Ecclesiastes 3

Ecclesiastes 3: 1 To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven

This chapter opens with perhaps the best-known passage in Ecclesiastes, maybe only because it was put to music by Pete Seeger in 1959 and made famous by The Byrds in 1965.

There is a time for everything. Solomon offers a long list of contrasts: birth-death, kill-heal, weep-laugh, mourn-dance, keep silence-speak.

There is a purpose for these times – in other words, they reflect various seasons that God ordained for man to experience, to live through, to struggle with. These seasons are a part of God’s created order through which we are to live.

I want to spend some time on this one:

Ecclesiastes 3: 8(a) A time to love, and a time to hate

We know about the time to love. We are told to love: God, our neighbors, even our enemies. So, what gives about a time to hate? I have been giving some thought to just this. When is it a time to hate?

Amos 5: 15(a) Hate evil, love good

We are told to hate evil, but we also know what “hate” does to us personally; it consumes us, it is harmful to us physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically. Our bodies tell us that it is harmful for us to hate – as if God put something in us to warn us off of hating. Yet, we hate anyway.

I struggled with this. It hurts our bodies to hate, yet we are told there is a time to hate. So, I turned it around: what does it do to our bodies to not hate? More specifically, to not hate evil?

I began by looking at this from the outside in – in other words, as shall be seen shortly, in precisely the wrong way, but the safest way for my ego. I thought about the evil in the world: genocide, war, corruption, pedophilia, depravities of all sorts. Yes, on one level I hate these, however these are really all abstract to me. I hate these without truly feeling anything personally.

I have ancestors who survived genocide and war, but not me. I see corruption all around me, the worst of which is personalized by the taking of my property through taxes. Yet this has become such a normal part of life…

In other words, it is all too abstract to me personally to physiologically harm me personally.

Then I looked closer: people around me, people who have been harmful to me, people who hurt me. Am I to hate them? Are times such as these a time to hate? Then it struck me:

Matthew 7: 3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Before concerning myself with the harm done to me by others, concern myself with the harm I do to myself. My sin is the thing which I am to hate – for this, it is time to hate.

Jesus teaches us this way not to compare the size of my sin to the sin in my brother: that my plank is bigger than my brother’s speck. He is telling us the relative importance: my sin is a much bigger problem to me than the sin of my brother is to me.

How much am I to hate this sin?

Matthew 18: 8 “If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life lame or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet, to be cast into the everlasting fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire.

Jesus is not teaching us to perform amputations on our physical body; He is teaching us that this is how much we are to hate sin – our sin. Jesus is painting a picture; He is not offering medical advice. I am not to cut off someone else’s foot for the hate of his sin, I am to cut off my foot for the hate I have of my sin.

What does it do to me physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, to not hate my sin, the sin in me, the sin for which I am to cut off my foot?

I know my answer, because there was a time when I did not hate my sin. It did nothing to me then to not hate my sin. When I lived “happily” in unrepentant sin, I did not hate my sin, and my sin did absolutely nothing to me physically, mentally, emotionally, or otherwise. I was “happy” in my sin, not realizing at the time the harm I was doing to myself and others.

So, at the time, not hating my sin did nothing to me. This is because my soul was empty; there was nothing there for my sin to harm – or so it seemed at the time.

Conclusion

There is a time to hate, and it begins here. Before hating the sin in another, before hating anything about any other, we are to hate the sin in us. Until we cut this sin from us – cut off the foot – we need not spend any time or energy on the sin of another.

Yes, it is damaging to us to see ourselves in the light of our sin and to hate our sin, but it is far more damaging for us not to.