The "Why" of It All

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:… He has made everything beautiful in His time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. Ecclesiastes 3.1, 11

For those who feel the need to “make sense of it all”, history is a baffling mixture of pleasant and unpleasant for which there seems to be no apparent rhyme or reason. The contrasts of life and death, war and peace, joy and sorrow and success and failure seem to go back and forth with no reason or purpose. In reality, we are not bewildered when pleasant things happen to us, for we feel that that is the way it should be. We are baffled only by the unpleasant – the disasters and tragedies of life. We wonder at the causes of hunger but never question why there is plenty. Someone we love gets sick and dies and we ask why but never seem to trouble ourselves with the question of why someone recovers and lives.

For the most part, people accept insufficient explanations for the unpleasant events in their lives. We are more ready to accept faulty rationalizations than to endure the emotional stress of not understanding why “bad” things happen.

Some turn to religion for solace in times of trouble. If they see others suffer, they are prone to calling it a judgment. They like to believe that those who suffer are merely getting what they deserve, and this brings them comfort for they feel they do not deserve such suffering and, therefore will never suffer like that. When they do suffer, they can take on the mantle of a martyr, one who suffers for a greater cause – and thus assuage their anger and sorrow at what has happened to them.

Others simply become cynical saying that there is no rhyme or reason to history and that, in the end, nothing matters.

Solomon is among the wisest of men who ever lived. His answer to this problem is a good one, but for most people, it will not be a satisfying one. Solomon teaches that God does, indeed have purposes and that He has set a time for all the events that bring about those purposes. Other Scriptures teach us that God has a singular purpose to which all lesser actions and purposes are moving. And here is the kicker: God has arranged things so that we cannot figure out the causes and purposes for what He is doing. He has set “eternity” (or “the world” depending on which translation you use) in our hearts so that we cannot figure out what God is doing. 

Neither “eternity” nor “the world” give us the full sense of what Solomon means. The word means “vanishing point.” If you stand on a set of railroad tracks and look behind you, it appears the tracks eventually come together, and you are unable to see any further than that vanishing point in order to discover where the train comes from. If you look ahead of you, the same thing happens, and you are not able to discover the destination of the train. And, in life, we cannot see beyond the limits of our own days to determine the greater causes of our lives or the purposes they serve. We can see back only as far as our earliest memories and we cannot see any distance into the future but must experience the future as it becomes the present. But understanding the causes of events and the purposes they serve requires being able to see beyond the events themselves – to able to see what comes before and after the event. Therefore, it is impossible for a man to know the cause and purpose of his life for it is impossible for him to see a picture any larger than his own life. Every attempt he makes to understand the cause and purpose of his existence runs into the vanishing points of his birth and death.

But that does not mean we cannot know the cause and purpose of our existence. We cannot discover it, but we can learn it, for God has told us. The problem is, most people do not like His answer. The cause and purpose of our lives are one: Jesus Christ. And that is true whether we believe God or not, whether our destiny is wrath or salvation or whether our lives are pleasant or unpleasant. History is not about us. Not even our own personal lives are about us. We exist because Christ created us and we have been created for His pleasure. The grand purpose to which all else is subservient is the glorification of the Lord Jesus. The grand purpose for our existence and all that we experience in our existence is the glorification of Jesus Christ, God’s Son.

We take this truth by faith for even though we have been told the cause and purpose of our existence, we are unable to perceive how Christ’s glory is going to be advanced by all that happens to us. But where sight fails faith succeeds and we live in the confidence that all is well for all is serving the glorious purpose of Christ’s glory. What are we to do, then? We must stop trying to make sense of it all, for it is impossible for us to do so. We must learn to live each moment according to what time it is: When it is time to laugh then let us laugh, but when it is time to weep, then let us weep. Let us dance when the music of our lives is light and festive; let us mourn when the music turns dark and the tones of a dirge are played. Let us never pretend it is some other time than what it is. Rather, let us embrace every event as it comes knowing it is the right thing for that time for the Lord has sent it at that time. 

There is a Divinely appointed time for everything – everything, that is, except questioning the Divine timing!

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