| << | Contents | >> |
Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
<page 134>…these verses tell us that there is a middle ground between crusading and crashing. …We refuse to “go with the flow” of the rebellious world …but we also see that it does no good to prematurely try to build a dam.
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; …
Yes, there's a right time and way for everything, …
(Ecclesiastes 8:6, The Message)
The Hebrew word for ‘season,’ ‘zeman,’ means “appointed occasion.”[93] It is not the same word that Eve used when she named Seth, but the idea is the same. In the middle of the scourge of sin and death, God has a set of appointments for us, a plan for good that covers everything under heaven.
If we find His task for each moment, we can find joy in that moment, in spite of the plague of sin and death that continues within and around us. If we don’t find His task, we tend to get stuck. We spend our life in either a vain fight to change the world or a vain surrender to it. In both cases, the hebel of life drags us down.
Those who choose the vain fight often become hard-nosed religious crusaders. They attack everything that threatens what is good and feel that if they can just put in place the right programs, they can drive away evil.
Their plans often have unintended consequences. For example, it is hard for a crusader to love those who are hurting others, so they generally don’t like prodigals. Like the older brother in the parable, they have little mercy for flagrant sinners. The Father’s heart is hidden from them, and they fall short of meaningful care for others.
In my case, my crusade against sin and death had led me to the unintended consequence of turning against my own heart. I was angry about the threats that my weaknesses brought, so I tried to crush them within me. I knew better than to blame my problems on God or others, so my growing rage took aim at the only person I could find who resembled a legal target: me.
Crusading is only one danger, however. Some see the folly in it and decide to take the opposite tack. They crash into disobedience, allowing sin and death to rule them. Their hearts toy with evil and hope that it won’t hurt them too badly. They wander under its spell into destruction, often claiming, “At least I’m not one of those crusading hypocrites.”
In Solomon, we see both crusading and crashing. When he was young, he crusaded to build the ultimate society based on wisdom. He tried to understand as much as he could in an attempt to <page 135>straighten what was crooked and bring something new under the sun. As he saw his limitations, however, his wishful thinking devolved into a painful crash. He ended up compromising with foreign wives and became disillusioned and depressed. The hebel of life was too strong for his great gifts, and he fell into hopeless idolatry.
Ecclesiastes tells us that crusading and crashing aren’t our only options. God has another way. It doesn’t involve a vain fight with the world or a foolish compromise with it. Instead, it recognizes that though sin and death are enemies, God has allowed them for a time. He is fighting against them, but He will do it in His time and His way.
The key to happiness is to work with Him in that. If we try to add anything to it or take anything away, we will be hurt. All we can do is to fulfill our part in His plan. Our job is to see what He is doing, join Him in it, and watch Him overcome evil. Ecclesiastes 7 gives us some insight into how to do this.
Do not be overly righteous, nor be overly wise: Why should you destroy yourself?
We become overly righteous or overly wise when we give up on God’s strategy in order to implement our own. We decide that He isn’t moving fast enough, and we forsake His plan in order to put in place something we think will work better. We crusade against this or that, hoping that we can change the world, or at least our little part of it, but in reality we are grasping for the wind. We can’t do a better job than the King of the universe.
If GOD doesn't build the house, the builders only build shacks. If GOD doesn't guard the city, the night watchman might as well nap. It's useless to rise early and go to bed late, and work your worried fingers to the bone. Don't you know he enjoys giving rest to those he loves?
(Psalm 127:1-2, The Message)
On the other hand, an equally unwise move is to crash by giving in to sin, the world, and the devil.
Do not be overly wicked, nor be foolish: Why should you die before your time? It is good that you grasp this, and also not remove your hand from the other; for he who fears God will escape them all.
Solomon isn’t telling us to compromise. He knows that we should fear God, not negotiate with Him. Instead, these verses tell us that there is a middle ground between crusading and crashing. We can resist evil …but also recognize that we have to coexist with it for now. We refuse to “go with the flow” of the rebellious world …but we also see that it does no good to prematurely try to build a dam. God has His time and way for every purpose under heaven. He knows when and how to deal with His enemies.
<page 136> He calls for us to grasp the reality of the wickedness and foolishness within and around us by accepting that we don’t have the ability to make them go away on our own. At the same time, we refuse to remove our hand from righteousness and wisdom by seeking to walk in His strategy for the war. We walk through the middle of the mess, looking for His way to bring answers into it.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; …
There is a time for everything, but how do we know what it is? How do we decide when God wants us to weep, laugh, mourn, or dance? When we see a pile of stones, should we cast some away or gather more? Let’s be honest, if we use these simple examples as metaphors for the complex issues of our lives, the decisions we must make are often perplexing. This book has described several examples of such decisions in my life, and it took me years to mature into the steps that led me into God’s purposes.
To make matters more difficult, tomorrow’s steps may not be the same as today’s, and the path God chooses for you probably will not be the same as the one He chose for me. How can we know the specific times and ways for us as individuals?
We can only know what God reveals to us. He speaks to us through His objective voice (the Bible) and His subjective voice (wisdom, creation, prophetic insight …). It is only as we grow in our relationship with Him that we see the appointments He desires for each occasion. It happens as we choose to obey His commandments and He makes Himself plain to us.
The person who knows my commandments and keeps them, that's who loves me. And the person who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and make myself plain to him.
(John 14:21, The Message)
Our deepening friendship with Him gives us the ability to find the wisdom, knowledge, and joy we need to participate in His work.
For God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy to a man who is good in His sight …
In time, His Spirit teaches us what He is doing and how to join with Him. This allows us to fight His fights rather than our own.
The book you are reading has described the period in my life when this truth became much more of a regular part of my experience. A key change came when I put in place the theology about the subjective voice of God that I shared in Chapters Six through Nine.[94] It opened the floodgates of <page 137>divine direction, and I found myself able to much more clearly see when it was time for one purpose versus another.
The foundation for this had been laid many years earlier. The time that God had spent teaching me from Proverbs had opened my ears to wisdom and knowledge. The insights I shared in Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents allowed me to learn the many skills that enabled me to do my part in His appointments.
Yet the book of Proverbs apart from the book of Ecclesiastes is incomplete. Skills can’t bring happiness without being combined with sensitivity to how and when God wants us to use them. The combined truths of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were what took me on the path to joy. I found the satisfaction of fulfilling my specific call in life. I gained the confidence to judge what was appropriate for me at each stage of my journey. I learned to make plans according to the Holy Spirit rather than according to my thoughts. As a result, I found strength for the battle, and a greater measure of sin and death were overcome by His power.
Throughout my life, I had looked for some sort of “final answer” to the hebel of life. I wanted to put the whole mess behind me – to once and for all end the struggle. It finally dawned on me that there was no “final answer.” We can’t once and for all put sin and death behind us. Until the Lord returns, they will always cause pain, but if we follow Him, He will equip us day by day to handle the pain. That is our hope on this planet. It is that we will find Him while facing stress, joy, suffering, or whatever else comes our way.
He uses our troubles to take us where we need to go.
Better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men; and the living will take it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by a sad countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
Our acquiring emotions tend to lead us away from the sort of mourning we find at funerals (the house of mourning). We don’t like to see our lives in the context of the pain that exists all around us. The above verses describe the pain caused by the death of those close to us, but the same principle, that we have to face sorrow and learn from it, applies to the pain caused by other events also (1 Peter 1:6-7).
When we don’t turn and face this sort of darkness, we often fail to learn how to handle real life. God calls us to sorrow so that He can make our heart better, teaching us some of the most important lessons He has for us. By avoiding this classroom, we are left unprepared for the hebel of life. We don’t recognize the times and seasons by which God wants to meet us, and we fail to properly handle the curse.
For example, the sorrow created by my sexual difficulties was intended to equip me to handle a wide range of darkness. In that classroom, I found that Jesus was more than able to speak to me in the middle of distress, temptation, and attacks. At the same time, I learned about my weaknesses and His strength. The struggle broke me and left me with no good choice but His power and guidance.
<page 138> Before I honestly faced the pain, I failed to develop the character that allowed me to build my life on His work rather than my crusades. I kept trying to force myself into a state where I could leave problems in the past, and this blinded me to the touch of my Savior who reaches into the dirt and grime of real life.
It was only as I embraced the messiness within and around me that I finally walked through the difficult process of finding His answers. I saw the unyielding nature of sin and death within me and others, which showed that life’s problems could never be handled by human crusading. I was left with no good option but His surprising work.
As for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, and given him power to eat of it, to receive his heritage and rejoice in his labor — this is the gift of God. For he will not dwell unduly on the days of his life, because God keeps him busy with the joy of his heart.
Both the crashing fool and the crusading zealot stumble over the above verses, but they do so for entirely different reasons. The crashing fool looks at the verses with amusement, thinking they support his approach to life. He is all about not dwelling unduly on the days of his life. He lives in denial of the problems within and around him, using good feelings to keep himself from considering the pain brought by the hebel of life.
Doing this may appear to work for a time, but when we don’t face the curse squarely and find God’s answers to it, we do more than simply ignore the nature of the world. We also set ourselves up for the curse to go underground in our personalities and resurface in damaging ways. It may show up as addictions, mental disorders, or damaging behaviors.
The willful ignorance of denial can so ingrain itself into our identity that it becomes seemingly inescapable. If we try to give it up, we enter the house of mourning only to discover that we don’t have the tools to handle it. Depression and irrational fear grab at our hearts. The complexity and strength of our issues mystifies us, and we face seemingly irresistible temptations to return to the comfort of avoiding truth.
It takes time to learn to handle the hebel of life, and this is especially true if we have spent years disguising its workings through denial. Sin and death have to be examined by God’s grace and seen for what they are as we discover His answers to them.
The crusading zealot fails to do this for a different reason. He sees the danger that sin and death pose, but he overestimates what he personally can do about them. He fails to wait for the gift of God that enables him to receive his heritage and rejoice in his labor. He ends up dwelling unduly on the days of his life as he constantly tries to avoid or stop the curse.
I can certainly relate to this second weakness. For me, the daily grind of practical obedience often seemed to exclude joy. There was some excitement associated with first learning some new truth, but the pain of trying to live it soon took over. I became angry and discontented, leaving me feeling as if my only choices were to expend great amounts of energy on forced wise choices or to flee back to the blissful ignorance of foolishness.
<page 139>It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than for a man to hear the song of fools. For like the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool. This also is vanity.
When we choose to hear the rebuke of the wise, we often underestimate the amount of growth and maturity this task takes. Truly facing sin and death can be a daunting task, one that will take us to a place of sorrow for some long hard lessons. Until I recognized God’s hand in this, turning from the laughter of a fool tended to gradually destroy all laughter in my life, even good laughter.
Part of my problem was that I tended to think too much in black and white terms. I become so committed to the rebuke of the wise that I had little time for the laughter of a fool. Imagine my surprise when I sensed God speaking to me from TV shows and movies that seemed to amount to the same thing as the song of fools. How could I explain the fact that I had unsuccessfully sought answers in the Scriptures for decades only to then find them while watching the tube? I wondered if I was permanently ruining my testimony in the eyes of many Christians.
It seemed I would have been better off, at least in my ability to share with others, if the TV had led me away from the Lord. Then I could repent and tell how God had turned me around. But who was ever going to believe that God was showing me valuable lessons as I watched horror movies and TV shows? Who could accept that I described an entire stage of my life with a phrase from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?! I was hardly following the recommended approach to spiritual growth.
All I can say is that, as best I can tell, it was the season for God to touch this crusading zealot in a way I could never turn into a crusade. He showed me that even though His word makes it clear that some activities are right or wrong, others are more on a scale of useful versus less useful. He did this by speaking to me through activities that Ecclesiastes 7 says are of lesser value. Solomon lists many contrasts in this chapter, and all of them say that one thing is better than the other. He does not say, however, the lesser thing is worthless.
In fact, it is obvious that what is lesser is often quite valuable. A good name is better than precious ointment, but precious ointment can certainly be good (Ecclesiastes 7:1, John 12:3-8). Sorrow is better than laughter, but what sane man would argue that laughter is never healthy (Ecclesiastes 7:3, Psalm 126:1-2)? The issue is not wisdom versus joy, or even the rebuke of the wise versus the song of fools; it is how we can embrace the good God has placed in everything.
The song of fools is a misguided attempt to hold to the truth of Ecclesiastes 5:20. It expresses the God given desire to not dwell unduly on the days of our lives, but it does this in the wrong time and way. It fails to give greater priority to the rebuke of the wise. That doesn’t mean, however, that the emotions expressed are bad emotions at their core. The denial of a fool is a twisted form of God’s gift that allows us to keep busy with the joy of our hearts in the middle of a world under the curse of sin and death. The emotions behind it are good; they are just expressed poorly.
In order to escape from crusading, we must embrace all of God’s grace – not only discipline and suffering, but also our fun-loving emotions. Our goal is not somberness and endless striving after the wind, but to face pain honestly as He leads us through it into rejoicing. We face our demons so that God can teach us how to overcome them.
A little laughter and entertainment can help in that, especially if they encourage us to embrace the battle before us, as shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer did for me.
<page 140>Finding God’s purpose for our emotions as we honestly face the hebel of life may force us to deal with levels of fear, guilt, anger, and sorrow that we have avoided for decades. By a gradual work of the Holy Spirit, we must come to grips with the fact that we are not in control. No matter how hard we toil, our outward success or failure is not in our hands.
I returned and saw under the sun that – the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.
As it dawns on us that our best efforts, even when they are done by God’s strength, may lead to what feels like failure, our emotions can be thrown into turmoil. For example, I had to come to grips with the fact that I was involved in a long and complicated struggle with sexual sins. I had little choice but to wake each day on a battlefield that few understood and many fled, a battlefield on which I sometimes felt abandoned and helpless.
I didn’t want to accept that if I lost this seemingly impossible struggle, people would label me a pervert. Even if I succeeded, I was still likely to end up isolated. Few would want to join me, grow to understand what was happening, and help me fight. Some would always consider me suspect simply because I needed to fight this battle at all.
I couldn’t control which battles I was given or how others would react. It made little sense to be overly impressed or critical with my apparent successes or failures in the eyes of others. Time and chance are in God’s hands. Circumstances and the judgments of people might make my greatest victories look like humiliating defeats, or they might do the opposite. Only God could tell me how to interpret the results of my life. Any judgments based on human standards, which tend to reward outward appearances, were a deception.
This is where the message of Ecclesiastes was essential. It taught me how to find contentment in this sort of a world. It said that all I could do was to work and toil with a view toward enjoying God’s gifts in the middle of my unique challenges. That is where I would find my heritage under the sun.
Here is what I have seen: It is good and fitting for one to eat and drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labor in which he toils under the sun all the days of his life which God gives him; for it is his heritage.
Crusaders have a hard time with this heritage. They want large public displays that will reassure them that they are doing something useful. They can’t be satisfied with the everyday pleasures found in practical relationships with Jesus and others. To them, that seems too much like the pleasure-based denial of the song of fools.
When employed in God’s will, however, the sort of enjoyment that can be abused in pleasure-based denial becomes essential. It is part of the emotional equipment He has given us so we will not dwell unduly on the days of our lives. Freedom comes as He saves each part of our personalities from the sin that distorts it. He reshapes both our serious parts and our fun-loving <page 141>parts to find His purpose for them. “It is good that you grasp this, and also not remove your hand from the other; for he who fears God will escape them all” (Ecclesiastes 7:18).
Solomon gave us a sampling of a number of possible appointments in Ecclesiastes 3:2-8. Here is a list of some additional ones I have seen in my struggles with sin and death:
To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to stand up and fight, and a time to break down and cry;
A time to take what you have and build what you can, and a time to drop what you have and wait for what you need;
A time to be logical, and a time to be emotional;
A time to work your tail off, and a time to goof off;
A time to force yourself to act mature, and a time to allow yourself to act like a child;
A time to flee and avoid temptation, and a time to turn and face the darkness;
A time to keep your distance from a demon, and a time to step in and drive it away;
A time to stay away from the world, and a time to step in and suffer for it;
Search Comments
This page has been visited 0017 times.
| << | Contents | >> |
10 per page