Verse of the day · September 21
What does a time to every purpose under the heaven mean in Ecclesiastes 3:1?
The chapter names twenty-eight seasons. Not one of them can be brought forward or put off.
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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
Ecclesiastes 3:1
A chapter earlier, the same writer had advised a man to enjoy the good of his labour. What he lays down next is a proposition about time, and the world it describes turns like a wheel: sometimes one spoke is uppermost and by and by the contrary. Is it summer? It will be winter. Is it winter? Stay a while, and it will be summer. From one extreme to the other the fashion of this world changes, and it ever did and ever will.
Those things which seem most contrary the one to the other will each take their turn and come into play, Matthew Henry writes, so that every purpose has its time. And the things that look to us most casual and contingent are, in the counsel and foreknowledge of God, punctually determined: the very hour of them is fixed, and can neither be anticipated nor adjourned a moment.
John Gill reads the season as a set determined time — when a thing shall come into being, how long it shall continue, and in what circumstances. All things that have been, are, or shall be were foreordained by God, who appointed their times, and who keeps those times and seasons in his own power. The world itself falls inside that. It did not exist from everlasting, nor was it formed by the fortuitous concourse of atoms; it could not have existed sooner or later than it did, and it appeared when it was the will of God that it should. It has an end too, and when that will be God only knows. There is a set time in the counsels and providence of God for the great events: the seasons of the year throughout all ages, and the second coming to judgment, of which day and hour no man knows. There is one for everything of a lesser nature too.
The second half widens to every purpose under the heaven, and Gill starts at its narrowest: every purpose of man that is carried into execution. Some are not. They are superseded by the counsel of God, or an obstruction is thrown in the way of them so that they cannot take place. Those that are executed have their time appointed for them, and are overruled to answer some ends of his own. Then he opens it past man's purposes to God's own, which he calls eternal and unfrustrable.
On the passage, JFB set a man's planting beside his dying: he can no more reverse the times and order of planting, of digging up, and of transplanting than he can alter the times fixed for his birth and his death. And to make earthly things the chief end is vanity, however good they are in their order and their season.
The Geneva Notes name two causes for this diversity of time. One is to declare that there is nothing in this world perpetual. The other is to teach us not to be grieved if we have not all things at once according to our desires, nor enjoy them so long as we would wish. Henry has a pair of his own for a man in prosperity. He is not to be secure, because he lives in a world of changes and has no reason to say that tomorrow shall be as this day — the lowest valleys join to the highest mountains. He is to be easy all the same, enjoying the good of his labour in a humble dependence upon God and his providence, neither lifted up with hopes nor cast down with fears, but with evenness of mind expecting every event.
The particulars that follow run to twenty-eight in number, Henry counts, according to the days of the moon's revolution. The list opens with a birth and a death, and some observe, Henry reports, that between them there is no time to live — it being so short that it is not worth the mentioning, and as soon as we are born we begin to die. He adds a set time the list does not carry: a time to rise again, when those that lie in the grave shall be remembered.
All a man's pains and care will alter neither the mutable nature of the things themselves nor the immutable counsel of God concerning them. The travail was not given him to make up a happiness out of, but to be exercised in — his graces drawn out by the variety of events, and his dependence upon God tried by every change. This world was never intended for his rest, so he was never appointed to take his ease in it. He does not get to pick the season he is standing in. He gets the work it cuts out for him, and that is the thing to be more solicitous about than the change itself.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made