Sermon: Ecclesiastes (Part Four; B)

Who's Really in Control? (Continued)
#1104B
John W. Ritenbaugh (1932-2023)
Given 27-May-12; 87 minutes

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We are going to continue going through Ecclesiastes right on through Pentecost because the book’s theme impacts dramatically on the theme of Pentecost. The two are very tightly enmeshed—Pentecost having to do with God’s purpose for the church, and Ecclesiastes having to do with our fulfilling that purpose for the church by and through faith. It is as though Pentecost represents a major goal, and Ecclesiastes is guidance toward the attaining of that goal and being part of the first harvest of souls.

The previous sermon primarily centered on two vital principles of living life by faith. I said toward the beginning of that sermon that I had given Ecclesiastes 3 the title “Who is Really in Control?” This is because much of Ecclesiastes 3 is instruction showing that God is sovereign over time. That is so important! Our life is lived and experienced within time, and if God is controlling time, it is undoubtedly going to have an impact on us.

It is further shown in Ecclesiastes 3 that it is God who imposes the merisms into peoples’ lives. I want you to see a little bit of proof on that in Ecclesiastes 3, and in verse 10, where it says:

Ecclesiastes 3:10 I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied.

The God-given task is the opportunity to live within, working through the merism events that were just listed prior to verse 10. God imposes the merisms at times suitable to His purpose. In other words, each one does not come on the whole group at any one time. They are hit, if I can put it that way, placed upon, imposed upon people as He sees fit, according to His time-table for what He wants to produce within a person’s life.

I paralleled this in that sermon with Deuteronomy 8:1-5. Again, I want to read these because these verses are central to what we are experiencing in life. Deuteronomy 8 is looking back upon the forty years that Israel went through the wilderness, and God says here, through Moses:

Deuteronomy 8:1 “Every commandment which I command you today you must be careful to observe, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers.

They were not in the land yet. They had not really completed their journey, but they were right on the cusp of doing it, and so Moses, at God’s behest, is reviewing a major point for the benefit of the people because they were going to have to continue living this way to some extent.

Judgment was going on constantly, and these, I hasten to communicate to you is not necessarily judgment for the purpose of finding fault, but rather judgment for the purpose of helping the people do more, seeing where they stood. The people could then see where they stood if they would use the information, and they could go on.

Deuteronomy 8:2-3 And you shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, . . .

That is, they had no previous experience with it until they were actually on the journey. We need to take note of that because there are many things that we are going to experience in our journey to the Kingdom of God that we never experienced before.

Deuteronomy 8:3-5 . . . that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. Your garments did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. You should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you.

“Chastens” there does not necessarily mean a spanking. It can simply mean discipline, and that is much broader than the word “chasten.” So I paralleled the application of these merisms to us by God with what God did to the Israelites in their journey across the wilderness. We are on our own pilgrimage, and it is to the Kingdom of God, and we are being instructed and tested, and so forth, and provided for while we are on our journey.

We have to add something to this and it is a sad thing for them. They would not cooperate with God, and it clearly shows why in Hebrews 3. It was because they did not believe Him. They would not live by faith. They did not believe Him, and thus they died in the wilderness. It was not His will that they died. They simply would not cooperate with Him even though they saw many miraculous things that He did in their behalf.

And thus, a major conclusion that we can draw from chapter 3 is that God is sovereign over time. It was God who set the forty-year period, and it was God who then dealt with them within that period of time, and He is dealing with you and me, and we have to learn He is sovereign over time. One of the ways we learn this is when the merisms begin to hit us. They do not hit us when it is comfortable for us. They hit us whenever God wants to use them.

The second vital principle to come out of this chapter is that we absolutely must, if we are going to live by faith, see ourselves as individuals having a special calling from God even as the Israelites were as a body of people—an entire nation sanctified from the world as a holy people.

The church is not much a body of people anymore, but what I want us to see is that we are sanctified individually. We are an individual, and it is important that we understand that other principle I think I used this morning, that God did what He did, and enabled us as He did, and He wants us to understand that it was not because we are better.

I want you to notice I Corinthians, chapter 1. These verses are put there to bring us down to earth. The calling of God is given to us not because we are better, but because He chose us. He had His own reasons for doing so, and He does not necessarily reveal what those reasons were, and so, as a generality, we have this in I Corinthians 1:26.

I Corinthians 1:26-29 For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.

We are a very select group of individuals chosen according to His will. It not because we have done anything special. It is simply that God chose us, and He has not revealed to us why, and we are to be humbled by what we have been given freely as a result of His will. Now this connects to this. We must understand we are not insects, but we are a special individually-set-apart people for God’s purposes. The emphasis is in the word “individual.”

In the entire history of the world nobody has ever been exactly like you. Nobody has ever had the same combination of genetic markers, sex, parents, siblings, schooling, job, accidents, diseases, nationality, ethnicity, religion, etc., etc., etc. Every single one of us is unique. That is awesome! We have many similarities, but nobody like you has ever existed before, and out of all of those billions of people, He chose you. A lot of people were similar, but nobody exactly the same.

We saw that it is God who determines the time of our birth, sets the time of our death, determines the timing of many events of our individual lives, but all the while we are making choices. We have the liberty to do this, and unfortunately we do not always make the right choices. Some of our choices were very good though. No doubt at all about that. What God is going to do in the performing and shaping of our character is bring us to the place where our choices are to do things the way God says they are to be done, and so, at the critical time in our life He opens our mind, calling us, and revealing Himself to us.

I hope that you get this major difference between the church and Israel. That difference is that we are called individually, sometimes even within a family. One is called, the other is not. That is God’s choice. We are called individually. Israel was called as a nation. That is one of the reasons why the merisms are imposed upon us individually. Some people are up. Some people are down. Some people are going through this, other people are going through that, and so they do not hit everybody all at one time as it did with Israel in many, many cases.

I want to review one more verse here, and it is very important. It helps us get a handle on how involved God is in our life. It is in the book of Psalms. It is Psalm 139:13-16. David is the author of this psalm. He is talking about his relationship with God.

Psalm 139:13-16 For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth [the womb]. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.

David meant that the days after he was born had already been fashioned for him by God before he was ever born. That is enough to blow a person’s mind. I hope to impress upon us that what David when through and recounted there, we go through.

I am going to read a portion of Psalm 139 as translated in The Revised English Bible. It says: “Your eyes foresaw my deeds, and they were all recorded in Your book. My life was fashioned before it had come into being.” There are other verses that support this, and show that from the cradle to the death bed God is overseeing your life. Brethren, God is that close to you in terms of His involvement in our life. But even though He is that close, He allows us to make the decisions that affect our life. Our course of action is overseen by Him, and He stands ready to make correction or to move us, as He wills, in another direction. He is that close, and it is one of the reasons that if we believe these things, we can live by faith.

As an example, let us take a look at the timing in the life of Jesus so that it might help us to grasp God’s sovereign oversight in carrying out His purpose for our life to completion. Do not forget this, that as our sovereign Creator, Jesus Christ set in order the rhythm of creation, and He never changes.

It was Jesus, as the Lord God of the Old Testament, who inspired the prophecies in the first place. The Father carried out every purpose pertaining to Jesus when it was necessary as Jesus was on earth. The first of these occurred when He was born as a human. I want you to go back into the New Testament to Galatians 4. Listen to what Paul writes regarding Jesus Christ.

Galatians 4:4 But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law.

When “the fullness of time” is rightly translated, it means, in modern English, “when the exact time had come.” The word “forth” simply means that time had run out. It had reached the exact point. No time was left on the clock, and Jesus was born. That is how exact God’s timing was. It just did not happen at any old time. He was born exactly when God wanted Him to be born. In other words, no more time would be permitted to pass, because the time that God had set for the birth of Jesus Christ had been reached, and that was it.

Let us go to the book of Romans. Remember, I am using this as an example, and in just a few minutes I will apply that to you and to me.

Romans 5:6 For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.

When you get a bill from a creditor, it always has a “Due Date” on it. Just think of that. You have all this time to pay the bill. If you want to, you can pay the bill up to and including the exact date it is due without an interest charge. We just get a picture here.

Jesus Christ died on exactly the day He was due to die. It had been set, and that was it. That is exactly what this verse means. God did not allow Him one day more, one hour more, which we will see in just a minute. I would guess right down to the second. God is sovereign over time, and He manipulates events in order to make His purpose fall right in line with the schedule.

Incidentally, the word “due” in Greek can also be translated “right” or “suitable.” Another word is “appropriate.”

John 7:30 Therefore they sought to take Him; but no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come.

We are beginning to see a precision here. The religious leaders were conspiring and plotting to put Him to death, but they were withheld until the hour came, and then they crucified Him.

Matthew 12:40 For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead precisely when He said He would—exactly 72 hours after He was buried in Joseph’s tomb. I think that you will agree that His resurrection was something over which He had no power, because He was dead. He and the Father are of one mind. They both are sovereign over time.

I feel certain that if a detailed study could be made of such things, one would find that Jesus knew when to preach a sermon on any given subject, when to heal, when to give a person vision or unstop one’s ears, when to speak, when to keep silent, but always He was bearing witness of the truth. He knew when it was time to cleanse the Temple. In fact He did it twice—once at the beginning of His ministry, and once at the end. He knew when it was time to laugh, and when to weep, and when it was time to hate evil and to stand against injustice. I would think that He went through all fourteen merisms during His lifetime, and that included during His ministry.

Considering the things that Jesus says about God being the One who times the birth and death, we could easily conclude, that yes, He would do those things for the prophets, for the apostles, for the evangelists, the pastors, and the kings, the important people in His plan and purpose, but that does not apply to little old me. Oh, yes it does!

Let us not forget that God is a creator, and creators make plans, outlining and detailing what they are creating. God is creating a family government. Today these plans are called blueprints, and in my time in working in the steel mill, working on construction projects, or putting together heavy machinery, I looked at many, many blueprints of what it was we were constructing or repairing.

Everything was drawn out by those skilled in doing that. Every measurement had already been made. Every beam, every column, every pipe, every bolt, every rivet, every bolt hole, every rivet hole, every washer, every flat washer, every lock washer. Not only that, everything on the blueprint told exactly how many pieces would be needed in all of these things. The various ties and the number needed, and even, in many cases, the guide to the erectors as to when things would be showing up.

Do you understand what I am getting at here? Even though Jesus Christ is a very important part of the plan of God, so is every other part of His body equally important in terms of the timing and the preparation of that part—you and me. Whatever part we are going to play in what He is creating, He is allowing enough time for us to be prepared to fulfill that part. If men can do this, why can God not do this? Where in the world do you think men got the idea? Every part of what He is creating is thought of beforehand.

This is why David said in Psalm 139 things that any parent would want to say when they knew they had a child on the way. They had plans for that child. They would like to see that child accomplish certain things in life, such as follow dad into business, or become something else. That is the way God is. He is planning His family, and He is preparing that family to follow Him in the family business, which is creating and governing the creation He has made.

The last few years I was in the steel mill I was not welding anymore. I then became a coordinator. That was my title. It was my responsibility to go out and look at the jobs the supervisors in different parts of the mill wanted to be done. I would go representing the boiler shop, the pipe fitters, the constructors, the welders, and so forth, and the supervisor would tell me what he wanted to be accomplished. Then the job was in my hand.

I had to make sketches. I had to figure out how many parts we were going to need. I needed to know when the parts needed to be there, when was the mill going to be down so that we could work on these things, and I had to coordinate all of these various things that were going on so that it was accomplished in the most effective and efficient manner.

If Ritenbaugh can do that, why can God not do that? That is what people do. They have plans. God has plans. He has a purpose, and every part of that purpose is going to be taken care of so that it arrives on the scene at the right time, and is a step toward completing the whole of the project.

I am going to give an overview of all 14 merisms. There is a general conclusion that can be rightly reached that fits into the overall theme of this book, and that is, that since virtually everybody is going to experience some level of these events, the best way to accomplish within them is that if we will cooperate with God, life will not be meaningless. The merisms have to be viewed for what they are. They are opportunities for God to help to form and to shape us, and the merisms are forming and shaping us as we go through them. A lot of times the forming and shaping has to do with psychological things, it has to do with the way we approach and make appropriate use of each.

There is again something that needs to be thought of as we go through these pretty quickly. There is a lot of similarity between the 14 merisms, and a lot of it has to do with what is appropriate at the right time. An awful lot of these merisms have to do with the development of discernment, discretion with them, and its application.

Let us go again to Ecclesiastes 3, the last part of verse 2. We already spent a lot of time on “a time to be born and a time to die.” Now we want to go on to the next part of verse 2, which is:

Ecclesiastes 3:2 A time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted.

We might say “planting and reaping.” Here is the lesson from this. A successful farmer knows that nature works for him only if he works with nature. A very obvious example would be that you do not sow your carrots and your radishes in the middle of December. That is not appropriate. The lesson in the merism is: Do not beat your head against the wall. Cooperate with God’s earth-created rhythms.

Ecclesiastes 3:3 A time to kill, and a time to heal.

This merism seems to involve judicial affairs. It is not something that we get involved in very often in our life since we are not operating within the world; but yet there is always time for judicial affairs, discernment, discretion, and reaching judgments in our own relations with one another. Even though this involves judicial affairs, they are not necessarily involving one’s participation in a formal trial as in a court setting, but simply the administration of justice as within a family—the administration of justice on the one hand, and the defense of innocence on the other. “He did it.” “No, she did it.” “I didn’t do it. He did it.”

How many judgments like that have to be made within a family? Well, there are appropriate times to inflict punishment. There are appropriate times to refrain from that. Yesterday Bill gave a sermonette, and I actually had this written down in my notes already, and that is “black and white blanket-rules do not always fit,” and so mom and dad, there are going to be a lot of times, occasions within a family in which judgments are going to have to be made. “I’m going to kill you if I ever get my hands on you!” We are not going to go that far, but you understand. There are times for discernment for expressing these things.

Ecclesiastes 3:3 A time to break down, and a time to build up.

There is a time to withdraw from something that is not working. Breaking down and building up. There is a time to withdraw from something that is not working or that needs repaired, and being willing to admit it is a failed project. Some people are just too hard-headed to ever admit they really made a mistake. It is a big thing in a Christian’s life to be humble enough to admit that something is not working, that it was his/her fault, and that it is time to withdraw from that, to break it apart.

Ecclesiastes 3:4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.

This one has to do with appropriateness in social situations. In one sense, we look on the one hand at a funeral situation, and a wedding on the other hand. Discerning between what to do here is not always easy.

Proverbs 24:17-18 Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles; lest the Lord see it, and it displease Him, and He turn away His wrath from him.

The implication is that when your enemy falls, it is not a time to rejoice. That is not a time that you rejoice, and discerning to not do that, like I said, is not easy.

I will give another series of verses. Let us turn to Matthew 5 and see what it says there.

Matthew 5:43-48 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Somehow God, in His mercy, it says there He sends His rain on the just and on the unjust. Somehow He is able to discern, “I need to do this for the good of these people even though they don’t like Me at all, never think about Me.” He nonetheless does good things for bad evil people. That is not easy for us to do, to treat one that we perceive as being an enemy, someone that we do not like, someone who drives us up the wall, who irritates us, and yet in many cases, the discretionary thing to do is to treat them just like God does.

Ecclesiastes 3:5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.

The Jews have a story that kind of fits this, because the land of Israel is so rocky. I have never been there, but I have read in a couple of places that it is really a rocky land. They of course complained to God about it. They blame an angel that it is this way, that God sent an angel out with a whole bucket of rocks that he was supposed to scatter over the whole world, but he tripped going across Israel. So I guess they are very familiar with digging rocks out of the soil and putting them into a wall to separate their farm from the farm next door.

This has to do with there is an appropriate time for projects to be attended to. For instance, land needs clearing before planting and building, but sometimes one needs stones for a fence; and thus it is with any project. There are clear occasions in God’s Word of Him embracing Israel, but there are other times, such as when He commanded Jeremiah not to even pray for these people.

As I said before we began, there are similarities between many of these merisms, but in almost every case the similarity has to do with discernment, with discretion, and deciding when it is appropriate to do this and that. In almost every one of these cases, what God is doing is testing our discernment as to when we will do what.

Now as part of that merism, there is embracing and not embracing. This one pertains to sexual relationships. There are some things one must not do, and by the same, restraint must be exercised. For instance, when two people are unmarried, or are not married to each other, you do not want to embrace at the wrong time with the wrong person. So that one has to do with that kind of a situation.

Ecclesiastes 3:6 A time to gain, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away.

This touches on acquisition and sacrifice, and sometimes prudence shows that it is better to deprive oneself in order to secure something greater. I will give you an example that appears in the Bible at least twice. The one was when Jonah was on the ship, and they threw everything overboard in order to keep that ship afloat. You see, they were casting away their wealth, and then when Jonah admitted that this was being done because of him, they threw him overboard! That example shows you how far one might have to go. One might have to break off a relationship with someone. You want to throw that relationship away because it is pulling you down. It is sinking you into a hole.

I said this happened twice. It happened to the apostle Paul. They were going across the Mediterranean, and a storm came up near the Day of Atonement. In this case Paul said, “Don’t do this. Stick with it. God will rescue us,” and He did. In that case they really did not throw a great deal overboard. At least they did not throw the apostle Paul overboard.

Ecclesiastes 3:7 A time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

There are times in life when something is beyond repair. It could be a relationship. It could be clothing. It could be an automobile, and sometimes it takes courage and discernment to know when to do what, but it is something that has to be entered into, and sometimes God calls for a decision, and we have to be willing to make that sacrifice.

It does mention “speaking” there. We are going to go to the book of Job and look at something there very briefly because of something that Elihu said.

Job 32:4 Now because they were years older than he, Elihu had waited to speak to Job.

There was discretion there, and Elihu just kept his mouth shut until everybody had run out of words, and then he spoke.

It is really interesting to watch little kids. We have had a little experience with that, and especially Evelyn. She will tell me time and time again that this happened to her. She might have even been talking on the phone, she might have been at the range stirring something, making dinner, and one of our little darling daughters came up and was right beside her, saying, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” They are not discreet at all. They want attention. They need to read Ecclesiastes 3!

Unfortunately, this is something that is not practiced very well in the United States. People feel free to open up their mouths and say things that are vile, sometimes to an extreme out in public anywhere. You can see it on television. It is getting nastier and nastier with the things that they say in public. They do not hold back. Maybe those things should not even come to mind.

Let us go to Proverbs 15. Now there are times when we should really speak up, but we carefully evaluate the situation, so that is included within the merism.

Proverbs 15:23 A man has joy by the answer of his mouth, and a word spoken in due season, how good it is!

Proverbs 25:11 A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.

Back again to Ecclesiastes 3.

Ecclesiastes 3:8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

This is for me the most difficult and the most mysterious of the merisms, and it is very difficult for the commentators as well. They have difficulty coming to a conclusion here because they understand that there is not a time for a Christian to kill, and so they wonder about the application of this merism, and yet they cannot argue that it is part of God’s Word. That is why it is so difficult to determine exactly how it is to be applied.

They can see that there are times to hate, because the Bible shows some occasions for that, and a time for war and peace and so forth, and so they are very sparse in their words concerning how this applies to a Christian. But the consensus of the thought is that its purpose is to return us to the thought of something being predetermined over which an individual has little control. In other words, his own personal choice regarding something is actually something that he does not have the power to do.

They do understand this: that it has something to do with relationships among people and among nations, and the ebb and flow of the emotions between them being affected by God, thus forcing challenges to the relationships, and the efforts to be made to make the best of a bad situation. In other words, they are saying there are things that come up in life over which you have no control, and it seems as though nothing you can do will change it.

As we leave the merisms, I want to remind us once again that Solomon is saying that God imposes these events into the life of everyone. Everyone does not face them at the same time, and God imposes them for His purposes, and everybody does not face them to the same level or intensity. They are acts of His as part of His creation of us into the image of Jesus Christ, and in order to meet their challenges, we have to be thinking on their purpose. This is why we must look up, look around, look ahead, and look within for sound counsel.

I know from having gone through situations that there are times that I am absolutely flummoxed about what to do, and so the only hope is to pray to God that somehow I get some wisdom, or somehow He does something that in a way takes it out of my hands, and then He does something that solves the situation. So the merisms are, taken as a whole, looking at life under the sun, because that is where they are experienced. However—and this begins to become very important—beginning in verse 9 of chapter 3, Solomon very clearly adjusts his vision upward, because God is strongly brought into the picture.

Ecclesiastes 3:9-11 What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

These merisms are part of our life, and they do take a great deal of time. We are told, in the New Testament, that we are to redeem the time because the days are evil. Brethren, I think that you can understand that actually redeeming time is an impossibility. I do not think that they had a word that would exactly fit what the Greek literally said, and they used the word “redeeming,” and inserted that. You cannot buy back time, because time is constantly moving. That is what they came up with, and what they intend for us is for us to make the very best use of the time that we have available to us, to learn to discern, to learn to be wise, to learn to be appropriate in our decisions, to make a decision, and go on with that.

I want to read with you in Luke 21, because it is Jesus’ counsel to you and me about using the time that we have available to us right now. There is a time to really “buckle down,” as we might say, a time to pay attention to what is going on in our life, and to make the very best use of time. Luke 21 is Luke’s version of the Olivet Prophecy of Jesus Christ, and we are going to read Luke 21:8-19 just to set the stage for the time we are living in.

God is sovereign over time, and we live in this period of time, and He knew very well that when He called us we would have to face the things that He describes here. And so with His help, and our cooperation with Him, we can meet the challenges of making the very best use of the time that we have open to us.

Luke 21:8 And He said: “Take heed that you not be deceived. For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am He,’ and, ‘The time has drawn near.’ Therefore do not go after them.

That is a very clear signal from Him, that when we reach this time there are going to be many claiming that they are Christ, that they represent Christ, but they do not have the truth, and so it is a portion of a merism. What do you do with that? What is appropriate? He gives us the answer: Do not have anything to do with them.

Luke 21:9 But when you hear of wars and commotions, do not be terrified; for these things must come to pass first, but the end will not come immediately.”

That is very clear. We are facing a very pressure-packed time. It is already pressure-packed. It is going to get worse, and the wars are going to get nearer and nearer. What do we do? Well, know this. We have to adjust to living in this pressure-packed time, and it is appropriate that we make adjustments in our life to what is going on.

Luke 21:10-12 Then He said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be great earthquakes in various places, and famines and pestilences; and there will be fearful sights and great signs from heaven. But before all these things, they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons. You will be brought before kings and rulers for My name’s sake.

He is warning us that these are coming. They have not reached us yet. We are feeling the outer fringes of these things.

I have an email at home in which a man detailed that President Obama is the most anti-biblical president in the history of the United States. He is not just anti-Catholic. He is not just anti-Protestant. He is not just anti-Jewish. He does not like any of them. This is going to be a portion of a merism. What are you going to do? God is calling upon you to make a choice about what you are doing with your life. It is being listed there as this pressure builds.

I do not know how much you are aware, but I gave a sermon last year at the Feast of Tabernacles—in fact it was the opening sermon—saying that Christianity is right now the most persecuted religion on the face of the earth. How long is God going to hold it back? Most of the active persecution is taking place outside the Western hemisphere, but it is coming. The warning is there.

How are we going to use our time? You see, God is sovereign over time, and in fairness, in love to you and me, He is already warning us these things are coming, and they are going to touch on our lives, and so He is warning us to get ready so that we make best use of the time.

Luke 21:12-13 But before all these things, they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons. You will be brought before kings and rulers for My name’s sake. But it will turn out for you as an occasion for testimony.

It is going to happen. How soon? I do not know, but the warning is already there.

Luke 21:14-15 Therefore settle it in your hearts not to meditate beforehand on what you will answer; for I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries will not be able to contradict or resist.

Recall that in Deuteronomy 8 God shows that He provided for His people in every circumstance. He will provide for us in this as well, but He is laying this out so that we will understand that this pressure is going to come on us.

Luke 21:16-19 You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But not a hair of your head shall be lost. By your patience possess your souls.

I believe that already we are into the prelude for such a time that Jesus is describing, and this will be a time of worldwide scope and far more dangerous than any other time in the history of the world. Jeremiah 31 makes that very clear. It says this will be a time that no one else in the world has ever experienced, and it is coming on this generation. What are we going to do? To some measure, all of us must face it. Verse 19 though is particularly interesting. It says there, “By your patience possess your soul.” We are, I believe, impatient by nature. This world is running to and fro, and we want to get on with what we are focusing on at the moment and finish the tasks that we believe are before us.

Life in the United States is lived at break-neck speed, and information is impacting on our minds from every direction. Something happens in China, and “boom!” it hits the airwaves in the United States of America. Something happens in Central Africa, and within an hour or so it is already being broadcast here in the United States.

Something happens in Japan, and now they are dumping radioactive dust on us. It is without a doubt affecting us. Who knows how much damage that is going to do to health, especially in the northern United States and in Canada because prevailing winds from the west are blowing that junk right this way. I think that you can begin to see that some of this is inescapable. How do you protect yourself from that radioactive dust?

I just read one of the scariest emails I have ever read in my life. It was from the Health Ranger. He in turn got the information from somebody else that researchers, I believe in Los Angeles, are finding that the chemicals we eat (pesticides, food preservatives, and things of that nature)—our bodies are not throwing off. Now this is where it begins to get scary. They are finding that even as children are born they are drug addicted because the mother was drug addicted, and that passed right through into the child.

They are now finding that even the chemicals in these pesticides and so forth, that they too are being passed on within the genes that are passed from mother and father to the new child, and the child starts out with a load of pesticides and preservatives, etc., already in his body. How much more does the child have to eat before it affects his health?

They went on to say that I believe that right now, one out of every 88 children is born autistic. They have projected out somewhere between 2020 or 2023, one out of every two children may very well become autistic because of a load of chemicals that are already in their body when they are born. Scary stuff. What a world!

All of us are having to face this. What we should do now as best we can is to not eat things with that stuff in it. I know it is hard, nearly impossible, but that is what we humans are doing to one another now. In many cases it is simply the desire to get wealthy, and so they produce things that we have to eat and we become impacted by it.

Even as we go through this, I want us to go back to Psalm 34 to pick up one principle there. David is the author. He said this. His world was difficult. His world did not have some of the same difficulties that we have. Now consider what David said in the light of the kind of world we live in.

Psalm 34:1 I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth.

Now in light of what we just read in Luke 21 and some of my comments regarding the kind of world that we live in, can we bless the Lord at all times? That is quite a challenge for us to do.

God knows the right time for everything, as He demonstrated in Jesus’ life especially. I believe that one of the reasons David was able to bless the Lord at all times is because he meditated on the things of God deeply, and often looked for God’s hand in whatever was happening in his life and around him. And so I ask you, do you see God as David did?

David’s psalms are the result of David’s meditation on God. He could not see God literally any better than we can, but he nonetheless looked at God and His hand in everything that was going on in his life, and in the country’s life. He did that purposefully. Not only at that, but with God’s timing and the events of his life.

The merisms create uncertainty in our lives, and that is one of their main purposes, because God wants to see whether we turn to Him and keep right on living by faith, not letting ourselves get out head of God. This is something we have to deal with all the time in our dealings with God. But He is not easily seen by us. We have to make ourselves look around for Him.

Acts 1:7 says, “And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority.” God withholds a great deal from us, does He not? He does that because He wants to see whether we are really going to trust Him even when the going gets tough.

Brethren, I asked earlier about our patience. Very often we are called upon to wait for God’s timing, and a great deal of that has to happen in our life. You can read in Isaiah 30:18, Isaiah 40:31, Psalm 31:14-16 that He often withholds things from us to see whether or not we are going to continue to live by faith even when He seems to be gone.

The ultimate here is when the time of our death arrives. I think of this more often than I used to, because I am approaching 80 years of age.

Hebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.

Death is mentioned, I believe, seven times in the book of Ecclesiastes. Can the knowledge of this be accepted by us, not morbidly, but simply as a fact, a reality that death is God’s will?

I found a quote that is to me wistfully humorous. It came from Vicomte de Turenne, a French military leader in the Battle of Salzback. He was mortally wounded at the Battle of Salzback in 1675, and he said to those who came to his aid, “I did not mean to be killed today.”

God only knows what time our death will come, and it is inserted into the book of Ecclesiastes because He wants us to think about it, not morbidly, but it is a reality, and He intends that it put within us some measure of urgency about how we live at any time. We are at a time when a crisis is right at hand, and so we are going to be faced with this more forcefully.

Knowing that we are going to die, and accepting it, means that it is our responsibility, it is our choice to make good use of whatever time that God gives to us. This is a job, brethren, a responsibility that cannot be delegated. It has to be faced by each person, and always we have to be using our time for the glory of God in order to be best prepared for our judgment.

Ecclesiastes teaches that there is a time and a season for everything under heaven, and this reason overrides all others—the fact of death—so God gives us His Spirit to enable us to have the wisdom to make the right choices while we have time, and so, brethren, we must learn to patiently look up, look around, look within, and look forward to make the right choices.

I am going to pull “a Richard,” and go a little bit overtime because there is something I want to give you. I want you to turn to the book of Joshua. Joshua lived through some hair-raising experiences. He went all the way through. He was the only one of two who made it all the way from Egypt to the Promised Land. He fought a lot of wars. He saw a lot of death, but he had something that was driving him all the time, and he expresses in his last words to the people of Israel just before he died these thoughts that we need to carry with us.

Joshua 23:4-5 See, I have divided to you by lot these nations that remain, to be an inheritance for your tribes, from the Jordan, with all the nations that I have cut off, as far as the Great Sea westward. And the Lord your God will expel them from before you and drive them out of your sight. So you shall possess their land, as the Lord your God promised you.

Think of yourself in this position. We are right on the cusp of going into the Kingdom of God, and here is our commander, as it were, leaving these words for us.

Joshua 23:6-15 Therefore be very courageous to keep and to do all that is written in the Book of the Law of Moses, lest you turn aside from it to the right hand or to the left, [The merisms can make us do that, to turn aside.] and lest you go among these nations, these who remain among you. You shall not make mention of the name of their gods, nor cause anyone to swear by them; you shall not serve them nor bow down to them, but you shall hold fast to the Lord your God, as you have done to this day. For the Lord has driven out from before you great and strong nations; but as for you, no one has been able to stand against you to this day. [God will do for us as He did for them.] One man of you shall chase a thousand, for the Lord your God is He who fights for you, as He promised you. [Do we believe that?] Therefore take careful heed to yourselves, that you love the Lord your God. Or else, if indeed you do go back, and cling to the remnant of these nations—these that remain among you—[Are we going to go back to the world?] and make marriages with them, and go in to them and they to you, know for certain that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations from before you. But they shall be snares and traps to you, and scourges on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land which the Lord your God has given you. “Behold, this day I am going the way of all the earth. And you know in all your hearts and in all your souls that not one thing has failed of all the good things which the Lord your God spoke concerning you. All have come to pass for you; not one word of them has failed. Therefore it shall come to pass, that as all the good things have come upon you which the Lord your God promised you, so the Lord will bring upon you all harmful things, until He has destroyed you from this good land which the Lord your God has given you.

That is quite a speech. Tremendously meaningful.

I want to leave you with something though that is very positive. The things I am going to give you are a picture into the mind of God. He is a creator. He is creating us in His image, and I am going to tell you just a tiny bit about the care, about the concern, about the accuracy of the mind of our God from the standpoint of the way David looked at God for everything, and how the creation filled him with inspiration and wonder because he knew that there was a great God and Creator who made everything he could see, and he could not even begin to see the things that we are able to see simply because we have these instruments to enable us to peer into the creation, into the mind of our Creator.

The things that I am going to give here are, in a way, very simple common things of our world, but I wonder if any of us has ever taken the time and care to look at things like this very carefully. These are faith-building examples from a multitude of places throughout His creation, and it provides us with the consistency and accuracy of His mind in virtually everything that He does. Now remember, He is creating you and me.

Do you know that the eggs of the potato bug hatch in 7 days, that the eggs of a canary hatch in 14 days, and the barnyard hen in 21 days? Are you beginning to see a pattern? The eggs of the duck and the geese hatch in 28 days. Those of the Mallard duck in 35 days. The eggs of the parrot and the ostrich hatch in 42 days.

Let us switch from that to the elephant—a marvelous creation of great weight. The four legs of this great beast all bend forward in exactly the same direction. No other 4-legged animal can do this. They just do not have the design. God planned it for the elephant, so that once the elephant got down on the ground, it could get up; otherwise he never ever could have gotten up. He needs all 4 legs to provide the leverage to stand. Pretty neat, is it not? And so for this reason He gave it 4 fulcrums so that this huge animal could easily rise from the ground, and without 4 fulcrums, if it ever fell or laid down, it could never rise again.

By way of contrast, a horse rises from the ground on its front 2 legs, but on the other hand, a cow rises from the ground on its 2 hind legs. Why did He do that? A little bit of fun maybe, I do not know, but it is a little insight into the mind of God. He could have done anything He wanted. I am not sure why this is so, but one thing I do know, and that is that there is a good logical reason why God designed them so distinctively.

Are you aware that each and every watermelon, regardless of where it is grown in the world, always has an even number of stripes on the rind?

Do you know that every orange produced by every tree in the world always has an even number of segments, and that each corncob, unless it is deficient in some way, always has an even number of rows?

I am only pointing this out to show you the mind of God. He leaves signs all over this place: “I made this, and I am making you, and yet you are different from every other thing I have ever created that is going to be in My image.”

Each and every stalk of wheat has an even number of grains. Every bunch of bananas, on its lowest row, has an even number of bananas, and that each and every row piled on top has one smaller number of bananas so that it fits within the groove between the bananas below it.

All grains are in even numbers on the stalk, and God in His Word specifies 30-fold, 60-fold, or 100-fold—all even numbers.

God has even designed and caused the flowers to blossom at certain specified times during the day, so that Linnaeus, who was one of the greatest of all botanists, once said that if he had a conservatory containing the right kind of soil, moisture, and temperature, he could tell the time of day or night by the flowers that were open and closed. What power!

This is just a tiny segment of the absolutely fascinating detail to which God has given this awesome creation. We sing the hymn that says, “For It Is God Who Orders Life.” Indeed He does, and He is the One overseeing our creation so that our lives can be molded and shaped into His image.

We are exceedingly more important to Him than the magnificent creations I just mentioned, and each of us may be ordered by the Lord in a beautiful way for His glory if we will only entrust Him with our life by giving Him the leeway of our life in submission to Him.

If we attempt to regulate our own life, I guarantee, on the strength of the book of Ecclesiastes, it will be a meaningless failure. Let the Creator have His way. He knows what He is doing. He knows what His goal is for you. Our responsibility is to submit to Him as we see fit in our life from the information He provides for us.

JWR/smp/drm