[Darris McNeely] There was a very well-known song from the 1960s, made famous by the group,
The Birds.
And it was taken right out of the Book of Ecclesiastes 3.
To everything, it says, there is a season and a time to every purpose.
And that song caught a lot of attention.
You still hear it occasionally on oldies playlists.
To everything, there is a time and a season, and time to every purpose under heaven, a
time to live, time to die, time to be born.
The first few verses of Chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes, there are quite interesting in that way.
I look at that and I think of another song called "The Long and Winding Road," about
life, that life can be kind of winding.
There's a time for this and a time for that.
And we have to be able to navigate all of the twists and turns of the journey of life
in order to come out right at the end.
And that I think is a good approach to looking at the Book of Ecclesiastes as a lens to understand
things about life, and especially in light of the author of that book, Solomon, the king
of Israel.
I've been doing a series off of some personal study on the Book of Ecclesiastes in Solomon's
life in this way.
And I talked earlier about the beginning of Solomon's reign.
But as the years went by in Solomon's kingdom, you know the story, he grew in wisdom.
God blessed him with wisdom as well as with wealth.
He asked for wisdom and God gave him wisdom and wealth in the famous episode that is described
there in the Bible.
His wisdom was so strong, and so well-known that people came from foreign lands.
And one of the better-known stories is that of the Queen of Sheba, or the Queen of the
South, who comes to examine what she had heard about Solomon and his kingdom, and the wealth
of his court in Jerusalem.
The story is told in 1 Kings 10 of how she came with her entourage.
And as she looked at everything about Solomon and examined him and listened to him, she
said, "This is better and more than I had even heard or anticipated."
She brought her gifts, they exchanged matters of things.
And she even shows up, the Queen of the South, in a statement that Jesus makes in Matthew
12:42 when He says that the Queen of the South will rise in the judgment.
And it's the judgment of what Revelation 20 describes as the Great White Throne, after
the 1000-year period of Christ's reign on earth called the millennium.
In that judgment, the Queen of the South will rise and condemn the generation that Jesus
was talking to in that particular account in the gospels.
Because she came and she saw at least the work of God as it was blessing, in a physical
way, Solomon, and she proclaimed that.
And she'll stand in the judgment at other times and other people's and say, "You should
have been listening to your servant," in that case, Jesus Christ.
When you think about all that Solomon built, and the Bible tells us the buildings, the
monuments, and the armies and what he did, there's a question that comes, what remains?
You go to Israel today, you see very, very little from the time of Solomon.
You'll see a few runs of some stables in a place called Megiddo, and maybe a few other
things, but it's all gone.
Of all that Solomon did, what remains?
Well, what remains are his proverbs, what remains is his story.
What remains is a ook called Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, wisdom, words written
down in a book, the Bible, for us to understand and to gain understanding, and in the seasons
of our life.
Remember, through everything, there is a season and a time for every purpose.
We look at times to those words.
There are certain seasons that I will look to those words.
Summertime happens to be one when I will read the Book of Proverbs, just to think about
wisdom.
But the big lesson is what comes out of the Book of Proverbs, that the fear of God is
the beginning of wisdom.
And that takes a lifetime of study.
In the Book of Ecclesiastes 12:11, Solomon wrote, "The words of the wise are like goads.
They're collected sayings like firmly embedded nails given by one shepherd.
Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them.
Of making many books, there is no end and much study wearies the body."
Well, a lifetime of study does sometime weary the body.
Hopefully, it doesn't weary the mind and our intellect, and certainly, our bent toward
righteousness and truth.
That's a lifetime study.
And that's how we navigate that long and winding road and learn to make sure that the seasons
of our life are aimed and guided in the direction of righteousness as we go through and learn
those lessons.
That's "BT Daily."
Join us next time.