The Creator Integrated the Whole of Creation into a Cacophonous Harmony.

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on mankind. He has made everything orderly in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end (Ecclesiastes 3:1-11).

Ecclesiastes is our English title of the Old Testament book known as “Qoheleth,” the Hebrew designation of which may be translated as “the Assembler” or even “the Preacher.” The Preacher wrote these familiar words popularized by The Byrds in 1965 in the song, Turn! Turn! Turn! With its words lifted from the Bible, the song’s popularity exponentially exceeded comprehension of its message. The message, however, captured my interest, prompting me to devote reflective consideration to the Preacher’s whole message in Ecclesiastes which resulted in my first published essay for a scholarly journal.

The Preacher’s quest (“What do workers gain from their toil?”) is linked with the shortfall of the Preacher’s quest (“He has set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end”) through the Preacher’s observation (“I have seen the burden God has laid on mankind. He has made everything orderly in its time”). The Preacher affirms that God has made everything orderly in its time. He uses a word meaning “orderly” or “beautiful” (yafeh, יׇפֶה), a synonym for “good” (tov, טוֹב). Given the contents of the Preacher’s litany concerning “a time for everything,” this orderliness or beauty is not that “good” which the Lord God pronounced over his creative work at the close of each day and the end of the sixth day of the week of creation (Gen 1:4, 9, 10, 14, 21,25, 31), for not yet had the Creator subjected creation to bondage and decay. Now, after Adam and Eve have disobeyed their Creator, the entire good created order has become pervasively marred by God’s curse. The good creation is subjected to the harmonic paradoxes of human affairs poetically captured in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. The beauty of which the Preacher speaks consists in this, that what occurs among humans comes to pass at its appointed time as a constituent aspect of the whole of God’s mysterious ways.

God established this orderly arrangement to all of creation, and he embedded an ineradicable sense of “eternity” within each of our hearts. God put into our hearts an intense inquisitiveness and yearning for understanding and purpose; we inherently know something of God, especially that we are accountable to him and without excuse before him. This impulsive drive and deep-seated desire to appreciate divinely established order and beauty arise because we are made in God’s image and after his likeness. However, this yearning impulse is obscured by abiding sinfulness that impairs our understanding as creatures who are carried along by God’s ordained wheels of incessant cycles of life’s seasons. We are impelled forward in this struggle to make sense out of these cyclic rhythms, an understanding that eludes our grasp because of the curse that bends everything toward the grave. Yet, because God made us as his earthly analogs who inescapably carry his image, this “eternity” that God has set within our hearts entails an unerasable residual knowledge of God’s eternal power and divine nature, discernible from all that God has made (Romans 1:19-20). This knowledge of God gives us our sense that there is purpose and meaning, though any full comprehension of it ever taunts us and evades our grasp even as it reminds us that we do not stand as innocents before the Creator (1:20).

This insatiable quest to apprehend the grandeur, the orderliness, the beauty, the symmetry, and the paradoxes of God’s created order, whether of tangible or of intangible things, manifests itself unevenly among us with various gradations of energetic pursuit and effectiveness, yes, even among atheists. Aesthetically we seek to appreciate creation’s beauty as we haltingly reproduce it by imitating our creator as we fashion beauty using a wide range of mediums at our disposal—words, speech, clay, sketches, shades of light, paintings, drama, dance, and numerous other forms. Philosophically, we seek to know the character, composition, and meaning of God’s created order. We confidently engage in scientific research and experimentation because God established reproducible order in his universe. Thus, we postulate provable hypotheses. Human behavior follows discernible patterns on which the discipline of human psychology rests. Because all humans are made in God’s image, everyone unequivocally knows that murder is wrong not because it is illegal but because it is contrary to our created God-designed nature. Thus, because nature instructs us concerning such things, human societies declare murder illegal and have developed the field of law and legal studies. Integral to every human discipline of study is this divinely imparted knowledge, first intrinsically made known through God’s created order and with greater clarity by way of God’s revelatory Word through the prophets, the apostles, and the incarnation of God’s Word, his only Son. Thus, theology is a human endeavor in every discipline of human knowledge and as a discipline of its own because we pursue discernment of God’s created and redemptive design, purpose, and destiny of his creation by studying God’s created order and God’s revealed Word. Since we all have this craving for meaning, a deep-seated inquisitiveness and capacity to learn how everything in this world fits together in a cohesive whole, we seek to grasp how God has integrated the whole, including our experiences, into a meaningful totality. We yearn to connect the various aspects of creation as we experience them to see each portion within the context of the whole of life. We eagerly seek to acquire a meaningful understanding of the world and of life for direction and a measure of mastery. We are like the Preacher who sought to add “one thing to another to discover the scheme of things” (Ecclesiastes 7:27). This is what is entailed in apprehending the Christian worldview, which is the divinely authorized view of the world and for the world.

The Preacher says that God has “made everything beautiful in its time,” entailing an orderly arrangement of paradoxical rhythms with the divinely appointed regularity, and he continues by saying that God has “set eternity in the human hearts” yet not one of us “can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Herein is the task or burden that God has laid upon all of Adam’s descendants: the search for meaning and coherency in a world rendered disjointed, topsy-turvy, without direct lines of justice correlating human actions and consequences. Human rebellion against the Creator invoked this curse. What was a pleasurable delight to Adam and Eve, whose creaturely power to apprehend the Creator and creation was circumscribed and derived was also pristine, became a heavy and frustrating burden to them and us, their offspring, because their blessed quest became a cursed pursuit now carried out in a cursed world wherein inexplicable paradoxes dominate—there are birth and death, mourning and celebration, hate as well as love, and war and peace. This kind of world, a unified whole yet twisted and interspersed with twists, turns, kinks, and gaps, the Preacher and we inhabit and seek to comprehend.

This frustrating pursuit to discover God’s purposes and design from what God is doing in his created order is an essential thread that the Preacher weaves throughout the fabric of his sermon. The elusiveness of meaning becomes a dominant motif (especially in 6:12-11:6). We are reminded that we “cannot discover anything about our future” (7:14; cf. 3:22) because God has made both good and evil to befall us and often randomly, without any necessarily direct correlation between the goodness or evil and consequences of human actions. The Preacher reminds us, “In this vaporous life of mine I have seen both of these: a righteous man perishing in his righteousness, and a wicked man living long in his wickedness” (7:15). Whether cruelties or kindnesses, both ordered by God, come to pass with disparity and inequity because “the righteous get what the wicked deserve and the wicked get what the righteous deserve” (8: 14). God has not revealed to us the secrets of his purposes, which move his actions (cf. Deut 29:29).

Our limitations and fractional knowledge as we seek to “add one thing to another to discover the scheme of things” (Ecclesiastes 7:27), is emphasized in 8:7-8a: “Since no one knows the future, who can tell someone what is to come? As no one has power over the wind to contain it; so no one has power over the day of one’s death.” The disproportionate allotment of God’s providence ruins our illusory hopes of mastering life and discovering the divine meaning and purpose of life’s comprehensiveness. The incongruities and paradoxes of the unified whole of God’s creation perplex the Preacher and confound us all. Nevertheless, because God’s curse hangs upon both ourselves and the world we inhabit, we are all tempted to do at least four things: (1) Forget the effects of God’s curse manifest in the paradoxes and incongruities that we observe in God’s creation; (2) Forget the enduring effects of Adam’s disobedient act upon the reasoning capacity of all his progeny by exaggerating our own capability to comprehend the incomprehensibility of the whole of God’s creation; (3) Lessen the authority and sufficiency of God’s Holy Word revelation, and (4) Overstate the knowledge of God that is discernible from all that he has made.

To the degree that we participate in any or all four of these actions, we are tempted to suppose that our task is to integrate the knowledge of God revealed in God’s Word and God’s world. However, as I reasoned in my initial blog entry, we creatures do not integrate what God reveals in the Scriptures and his created order. Such integration is not our work but the Creator’s work. When God created, he integrated all things into a harmonized and unified whole. Perhaps an oxymoron effectively captures the created order as it now exists and functions under God’s curse; it is cacophonous harmony. Such is the realistic perspective concerning God’s created order that the Preacher clearly affirms and which we are obligated to affirm also:

“What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are vaporous, a chasing after the wind.

What is crooked cannot be straightened;
What is lacking cannot be counted.
Consider what God has done:
Who can straighten
What he has made crooked?
When times are good, be happy;
But when times are bad, consider this:
God has made the one
as well as the other.
Therefore, no one can discover
anything about one’s future” (Ecclesiastes 1:13-15; 7:13-14).

* * * * * * * * * * *

For a fuller development of my understanding of Ecclesiastes, see these two essays:

• “Qoheleth: Enigmatic Pessimist or Godly Sage?” Grace Theological Journal 7 (1986): 21-56.
• “‘Everything Is Vapor’: Grasping for Meaning Under the Sun,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 15.3 (2011): 26-40.

The first essay shown above was my first published in a juried journal. It was a highly influential piece in my portfolio to secure my acceptance into the inaugural cohort of the newly minted Ph.D. program in 1987 at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. Years later, I was asked to contribute to an issue of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology on Ecclesiastes. That essay shows considerable maturation in my capacity to provide clear expression to my thoughts concerning the overall message the Preacher conveys. Even now, as I have written this blog entry, I observe greater maturation in formulating my thoughts on the subject. I say this to encourage younger writers to take heart. Our quests for perfect clarity of thought is accomplished incrementally but never perfectly.