Ecclesiastes 3 Devotional

Living One Season at a Time

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom the work that God has done from beginning to end.”Ecclesiastes 3:11 (BSB)

The chapter's poem moves through life in pairs: birth and death, planting and uprooting, weeping and laughing, war and peace (3:1-8). No one chooses all their seasons. Then the Teacher says that God makes each thing lovely in its season and has placed a longing for eternity in human hearts, though no one can trace his work from beginning to end (3:11). We are made to long for the whole picture, yet we live one season at a time.

The chapter is honest about what troubles him. There is wickedness in the very place where justice should be (3:16), and people die and return to dust as the animals do (3:19-20). But he holds on to what he knows. Whatever God does lasts forever, with nothing to add or subtract (3:14), and he will judge in his time (3:17). That is why he can call daily food and work a gift (3:13). You do not need to understand the whole design to receive the season you are in from the one who sees it all.

To think about: What season are you in right now, and what would it look like to receive it from God rather than resent it?