Tune in to hear Joni interview her pastor, Bob Bjerkaas and learn new insight into Ecclesiastes 3.
SHAUNA: This is Shauna from Joni Eareckson Tada: Sharing Hope with an interview between Joni and her pastor, Bob Bjerkaas that will bless you beyond belief.
JONI: Welcome, Bob.
BOB: Well, thank you. It’s wonderful to be here with you.
JONI: And for those listening, Bob is our pastor. We attend a little PCA church near our home. And Bob has a disability; a visual impairment and so that makes him my “go-to guy” whenever I have got questions about the Word of God and suffering and the goodness of our heavenly Father. Bob, you and I have often discussed the subject, but there are all kinds of different ways to approach suffering when counseling somebody who is really downcast about affliction, right?
BOB: Yeah, absolutely!
JONI: What is the passage of scripture that you find yourself most often going to?
BOB: Well, one of the passages of scripture that I use a lot is Ecclesiastes 3. And in Ecclesiastes 3 [that’s kind of famous in pop culture generally because of the song about “for everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn”] but we are familiar with it from weddings: “there is a time to be born, a time to die, a time to build, a time to tear down, a time to rip, a time to mend, a time to love, a time to hate.” In a sense you read that beginning poem in Ecclesiastes 3, and you get this idea that everything has its place in this grand economy of God’s work in this world. And I think too often our familiarity with Ecclesiastes 3 stops right there because it is after the poem that we get to what I call “the basic problem of human existence”.
JONI: And what is that? What does it say?
BOB: Well, Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, I believe, he writes, “I have seen the burden God has placed upon men.” And the burden that God has placed upon men begins with the fact that God has set eternity in the hearts of men. And the word used there for eternity is the Hebrew word “olom”. I noticed downstairs in the lobby of the wonderful facility you’ve got children’s books and like many of the dads and moms listening today, I’ve read a lot of stories to my kids, and they always ask questions: what does this mean? What does that mean? What is this?
What is that? All of the stories that I’ve read to my kids ends happily ever after. I’ve never had a child ask me: “What does happily ever after mean?”
JONI: We all want it, don’t we?
BOB: Yeah, but we also all intuitively know what it is. See, that idea of “olom” is not just an idea of an eternity with respect to time. Sometimes that word is translated “mature” or “complete” or “whole”. And you see God has set in all of our hearts this sense of the way it ought to be.
JONI: So is that the burden that God places on men?
BOB: That’s the beginning of it. You see, the first thing in Ecclesiastes 3 says, “I have seen the burden God has laid on many. He has placed eternity in the hearts of men”; and the second part: “and God has made everything beautiful in its time.” A clear reference back to the previous collection of joys and sorrows.
JONI: So we want everything to be happily ever after but it doesn’t always happen when we want it.
BOB: Exactly! And we recognize that God is God and there is a sense in which the things he is doing in our life are good, but it doesn’t match the way we know it ought to be. And in fact, that is what the text goes on to say, “He has set eternity in the hearts of men. “He has made everything beautiful in its time, but we cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” And so there is a sense in which when I suffer, when I help one of my parishioners or dear friends go through a grieving process, I try to help them look at it through the lens of faith and see that the thing that is really causing us pain right now is that we don’t know what God is doing because if we knew what God was doing; if we understood how it is beautiful that I’m losing my vision and you use a chair, that there is something great and glorious about that and how we are able to serve and praise God from those perspectives. Well, if we could understand what God is doing it would be easier to rejoice.
SHAUNA: Thanks for listening today on Joni Eareckson Tada: Sharing Hope.
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