2002-01-01
Good Morning Dear Friends,
I hope your Christmas was wonderful and that you enjoyed bringing in the new century. I’m glad to be back writing you these messages of hope; my spiritual batteries have been recharged. Praise God!
Since the issue of time is so much on our minds today, God led me to write about that. He led me to the little book of Ecclesiastes written by King Solomon, the son of King David. I had a hard time understanding this book the first time I read it, because it’s style seemed so depressing and negative-so different from the ultimate messages of the other books. However, after looking into it with more patience and diligence, Solomon’s character, the “Philosopher,” had some very important lessons for us. When you look at life only from a human perspective, it is depressing and seemingly hopeless. Life is short and often contradictory. The “Philosopher” while advising people to work hard, tells them to enjoy the gifts of God as long as they can. The real message underlying this book is to reach to see life from God’s perceptions, wherein is found the greater meaning and hope that we so desperately need. We need this to deal with our time while the earth-bound sanctification process is in progress. That is in preparation for the reward the awaits us in eternal life with our Lord. Biblical faith is broad enough to take into account the pessimism and doubt expressed in Ecclesiastes while we look to God through Christ for a better bead on His perspective. There’s enough to say on this subject that I may need to write more than one message on it.
EC 3: 1 reiterates a truth that is often hard for us to accept, “Everything that happens in this world happens at the time God chooses.” If you are anything like me, you want certain things never to happen, like the death of a loved one, and for other things to happen yesterday tied up in a neat package, like Pete getting a career position. But, it is God who knows best when something should happen and why. That is because He sees it in His higher, more perfectly accurate perspective and we don’t. For us to accept God’s timing, we must believe that not only is His wisdom on when better than ours, but that He is always 100% righteous, having our best long-term interests in mind. It’s a lot easier to say that than to accept it in your heart and use that knowledge to discern your own responses and actions.
EC 3: 1-8 is the most famous passage in this book. With your patience, I would like to take my time discussing it to mine the great truths that God put into Solomon’s heart to share. (2) “He sets the time for birth and the time for death, the time for planting and the time for pulling up.” Often I have heard people say to me such adages as, “The only things you can count on are birth, death, and taxes,” and “Death, like birth, is a part of living.” Well, I certainly think we can count on more than birth, death, and taxes. We can count on God! After all, the whole thing is His plan carried out for His righteous reasons. We all celebrate the birth of a baby. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of the most important baby ever born. And yes, we all know that come January, it’s time to pay our taxes. We don’t celebrate it, but we know it’s necessary. Those of us who have taken the time to read MT 17: 27 (Christ’s teaching on paying temple taxes), MT 22: 21 (Christ’s teaching on paying taxes to the ruling civil authority), and RO 13: 1-8 (Paul’s teaching on paying taxes to civil authorities) know that God’s attitude on this touchy matter is very clear. Anyone who understands how government works and supplies the services we often take for granted knows that it’s the money we pay in taxes that allows those services to be rendered. This is not the place for an argument about political matters, so I’ll leave those particulars out of this discussion. Let’s just stick to God’s words on the subject.
Death is a very difficult subject. A person with only a human perspective finds death depressing. Yet, I was amazed when speaking to two people of faith who were facing their own rapidly impending deaths to find that they were not the least depressed about what was about to happen to them. In fact, they were looking forward to it-and not just because it would be a release from the pain they were experiencing. It was because they knew they would soon be “home with their loving Father.” Truthfully, death had always been such a painful subject to me that I had just pushed into the “deal with it later” file in my mind. I had lost my father when I was too young and had no real faith to appreciate it as more than the loss of that person in my life. If anything, I was angry that it happened to him at so young an age (only 59). I had lost my father, and his patients had lost their physician. I railed at the injustice of that with little thought that an omnicient God had decided His purpose would be served by this event happening at the time it did. Our way of looking at physical death can be very different when we have the discernment given to us by the Holy Spirit in our lives. That is why my view of the loss of my dear uncle last March is so different than my initial reaction when my father died all those years ago. God tells us in EC 3: 4 that “there is a time for mourning,” and it would be inhuman if we didn’t when we lose a loved one. However, our loving Abba gives us a way to put our loss in a more God-like perspective from what He reveals to us in the Scriptures. With that understanding, we are not robbed of hope, the hope of the resurrection and the faith that our Lord is compassionate. When you come from the kind of family I do, your greatest prayer is that the members of your family will come to faith before they pass on. Christ deals with this issue in the Great Commission of MT 28: 19-20, and we hear it again in the “marantha” message of REV 22: 17. I hope you will read all these citations.
The issues of planting and pulling up in EC 3: 2 are also no small matter. It’s obvious to anyone who farms or gardens that these things must be done at the appropriate times of the agricultural year for whatever geographical area we live in. However, these terms can be used as metaphors for other kinds of planting, like the teaching of little children to know and love God or of coming up with ideas to solve society’s problems. Solomon’s comment on pulling up struck me, because Pete and I have had to pull up stakes and move so many times as a part of his former career. I’ve lived all over North America because of that. No doubt God wanted me to have a broader perspective on my life than I would have had living in only one place. Yet, with other people, He chooses for them to stay in one place all their lives, because He has something important for them to do in that place that wouldn’t be accomplished if they moved around as I have. God’s timing and His reasons are best. That is the faith I have.
PRAYER: O Lord, You choose the time for things to happen for Your own always-righteous reasons. Help us to understand that and to be willing to reach to see Your perspective, which is always better than ours. Thank You for giving us the Holy Spirit, prayer, the Scriptures, our circumstances, and our churches to help us do that. In Christ’s name, amen.
More on the issue of time to follow, Dear Friends. Pete and I wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR AND CENTURY. We send you our love in Christ.
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn