Pete Seger is credited with writing the song “Turn, Turn, Turn.” It was written in the 1950s but was not set to music until 1962. Seger did a rendition of it, as did the Limelighters in the early sixties, but neither took off. It was in 1965 that the Byrds put it to a contemporary rock sound that it made it all the way up the charts to #1 on the American Billboards. I graduated in 1965, and our yearbook committee chose it as our theme song for the class. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 was the theme passage for our class. Pete Seger, who got all the royalties, wrote only one word of the song. That word was “turn.” He repeated it three times (Turn, Turn, Turn) as the chorus after the verses that were penned 3000 years ago by Solomon. The passage uses the word “time” twenty-eight times.
According to Phil Ryken, Plautus wrote about the tyranny of time, “Bemoaning the stress caused by the latest device for keeping time, the Roman playwright said, ‘the gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish hours! Confound him who has cut and hacked my days so wretchedly into small pieces. Confound him who in this place set up a sundial.’” How much worse is it for us today? We all wear watches to keep close track of what time it is so we can meet our next appointment or accomplish our next mini-mission. I remember the story of the missionary who moved to the jungle to reach a very primitive tribe. The tribe’s people referred to him by a particular word that he could not understand. When he got a translator, he told him that the natives had given him a name that he didn’t understand. He then asked what the name meant. The translator laughed and said it means, “The one who wears his god on his wrist.” Like most Americans, the missionary always checks his watch before doing anything. We are indeed slaves to time.
Ecclesiastes 3 begins with, “There is a time for every purpose under heaven.” It is followed by the repetition of the word “time” 28 times in 14 pairs of perfect opposites. Looking at these opposites, we might notice that they cover the entire gamut of the human experience. However, we might also notice that there is a “purpose” expressed. Each event has a sovereign design and order, beginning with “a time to be born and a time to die.” God is sovereign over birth and death. Once a year, we celebrate what is known as the “Sanctity of Life Sunday.” Ronald Reagan established that back in the 1980s. Its focus is to draw our attention to the fact that God, and only God, has the power to start or end life. Reagan believed that life began at conception. Each conception is a miracle. Think of all the circumstances that must take place for any particular person to be conceived. It’s not just sex! Abraham and Sarah had sex thousands of times (I’d expect), as did many other couples in the bible who never conceived a child. Each conception is a miracle planned and purposed under a sovereign God’s mighty hand who establishes a “time to be born” and “a time to die.” Life from conception to death in God’s time is sacred.