Tyler Shipley
How often do you think about your death and where you will be after you die? This is something that I have thought about more recently. It was something that terrified me as a kid.
The average American believes that heaven and hell are real, but that majority say they will be entering heaven because that is “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded.” This majority also says that hell is the place “where people who have led bad lives, and die without being sorry, are eternally punished.”
In this quest to find meaning, the author of Ecclesiastes points out that everyone’s days are numbered from their beginning to their end. He gave us a glimpse, saying that everyone will endure various seasons in their lives. He wants the reader to see that God stands at the center of all time and eternity: He has complete control and there is nothing that can frustrate what has been written for all of time.
Here is the reality that I want us to see: God has placed within our hearts a longing for something greater, something more meaningful even if we do not fully understand it. If God has limited our understanding about the work he is doing, he has shown us three unchanging truths.
Life is a gift from God (vv. 9-10).
We like to use the phrase, “I am the master of my own destiny,” that we hold everything together because we are organized. We know what’s best. In reality, we do not hold our lives like we think we do. God is the one who gives us what we have. They are his blessings to us.
God has you here for a good reason. He is working in our quest to find meaning in the meaningless.
Life is connected to eternity (v. 11).
The things that we see happening all around us — even in our lives — may not always feel good or right. They seem contradictory to that which is good. We see that happening in our culture: school shootings, war in Ukraine, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and more. We see the evil in our world and wonder, where was God in all of this? God cannot really be in control of all this evil, can He?
God appoints each person to eternity, but we will never fully grasp this concept. God has placed a longing within our souls that we are on a quest to retrieve. The problem with this quest is that we are never going to fully grasp what God is doing in this life, even though we try so very hard to know. We are so limited because God uses that to draw us closer to him in faith.
The best way that I can explain this is a young child in their “why” stage of their life. That child will always ask “why” when you try to explain something to them or tell them what to do. That’s their response to almost anything and everything. “Why, Mom?” or “Why, Dad?”
When it comes to God’s control over time and eternity, we are always asking that eternal question of “why?” We take the role of the child to fully understand why God works in the way he does. The answer is always the same: we will never fully understand from beginning to end.
We will never grasp what God is doing, but faith isn’t about seeing, but about believing in the One who works all things for our good.
Let eternity shape how you live in the present (vv. 12-13).
Joe Rigney urges Christians to “embrace your creatureliness. Don’t seek to be God. Instead, embrace the glorious limitations and boundaries that God has placed on you as a character in his story.”
To fear God rightly is to remember our humanity. When we can’t see around the dark corner of life yet to come or understand the eternal question “why” — no matter how much we want to — we remember our humanity. We remember that God is God, and we are not. He controls all things at all times at all places, and he is good.
Tyler Shipley is pastor of Fillmore Baptist Church. This sermon is from a series on Ecclesiastes.