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“Time, Why You Punish Me?”

Time can feel like a punishment sometimes.  Darius Rucker and Hootie and the Blowfish captured this well in their 1994 song “Time.”  Part of it goes like this:

Time, why you punish me?
Like a wave crashing into the shore
You wash away my dreams
Time, why you walk away?
Like a friend with somewhere to go
You left me crying

Time, you left me standing there
Like a tree growin’ all alone
The wind just stripped me bare
Time, the past has come and gone
The future’s far away
Well, now only lasts for one second

Can you teach me about tomorrow
And all the pain and sorrow, running free?
‘Cause tomorrow’s just another day
And I don’t believe in time

Time without courage, time without fear
Is just wasted, wasted, wasted time
Time, why you punish me?

Or, as Isaac Watts put it in his 1719 hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past”: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.”

For some, time moves way too fast.  The moment we figure out one season, we’re on to the next one.  Time doesn’t slow down long enough for us to enjoy anything.  For others, time moves too slowly.  We can’t wait to be done with school, to be out on our own, to get married, to start our career.  Time frustrates all of us!

A Poem about Time

There’s actually a poem in the Bible about this, about how time moves from one activity to the next, with a sense of punishing us with its monotonous repetition.  It’s in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.

Solomon’s poem is about the inevitable monotony and sameness of life.  We’re born, live, work, love, and then we die.  Nothing really changes for the human race.  No wonder our lives can feel so meaningless!  We’re here today and gone tomorrow and nothing can change that.

The poem doesn’t evaluate the movement of time as good or bad.  It’s merely describing the seasons of life.  But in verses 9-15, Solomon reflects on the truth of the poem.  Verse 9 restates the question from 1:3.  What gain is there in a world where God has imposed a curse on all our activity and toil?

In a sense, the answer is, “Nothing is gained.”  The teacher is saying that there’s no gain because everything is nullified by the curse.  There’s no net gain because nothing fundamentally changes.  There’s just more work to do, more dishes to wash, more wars to fight, and it all ends in death.

The poem of verses 1-8 hints at the great absurdity of life, as each activity cancels out the other.  There are fourteen pluses and fourteen minuses, adding up to zero.  Every birth ends in death.  Every building is eventually torn down.  Everything we keep is eventually lost.

One commentator summarizes it like this: “Life is a big nonplus.  We seek meaning in all of our activities and come away frustrated.”[1]

“An Unhappy Business”

This is what Solomon says in verse 10.  Verse 10 is a restatement of 1:13, where “unhappy business” can also be translated, “miserable, grievous, or (literally) evil business.”  This gives the poem of verses 1-8 a negative evaluation.

The “unhappy business” of man is to toil through life.  Why?  Because God imposed a curse on the world because of Adam’s sin.  Our frustration is a “God-enforced burden.”[2]  Why?  The next verse tells us why.

“Everything Beautiful In It’s Time”

Verse 11 has three clauses.  Let’s look at them separately then try to put them together to see why God wants us to toil through life.

The first phrase says that God “made everything beautiful (or appropriate) in its time.”  “Time” points us back to the poem of verses 1-8, letting us know that he’s commenting on it.  “Made” points us back to the creation account where God “made” everything.  God made everything “appropriate” in its time means he made everything good and right and that everything fits into its own place and time.

This first phrase summarizes the poem of verses 1-8 and means that God is the One in charge of these times and activities.  It means that he’s ordained all these things as part of his plan for the world.

“He Has Put Eternity Into Man’s Heart”

The next phrase is the famous one, “he has put eternity into man’s heart.”  “Eternity” here contrasts with “time,” which was used 29 times in the poem.  What does this contrast mean?  He’s saying, “Yes, we live in the seemingly meaningless repetition of the mundane, the slow crawl of time.  But we live in the smallness of time with something God-sized in our hearts.”

“Eternality” is an attribute of God.  God putting “eternity” in our hearts means he put something of himself in us.  This is analogous to being made in the image of God.  We’re made out of dust, but we have something spiritual in us.  God put something big in our little hearts.

Why is Solomon telling us this?  To tell us that this is why this life feels so meaningless, why we know that “time” isn’t all there is, why we desire more than this life offers, why we desire to live forever in a world freed from the curse, why we have a longing for what’s beyond this life.

“So That He Cannot Find Out What God Has Done”

The last phrase of the verse is often ignored but it states the problem we all have: “But no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end” (CSB).  Our problem is that we can’t fully see or grasp God’s plan.  We know there’s more out there, but we can only handle a sliver of what God is up to.

We’re like children who ask “Why” about everything.  They question every explanation until finally a parent has to say, “Because I told you so!”  We can’t handle all the “whys” of God’s plan, so he tells us to do our best to enjoy this life and to trust him (vv. 12-14).

Trapped Between Time and Eternity

We’re trapped in between time and eternity, with no way of escape, so our only hope is to trust that God is up to something bigger and grander in the mundane and repetitive and seemingly meaningless details of our lives.

We can’t see the whole picture, so we must learn to lean on the One who does.  We must learn to trust that God is doing something in our lives whether we see it or not, that nothing is wasted in God’s world.

Our frustration with the way the world works should turn our hearts to God (v. 14).  God has given us desires beyond our reach.  As one commentator says, “We perceive and long for better things than this cursed misery.”[3]

Our unfulfilled longings lead us into despair, but despair is meant to lead us to God.  Only when we honestly acknowledge the meaninglessness of our lives apart from God will we come to him.  How did Jesus treat despairing people?  With gentleness and love.  It was the smug and proud religious people that he rebuked.  Jesus knew it was the sick who knew they needed a doctor.

What if our despair is a gift from God meant to lead us to him?  God put something big in our little hearts.  Why?  To life our eyes off of time and onto eternity.

Is There Meaning in Life?

Solomon perceived the emptiness of this world and that God made us for something bigger and better.  He believed there was a deeper meaning to be found in the mundane existence of our lives.

Our modern society struggles to come up with reasons for meaning in life that go beyond personal expression.  Peter Kreeft, in his book Heaven (written in 1980), explains our society’s condition like this:

“Most people in our modern Western society do not have any clear or solid answer to (the question, ‘What is the point of life?’).  Most of us live without knowing what we live for.  Surely this is life’s greatest tragedy, far worse than death.  Living for no reason is not living but mere existing, mere surviving.  As Viktor Frankl found in a Nazi concentration camp, our deepest, rock-bottom need is not pleasure, as Freud thought, or power, as Adler thought, but meaning and purpose, ‘a reasons to live and a reason to die.’  We need a meaning to life more than we need life itself.

Millions all around us are living the tragedy of meaningless life, the ‘life’ of spiritual death.  That is what makes our society most radically different from every society in history: not that it can fly to the moon, enfranchise more voters, have the grossest national product, conquer disease, or even blow up the entire planet, but that it does not know why it exists.

For the first time in history, society no longer regards tradition as sacred; in fact, it no longer regards it at all.  We are the first tree that has uprooted itself from the universal soil.  If we are to find an answer to the question ‘For what may I hope?’ we must find the answer individually; our society simply does not know.  The only sound we hear from our noisy society concerning the most important questions in the world is the sound of silence.

How is it that the society that ‘knows it all’ about everything knows nothing about Everything?  How has the knowledge explosion exploded away the supreme knowledge?  Why have we thrown away the road map just as we’ve souped up the engine?”[4]

Our society doesn’t understand that the meaningless of life is meant to point us to God, so it teaches us to look inward to find what in the past was always found by looking upward.

Kreeft is saying that it’s ironic that a society that prides itself on knowledge can’t figure out the most basic questions about life.  But the questions haven’t disappeared.  People keep asking the ultimate questions about meaning and existence generation after generation.  It’s almost like there’s something hard-wired into us telling our operating system that there’s something outside of us who we’re made for, another world we were designed to live in.

Lewis’s Argument from Desire

  1. S. Lewis, in his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” lays out what’s called the “argument from desire.”[5] He argues for the existence of another world of glory, heaven as we call it. He says that if we were made to commune with God in Paradise, just as Adam and Eve did in the beginning, then this desire will be in us.

He says that this desire for the “far off country” is an “inconsolable secret,” a “secret we cannot hide and cannot tell.”  He says, “We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.  We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it.”[6]

He says we wrongly call it beauty when we hear or read or see something captivating.  He says it isn’t something in the books or sunset or song but something that comes through them that captures us, “and what came through them was longing.”[7]

What Do You Do with this Longing?

Have you noticed this longing in yourself?  Why did we get so excited when the Texas Rangers won the World Series, a team none of us watched all year?  Because we long to be part of something bigger than ourselves.  We long for meaning in community.  We long for joy.

What do you do with that “indescribable something” that beautiful objects become the messengers of?  That “old ache” that yearns for healing?  Lewis asks, “What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating?  Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us.  The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy.”[8]

Are you thirsty for water from this fountain?  There’s only one thing that will quench your thirst.  Jesus says, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (Jn. 7:37-38).

You Were Made for God

You were made for heaven, but you already knew that.  You were made for God.  God made us for himself, and in a world under the curse of sin, he put a desire and longing in us meant to draw us back to him.

When I say, “You already believe in heaven,” what I mean is that God put eternity into your heart so that you’ll sense the emptiness of this life without God, that the deep longing in your heart for a better world means you were made for another world.  As Lewis said in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

What if the desire itself is a gift from God meant to lead us to him?  As Paul told the Athenians on Mars Hill: “(God) made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth…that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him.  Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:26-28).

God put eternity in our hearts so that we’ll be dissatisfied until we turn to him.  You’ll never be satisfied without God.  As Augustine famously said about God, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”  If God made us for himself, then it shouldn’t be surprising that we get frustrated when we turn away from him.

Your frustration with the punishment of time and your deep ache and longing and desire for something that you can’t quite name, something that nothing else satisfies, is God’s way of calling you to himself.  Are you listening?

[1]Daniel L. Akin and Jonathan Akin, Exalting Jesus in Ecclesiastes, Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2016), 41.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Ibid., 42.

[4]Peter Kreeft, Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 12-13.

[5]C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 29ff.

[6]Ibid., 30.

[7]Ibid.

[8]Ibid., 44.