Bottom line up front: A Time for Everything

This Cultural Moment: Like you, perhaps, I am watching the events in Minneapolis, New York City, and other flashpoint cities. Will the slide into tribalism continue? Scores of thinkers are labeling this era as a ‘cold civil war.’ Regardless of one’s worldview, if that diagnosis is accurate, it spells danger. Battlelines are being formed. Some folks are cheering the murder of Charlie Kirk. Some folks don’t want free speech; they actually demand silence and submission. They want to gag the whole foundational freedom of America’s cornerstone: liberty and freedom of expression.

These are, if one is honest, perilous times. Will we be a nation of free people or will we succumb to the mobs and tribalism and a cold civil war where the respectful exchange of ideas is smashed and replaced by ruthless power? I cringe when I hear the levels to which debate has sunk. It seems that the free exchange of profound ideas has been replaced by ad hominem attacks and sound bites. Where’s wisdom?

What Scripture Says: My longstanding favorite book of sacred Scripture is Ecclesiastes. Why? Well, it’s part of the Wisdom Literature in the canon. Surely most people have some familiarity with the lines below:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

a time to kill, a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to seek, a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to go to cast away;

a time to tear, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace (Eccl 3:1-8).

Encouragement/takeaway: Even as I type the familiar words, I hear the song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by The Byrds running in my mind’s ear. When we survey our day, it’s vital to know the times and what we ought to do (1 Chr 12:32), is it not? The whole idea of Ecclesiastes is that we are to fear the true and living God and live by his Word. That’s how Solomon ends the 12 chapters: “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Eccl 12:13-14).

A “time for every matter under heaven,” the refrain goes in this Solomonic wisdom. When we study the life of Solomon, he did not end well. He very often succumbed to licentiousness and license. He went, as I’ve often preached, from hero to zero. But he left us warnings about what happens when an individual or a nation abandons godliness; it suppresses truth and descends into paganism and moral melee is the result. Scripture attests that “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9b).

My prayer is that our nation would, against all odds, learn from history, and not go from hero to zero. But that hinges–whether folks wish to admit it or not–upon how we respond to God’s revelation. If you want to know what it looks like when a people reject God, look no farther than what’s happening in each day’s headlines.