death.

Now, we have some choice about how much we want to laugh and about how much we want to morn. But, in general, the Preacher is saying that even here certain seasons are dictated to us, and we have only to respond in a way that accords with the season that we’re in. So, this poem is inviting us to know that seasons exist; to know that seasons change; and whatever season you are in, live in accordance with it. Don’t fight the seasons, so to speak. Don’t wear a winter coat at the beach in the summer, and don’t wear your swimsuit in a blizzard. Don’t laugh and dance at a funeral, and don’t mourn when a new baby is born. Again, know that seasons exist. Know that seasons change. And whatever season you are in, live in accordance with it.

Looking at the poem in context, we see this is what he means. Look at vv. 12–13.

12 I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.

Everything the Preacher has said so far is true. Under the sun, all our best efforts are like building sandcastles at low tide. Tomorrow they will all be washed away, and that’s true. But that doesn’t mean those sandcastles don’t matter or we can’t enjoy them.

If we do not force our greatest efforts in life to bear the weight of eternity—if our best efforts do not have to be the things that make or break our life—then we can enjoy them for what they are. This is what I mean when I said in my first sermon that the Preacher in Ecclesiastes wants to lower our expectations so that he can save our expectations or, better, save us. If I believe my sandcastles have to last forever, then, as I live under the sun, to use the phrase from the book, I’ll be disappointed. But if I know they don’t have to last, and if I can receive each moment from God, I can build the castles with the people I love and enjoy the process.

I’ll illustrate enjoying the moments and not wasting them. I love when my parents come to visit or when we go to visit them. They used to live in the Midwest, as I did, but they’ve moved much closer and now live in Richmond, so we see them more often. It’s great. And when we get together, let’s just say they like food and meals. My father is amazing at cooking meat on the grill, so sometimes he does that for us. And other times he takes us out to eat at restaurants we wouldn’t normally get to go to. That’s great too. But something we’ve noticed when all of us get together, sometimes with my brothers and sisters, that while we’re eating one meal, we’ll stop enjoying that meal and begin thinking and talking and planning the next meal. “Okay, okay, this is a good lunch and all that, but what are we doing later today? And this is a good dinner, but what are we doing for dessert? And what will we eat for breakfast?

Maybe your family does this with meals. Maybe you’re doing it not with meals but with your life. There’s a way to constantly wish away the moment as you look past it to some place, some season in the future. The Preacher is telling us through his poem that’s not wise.

There’s an author I like who has said, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” The idea is that we can trick ourselves into believing that we are using our time well, but if what we are doing at every moment is wishing away the present moment, longing for something else, longing for different days, then we’re actually wasting our years. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, she wrote.

You may want to win the championship, get the award, get the scholarship, get the degree, score the big job, marry the right person, get the kids out of diapers, then into the right school, then get them through school, then have all that time in the empty nest years to finish your career so you can get to retirement and go on big trips. You can do all that constantly wishing one season was another season, and thus spending your days in a way that becomes spending our lives constantly discontent. The Preacher wants you to enjoy, as much as you can, the season you’re in, if you can see that the season comes from God.

But here is the main thing that the Preacher’s poem about the changing of seasons is designed to do. The change of seasons bring us to a place of humility. There’s another famous poem, not a poem in the Bible, called “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” It’s a poem about fighting while there is still time, even through old age and death. The poem has the line, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I can respect part of what that poem might mean. We should fight for the good, as the Preacher says in v. 12. We should fight in every season for joy and for love and for saving marriages and raising children or being active in our singleness and serving this world and doing good work in our careers and so on. But on the other hand, to rage, rage against the dying of the light, is to rage against the inevitable. The author of the poem died seventy years ago. Whether he lived well to the end or not, the light died.

Again, this should bring us humility in each season of life. That’s the point the author makes later in vv. 16 to the end of the chapter. I’ll just read a couple of verses.

18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. 19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. 20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. (3:18–20)

This is stark, jarring, provocative, and even striking language—especially to a Jewish audience. In the book of Genesis, we’re told that men and women are made in the image of God and in God’s likeness. This means you and I are special and above animals. Indeed, humans are to have dominion over the animals and the earth. So when the Preacher says that in some respect dogs and humans go to the same place, that’s provocative language. It could almost feel like the Preacher is going against the rest of Scripture.

Except the same part of Genesis that tells us humans are special also tells us that we came from dust and to dust we will return. God says to Adam in Genesis 3,

By the sweat of your face
    you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
    for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
    and to dust you shall return.” (Gen. 3:19)

This is what I mean by humility before the seasons. We may be able to wear a jacket in the winter or use an umbrella in the spring rains and plant our crops and watch them grow in summer and then harvest in the fall. We can respond to the season, even enjoy them as much as they can be enjoyed, but we don’t stop our trips around the sun. There’s a time to be born and a time to die. We are to have humility before the seasons.

Which is really a way to say something more profound. The Preacher is not so much writing poems and preaching sermons so that we’ll have humility before the seasons but so that we’ll have humility before God, the one who orchestrates the seasons.

God’s Sovereignty

One of the things we have to decide as we read this book is what to make of this Preacher. Is he a madman who only sees the worst parts of life? Can the Preacher only see what can be seen under the sun? Or does the Preacher see more?

I tend to think the Preacher in this book knows what he’s doing. Because while the Preacher says some pretty stark, provocative, striking things to get our attention, he also says some warm, encouraging things—and not just at the end of the book. Look at some of the statements the author makes about the sovereignty and goodness of God.

9 What gain has the worker from his toil? 10 I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time.

Then look down in v. 14.

14 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.

The kind of God that Solomon believed in is the kind of God who is absolutely sovereign. He rules and reigns. And whatever he wants to do, he does, and it lasts forever. God, if he wants to, makes sandcastles that don’t get washed away.

That, of course, would be terrifying if God were not also good. The Preacher also believes in a God who makes all things beautiful in this time. A time to kill, a time to mourn, a time to tear away, a time to lose, a time for all the hard and all the good—the Preacher believed that our God was the kind of God would make all things beautiful.

But what do you believe? What do you believe about God? Is God doing this or not? If you don’t believe God is both sovereign and good, you’ll be restless or go mad. But God is good, God is wise, God is strong, God is faithful, and God makes everything beautiful in his time, and if you believe that, then you can rest. You’ll find contentment in a world that doesn’t know anything about contentment.

I think of the words of the apostle Paul that he wrote to the church in Philippi, saying,

I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. 12 I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. 13 I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Phil. 4:11b–13)

If you have this same faith in God, you also can know this same contentment.

Conclusion

Pinterest is the social media platform for beautiful things, beautiful people, beautiful recipes, beautiful houses, beautiful pets, and beautiful home projects. But often when people try to make beautiful things, it doesn’t go so well. If you were to do an internet search for “Pinterest fail,” you’d see a whole bunch of funny ones. It’s actually super funny. I grabbed a few pictures of them under “Pinterest fail cakes.”

They didn’t go so well, did they? Sometimes our lives look like this. I will tell you that Grandpa Solomon felt like that. His life was a Pinterest fail. He started out so well. And he ended so poorly. His only hope was that God could make all things beautiful in his own time. And maybe even, as the people of God have for 3,000 years taught and preached this book, it has in a small way made beautiful Solomon’s mess. That’s who our God is. God makes beautiful things out of messy things, messy people. That’s ultimately where the Preacher wants us to rest.

One pastor put it like this: Those 28 items in the poem at the start, embrace and sow, tear and cast away, war and peace, are like ingredients. And if it were up to us, we might like different ingredients. We don’t like to eat flour. We like sugar, but not raw sugar. We might like some butter, but not raw butter. But together in the hands of a master baker, out comes a beautiful cake. In his time, God makes all things beautiful.

As we close, consider these two verses from the New Testament about God’s timing. In Galatians 4:4–5, we read, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” When the fullness of time had come, he writes. The perfect timing. All the sin and suffering of the Jewish people. All the working of God in war and peace, laughing and dancing, crying and mourning, there came a time called “the fullness of time,” the time to send forth his Son. In Romans 5, we read this.

6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom. 5:6–8)

While we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for us. And that is good news. The God who Grandpa Solomon tells us to trust is the God who comes to experience all the seasons we experience. Jesus knew life and death. And he knew resurrection. And in the fullness of time—indeed, at just the right time—he’ll come again.

I’ll invite the music team forward as I pray. Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father. . .”

Sermon Discussion Questions

What things in your life seem most out of your control and how is that frustrating to you? How might your frustration change if you saw them in God’s control?
What aspect of this season of your life do you most want to change and why?
What places do you see injustice taking place in our world and your life? Why do you think injustice frustrates you, that is, what does it say about us that we long for true justice? See Ecclesiastes 3:11.
How does the book of Ecclesiastes stir our longings and affections for the person and work of Jesus?

EcclesiastesEcclesiastes 3

Benjamin Vrbicek

Community Evangelical Free Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

https://www.communityfreechurch.org/