Bowling Green Covenant Church

The Traveler’s Advisory

Friday 16 June 2006

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose matter under heaven.”—Ecclesiastes 3.1 [ESV]

Before my wedding day my father offered me some sage advice. “Mike,” he said trying to hide a grin, “never buy Jill a household appliance for her birthday, your wedding anniversary or Christmas.” What my father’s counsel lacked in eloquence it made up for with folksy charm. Still it was no “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

The first time I heard these words from Ecclesiastes was not in church. They crackled from a beat-up AM radio my brother brought to the beach. A folk-rock group called “The Byrds” released a single titled “Turn, Turn, Turn,” (If you don’t know what an AM radio is or what a single is, ask anyone born in the 1950s—they’ll know.) “Turn, Turn, Turn,” used the words of Ecclesiastes 3.1-8 to score a Top 40 hit.

Ecclesiastes is more than a good source for folk wisdom and folk music. Even so, that does not tell us what Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher as he is also known, meant by them. While the answer should be obvious, sometimes the obvious is like buying your wife a blender for her birthday, or a microwave for her anniversary—useful but not necessarily appropriate.

Ecclesiastes words tell us there is an inevitability to life, to time. This inevitability came home to me when I lived in North Dakota where I heard a man say this to a widow at her husband’s funeral: “Floyd was a good man. But you know, we’re born, we live…and then we die. And that’s the way it goes.” That man read Ecclesiastes. What he said lacked tact, yet tactless as it was his statement was still true. His words would have met with solemn agreement from the Preacher.

Scholars tell us Ecclesiastes contains the reflections of an old man. Many believe this man to be King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived. To read Ecclesiastes is to see life through the tear-filled, aging eyes of a once wise man who has realized too late that life is short, that we are born, we live and then we die. Ecclesiastes is written by a man who now regrets not appreciating the fact that for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

Ecclesiastes contains the journal of a man who knows what matters is not how long a person lives, but how well one lived during their lifetime. As the songwriter says, life is not about the dates on your tombstone, but the dash in between. During his lifetime the Preacher squeezed in as much as he could into the dash in between.

He availed himself of the best life had to offer—wealth, women, philanthropy, pleasure, and knowledge. At the end of his life, he called it all vanity, emptiness, a meaningless exercise, futility. He lived a full life, yet his soul was empty. It is a curious thing that in his list of things for which there is a time, there is no mention of a time to act and a time to reflect. The closest he comes is when he says there is “a time to keep silence and a time to speak.” The truth is we are born, we live and someday we all will die. That is the way it goes. But is that really the way it goes, or did the Preacher finally learn how to keep his life from being meaningless?

Maybe.

His last words are these—“Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or bad,” (Ecclesiastes 12.13, 14).

You think about that.

MM