Time
To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born,
And a time to die;
A time to plant,
And a time to pluck what is planted (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2).
The human heart is an incredible organ. By the time you are 66 years old, it will have completed around 2½ billion beats. What is also astonishing is that your heart begins to beat 21 days after you are conceived in your mother’s womb! Heartbeats mark the passage of time. Each second, minute, hour, day, month and year can never be repeated. They mark out the unique journey we take through life and measure our days.
The writer of Ecclesiastes takes up the subject of time. He begins, “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.” We associate seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter – with nature. The cycle of life is expressed in birth and development, maturity and fruitfulness, ageing and finally death. What we see in nature, we also see in our human experience. The writer of Ecclesiastes understood this pattern, and he understood human experience.
But the Bible brings in another dimension: the spiritual dimension. Ecclesiastes teaches that there is a time for everything; also that there is a purpose to everything. God allows us to pass through a whole range of experiences, but these are not random or accidental. They have both meaning and purpose. “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28).
The beginning and ending of life is highlighted in verse 2: “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted.” This verse sets the two boundaries of human life: the “time to be born” and the “time to die”. And it also implies a harvest when the value of a life is realised. The writer paints a picture of a farmer planting a seed and later receiving a harvest. It is beautiful to see God as the farmer, the seed as our life and the harvest as our death. It is not merely that life begins and ends, but that it has a purpose, to produce fruit for God: “By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples (John15:8).
The Lord Jesus uses the same illustration of planting and harvest to describe His own experience of life, death and resurrection: “Jesus answered them, saying, ‘The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified. Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain’” (John 12:23-24). The Eternal Son of God entered into time and passed through the cycle of natural life that we experience. He describes His perfect work of salvation in terms of a grain of wheat, planted in death and bringing a glorious harvest in resurrection. Our lives for Him follow the same pattern. We have received life in Him. It has brought us into fellowship with God and given us the capacity to live fruitful lives for Him. We possess eternal life. We enjoy it now, and we will enter into all its fullness in a coming eternal day.
The question is, How do we use the time we have in response to the Saviour who lived and died and lives again for us?
