Ecclesiastes 3:3

a time to kill, and a time to heal The first group had brought together natural death and natural birth. This includes in the induction the death which man inflicts in battle or single combat, in attack or self-defence, or in administering justice, and with it the verb that includes all the resources of the healing art which can raise men from all but actual death. Here also there is an appointed order, and man's wisdom lies in accepting it. This, rather than a fatalistic theory of Necessity, as being what man cannot, even if he will, resist, seems the thought expressed. The wise man knows when to slay and when to heal.

a time to break down, and a time to build up The grouping reminds us as before of Jeremiah 1:10 and may possibly be extended so as to take in a figurative as well as a literal building. We may perhaps trace an allusive reference, if not to the text, yet to the thought which it expresses, in St Paul's language in Galatians 2:18, "If I build again the things which I destroyed I make myself a transgressor." His wisdom lay in recognising that the "fulness of time" had come for breaking down the old structure of Judaism and building up the new structure of the kingdom of God. Of the mere literal sense we have a striking illustration in the paraphrase of the words of Elisha to Gehazi (2 Kings 5:26) as given in the Christian Year.

"Is this a time to plant and build,

Add house to house and field to field?"