What's the point?

This life is not the most comfortable, is it? Sometimes it is hard work just living! Sometimes it feels like life is a random mix of issues and experiences. It’s not that I’m complaining. I’m just reflecting on life under the sun. What do we gain from our work, from our sacrifice? What does the worker gain from his toil?

In Ecclesiastes 3, Solomon asks it this way:

What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere him.

This passage comes immediately after the most quoted section of Ecclesiastes, where Solomon lists all the various seasons of life and activities under heaven. As he ponders all the things that come into our lives, some delightful, some painful and everything in between, he comes to the question of gain. He is essentially asking, “What do we get out of all this? What is the point?”

As he ruminates, he recognizes the sovereignty of God. He points out the God shaped hole in our hearts and the limitations of our understanding. He says that if this world is all there is, the best we can hope for is to eat, drink, and enjoy our work. Even the ability to enjoy our work is a gift from God. But Solomon pushes deeper into the mystery. There must be more!

He then returns to the mystery of God’s implacable sovereignty. We hear echoes of Psalm 115:3 as Solomon extols God and irresistible and unchangeable will. But the why question remains. Why does God do these things? Why does He fill our lives with pain as well as pleasure? Why is their war as well as peace, hate as well as love, weeping as well as laughter?

The key to understanding this passage is the very last sentence. “God does it so that men will revere him.”

Reverence is the only right response of a creature before their Creator. Therefore, God’s goal in all that He does under the sun is to restore the right relationship between us and Him. All the seasons and experiences of our life are a gift from Him to realign our hearts with His. God is freely and creatively doing whatever is best for us, whatever will form us more completely into the likeness of His Son. God measures out, into our lives, exactly what we need to renew our perspective and draw us into right relationship with Him.

What do we gain from our toil?  What is the pay off for slogging through the peaks and valleys of life? We gain an ever deepening relationship with God. We gain God Himself.

Everyone wants to go to heaven...

The gospel of Jesus Christ is a gospel that endures the cross for the joy that is hidden on the other side.  The cross precedes the resurrection.  There is a death between old life and new life.  I am reminded of a song by David Crowder, The chorus says, "Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. "How can we invite people to believe in a gospel that we don't believe in ourselves?

Every Christian I know wants the joy of the Lord, the fruit of the Spirit, the power of the resurrection in their lives.  The irony is that as we long for these realities to manifest in our lives we do our best to avoid the pain, the suffering, the cross.  The problem is that suffering is an unavoidable part of the journey. So, we veer off the path that would bring us to our desired destination.  Death is interwoven with life and process of growth.  

This was brought to my attention recently through my garden.  I have never been a gardener.  I mowed the lawn when I was a kid, but that's about as close as I have ever come to tending a garden.  When we moved into our current house, we inherited a wonderful garden.  It had been thoughtfully planted and arranged so that in every season there is something new blooming and sprouting throughout.  It has been a wonder for me to observe, and a steep curve for me to learn how to care for it.

It is a very low maintenance garden, but still it requires some work from time to time.  The most nerve wracking part for me is the transition between seasons.  That is when the cutting happens.  I am a far cry from a horticulturalist and have a hard time telling flowers and weeds apart.  I can pick out the familiar ones but do get confused.  Some of the weeds here actually have pretty flowers, and some of the flowering plants look suspiciously uninviting until they bloom. Then there is the real danger that I will kill a bush or plant when I am trying to help it. I might prune too much or too little and actually cause more harm then good.

We have now been here a year and I am please to see the results of the pruning that I did a year ago.  It appears that I have only significantly damaged one bush, the rest of the garden is really healthy.  Last summer when I was brutally hacking away at the garden I was pretty sure that I was doing irreparable damage, despite the guidance and advice of my expert gardening neighbors.  When I finished with some of the bushes they were all knobs and bare branches.  They continued to look ugly and bare for most of the year, but in the last month they exploded with life and are now full and beautiful.  The new growth more covers for the old wounds and would never have happened without the cutting.  The new blossoms push the cutting and death of the pruning to the distant recesses of my memory.

There was real cutting.  There was real death.  There were wounds and barrenness for a season.  These painful realities where not only unavoidable, they were preferable.  So it is with us.  It is not by accident that scripture is full of agricultural metaphors.  The life of the Spirit, in the Spirit, is organic.  We must choose to enter into and endure the pruning, the suffering, the seasons of death in order to experience the joy that comes only on the other side.  This requires an unnatural and patient faith.  A faith that trusts the gardener and that looks beyond the season of ugliness, trusting that there is a purpose to the pruning and that beauty will follow brutality.

Production and Patience

I find myself torn between two poles.  On the one hand I feel strongly that we are engaged in a battle and that we must be zealous and active in the fight.  On the other hand, I know that God is sovereign and is in control of all things. I was thinking and praying about this as I walked on the beach the morning.  I was feeling SO burdened by some specific situations.  I was moved by the immediacy of the problems and was interceding.  I was begging God to bare His arm and win the victory.  I was on the verge of despair that He could do anything, or would do anything, when I noticed the action of the waves.  The tide was going out, so the waves were not crashing, but instead gently rolling up and down between the rocks and over the sand.  I noticed that the rocks were well worn; some had taken on impossible shapes beneath the steady motion of the waves.  I saw the sand being pushed up and down the beach by the surf.  I saw small pebbles rolling around beneath the water, on their way to becoming sand themselves. It was then I was reminded of the inexorable coming of the Kingdom of God.

God is moving and His Kingdom is coming, but all in His own mysterious time and paradoxical ways.  I feel such an urgency an impatience for God to move!  I want His Kingdom to come and His will to be done NOW!  I don't think this is all bad, but I see that our sense of urgency and activity often leads us to make subtle choices that lead us away from dependence on God.  It seems that what we want is results, people saved, children fed, schools built, churches planted, families transformed, or cultures redeemed.  Being heirs to the industrial and information revolutions, we then set out to design and build systems that will efficiently and effectively produce the results that we need, that we believe God wants to see happen.

Unfortunately, our reliance on these systems and our efforts to perfect them often causes us to lose our way.  Ultimately our goal is not the production of particular results, good though they may be, but rather, as Jesus taught, God's Kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.   The reign of God is massive!  It is much bigger and more complex than we can imagine.  We understand very little about the universe we live in, and even less about the God who created it all.  His Kingdom is mysterious and even paradoxical.  It has so many aspects, contains so many interactions, and has so many simultaneously moving parts!  It is organic and dynamic, it cannot be placed under a microscope and dissected to unlock the secrets.  When we attempt to do this, we reduce the movement of the Spirit to the distillation and application of principles.  We lose the life of the Spirit, but we gain the illusion of control and efficiency.

Oh, but we are an impatient people!  The movement of God sometimes takes much longer than we would expect.  The waves are an ineffecient way to shape stones and to make sand.  So, we devise machines.  We research, discover, and apply the laws of physics and harness what powers we can to accomplish our goals.  We are efficient and effective as we improve upon God's methods.  We never equal His grace and beauty, but no matter because we can do it faster.  Unfortunately, there is more to what God is doing with the waves than just making sand, more than we can possibly understand.

When we skip the process to achieve the end we end up missing both.  We can produce sand and gravel from stones, but that is only a small part of what God is doing; one small part of His grand design.  The marvelous interactions of all that is happening on the beach are part of an intricate dance that we can pick apart but never duplicate.  Behind it all is the hidden hand of God.  He calls us to enter in with Him and to take an active role, but also not to overestimate our own prowess or importance.  We are each like one wave on the beach.  We matter, we have a role, but it is all so much bigger than us.  So, we must take our part in the line of waves accomplishing the will of God by measures and asking Him to give us both the patience and the endurance to keep going.