“Carpe Diem” is a Latin phrase meaning “pluck the day.”
It is used as a call for all to seize the day or to seize the opportunity. Time
is relentlessly moving on. Once it’s passed, it is gone forever. The Greek has
two terms that is translated time in the Bible. One word is “Kronos” where we
get the word chronology or chronograph. It speaks of physical time like the 24 hours
we have in a day. The other word is “Kairos”, better translated as opportunity.
It is the content or activities that fill our “kronos.” They are the substance
that will help us make the difference in life. That’s why Paul urged us in Ephesians
to redeem the opportunity or the “Kairos”, for the days are evil.
In these verses, Solomon virtually penned a beautiful
poem that shows how orderly our God truly is. The orderliness of life is so
well captured in these verses that even the singing group, “the Byrds”, had put
it into a song, entitled – “Turn, Turn, Turn.”
Yes, to everything there is a season. Time has its beginning in the
Sovereign God. Before He created the world, there was no time. It was just a
long stretch of endless eternity. The moment God brought the world into
existence, time began. Conscious of it or not, nothing happens outside of the
will of God. In these eight verses, we see 14 pairs of couplets to show that
God through time covers every aspect of life in human experience. A time to be
born and a time to die is speaking about the whole range of human existence. A
time to weep and a time to laugh encompass a whole range of human emotion.
What these eight verses tells us also is that God is the
keeper of time. He is in total control of all our time, and He regulates the
hours, the minutes and the seconds. Nothing happens to us outside of God’s
supervision. There is not a moment of our life that God is not aware of. Not
only is God in control of time completely, He is also the regulator of time. In
Him there is precise orderliness and that tells us that He is a God of
precision. He does things just at the right time. There is no misplaced
activity with God.
We shall not take the time to account for each activity
enumerated in these 14 couplets. But do think of it this way, birth and death
are two appointments that everyone of us must keep. Both our birth and our death follow God’s
timetable. The Bible said we are intricately formed in our mother’s womb, but
it also says that it is appointed unto man once to die. When we consider this
list of 14 couplets, we must see them as complementary not supplementary. It is
not a case of one over the other, but a case of one and the other. God shows
that by His character. He is both a God of love as well as a God of wrath. In
the same way we accept both these attributes of His, we also accept that each
of the 14 sets that states two complementary opposites will be experienced in
life.
Time is in God’s hand. He is the author and finisher of
it. What do we do with time and its whole stratagem of activities? We are
exhorted in Ephesians 5:16 to make the best of our time. What does it mean for
us practically? Here are a few for our consideration. Firstly we must take
God’s timing into consideration as we plan the activities of our life. Secondly,
we seize each moment and maximize it, knowing that once that moment passes us,
we can never have it back. Every second wasted is every second lost forever.
Thirdly, we make sure that we profitably use every moment. Don’t squander it in
mindless activities that lead us nowhere. Make your life count. Memorise Psalm
90:12 and tuck it somewhere in your heart. Make it one of your life verses. “Lord,
teach us to number our days aright so that we may present to You a heart of
wisdom.”
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