Have you ever hiked up a mountain, or even a wooded hill? If so, chances are your view was limited until you passed the tree line. A hike in the woods offers many lovely views, but once you’re above the trees you can see for miles and miles. When we lived in Pennsylvania (Penn’s Woods), we weren’t far from a portion of the Appalachian Trail. Hiking on the AT to “the pinnacle” was a fun activity on crisp Fall days, and we’d often go with a group from church on Sunday afternoons in October. The trail through the woods was well marked, with painted blazes on the trees and crunchy leaves underfoot. Every bit of it was lovely, but once we reached the pinnacle with its rocky outcrop overlooking the valley, the panorama of hills, river, and all the colors of Autumn painted in the trees below us was absolutely breathtaking.
After his celebration of the sovereignty of God in the poem of Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, one might expect the Preacher to depart from his earlier theme of gaining from our toil, but he drops us right back into it with the question, “What gain has the worker from his toil?” (3:9). And yet this isn’t a return to the darkness of his earlier despair, because he points us immediately to the purposes God gives to mankind in our work.
The Preacher makes several observations, beginning with the “business God has given to the children of man to be busy with.” God hasn’t left us with nothing to do but has given us purposeful work. Not just ‘busy-work,’ he has called us to good and honest labor in his world. We’re now looking at this theme not from “under the sun,” but from the heavenly view which informed the poem of the times and seasons. And this view is breathtaking, because “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (11a).
More than merely “pretty,” or simply a visual beauty, the word “beautiful” here has a “wider range of meaning—something beautiful is something good; It is right, pleasing, appropriate.”[1] What God has made, and called us to labor in, is good, right, pleasing, and appropriate. Whether our labor is the ‘blue collar’ labor of farming, manufacturing, or ditch digging; or whether it is the ‘white collar’ work of medicine, education, or architecture, we are to do it as “under heaven,” knowing that our work unto the glory of God and under his sovereign control is never in vain. The poem of 3:1–8 is not disconnected from this passage, but informs our understanding of it. As Douglas O’Donnell points out, “The purpose of seeing from a heavenly perspective the tick and tock of time on earth is, first of all, so that we might embrace the beauty of God’s comprehensive control of everything.”[2] Rather than being suffocating or rigidly limiting, we should see God’s sovereign authority over time as beautiful.
Verse 11 continues on from beauty to eternity. “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 (11b). God made us to live forever, with, as O’Donnell poetically writes, “An etching of the eternal on our soul.”[3] And yet, we are limited beings. We are “caught between time and eternity—we were made to live forever… (but) we are living in a time-bound universe. There is a huge gap between our present mortality and our future destiny… God has a complete view, all we have is a point of view. Our limited perspective is unable to span the mind of God”[4] Though a moment’s thought would tell us this, we still need to be reminded that “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deut. 29:29). Rather than frustrating us, this gap should drive us to our Maker who designed us with this “God-shaped hole” in our hearts. While we cannot find ultimate satisfaction “under the sun,” we should seek it instead from the Creator who made us to live forever. As C. S. Lewis so poignantly wrote:
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.[5]
Lewis wrote elsewhere that “The sweetest thing in all my life, has been the longing . . . to find the place where all the beauty came from.”[6] Do you find that the beauty of this world leaves you unsatisfied? Is there an unfinished ache left throbbing in your chest? On the few occasions when everything goes to plan, when it all turns out just as you’d hoped, isn’t the feeling of fulfillment a fleeting thing? “Our deepest longings,” writes Phillip Ryken, “will never be satisfied until we come to a personal knowledge of God and of his Son Jesus Christ.”[7]
The Preacher’s next observation is that “there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man” (12–13). Simply put, God means for us to enjoy the fruits of our labors as gifts from his sovereign hand. Put another way, “Under the sunlight of God’s sovereignty we should be holy and happy.”[8] That “there is nothing better” doesn’t mean we should be merely resigned to these things, but that this is the best thing we can do as long as we live. God has given us splendidly simple gifts in the ‘everydayness’ of our lives, and to enjoy these gifts is the best way to spend our days.
The third observation the Preacher shares is 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” (14–15). Basically, “‘Whatever God does’ includes everything that God does, at whatever time he does it. He is sovereign over the times and the seasons. Whatever he does will endure: no one can add to it or subtract from it—now until forever.”[9] The Lord tells us this himself through the prophet Isaiah.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” —Isaiah 55:8–11
God’s sovereignty encompasses all that he has done in the past, all that he is doing now, and all that he will do in the future. And the purpose of it all, according to verse 14, is to inspire in his creation the right fear of the Lord. “The purpose of time is to fear God.”[10] God stands outside of time directing all things according to his holy will—his word will succeed in his holy purposes. And his holy purposes include sending Jesus Christ to seek and to save the lost (Lk. 19:10). Even though mankind was driven from the garden paradise of Eden because of our sin, God pursues us even still by the means of the gospel, and every sinner bought by the blood of his holy Son will be freed from captivity to sin and brought all the way home to heaven (Eph. 4:7). With this in view, dear Christian, no matter the circumstances in which you find yourself, weary, frustrated, or beaten down, “Acknowledging God as exhaustively sovereign is the only foundation for happiness.”[11]
Finally, the Preacher returns to his view of the world “under the sun,” only to observe the injustice and wickedness reigning even in the places where justice and righteousness ought to be: in the court of law and the temple of worship. Yet even still, “God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work” (17). “Our confidence does not lie in a justice system but in the Chief Justice himself, Jesus Christ. God has promised a day when his Son will judge the righteous and the wicked (Acts 17:30–31). If justice seems a long time coming . . . we should believe the words of the prophets who said, “If it seems slow wait for it; It will surely come; It will not delay’ (Hab. 2:3)”.[12] God’s timing and ways are perfect, and he is using the injustices and wickedness of this world to show us the truth about our mortality. Whether we are destined for heaven or hell, we will die, just like the animals around us, and our bodies will return to the dust after our brief lives. So once again, the Preacher reminds us that “there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot,” and he adds, “Who can bring him to see what will be after him?” (22). Whatever happens after we are gone is no longer our concern, but we are to entrust even that into the mighty hands of our sovereign Lord.
I’ll close with David Gibson’s summary of this section of Ecclesiastes.
Living well in God’s world means recognizing that when it comes to our own lives, we are not mini-gods, and this is his creation, not ours. We have all the pieces of our lives given to us and things come and go and seasons change, and it is only God who knows exactly where everything is meant to go, in which order, at what time, and why.[13]
And so, dear ones, let’s raise our faces to the sunlight of God’s love, look for the beauty, and be holy and happy, enjoying the simple blessings he daily sends.
[1] Phillip Ryken, Ecclesiastes: Why Everything Matters, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway,2010), 90
[2] Douglas Sean O’Donnell, Ecclesiastes: Reformed Expository Commentary, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2014),74
[3] O’Donnell, 74
[4] Ryken, 92
[5] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 120
[6] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harcourt, 1956), p. 75
[7] Ryken, p. 93
[8] O’Donnell, 75
[9] Ryken, 96
[10]O’Donnell, 78
[11] O’Donnell, 76
[12] Ryken, 103
[13] David Gibson, Living Life Backward; How Ecclesiastes Teaches us to Live in Light of the End, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 62
