A Time To Be Born and a Time To Heal

The author of the book of Ecclesiastes said:

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born and a time to ... heal” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-3 ESV). What Qoheleth did not say is that between the time to be born and the time to heal, there is a time to be sick.

People, Christians and non-Christians alike, deal with the problem of sickness in different ways. Many years ago I met a woman whose young son was very sick, suffering with asthma. With the desire to see her son healed, this woman went to a healing service in order to ask the visiting evangelist to cure her son.

During the healing service, the woman presented the child to the evangelist who proclaimed that all sicknesses are from the devil. The evangelist took the medicine away from the mother, threw it in a trash can and prayed for the child, declaring that the child was now cured.

I never again saw that mother and her young son. I felt sorry for her and her child because I knew that, although the evangelist was sincere in his belief, his theology was completely wrong.

All of us eventually will be concerned about sickness. Either we will be sick or a person we love will become ill and even die because of that disease. What happens to people when tragedy strikes? When tragedy strikes people will react in different ways.

In some people, illness gives way to despair and they give up on life or blame God for their illness. When sick, some people drown their sorrows in drinking, others try to alleviate their pain with drugs, while others commit suicide or turn to evil and try to atone for their tragedy by killing others. Often, people turn to God to find hope in the midst of despair and to find healing through divine intervention.

The problem of human illness raises a difficult question that will confront all of us, sooner or later: Why do people get sick? The answer to this question is not easy, but the answer is not: “It is God’s will.” God does not want people to get sick.

The story of creation in Genesis says that God created a good world: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Man and woman were created in a good world and they lived under ideal conditions. Then, they sinned against God. When they sinned, several things happened: they left God’s ideal place, death entered the world through sin and death spread to all people (Romans 5:12). Thus, from a biblical perspective, sickness is the result of sin entering into this world. Human beings live in a world that is not the ideal world God created. This is the reason there is sickness in the world.

If God does not want people to get sick, then why do people get sick? The answer must be that it is because our human nature is very weak. We, human beings, are affected by our environment.
The food we eat is preserved with chemicals, the air we breathe is filled with pollutants, the water we drink has many contaminants that affect our health. People smoke and cigarettes kill people. People breath second hand smoke and they also get sick.

Healthy people come into contact with people who are sick and their illness affects the healthy. People do not wash their hands and they transmit their diseases to others. That is how people get sick. It is not what God does. It is what we do to ourselves; it is what other people do to us.

Being sick is the lot of every human being. As Qoheleth also said: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: [There is] a time to ... break down” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 3). Our young and strong bodies soon become weak and old. When our bodies become weak and old they also become less resistant to illness and sooner or later they break down.

It is at times of illness that believers find two wonderful promises of healing in the Bible. The Lord said: “I am the LORD, who heals you” (Exodus 15:26). These words from the Lord provide believers with hope and comfort in times of sickness. God is the great physician and in times of illness, God is the great healer and if we are to be healed, it is he that restores us to health by using human instruments and divine intervention. The psalmist wrote: “The Lord sustains [the righteous] on his sickbed; in his illness you restore him to full health” (Psalm 41:3).

The other promise says that “And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up” (James 5:15 NIV). The prayer of faith brings divine intervention and God brings healing. One example of divine intervention is the case of the woman whose son was very sick. The Bible says that “his illness was so severe” (1 Kings 17:17) that he died. Elijah prayed (1 Kings 17:20) and God restored the life back to the child.

Believing prayer and God’s divine intervention may bring healing, but not in every case. Elisha was a man of faith but he became sick with an illness which eventually caused him to die (2 Kings 13:14). When Paul was sick, with what he called “a thorn in the flesh,” he prayed three times for God to remove whatever ailed him. The Lord did not remove that thorn, but told him: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). God does not always promise healing, but if faith is exercised, God always promises to save, which is more important.

So, what must people do when sickness comes? When some people get sick, their sickness leads to panic, resentment, or resignation. To others, their sickness helps them look at their own life from a different perspective. To a small group of people, sickness leads them to faith and to dedication of their life to a higher purpose. Many people have learned that when they are on their backs, they are forced to look up.

Several years ago I met a couple whose son, a young man who had committed his life to God to be a missionary, was killed in a tragic car accident caused by a drunk driver. The father of the young man, who was a church member, became so despondent that he blamed God for the death of his son. In his despondency, he lost his faith, left the church, and became an atheist.

The mother of the young man, in her loss, looked to God for comfort. Even though God did not heal her sorrow by returning her son back to her, her sorrow became the instrument by which she found a deeper relationship with God. The death of her son helped her to develop her faith and find life’s greatest meaning: God’s peace and God’s love. She kept the pain but gained the power to endure her pain, and that in itself is a higher form of healing.

Eventually, you who are reading this post, will become sick. When you become sick, it will be at that time when you will need to have a strong faith in God. The Bible emphasizes the power of believing faith. For you to gain healing and health through faith and prayer, several things must happen:

First, you must believe that God can and will heal. The Bible says: “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Hebrews 11:6).

Second, you must believe in the combined power of medical science and religious faith. God works through physical laws and through spiritual laws. God made the physicians and God made the medicines. They are God’s special agents for the healing of sick people.

Third, you must remove spiritual hindrances to healing such as sins and wrong attitudes. Sin and wrong attitudes go together. They cause many of the illnesses that affect human lives. People who practice sexual promiscuity get sexually transmitted diseases. People who use drugs are more susceptible to various kinds of illness. Anger causes stress and stress causes heart attacks. Unforgiven sins bring guilt and guilt causes many physical and psychological illnesses.

Fourth, you must accept God’s will for your life and you must be willing to accept his answer to your prayers, whatever that answer might be.

When people get sick and pray and there is no healing, people ask: “Why is it that God brings healing to certain people and not to others?” I believe that the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well, but it is also possible that healing may not be God’s will every time a person prays for healing. Jesus prayed: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. But let your will be done rather than mine” (Matthew 26:39). It was not God’s will for the cup be removed, so Jesus suffered.

We have to remember that sooner or later, all of us will die: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2). We have to die in order to gain eternal life. God’s will for your life is health instead of sickness, it is strength rather than weakness, pleasure instead of pain, for God does not enjoy seeing His children suffer. But sickness will come and so will death.

When we believe in Christ and pray in faith, when we do all we can within our power to use the means of health available to us, when we surrender our wrongs and open the way for his cleansing and forgiving love, and above all, when we trust his wisdom in the answer he gives us, then a marvelous peace will come to us. God’s peace eliminates our fears and our despair.

After his friend Lazarus died because of his illness, Jesus told Martha, Lazarus’s sister: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26). Some sickness may end in health, others in death. Martha was thinking about the healing of Lazarus’ body and a longer life for him on this earth, but Jesus was thinking about another kind of life, a life that would be everlasting.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Divine Healing, Ecclesiastes, Illness, Qoheleth, Sickness,

The End of Wisdom: A Rebuttal by Martin Shields

In a recent post, I noted the new review of books listed in the most recent issue of The Review of Biblical Literature. Among the books reviewed was a book written by Martin A. Shields, The End of Wisdom: A Reappraisal of the Historical and Canonical Function of Ecclesiastes. The book was reviewed by Harold C. Washington.

The author of the book, Martin Shields, has written a post for his blog, shields up, in which he rebuts some of the criticism Washington made about the content of the book. You can read Shield’s rebuttal here.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Martin Shields, Qoheleth, Wisdom

The Book of Ecclesiastes: In Search of a Better Life

In my previous post, I said that the book of Ecclesiastes reflects the struggle of an individual who was searching for meaning in life. He was a troubled person, a person bothered by the inconsistencies, the inequalities, and the mysteries of life.

The author of the book, known as Qoheleth, used Solomon as a literary devise to tell his story. Although he did not find meaning in riches and pleasures, he found something greater. Qoheleth’s search for a better life is the search of every individual and it is here where his book can help us.

The author of Ecclesiastes presents “the son of David” reflecting back on days he lived in futility and on the tragedies of his life. By adopting Solomon as the literary character of the book, Qoheleth introduces the “son of David” as one who was everything a king represented and who had everything a person wanted. And yet, he was dejected, haunted, disillusioned, and disappointed.

Having gone after wisdom, pleasure, and wealth, Qoheleth realized his prodigal ways of life and his efforts to find happiness left him empty, as empty as he was when he began his search.

The primary lesson of Ecclesiastes is that money and power cannot satisfy that unnameable hunger of the human spirit. The human spirit is hungry for meaning, for the assurance that life matters, that the world will be different once answers are found, and that human life will be better because one understands one’s purpose in the world.

Qoheleth’s theme is that human life without God is vanity and empty of meaning. He illustrates his theme by stating the futility of all wisdom, the vanity of pleasure and labor. To him, everything in life is hollow, it is like vapor, and it amounts to very little. People live in a world in which there is endless movement but little change, there is a perpetual pouring out of effort and yet, little profit.

Qoheleth believes that “There is a time for everything, and there is a time for every activity under heaven,” (Ecclesiastes 3:l-8). These words reflect his view that everything that happens to people has been predetermined and it will happen in its uniquely appropriate time. He knows and understands that people must learn to live with what cannot be changed for God has already decreed everything that is to happen: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

In the end he discovered that anything under the sun that dominates a person’s life is futile. His conclusion tells all: “After all this, there is only one thing to say: ‘Have reverence for God, and obey his commandments because this is all that man was created for’” (Ecclesiastes 12:13).

It seems that the author of Ecclesiastes wrote his book to tell others the results of his search for wisdom, to comfort those who were experiencing the burdens of life, and to lift up those
who were naturally weak or depressed by their own circumstances and to lead them back into the ways of God.

He was moved to write his book as a result of a life painfully full of disappointing experiences, a life he lived away from God. With deep sympathy for other seekers who may have been experiencing the same feelings and sufferings in their lives, he wrote to lead them out of the skepticism and perplexities in which he once was entangled.

The message of the book of Ecclesiastes is a message than can also be addressed to people who live in the twenty-first century, people who are trapped in a world of materialism, secular humanism, greed, and hedonism. Like Qoheleth, they are searching for a better life but are unable to find satisfaction in the things they do and in the things they have.

People who read the book of Ecclesiastes discover that the way of life described in the pages of this book is an accurate description of the way life is lived today. Ecclesiastes brings a special message of hope and direction to those who are searching for a better life, for the book shows that the author confronted a life of perplexity and meaninglessness and in the end found his answer.

What then is life all about? Qoheleth struggled with the mysteries of life and he found an answer. His answer? Qoheleth discovered that all human affairs and pursuits are vain and useless unless God is present in human affairs.

The book exhorts the reader to avoid the vanities of this life and to pursue the things that lead to love, industry, patience, and the fear of God. In the end, the book is an invitation to draw near to the living God in reverent worship and in humble acknowledgment of his power, and in reliance on his justice. Life is highly complex, and it is the work of a great Creator. God has designed the world and everything in it to function according to his wonderful purpose.

Qoheleth discovered that people try to live their complex lives independently of God, without living their lives according to the purpose for which the Creator intended: “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, ‘I find no pleasure in them’” (Ecclesiastes 12:1).

The work of Qoheleth serves as a preparation for the Christian faith for his book shows the full impact of what happens when an individual lives without God. A. S. Peake (p. 155) spoke of the significance of the book of Ecclesiastes. He wrote:

“It puts forth the logic of a non-Christian position with tremendous force, to all who feel keenly the misery of this world. More vividly than anything else in the Old Testament, it shows us how imperious was the necessity for the revelation of God in Christ.”

Because Qoheleth was courageous enough to express the deepest sentiments of his heart, we can acknowledge with all certainty that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the best help for us who live today in a world that offers no easy answers to the difficult problems of life.

Reference: A. S. Peake, The Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament. London: Epworth Press, 1947.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth,Vanity

The Book of Ecclesiastes: Vanity of Vanities

The book of Ecclesiastes is the work of an individual known as Qoheleth who was searching for meaning in life. Confronted with inconsistencies, inequalities, and other things that to him were absurd, Qoheleth tried to make sense of life and its mysteries.

The main theme of the book is expressed by the word “vanity”: “‘Vanity of vanities’, says the Preacher, ‘vanity of vanities! All is vanity’” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). This cry, found throughout the book, reflects the futile effort at understanding the things of God through human wisdom. Qoheleth said: “I devoted myself to search for understanding and to explore by wisdom everything being done in the world” (Ecclesiastes 1:13). What he discovered was that it is futile to try to understand the mysteries of life apart from God.

In his search for meaning and in his attempt at trying to make sense of life, he discovered that without God all endeavors are futile, that life is empty and meaningless, and that human wisdom leads to skepticism.

The author of Ecclesiastes used his own personal experience to show that all human efforts and earthly goals, when pursued for selfish desires and unbridled ambition, only lead to dissatisfaction and emptiness. This is the premise he introduced to the reader in the first chapter of the book. Qoheleth speaks of the futility and meaninglessness of all human endeavors and occupations. In his quest for answers, Qoheleth discovered that any attempt at finding an answer to the ultimate meaning of life through the acquisition of wisdom or knowledge provides no answer, and, in fact, it only increases the sense of futility and inadequacy.

To better understand the message of Ecclesiastes, it is important to acquire a background about the book and its author.

The book receives its name from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. In the Septuagint the book is called ekklesiastes, a word that means “assembly, congregation.” The name of the book in Hebrew is “Qoheleth.” The name comes from the word “qahal,” and it means “one who assembles.”

The title of the book has been taken to mean either, “one who collects wise sayings” or “one who addresses an assembly.” The author has been called “a preacher” or “a speaker.” Thus, the title implies that Qoheleth was the leader of an assembly, one who assembled a group for the purpose of addressing it.

In his book, Qoheleth describes himself as “the son of David and king in Jerusalem” (Ecclesiastes 1:1). This veiled reference to Solomon (Solomon’s name does not appear in the book) serves to emphasize that the one who is speaking was one who possessed wisdom and enjoyed the pleasures of life.

Most scholars agree that Solomon did not write Ecclesiastes, but he is the central figure of the book because the unknown author, Qoheleth, used him as a literary device to present his message to the reader.

The book of Ecclesiastes has a message for today’s society. Every day and everywhere we see many examples of what this book is conveying to his audience. People today seem to be reliving the life lived by Qoheleth. People work hard at trying to be happy in life. They buy things, change lifestyles, and seek after unending sources of pleasure in order to find happiness. However, in the end, many of these people do not find the happiness they seek, rather, it eludes them in spite of their efforts and hard work.

In western societies many people believe that career, success, and personal achievements are the most important goals in life and that achieving these goals is crucial for attaining a happy life. It is in light of these achievements that people are judged to be successful.

People today search for happiness and the true meaning of life in different ways: in satisfying physical desires, in material possessions, in wisdom and even in religious experiences. This is what Qoheleth did: “I determined that I would examine and study all things that are done in this world. I have seen everything done in this world, and I tell you, it is all useless” (Ecclesiastes 1:13-14).

In his search for life’s supreme good, Qoheleth, examined and studied every thing and experienced everything: drinking, possessions, wealth, power, pleasure and he concluded that, no matter what he did, the end of life was the same for everyone. He also discovered that no matter what he did or who he was, no matter how good or how badly he behaved, or how wise or how foolish he was, there was no ultimate good in life.

What people must learn today, as Qoheleth learned many years ago, is that life without God is empty and meaningless, that wealth and power, pleasure and possessions, position and prestige cannot make anyone happy.

Qoheleth has a very important lesson to teach people today. We must learn from him.

Next Post: The Book of Ecclesiastes: In Search of a Better Life


Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth, Vanity