Turn, Turn, Turn

There is an appointed time for everything.  And there is a time for every event under heaven –   Ecclesiastes 3:1

Appointed Time – Do you believe that God has an appointed plan for your life?  Do you think that everything is already mapped out for you and you are just waiting for it to happen?  Does God pre-arrange the history of the cosmos?

If you have been persuaded by the Greek idea of time, you might think everything has already been set in stone.  The Greeks viewed time like a river.  What is upstream is the future.  What is downstream is the past.  You and I sit on the riverbank at this moment called the present watching the stream of events go by.  The future is already there, it’s just out of sight from our position on the bank.  The future is fixed.  The stream already carries all the debris and other materials in it.  It just hasn’t arrived at our location yet.  Far too often, when we read this famous poem in Ecclesiastes, we think Qohelet is speaking like a Greek philosopher, telling us that the times of all these actions are already set.  But that’s not a Hebrew idea.

The expression in Hebrew (zeman . . . ‘et) isn’t about a fixed time.  It is about the right time.  There is a right time for birth, for death, for planting, for harvesting.  There is a time that is ripe for laughing, ripe for weeping, ripe for conflict, ripe for reconciliation.  None of this implies that these times are predetermined or preordained.  What Qohelet is saying, from a Hebrew perspective, it that life is filled with moments when certain actions and responses are called for.  These moments do not come to us on an already-existing stream where we are simply passive observers.  These moments are simply the occasions when a right response is expected and required.  Life isn’t set before you get here.  Your responses, your choices, your actions – and the actions of all the rest of the created order – shape what happens next as we go along.  What you do has eternal consequences.  The Butterfly Effect is real.

This Hebrew perspective has two enormous implications.  The first implication is perhaps the most obvious one – and the easiest to deal with.  If there is no predetermined plan, then how can we claim that God is sovereign?  Doesn’t this mean that the cosmos is really out of God’s control?  The answer is found in the careful distinction between sovereignty and immutability.  Sovereignty means that God is finally (at the end of it all) in charge.  At any moment, for reasons of His own, He can take charge of any and all events.  Nothing usurps His final authority.  But the creation of other moral free agents means that God has purposefully limited His potential total control in order to allow other free agents to choose.  In the end, He will act, but in the meanwhile, we act either with Him or against Him – and our actions change things.  Augustine’s proposal that God simply knows exactly what we will do (our future free will “choices”) from all eternity is wrong.  It is logical Greek philosophy but it isn’t biblical.

The second implication is more disturbing.  What we do now changes the course of the universe.  The weight of the world rests on our shoulders.  Your choices affect everything else.  Because the “plan” isn’t fixed, your choices alter consequences which affect other choices which alter other consequences, and so on.  Can you live with that?  Can you live with that responsibility and, at the same time, recognize that you don’t really know all the consequences of any one of your choices?  That’s Qohelet’s nightmare.  How can you decide anything if you don’t know all the consequences?  If the “plan” really does evolve, how do you know what is the right thing to do?

Well, how do you know?

Topical Index:  time, season, zeman, ‘et, plan, predetermined, Ecclesiastes 3:1