God Gives - Part 2: Time and Purpose - Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Well, this morning we begin chapter 3 in our study of Ecclesiastes and we'll be looking at verses 1 through 8 together this morning. Last week, of course, against this backdrop of labor and toil, toil and labor, labor and toil, toil and labor, that constant refrain and repetition that rings true to our experience of that restlessness, the fatigue, the weariness of toiling and laboring under the sun, and of course, that itself is downstream from the grand question, the programmatic question that began this book in chapter 1, verse 3, what prophet has a man for all the toil with which he toils under the sun?

And last week we began, after about two chapters of surveying the king in Jerusalem's lament, the beginning of an answer, the beginning of an answer, and that was the first so-called carpe diem statement, which was said, again, seize the day, not exactly what's going at, seizing, grasping, clutching, striving is not at all what that sentiment of 2 .24 through 2 .26 was holding out to us.

Rather than seizing or clutching, it was to open our hands and to receive what God gives. And so that was part one last week of God gives and we saw there's nothing better under the sun than for us to be able to eat and drink and enjoy our labor, enjoy not only the fruit of our labor but even the labor that God has given us to do, our portion under the sun.

And so this is the beginning of an answer and as we said, we're going to see these statements again five more times before we complete this book. In fact, in chapter 3, we'll see it twice and then again in chapters 5, 8, and 9, we'll see this repetitious theme of these statements about receiving from God what He gives, understanding how we can enjoy life even under the sun.

So we had the beginning of the answer and now the reason I had our corporate reading begin in 2 .24 is to carry that into the beginning of chapter 3 and this poem, perhaps one of the most cherished passages from this book, if not the Bible, this is something that has been recounted in literature, in poetry, in film, it's been something that's been cherished and celebrated, a very poignant, beautiful, delicate poem about times.

This is going to carry beyond verse 8 as we'll see next week with part 3 but I want to appreciate this poem for what it holds out to us and I want to key in to a word that is used here in parallel with time that I think is very instructive for us, very helpful for us, and I think it accords with the purpose of chapter 3.

Time and Purpose in Ecclesiastes 3

So looking at Ecclesiastes chapter 3 beginning in verse 1, to everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck what is planted, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to gain and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time of war and a time of peace.

So, this passage, as we can see just holding it with chapter 2, is a huge tone shift. It's away from everything that we've held together from chapters 1 and 2. This is unlike anything we've encountered so far in Ecclesiastes.

This is set apart in polished form, a poem that is a change of style from the surveying of the king in Jerusalem. And it seems to be the wise, sober reflection after this survey, after this quest, that flows from this recognition of the good that can be enjoyed under the sun when it's received from God's hand in God's way.

And then we'll say here with chapter 3, in God's time, a gift received from God's hand in God's way and in God's time. We have here before us in these eight verses a series of merisms. Merisms are words that depict a whole.

They're parts, even bookends of a whole. We think of, well, there's valleys and hilltops in life. Well, you're thinking of the whole land if you're thinking of valleys and hilltops. So you're using this pair to illustrate the whole.

Or we find the same thing in Deuteronomy 6 or in Psalm 139, from my rising up to my lying down. What do those two phrases imply? It implies everything in between, not just when I rise and then I go blank until I go down at the end.

But no, you know my rising from my lying down. Your thoughts are with me from the time I rise up to the time I lay down. That also includes everything in between. And so these merisms, and there's 14 pairs, they illustrate two extreme ends.

Another word we would use is antinomies. These are antinomies. They're opposites of each other, war, peace, love, hate, a time to plant, a time to pluck, a time to tear, a time to sow. These are antinomies.

They're opposites. And yet they're extreme ends of time that include everything in between. And so in these 14 paired statements, you have, as it were, the fullness of human experience, of extreme ends that include everything in between.

And of course, these pairs are instantly memorable. They're framed very beautifully, and that's why this passage has always stood on its own. Not only does it come to us sort of in its own solitary form in the midst of chapters one, two, and three, we'll see in verse nine we return to familiar territory.

This poem in its own way stands on its own as a depiction of human experience, of what it's like to live life, the kinds of things that we encounter, the things that we do and the things that are done to us.

That's all held out in these eight verses. Everything we read in verse one has its time. That's a key to where we're going, as we'll see next week in verses nine through 15. The implications of this poem are drawn out, the key especially with verse 11, the way that God has set timelessness in our heart.

So here under the sun, everything is apportioned its time, and yet God has put timelessness within our hearts, a yearning for forever, a yearning for eternity. That creates the tension to which chapter three will speak.

To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven. That's verse one. It introduces the poem, and it introduces the poem with a very simple chiasm. We haven't come across many of these.

We did in our time in Genesis and Exodus. We're going to see these as we work our way through Ecclesiastes. A chiasm is simply a structural arrangement where you have parallel statements. Often these are labeled by scholars, so you'll have the capital letter A for the first line, and then its corresponding parallel will have A with an apostrophe.

And these can be very short, very common in biblical literature. You have A-B-B-A chiasms, so parallel lines at the beginning and end, and then parallels in the middle. I'll just give you a very quick example just for illustration, Psalm 103 .1.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name. That's a very simple A-B-B-A chiasm. Bless the Lord, bless His holy name. Those are the A parallels. And then what's in between?

With all that is within me, and O my soul. Bless the Lord, O my soul, all that's within me, bless His holy name. So that's A-B-B-A. Here we have that same structure. For everything, that's an A parallel, there's a season, a time for every purpose.

That's our A-B-B-A. So time, purpose, these things are held in parallel. There's a purpose, there's a point, there's a matter to everything. Everything has its season, everything has its time. Now, I want to lean into that word season this morning.

We'll do a little bit of work. I just want to point out a few things on this poem, but just to stress the importance of that word season. I want to acknowledge the fact that it's in parallel with time, but I think the way we experience time, the way that we even conceptualize time, is woefully short of what this poem holds out.

And I think part of the answer, part of the help, is in recognizing the fullness of that word season, season. That's where this morning's message will go, and I hope it will carry into next week as well.

But let's just look at this poem in a little more detail. To everything, there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck what is planted.

So the very beginning of this poem brings us to the extremes of life, life beginning at birth, so to speak, in terms of the poem, time to be born and life at its very end. This isn't speaking of life in a biblical definition that we would use, say, outside of the abortion mills, but rather, again, our experience of time, our experience of being born and then being taken away, dying.

A time to be born and a time to die. In other words, the full realm of human experience is held out to us here in verse 2. From the time we have been born to the time we die, what do we encounter? All of the times that consist between these two bookends.

And with that, a time to plant. This is leaning again into creational imagery. It was Adam and Eve who were created and then planted in the Garden of Eden. And so we're still in this language of creation, of life.

We're using agricultural imagery to think about human experience. This implies growth. This implies the kinds of changes and fruition that God intends. A time to plant. Then we have, perhaps, again, with reference to a time to die, a time to pluck what is planted.

This is not the verb you would use for harvesting. This is not a time to plant and a time to reap. This is a... A better translation would be a time to uproot. The idea is there's a deliberate pulling, almost a destruction of what has been planted.

So this is not the chore of harvesting. This pair is an extreme. There's a time to plant and there's a time to rip it out of the soil. It's like there's a time to be born, there's a time to be taken away from life, a time to die.

We're going to see this imagery continue with tearing down and building up in verse 3. A time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up. Again, these are intensive images.

You think of the imagery of warfare. That's where killing and perhaps healing from the wounds of war takes place. That's where walls and gates are broken down, homes are destroyed. That's where rebuilding must occur.

You think of the biblical corpus where we have these verbs of killing and of breaking down or of building up. It's cities that have become besieged. It's places that have been razed to the ground by invading armies.

And with that, we can think of what happens to those who have been killed, to places that have been broken down. There's a time to weep. But with the building up, with the restoration, there's a time to laugh.

So in the midst of mourning, there's also dancing. Think of the difference between gathering for a funeral as opposed to gathering for a wedding. There's a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones.

It's interesting, the rabbinic commentaries on this take this as a euphemism for intimacy, a refraining from intimacy, and they take that in pair with the rest of verse 5, but I think it actually flows out of verse 4.

We have the breaking down and the building up, a casting away stones. Is this how you would destroy something? You would hurl stones. You would break down buildings or even destroy crops in a field by hurling stones.

Why would you gather stones? To rebuild, to restore what had been broken down, to make repairs in the breaches. There's a time to embrace, but a time to refrain from embracing. A time to gain, that the embrace there is this picture of peace, where there can be peace, an embrace, and we're going to find that at the very end.

A time for war and a time for peace. A time to gain and a time to lose. The idea is not something's gone missing, but you declare something is lost, it's gone. It's beyond retrieval. That's the idea. There's a time to gain something and there's a time to recognize that is gone, it is lost.

A time to keep and a time to throw away. If you have a bunch of toddlers, that's a constant time. What do I keep and what do I throw away? A time to tear and a time to sew. A time to keep silence and a time to speak.

Here we have a lot of perhaps memorable statements that bring us to the story of Job. You think of tearing and sewing, of keeping silent and speaking. We're reminded when Job's life fell into calamity, how his friends came to comfort him.

And the first thing they did is they tore their robes. There was a time to tear. And then they sat with him in silence for seven days and seven nights. It wasn't a time to speak. Only after was it a time to speak, and only then could they begin to mend their clothes.

So again, this picture of grief, of calamity, of loss, of strife, of conflict, it's held out in this poem. And then we come to the encapsulation of it all in verse 8. In the extremes, a time to love and a time to hate.

A time of war and a time of peace. Here, what a fitting conclusion, that peace being the image of wholeness, of fullness, of completion, shalom. Now, these lines echo at a number of levels, the language and the imagery of chapter 1, verses 3 through 11.

It was the king in Jerusalem who was engaged in invading, of hurling stones and killing and taking captive these cities and other enemies' territory. And as he was expanding, he was building out his gardens.

He was gathering stones and cedars and many riches from afar to enhance his life and his luxury. And we find, again, this imagery of the things that he loved in the midst of the things that he lamented, the things that he gained in the midst of the things that were now lost.

We find this wind, as it were, sweeping through, this breeze, this heavel, this vanity, sweeping across the extremes held out in this poem. And he recognizes, perhaps in a sober reflection, that there was a time for it all.

There was a time that God allowed for all of it. And only now, seeing that order in these paired statements, can he recognize where he really is in his relationship to life, in his relationship to life under the sun, in his relationship to God who exists above the sun.

So right out of the gate, we have him recognizing all the things that I was trying to secure and bring about were actually just portions that God had given for a time. And I can look back and I see for times that I was building, there was also times that there was destruction.

For times that I was planting, there was also times for plucking up. For times that I was enamored in love, there was also a time for hatred. He's recognizing the fullness of his experience and looking back on all the things that carried through into chapter two.

He doesn't see it as chaotic. He doesn't see it as meaningless. Behind all of life's changes, behind all of these paired statements, he recognizes the very thing he called out in chapter two at the end.

It's the hand of God, the hand of God that gives. Life, of course, to his experience, life to our experience may seem unpredictable. From our perspective, uncontrollable. But he's able to see in everything, there was a balance, there was a season, there was a purpose running through it all.

There's a purpose for everything that occurs under heaven. To everything, there's a season, a time for every purpose. So this is not meaninglessness. This is not purposelessness. He's recognizing, rather, his purposes were very limited.

Limited, if not by perspective or vision, then limited by just capacity or power. He wasn't able to control or secure anything. It was God who was in control. It was God who had a greater purpose that overrode all the things that consisted in his life.

So the first thing we see from this poem, if we're reading carefully between the lines and where we're going, is a recognition of God's sovereignty. God is the one who gives. God is the one who takes.

That's the conclusion of Job. That's the conclusion of the king. With this poem about times, we're brought to a view of God's sovereignty. And it's reassuring to us in one sense. It's also very challenging to us in another.

It's reassuring because we recognize it is God who is in control. But it's also challenging because we recognize his control is so often veiled from our sight. He has a purpose for everything that occurs.

And yet we don't always understand what that purpose is. Martin Luther sums it up in this way. All human works and efforts have a certain indefinite time of acting, a beginning and an ending, and these are beyond human control.

It is not up to us to prescribe the time, the manner, the effect of the things that are to be done. Everything comes and goes at the time that God has appointed. He proves this on the basis of examples of human works whose times lie outside the choice of man.

And from this, he draws a conclusion that it is useless for men to be tormented by their striving. They do not accomplish anything, even if they were to burst over it, unless the proper time and the hour appointed by God has come.

So the first thing this poem presents to us is a recognition of God's sovereignty. It's God who gives. It's God who appoints. It's God's purpose that stands. And the question that flows from that is do we recognize God's sovereignty?

Do we recognize it? Again, and I'm gonna probably say this throughout this series, please do not be quick to answer that question. Yes, of course I do. We're so capable of straddling the things that we understand mentally, conceptually, abstractly, from ever touching the roadway of our life.

The tire somehow mysteriously floats above. It's like the, whatever that little land thing was from Star Wars. It just kind of hovers over. My abstract awareness of Christian confession and Christian doctrine will not actually make an impact into the experience of my lived life.

And so I can all day long say that God is sovereign without it meaningfully impacting the way that I'm experiencing life, the way that I'm living my life. That looks as simple as thinking that by maneuvering, by manipulating certain things, I can secure a control and outcome.

I can expand or shorten a season. And we often do that without ever feeling that conflict in our conscience that this is against the very sovereignty of God. God has a purpose. God appoints the times and the seasons, the means and the ways and the ends.

We live as it were. We have our living, our being, our moving, our breathing in him according to his sovereign purpose. So what I'm saying is it's easy for us to yes and amen that we recognize God's sovereignty, but live our lives as if it were not so.

I just need this. I just need to do that. If I can just get here, if this would just happen, do we recognize God's sovereignty? Well, how could you understand your recognition? How can you recognize the degree to which you recognize God's sovereignty?

This is gonna be something that develops as we work through Ecclesiastes. Let me just give you a preview of the answer in part. The preview is how we pray. How we pray will reveal a lot about the degree to which we recognize God's control over our times, over his purposes for us in every season of our lives.

J .I. Packer put it so memorably. He says, I do not intend to spend any time at all proving to you the general truth that God is sovereign in his world. There's no need. For I know that if you are a Christian, you already believe this.

How do I know that? Because I know that if you are a Christian, you pray. And the recognition of God's sovereignty is the basis of your prayer. In prayer, you ask for things and give thanks for things.

Why? Because you recognize that God is the author and source of all the good that you've had already and all the good that you hope for in the future. This is the fundamental philosophy of a Christian prayer.

The prayer of a Christian is not an attempt to force God's hand, but a humble acknowledgement of helplessness and dependence. When we are on our knees, we know that it is not we who control the world.

It is not in our power, therefore, to supply our needs by our own independent efforts. Every good thing that we desire for ourselves and for others must be sought from God and will come if it comes at all as a gift from his hands.

If this is true, even of our daily bread, as the Lord's prayer taught us, much more is it true of spiritual benefit. This is all luminously clear to us when we're actually praying whatever we may be betrayed into saying in argument afterward.

In effect, therefore, what we do every time we pray is to confess our own impotence and God's sovereignty. The very fact that a Christian prays is proof positive that he believes in the lordship of his God.

So how do we pray? Do we pray as an attempt to secure favor, to secure an outcome, or do we pray as it were, humbly acknowledging God's control and a purpose that may be hidden from our minds? Do we pray meaningfully to bless God when trial or adversity comes our way?

Are all our prays almost a spiritualized form of hyperventilation to prevent that adversity or get out of that trial? Again, how we pray is going to reveal a lot about how we understand God's sovereignty.

Do we bless God for withholding things that we want in order to give us things that we need? Let me say that again. Do we bless God for withholding things that we want in order to give us things that we need?

How we pray will tell us a lot about how we understand God's control. But it's not just his control as if we can manipulate or thwart or change his purpose according to our limited vision. It's rather his purpose.

That's where this word season comes to the fore. Before I get there, let me try to paint the picture a little bit. This word season to me is so fascinating because it's a word that we use. It's part of our Christianese dictionary.

And just as Ambrose Bierce had written a very famous dictionary with some good tongue-in-cheek definitions, I've often thought, wouldn't it be great to have a Christianese dictionary, sort of tongue-in-cheek where all the words that we use with the definitions that actually fit how we use them.

And we use this word season a lot. It's part of our Christianese. If you're a new believer, if you're new here, you'll start hearing it more and more. We often use it in a sentence like this. Now, it's been a tough season, you know, but God is good.

Or, oh, it's just a season. You know, it's just one of these seasons. Or it's, you know, I've just come out of a season of dryness. It's been a really, we speak of season in this way. And season is almost always used pejoratively, negatively.

It's funny that we use the word season for trial or difficulty, and we don't use the word season for blessing, not very often in my experience. Blessings are just blessings. Difficulties are seasons. That's how we speak of season.

I look around our world today, I look around at our society, and I see, as it always was ever since the curse, ever since the fall, an attempt of fallen man to mitigate the constraints of time and exercise some level of control.

Again, we want to be like God. We don't want to be creatures dependent upon God. We saw that in Romans 1. They did not acknowledge God as God. Therefore, he gave them over to feudal minds, gave them over to idolatry.

Modern technology is perhaps one of the most powerful idols in our day because it seems to offer a glimmering hope that we finally can transcend the constraints of time or even of season. If we can just control the flow of time, if we can control the changes of season, because as seasons change, a lot changes with the season.

We know this, right? What happens if you go from, let's say, October to January and you don't have a wood pile and your oil tank is empty? You don't have good tread on your tires or driveway salt? You have not adjusted to the changes that that season has brought.

Modern technology offers this glimmering hope that somehow we can transcend the limitations of time and avoid the changes of season. We want to avoid anything that reminds us of our creaturely dependence upon God who orders the time and arranges the seasons.

The idea is if we can just control the passage of time, if we can expand seasons or slow them down, if we can prevent so many things from changing, we will actually secure profit under the sun. That's the answer to chapter one, verse three.

This is what I can gain. This is where the value can be found. This is what will give meaning to my life. The only thing that stands against that is time. The only thing that stands against that are the changes that I cannot control, the changing seasons of life, the changing seasons all around me.

Ecclesiastes one comes as an artillery shell to explode that sentiment. To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven. And again, we're gonna see how this is held together with verse 11.

God's put timelessness, eternity within our hearts. So this whole thing is held together. Listen to how Dane Ortlund puts it, or sorry, Eric Ortlund puts it. Verse 11, which we'll get to next week, and verses one through eight form a context for understanding the claim that God has put eternity in the heart of man.

As we move through differing seasons in our lives, we recognize that God has appointed them for us, and we get a hint of a far greater order of which these individual seasons are only a small part. That's the key.

A far greater order of which these individual seasons are only a part. Let me translate that a little. A far greater purpose. For which these individual seasons are only a small part. Let me give you an equation.

Time plus purpose equals season. Here's how I want to define and hopefully help us understand this poem and apply it to our lives. Time plus purpose equals season. In other words, our experience of time, something we're wholly constrained by, something we're wholly subject to, our experience of time plus God's appointed purpose for our time equals a season in life.

Our experience of time, God's appointed purpose for that time equals a season in life. That's the equation. And of course, from the beginning, we should recognize that God didn't make things all flat and circular, that he disrupted and divided and brought into the world a certain rhythm in creation.

God made the moon to mark the seasons, the sun to know its time for setting, Psalm 104. While the earth remains, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.

God didn't just create, he divided what he created in order that there would be a rhythm of life. That rhythm reveals something about the purpose of God in time. This is why mankind, even in this poem, is first spoken of as something that gets planted.

Just as in the creation account, Adam and Eve are planted in Eden after they've been created. The idea is God is going to be doing something in their planting that will bring forth a change. There will be fruit that is not evident in this seed form.

There will be activity that corresponds to the fullness of God's purpose. All these things are held out enigmatically. Time is not just some abstract concept. We're all just going through it and there's no order or rhythm or purpose to it all.

We recognize the way that we order time is a season and we recognize in every season there is a purpose. Time, in other words, as a result of God's division, as a result of seasons, time offers us a rhythm, a rhythm of beginnings and a rhythm of endings.

Now, here's my proposition. We are living in the days of instant gratification. We are living in the days of instant gratification. Most of the things that are sick in our society, our societal ills and maladies, come about by this disease of instant gratification.

I want everything now. I don't want to have to wait to grow up. I want to be treated as an adult now. I want instant gratification now. I grew up in the days of dial-up internet. You don't even know what it's like.

I forget what it's like, because I complain when something's slow for about .3 seconds. I'm like, what's wrong with this thing? We want everything to be faster, more efficient. We want 24 -7, 365 accessibility.

We don't like having to wait for anything. I don't want to wait for a response. I don't want to wait for an appropriate time or a delay. I want everything to be available to me all the time. I need that Amazon drone to drop it on my lap in less than 30 minutes.

This is the direction of our culture. I would say as Christians, we have been, we have been diseased. We have caught the contagion of instant gratification. Rather than respecting seasons that God has ordained and trying to discern with biblical wisdom His purpose for that season, that we may live in a way that is thankful and glorifying and accomplishing that purpose, we want to be removed from seasons.

We want all seasons or all times to be alike. We want to secure it all, put it all into a blender, and not have to experience the changes and the tensions and the vicissitudes of these extremes. I don't know how your Bible has arranged these statements, but put your hand over the second half of all of those lines.

That's what we want. I just want dancing. I just want laughing. I just want healing. I just want planting. Who is living in such a way that they're looking to be plucked or torn down, to weep or to mourn, to go to war?

We don't live in that way. In fact, we try to control and manipulate so that we can avoid those necessary experiences of God's purpose under heaven. So my claim here, the big claim, it's gonna carry into next week, is that we're living in days of instant gratification.

We as Christians have been caught by that contagion, and we ourselves do not like to live in the conditions of God's seasons for us. Have you ever, I mean, this is such a, if there's one thing that, generally speaking, and I'm speaking this as a Scottish, of Scottish ancestry myself, is one thing that us pale white folk lack, it's rhythm.

And you can see that when you have some concert, you're like, all right, everybody, let's clap. It's always like some people that are just like way off, and it's like, how are you missing this? Just clap with everyone else, and there's always people off beat.

Usually I'm one of those guys, just off, oh, I missed it, oh, that was close. Recognizing rhythm in the Christian life is a call to recognize the seasons that God has appointed. Again, time plus God's purpose equals a season.

When you're not thinking seasonally in this way, you're not looking for God's purpose. You're wanting to control the time, control what this time has allowed, what this time is for, try to control the outcome of that.

But that's not God's will for you. That's not God's point in giving a season. If you want to understand the meaning of spring, you have to look to winter. If you want to understand the meaning of winter, you have to look to spring.

God has brought a certain rhythm into the world that we're caused to reflect upon, so that we learn to receive all that God intends for us in a season, because we're living in the rhythm of his providence.

We're bowing to his sovereign control. We recognize there's a purpose in these pairs. God's hand is not only in half of this list, it's over the whole. God has a purpose when we're weeping as much as when we're laughing.

God has a season that's appointed for us to plant, even to be plucked up. Think of how often the Christian life is spoken of in agrarian terms. How James says that the Christian ought to be like the patient farmer who waits for the precious fruit of the earth.

What has that patient farmer done? He's paid attention to weather patterns and the changing of seasons. He sowed when it was appropriate to sow. He's watered when it was appropriate to water. He's done what he's needed to to protect the crops from pestilence or other maladies.

But at the end of the day, he recognizes God is the one that must give growth. I have to wait, because at the end of it all, despite my toil and labor, I'm dependent upon the creator to give growth. He must provide.

So a farmer in that way learns to recognize and to submit to the rhythm of God's purpose. God has a purpose for seasons. God has a purpose for time. We think of this imagery, we read some of this from Psalm 65.

You visit the earth and water. I want you to think of this creator God spoken of with this kind of imagery. It's a picture of the absolute splendor of abundance. Listen to how this is described. You visit the earth and water it.

You greatly enrich it. The river of God is full of water. You provide their grain, for so you've prepared it. You water its ridges abundantly. You settle its furrows. You make it soft with showers. You bless its growth.

This isn't happening all year round, is it? This is describing a growing season. But then what comes in verse 11? You crown the year with your goodness. Now we're in harvest season. So we went from the season where God is, as it were, softening the soil with water, this water that's rolling over the furrows and the ridges, it's softening the ground, and then He crowns the whole year with His goodness.