Consider This - A Time to Plant & Uproot

Ecclesiastes 3:2

A time to give birth and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.

Photo by Binyamin Mellish: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-planting-plant-169523/

As we continue our journey through verse 2 of this chapter today we get to look at a time to plant and a time to uproot. It’s interesting to think about planting things because planting is so much a part of God’s creative design that it’s very easy to overlook.

The Hebrew word plant is nāṭaʿ which means to plant, fasten, fix, or establish. It can mean this literally or figuratively.

The first time the word is used is in Genesis 2:8 which says…

The LORD God planted ^H5193 a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.

You can do a quick word study on this and also note the many other places the word is used. It’s very interesting because we see Noah and Abraham planted things, there are rules about this in the Levitical law, and we also see in Proverbs 31 that the woman planted a vineyard.

So planting is something that is mentioned all over the Old Testament and Solomon also planted vineyards.

Now in the New Testament, a quick search on the word plant only revealed one verse that mentions the word. The verse is Matthew 15:13 which says…

But He answered and said, “Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be uprooted

The Greek word is phyteia and means a planting or a thing planted.

Isn’t it interesting that Jesus said what He said and also mentioned the word uprooted? I think so.

Then we see there is a time to uproot what was planted. The word uproot means literally to pull up and to uproot. It can also mean to hamstring or to cut.

The meaning behind to hamstring means to basically make useless as in hamstringing a horse by making it useless for work.

Today as we consider this, something that comes to mind is that whenever we plant something, there is always a harvest afterwards. You cannot uproot something if nothing has grown. This can be both literal when we plant something in the ground or it can be figurative as in when we plant things into the lives of other people.

I often think that we don’t realize how much what we say to others impacts them. We can bless others with our time and with our words and in return when we “uproot” the results we can see the fruit. Parents raising children see this all of the time. I think we also see this in our spiritual lives. If we take time to plant ourselves in the word of God, we will have spiritual fruit to harvest and pull up. Just a thought to consider today.