Ecclesiastes Lesson 1
The Torture of Human Viewpoint – 1:1-11
We are about to begin a study of one of the most unique portions of God’s Word. This is the only book in the entire canon of Scripture that is pessimistic. This is the only book in the entire canon of Scripture that contains areas that are contradictory to other places in the Word of God. For that reason the canonicity of this book has been questioned because people have failed to understand the purpose and the reasoning behind the Holy Spirit’s inclusion of this book into the canon of Scripture. This is one of the most important books of our time, to study particularly in the last third of the 20th century, because we are winding up at the same spot that Solomon wound up in back in his day. In verse 1 we have the beginning of this book and we’re going to spend considerable time defining certain terms about verse 1, and explaining the word “vanity” in verse 2.
Let’s look first at verse 1, “The word of the Preacher,” your Bible says, “the son of David, king in Jerusalem.” Frankly, that’s one word I can’t stand, is the word “preacher.” I can’t stand to be called a preacher, I just detest the word, I can’t stand it because it sounds like somebody is getting up and putting out some pious platitude about something. Of course it’s a beautiful word in the New Testament, kerusso and it means to proclaim something, a message with content. But today because of various connotations I can’t stand the word. Besides, in the New Testament there is no such thing as the gift of preacher; there’s a gift of pastor-teacher and the word “preacher” isn’t even found in the list of gifts. With that, fortunately as I looked at this and began to study my original Hebrew text I was elated to find out the Hebrew doesn’t say “Preacher” either.
The Hebrew uses the word koheleth, now koheleth which basically no one knows its meaning; it comes from a Hebrew word which means to assemble. It means to take the various people of a group and bring them together into one assembly. But koheleth seems to be a strange word to be used of Solomon, of whom it obviously is used in verse 1. And there have been two suggestions as to why he is known in this book as koheleth. I think both of them are valid. The first one is that he was the one who assembled the nation together in 1 Kings 8 to consecrate the great temple that he had made. And so he was known as the one who assembled, or the assembler. A second meaning of the word is found in Ecclesiastes 12:9 we’ll see one of the other functions of Solomon. “And, moreover, because koheleth was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs.” Now it means therefore he had two functions; he assembled the people politically and he assembled the people as far as teaching wisdom was concerned.
Now because the book of Ecclesiastes is part of that corpus of literature in the Bible known as wisdom literature, we have to understand a little bit about the word “wisdom.” The word wisdom, chokmah, that’s a German “ch,” means to have a skill, being wise in the sense that you and I use it in the English language it simply meant a man of skill. For example, you remember in the Old Testament it talked about the tabernacle, it talked about getting carpenters that were skilled in working with the wood in the tabernacle; it spoke of the tailors that worked with the canvas overlays on the tabernacle and it spoke of them as skilled, as having wisdom. So get out of your mind the English connotation of the word “wisdom.” It just isn’t there. The Hebrew word for wisdom means skill.
Now, how do you go from the concept of skill over to the concept that it has today and obviously in the wisdom literature. It means skill in living. A person who is wise had mastered spiritual principles that he would be successful in his life. And to the Old Testament way of thinking a child was not educated until he had chokmah or wisdom. It didn’t matter whether he knew a technical skill such as mathematics, such as some skill of life, that was beside the point; the real issue was that the child know how to live, does he know how to meet the catastrophes of life, does he know how to encounter such things as marriage and other things of life and know how to come through successfully. Or is he a crybaby, does he give up. Now that is the concept of wisdom that we have.
And wisdom literature was originally written to teach the young people; the book of Proverbs with Solomon’s large compilation for his idiot son Rehoboam. And obviously from the way Rehoboam acted after he became king he absorbed about one thousandth of what his father tried to teach him. But the book of Proverbs is designed to teach young people skill in living. Now Ecclesiastes is included in the wisdom literature; it’s part of Proverbs. Other wisdom literature is the Song of Solomon, which is a love book, but Ecclesiastes is a pessimistic book and you wonder what place does this have in a set of literature that has to do with skill in living. But Ecclesiastes was deliberately included in the canon because of several reasons. One of the reasons was to show what happens when a person is out of fellowship with God as a believer. It’s to show that no matter what you think about the grass being greener on the other side of the fence, it’s not true. Therefore, the Holy Spirit has included the wanderings of this king, spiritual wanderings, across to that so-called greener grass on the other side of the fence and this is his report back to you. This is one believer to another believer saying I went through, this is my testimony. And one of the tragedies of Solomon’s life is that he himself never learned from his own report.
We find out a little bit about Solomon in the book of Kings. Turn to 1 King 3:12, we have to get the perspective of this man Solomon so we understand the background for this book of Ecclesiastes and why this book is so important for you today. “Behold, I have done according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and understanding heart, so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall there be anyone like thee.” Now what’s the point? The point here in verse 12 is to show you that never in history has there been a human being with the versatility of the man Solomon; never! In the humanity of the human race there never has been a man that had the skill and the versatility of this man, Solomon. You can take all the geniuses of history; one genius that stands out in particular is Leonardo DaVinci and yet as you study his biography you’ll find not half of the achievements of this man Solomon. Solomon was one of the most fantastic men of all history.
So therefore, if this is true, if verse 12 really is true, that “there was none like Solomon before thee, neither after thee shall there arise anyone like thee,” if that is really true, what does this tell you about yourself and Solomon’s experiences? It says that after you get through reading this book you haven’t got the right to say Solomon forgot something, I know what it is, I know some carnal means of getting fulfillment in life and Solomon didn’t try it and I’m going to. Oh no, Solomon tried everything; the wine, women and song philosophy, academics, you name it, Solomon had it. And we’re going to go through every one of those areas carefully and it’s going to be torturous and it’s going to be horrible to go through some of this but we’re going to try to face up and keep our spirits up by going back to the New Testament and seeing how we should behave under divine viewpoint. But as you go through this I want you to remember that you do not exceed Solomon; you do not have half the fun. If you pooled everybody’s money in Lubbock you still would not have the resources that this man had. From one source along Solomon had a personal allowance of twenty million dollars a year in gold. That was just his allowance, that was his spending allowance. And that doesn’t include the revenue for his kingdom, so that shows you that this man not only did a spiritual pilgrimage but this man had the assets and the resources available to conduct experiments that you and I wouldn’t have a chance to perform if we lived for two millennia; Solomon did it for you.
And the way to reduce your self-induced misery today as a Christian is to learn from Solomon; learn carefully from Solomon and be able to spot the errors of your contemporaries, the errors that men are making in the United States, doing exactly what Solomon tried and finding exactly the same thing and winding up with nothing better to do than drug themselves into oblivion or commit suicide. And it’s obvious that they’re doing this because that’s all there is.
Let’s look a little bit more about Solomon; 1 Kings 4:29, here are some of his accomplishments. And God gave Solomon wisdom and very much understanding, and largeness of heart, even as the sand that is on the seashore. [30] And Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the east country, and all the wisdom of Egypt.” The “east country” refers to the Sumerian area of Mesopotamia, a center traditionally of great wisdom. By the way, the center from which the “three wise men” (quote/end quote) came. So this area, this is a tremendous statement, both the east country and Egypt Solomon exceeded. Now it’s interesting, every once in a while you’ll get into these brotherhoods, various men’s organizations that love trace their lineage back to Solomon’s temple and all the rest of it, and they go back to Egypt and so on, yet Solomon exceeded all of this. And all the wisdom and all the gifts, Solomon says it’s a bunch of bologna, vanity, vapor, nothing. So don’t be snowed.
Verse 31, “For he was wiser than all men, than Ethan, the Ezrahite, and Heman, and Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol; and his fame was in all nations round about.” We don’t know exactly who these men were and what they did, but evidently these were great teachers in Jerusalem, very wise people. One of the first things I discovered when I began to study seriously the Old Testament, I found as I studied ancient history around and about Israel, and read about Israel by their enemies; when I read about the history of Israel by reading the writings of the Assyrians, etc. and began to study these things I realized something tremendous about the Bible, is that they don’t coincide; factually they do but not in emphasis.
For example, all of the kings of the northern kingdom of Israel are not known as the house of Israel to the nations round about Israel. They were known as the house of Omri. And yet it’s interesting to note in the Bible Omri only rates two paragraphs, two verses really, and that’s all the Word of God devotes to Omri. And yet the world round about in that day thought so much of King Omri that they named the whole dynasty of the northern kingdom, all the dynasty together was known as the house of the Omrites. Why? Because the projection, the human viewpoint projection into the world impressed the Gentiles but God was not looking on the outer appearance; God was looking in the heart. And so what you have in Scripture is God’s divine viewpoint of life and this is why certain things are emphasized and certain things are not emphasized. But yet in secular history you will see these things emphasized.
Now here the Word of God is emphasizing a thing, verse 32, “And he spoke three thousand proverbs, and his songs were a thousand and five.” Now you name a composer that’s written one thousand and five different pieces and also a man that’s written three thousand proverbs. The man was an absolute genius, and yet we don’t have many of those 2,000 proverbs and we only have one of his songs, the love song, Song of Solomon. And that’s the only one of the 1005 that God preserved. Why? Because God’s not interested in that, God’s interested in this man’s spiritual pilgrimage and showing you the fallacy and the emptiness of this life of the genius, a life that on the outside would be attractive. There probably isn’t a person sitting here that if Solomon walked in and sat down he wouldn’t be the most impressive man from the human viewpoint, the most impressive man that you probably ever would see. And the way he conducted himself in his speech, in his physique, in his education, in his ability to carry on a conversation, his social manners, his accomplishments, there wouldn’t be a man more impressive to you, and yet God is not impressed and there’s certain reasons why.
We see Solomon’s demise in 1 Kings 11:1, “But King Solomon loved many strange [foreign] women; in addition to the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites, [2] Of the nations concerning which the LORD said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to them; neither shall the come in unto you’ for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods. Solomon clung unto these in love. [3] And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. [4] For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David, his father. [5] For Solomon went after Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites. [6] And Solomon did evil in the sight of the LORD, and went not fully after the LORD, as did David, his father.”
I want you to notice something about verse 6, a little Christians like to throw around the phrase, he didn’t go “fully after the Lord” and they interpret that phrase as to mean depth of dedication, you haven’t fully committed your life to Christ in other words. But that’s not what’s meant here, it’s not depth that’s meant here, this is duration, not depth, it’s duration. Solomon went totally after the Lord for a while but it didn’t last. Solomon flaked out; he went into a carnal tailspin and never pulled out. Solomon committed the sin unto death and was reprieved by God for one reason, because God made a promise to his father, otherwise Solomon would have died. Solomon actually committed the sin unto death and yet was the only man in God’s Word to survive the sin unto death simply because of God’s grace.
Verse 7, “Then did Solomon build an high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab,” now understand, God Himself appeared to Solomon twice, God literally appeared in a vision to Solomon and yet people say oh, if we just had visions today, we need a fresh vision. We don’t need a fresh vision, we’ve got the Bible, all people have to do is clean their glasses and read it. That’s what has to happen. Solomon had the visions but it didn’t do any good because in verse 7 what is he doing? He’s building a “high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon.” He had to make a deal with every woman he married; it was part of the politics of the day. Now it wasn’t that Solomon ran a playboy club; Solomon married these women because of political alliances that he thought had to be made. There was a political intrigue associated with this heathen marriage. Those of you who have studied European history, you’ve studied the marriages between the House of Windsor for example, and the Hapsburgs, and Catherine the Great of Russia, etc. and all these royal families of Europe how they intermarried for solely strictly political reasons. They didn’t love one another; they knew that they could get more out of the other home by doing that. So many of these alliances were solely political, it’s not that Solomon loved these women in the sense that he loved them personally. He loved the gains by marrying these women. For example, he’d make an alliance with Pharaoh and part of the deal was that if Pharaoh had daughters he’d say all right girls, line up, and Solomon you pick out and whatever you pick is yours. Solomon would say I like that blonde there, so I’ll pick her, I like that brunette, I’ll pick her and that’s the way it was done. And with that he would seal the alliance that he had made with Pharaoh. But part of the deal was that when you married the girls, she could bring her gods into his land and he would have to accept this. In other words, he couldn’t convert her, much like you hear Christians saying well I’m going to marry somebody and I’ll convert them after we’re married. You ought to be in my office during the week, I deal with the pieces that come out of those relationships. It’s the same old story, they’re going to change after we’re married; they’re not going to change after they’re married, they may change for the worse after they’re married.
So Solomon had this problem, 700 of these deals he concluded, so you can imagine he had quite a few alliances and he had more women than any man would know what to do with. And Solomon didn’t know what to do with them either; he obviously didn’t know what to do with them because they got the better of him. And here you have one of the most brilliant men. You see, a sign of his brilliance was that it took 700 women before they could tear his heart away. But nevertheless they finally did it, even with Solomon. And this is what it means in verse 6 that he did not go fully after the Lord; that expression is only used twice in the Word of God, once for Solomon and once for the generation of the wilderness wanderings. And it means that they are believers once in phase two but after a while they fall off and commit the sin unto death. That’s what not going fully after the Lord means.
Verse 8, “and likewise did he for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and sacrificed unto their gods. [9] And the LORD was angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned from the LORD God of Israel, who had appeared unto him twice. [10] And had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods’ but he kept not that which the LORD commanded. [11] Wherefore, the LORD said unto Solomon, Forasmuch as this is done by thee, and thou hast not kept My covenant and My statutes, which I have commanded thee, I will surely tear the kingdom away from thee, and will give it to thy servant. [12] Nevertheless, in thy days I will not do it, for David thy father’s sake: but I will tear it out of the hand of thy son.”
It’s a tragedy for Solomon had been promised the kingdom; David had been promised the kingdom and yet God says I’ll keep My promise Solomon but it’s not going to be to you; you just disqualified yourself. So therefore with this God has passed the sentence of doom upon Solomon. From this point in Solomon’s life until the time that he dies, and I have examined the Bible and I have examined extra-Biblical tradition, and to this day no one knows for sure whatever happened to Solomon. One of the greatest men of all Israel and yet he disappeared without a trace. God’s Word doesn’t even honor his funeral. At least the other kings it says “and he died” and it describes his death, but not Solomon. No great funeral, no great memorial, no great testimony because this man went down the tube spiritually, never recovered.
And we’re going to see the product of that in this book of Ecclesiastes to which we’ll turn. These are the memoirs of Solomon. You can see that they are much as other great men in our own day, when they get out of public office or when they’re still in public office, toward the end of their life they will write their memoirs. Some of the greatest memoirs that have ever been written in this generation are the memoirs of General Douglas MacArthur, one of the greatest Americans who has ever lived, a man who was maligned in his day because he saw clearly where we were headed as a nation; a man who after World War II saw the spiritual issues of the Far East so carefully that he sent letters back and pleaded with Americans to send missionaries to fill the vacuum in Japan for he said in ten years this vacuum is going to be filled with paganism. And it was, and the Christian church in American wasn’t prepared to listen to Douglas MacArthur. The American politicians weren’t prepared to listen to this military genius; if we had him here today we’d never be in the mess we are in Vietnam. But nobody listened so all we have left are his memoirs.
Well, all we have left of Solomon is his memoirs, except they’re written in a different vain. What we have here is how not to do it. With MacArthur it’s what we should have done; Solomon says what you shouldn’t have done, exactly the opposite and written for exactly different reasons. I want to pause here a minute to discuss some of the things that would be pertinent today, in school in comparative religion class, etc. This book is one of the most attacked books from the liberal point of view in the whole Old Testament. They claim that Solomon could never have written it, it had to have been written later. And our view, of course, is that Solomon wrote it, there’s no archeological or linguistic evidence that’s substantial against this position, because we do not know enough about the linguistics of the ancient Near East to determine exactly just who could have written and who could not have written.
This book must have been written by Solomon. And the liberals, although they say it was written two to three centuries before Christ, in other words, hundreds and hundreds of years later, they have to say that an imposter wrote it. And they know Solomon is a historical person. This is the story the liberals would try to put forth but basically but basically this book represents a redaction, you have a man who is historically impersonating Solomon to give you his particular position and this is sheer liberalism perceived out of the assumptions of liberalism.
Let’s go to verse 1 and explain several of the terms used. The “king in Jerusalem,” is an expression the liberals jump upon and say aha, this is proof that Solomon could never have written this because the expression “king in Jerusalem” is an utterly unknown factor in the Old Testament. It doesn’t mean that the one came from Jerusalem; it means the fact that the expression “king in Jerusalem” could not have been [can’t understand word] in the kingdom because it wasn’t they were kings in Jerusalem, they were kings over Israel and that expression is used always for a king, never this expression. But I think there’s a reason why this expression is used here for special expression; it indicates that Solomon as not performing as a king should, he was not really the king over Israel because inside his own heart he was having spiritual difficulty and therefore he’s just a king and he happened to be located in Jerusalem. A very tragic description of the most powerful man, probably, who ever lived politically.
“Vanity of vanities,” says Koheleth, “Vanity of vanities, says Koheleth, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Now something you want to understand about this word “vanity” is that this is the Hebrew way of saying a superlative; “vanity of vanities,” it means the greatest vanity. For example in the next book, the love song says “this is the Song of Songs,” but what it really means is this is the greatest song of all and this is simply the Hebrew way of depicting superlatives. They didn’t have any “est,” you take an adjective in the English language, add “est” and you’ve got your superlative. Hebrew couldn’t do that so they repeated it. “Vanity of vanity” and Solomon says this is the greatest vanity. And to understand the concept of vanity we have to look at the word abel, automatically you know someone by that name, Abel as you pronounce it, but his real name is abel and it means emptiness and vanity.
To which we go now back to three different descriptions or three different factors that are taught by this word “vanity.” The first thing that the word denotes is that it’s a vapor. It’s just a vapor, it has substance that’s visible but it does not endure. That’s the point of vanity; in other words, life lived from the human viewpoint, lived in the energy of the flesh, it’s there, you can see it, you can feel it, you can hear it, etc. but it has no endurance, it doesn’t satisfy. This is what Pascal meant when he said there’s a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man that only God through Jesus Christ can fill. And that’s what he meant. It doesn’t mean that you don’t know life, of course you do, but there’s nothing that really satisfies you, nothing that really is exciting about life apart from the divine viewpoint and the filling of the Holy Spirit.
So the first point here under the word “vanity” is that it has no endurance; it has absolutely no base for endurance, it’s visible but no endurance. The second thing about the vanity is that it refers to the true characteristic of the old creation. We have the old creation, here’s the time that you receive the Lord Jesus Christ, here’s the new creation. When you receive Christ God puts you in that top circle; that is your legal position that never changes. You have what I call the new creation; that is how I designate it diagrammatically what the Bible teaches about the new creation. And above this, at this point in history, you have only one person, the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. He is the first component of the new creation. Every one of you in your human spirit are the new components for this new creation, but as of now the universe, the new heavens and the new earth have not yet been made. Now down below this line and to the left you have the old creation. The old creation is under the curse of God and to see let’s turn to some verses.
Turn to Genesis 1:31, out of this is going to come one of the chief truths of walking in the power of the Holy Spirit and yet we find that before the filling of the Holy Spirit was ever given. “And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” Those of you who come across these people who say I don’t believe in God because how could a good God create the world that’s in the mess it’s in? All you have to do is pick up the latest issue of Life and all you see is pictures of the 1960s, somebody shot, maimed, somebody getting assassinated, and they say God created that? All you have to do is remember Genesis 1:31, when it left God’s hand it wasn’t in that kind of a mess. When it left God’s hand He pronounced it very good, and so therefore things are fouled up. Guess who is responsible? Not God, don’t go blaming God because the world is in a mess, it’s not His fault.
Genesis 1:31, “God say everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” Now Genesis 2:17, here is the curse. “But from he tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the day that you eat thereof you shalt surely die.” And here you have the curse in the old creation, the equation that always works, that never is violated, sin always leads to death. That equation is never changed, including the Gospels. That’s a trick question to ask somebody, does God ever violate that equation when He forgives you from your sin. Answer: negative, that equation is never violated. What God does is He lifts your sin and puts it over on the cross, but that sin still leads to death; it is not your death any more, it’s the Lord Jesus Christ’s death. But that equation is never, never changed, never changed! God never forgives by breaking this relationship. Sin always leads to death, period. So that’s the trouble with the old creation.
Now if you look at Genesis 3:19 you’ll see the immediate effects of this curse and here’s where we have the development of abel, or the concept of vanity. “In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread, thou shalt return unto the ground; for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return. That verse teaches you something; it teaches you that work is not the curse, it’s the frustrations that you get while you’re working that is the curse. God gave Adam a job and work to do; work is not part of the curse. What is part of the curse is that when you do your work something always happens to frustrate you. That is the curse and that frustration that you encounter in your life, whether it’s on the job, whether it’s in your marriage, whether it’s in your personal relationships with other people, whether it’s in your family, whatever it is, when that happens you are experiencing the truth of this equation: sin leads to death. And when you experience these things remember and relate it back to the Word of God. These frustrations are there because of the curse on the creation.
Genesis 4:2, the second main son of Eve. Now Adam and Eve had many sons; where did Cain get his wife from? Obviously one of the sisters, where else. Verse 2, “And she again bore his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of the sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.” Now it’s interesting that Eve finally gave up where she came to here second [can’t understand word] son here in the Word of God. She had Cain, verse 1, “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bore Cain, and she said I have gotten a man from the LORD.” She’s excited, it’s thrilling, and she realizes he’s not the Messiah and then she’s discouraged. And so the next son comes along, because she and her husband have now experienced the curse of Genesis 2 and 3, Adam has gone out into the field and toiled by the sweat of his brow; she’s gone through the tremendous pain of childbirth and she knows now it’s not pleasant to live in the old creation; it’s a curse and so now she says I’m going to name my second son “vanity” and that’s what abel means, it means vanity. And that’s exactly what Solomon is talking about, “Vanity of vanities,” and that’s what life really is.
Now turn to the New Testament, Romans 8:20, you’ll see where the word “vanity” occurs in the New Testament. This is the creation in verse 20, “For the creation was made subject to vanity,” mataiotes in the Greek which is the Greek equivalent of abel in the Hebrew and is vanity. The entire “creation was made subject to vanity not willingly, but by reason of him who has subjected the same in hope. [21] Because the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Now that is talking about the creation and it is saying that the entire creation was made subject to the vanity principle. You have this thing, sin unto death leads to vanity. And that’s the trouble with the world, it is polluted by the curse, and there’s nothing pleasing to man or God in the old creation, and that’s one of the greatest principles of the spiritual life which we’ll see in a few moments, that you cannot serve God with any piece of the old creation; everything that is used in the service of God must emanate from the new creation, from what He has supplied for you, the divine operating assets that He had given you at the moment of salvation. And those and those alone are to be used for Him, not any of your talent or your scintillating personality, or anything else, it’s all part of the old creation and as far as God is concerned its vanity.
1 John 2:15-17, here’s the slogan of this book of Ecclesiastes. Here is the commandment by the Apostle John, often misunderstood by believers and very often, more often in fact, not only misunderstood but very little appreciated because of the principle that lies behind it. “Love not the world, neither the things of the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. [16] For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.” And now notice verse 17, that’s the principle, and verse 17 tells you why verses 15-16 are there. It’s not that God is spanking your hand in verse 15 and saying now now Christian, you can’t have a good time; go around and walk straight-laced, etc. don’t come your hair, ladies don’t wear lipstick and all the rest, go around and look as sloppy as you possibly can and call it pious spirituality. That’s not what God is talking about but He gives you the reason for the command in verse 15 in verse 17, “Because the world,” present tense, “is passing away,” right in front of you, “and the lust thereof; but he that does the will of God abides forever,” and that is the lesson of the book of Ecclesiastes in a nutshell.
What Solomon is going to prove to you as we go through this book is you can take every detail of life, whether it’s in the area of sex, whether it’s in the area of enjoyment, whether it’s in the area of academics, whether it’s in some other area of your life, you can take any area and Solomon is going to prove to you by case history that it is passing away in front of you. Now there isn’t a businessman in his right mind that’s going to take his money and invest it in something that’s passing away. Nonsense! Well then why take your life and invest it in something that’s passing away? That would be stupid; God has given you, say so many days, here’s X number of days that God has given you and you have a certain production quotient in the eyes of God and that production quotient is going to be determined by your production divided by the opportunities that God has given you. And that’s the basis on which you are judged before the bema seat. Now, how are you going to increase your production? By maximum walking in the knowledge and the will of God throughout these days that has given you. If God has given you X number of days why blow all your opportunities by loving the world and following. That’s the point. Why waste your time, life is too short. You might as well enjoy it and the way for a Christian to enjoy his life is to walk in the filling of the Holy Spirit.
This introduces us to the third point under the doctrine of vanity. First we find that has no enduring stability. The second is that it means and refers to the doctrine of sin giving rise to death, the curse from the old creation. The third thing about vanity is that it means and refers to the painfulness of phase two. In other words, God’s plan of salvation looks like this: the time you receive Christ, phase one; phase two extends from that time until the time you die; phase three from that point on. Phase two is a very painful time in case you haven’t noticed it, in case you haven’t realized it, you have problems, etc. Well, phase two is a painful time and the word “vanity” refers to this.
Psalm 90:10 says “the days of our years are seventy, and if by reason of strength they be eighty, yet is their strength, labor and sorrow; for it soon shall be cut off and we fly away”. That’s what Moses said in Psalm 90. David said in Psalm 144:4, “Man is like to vanity; his days are a shadow that passes away.” David refers to the same thing. And in James we have this similar phrase, “But what is your life, it is even a vapor, it appears for a while and vanishes away.” [4:14] Now that’s realism. Now that’s realism; this isn’t just unreal pessimism, this is just shooting straight. Now let’s look at Ephesians 4 to find out how a believer can get so fouled up like Solomon did. Ephesians 4; we’re going to study the area of the spirit and the body and the soul because we want to understand how these interplay and how they work. And this passage in Ephesians is going to teach us some vital things about this.
Ephesians 4:17-19, but you have to understand that these verses have to be adjusted, simply because they’re from the Greek syntax we know that there’s a series of cause and effect relationships. Here’s how logically the verses should be ordered. First there’s 18, then verse 17, then verse 19; syntactically that is how it is designed. First verse 18, then verse 17, then verse 19 and when you get that in order now you’ve got the right cause and effect relationship working. Start at the end of verse 18 and what does it say, start with the word “through.” “Through the ignorance,” now this is the first cause, “through the ignorance” and “through” means on account of, “because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” Now this is going to describe a way of explaining unbelievers but by way of application it explains believers. I am going to go through this passage, I’ll briefly tell you the interpretation, unbelievers, but I want to apply it, application to believers. It’s the same dynamics but we want to work through it this way.
The first clause, “through the ignorance that is in them,” and through “the blindness of their heart.” Two words we must understand; the word ignorance means woeful ignorance, this is not innocence, “who me?” kind of operation. This means you didn’t want to know and therefore you don’t know. It refers to the kind of ignorance often times that comes up on a final exam where a student hasn’t paid any attention all semester and they try to ram, cram and jam the last 30 minutes before the exam and all of a sudden it doesn’t happen. Or they get it all up there and they get into the exam and something precipitates and bang, it all is empty, a complete blank. Well that’s woeful ignorance. Secondly, “blindness of their heart” means callousness, it doesn’t mean blindness, there’s another word here so don’t confuse it. The word “blindness” means callousness, it means to be loved until you hit a hard spot; that’s what this means.
Now let’s go to the doctrine of the body, soul and spirit for a moment. Let’s look at the human spirit; the human spirit has conscience, guidance and worship. These are the functions of the human spirit. The human spirit has conscience, it functions to guide us, and it is the location of worship, they shall “worship Me in spirit and truth.” Then we go to the human soul and the soul has various functions; it has the function of volition, it has the function of personal affections, it has the function of mentality. Some people call the personal affections emotion and I have deliberately split it up between personal affections here and bodily affections down here to refer to those things that are caused and related to your physical needs. So we have volition, personal affections, mentality, bodily affections where the soul interacts with the body.
Now the human spirit gives life to your physical body. James says without the spirit the body is dead, so even in the unbeliever the human spirit, although it exists, of course it’s not functioning, it’s dead spiritually, it does have one function and that is it keeps them alive. So the human spirit in the unbeliever is there operating on one of two channels; operating only on channel one and it is causing the soul and body to exist together as a unit; when it’s just channel one discovery of course the person dies. But the human spirit is there to give life. Now part of the function of the human spirit is performed even in the unbeliever; we find this in Romans 1 for example, conscience. The unbeliever starts out life with a conscience. For example, a child has conscience. Now the Bible says in Romans 1 and 2 that basically as a person gets older in life the conscience testifies to an absolute, a moral absolute, not necessarily specified what it is but it testifies that there is one. Paul says that in Romans 2, every man knows this, none of this business that I didn’t know there’s God or something else. That’s nonsense. In Romans 2 every person is born with an active conscience.
Now what else happens? The human spirit also does something else; it has something within it that is said to be epignosis in Romans 1. epignosis looks like this: you take the soul and you have mentality in the soul and you have the human spirit over here; the mentality takes in information, divine viewpoint, and it is processed in the human spirit and becomes epignosis which means total knowledge; over here knowledge, when it gets to the human spirit it is known in the Bible as epignosis, or soul knowledge. Now the unbeliever actually has epignosis and we call it God-consciousness; how he gets this we do not know, it’s not the same as the epignosis of the believer but the unbeliever has epignosis; he has enough epignosis in his human spirit, even though it’s dead, he has enough to activate his conscience and to show him that God exists. Therefore the unbeliever starts out life with two things: he starts out life with an innate awareness of a moral absolute, that’s his conscience, Romans 2. He also starts out life with a minimum epignosis or God-consciousness, that God exists, “what can be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it unto them.” I don’t care what the people are, I don’t care whether it’s a tribe in South America, Africa or anywhere else, and I don’t care what any anthropologist says, the Apostle Paul says every person has a basic epignosis at the point of physical birth.
Now, after that comes the problem; after this if a person habitually goes on negative volition then epignosis is cancelled out, etc. and we have conscience gradually shorted out to the point where the person becomes a spiritual dud. Now it doesn’t mean a person starts out saved; he’s not saved but he has an innate God-consciousness and this is why children are oftentimes easy to win to Christ because they have this and it hasn’t been covered up with a lot of negative volition and all the rest of it. As they get older they become more and more skilled, adults are particularly very skilled at rationalizing out their conscience, etc. So it has decreasing value as time goes on.
Now let’s look at what happens; here’s the sinner, here’s the person controlled by the flesh, first he has negative volition. This is what the flesh does to the functions of the soul; this is what the Bible means when it says a person is “in the flesh” or if it’s referring to a believer he’s “walking by the flesh.” Let’s see what happens; here are your functions, here’s what happens to them: volition goes negative, personal affections and I’ve listed some that the Bible lists in the various sin list; instability, you take the emotions of an unbeliever or the emotions of a carnal believer and these people are always swayed by their emotions. For example, they see somebody out there that’s a wonderful person, they say oh, if so and so could just be a believer they’d be the greatest believer of the age because they’re such a scintillating unbeliever. That’s nonsense. You could take a person who was a tremendous unbeliever and he would make a spiritual dud and you know why? Because he thinks so much of himself that when becomes a Christian he still thinks a lot of himself and it hurts him and so often times you can look upon an unbeliever and a person who is a tremendous person and yet they make spiritual ignoramuses because it hurts them, their very accomplishments that you admire hurt them spiritually.
So you may be a person walking in the energy of the flesh, you may be an unbeliever or a carnal believer, and so you’re unstable, your emotions are easily swayed, you’re impatient, irresponsible. People who walk in the flesh are always irresponsible, these people promise you, promise you, promise you and they never come through with it, because under the emotions of the moment their emotions get the best of them, oh I’ll do this for you brother, I’ll do that and all the rest of it and they don’t mean a word of it, all they mean is they’ve gotten themselves involved in this situation and they’re so involved they haven’t got any control over their emotions and so their emotions run wild; they have approbation lust. A lot of this business of coming down the aisle, a lot of it is approbation lust, I want to get the approval of the group and so I’ll do something that blends in with the group. We have power lust, often times in local churches you have one or two men who are beaten down in their business and they come home and the wife hits them over the head and the poor guy, the only time he has to vent himself is in the board meeting somewhere; so they’re going to throw their weight around the church. We have people with materialism lust, oh, I need that GT, it’s beautiful, it’s nice red with chrome wheels, I may be thousands of dollars in debt but I want it. So you have materialism lust and here the emotions are going on. The emotions are all out of control; that person is walking in the flesh.
What are some other things? The flesh affects your mentality. This is a point that the intellectuals never like to admit. And error in the heart leads to an error in the head. It’s always true that the flesh will affect your mentality, it leads to confused thinking. This is why in our foreign policy as a nation we have such confused thinking because people that run the politics is walking in the energy of the flesh, no discernment, nothing stable. We don’t have any absolutes, no confidence in absolutes and so everybody is up in the air in confusion. We have worries, distractions; Christians who are always distracted also are walking in the energy of the flesh. If the Holy Spirit is controlling your mind you’re not going to be distracted. Why do we have people sit through Bible class after Bible class and they’re looking at the ceiling, the curtains, the floor, the person in front of them, and something else, always distracted; it’s obviously the operation of the flesh on the mentality of the soul. Then we have occupation with human viewpoint; these people, if there is human viewpoint within 50 miles they’ll take it. If it’s in the newspaper they’ll get it; if it’s in a magazine, or on some TV program, oh it’s great, did you see that program, wonderful, wonderful; it’s just sheer human viewpoint, that’s all it is. So here you have the operation of the flesh.
It’s the same thing with the body, they can’t suppress their bodily desires and they get an urge to do something and they go ahead and do it regardless—no control. And that’s the way the energy of the flesh looks and this is what Paul is saying here. First, ignorance is in them because of the blindness of their heart; ignorance that is in them is willful ignorance. What’s happening? Paul here is talking about the unbeliever so you have the conscience; conscience operates in the unbeliever and when Paul says “blindness of their heart” he’s talking about callousness to their conscience. And what he is saying is that through their negative volition, it goes negative, negative, negative, negative, it’s saying I block the human spirit, I won’t listen to the human spirit, I won’t listen to my conscience, and so they erect this big callousness. Therefore the human spirit is completely blocked. This is the unbeliever and what is the logical conclusion; back up in verse 18, “through the ignorance” and here you have willful ignorance, and this begins to infect the mentality. First you have negative volition, it blocks out the testimony of the human spirit and now it begins to affect the way they think and so they have willful ignorance, absorb the human viewpoint, and then later on in verse 18, this leads to an alienation “from the life of God,” and it means that God the Holy Spirit cannot regenerate, because of the gospel, God the Holy Spirit has to have positive volition in order for Bible doctrine to come through the mentality and get into the human spirit. Remember, for a person to be saved Bible doctrine has to go into the human spirit and the Holy Spirit, according to John 16 has to convince them of sin, righteousness and judgment and the location where he does this is in their human spirit, even though at that point it’s not yet regenerated.
Now what happens? He says their
“Understanding is darkened” and this means mentality again and this means their
whole thought pattern becomes completely confused. Now why do we have Christians totally and completely
confused? It’s simple; they’re doing
the same thing the unbeliever is doing.
Now verse 17, what is the result of all of this? They “walk in the vanity of their mind,” and
the “vanity of their mind” means that at this point, when the mind is confused,
when the mind is worried, when the mind is distracted, when the mind is
occupied with human viewpoint what’s going to happen? The mind becomes a vacuum and sucks in more human viewpoint and
all these people can produce is human good and personal sin. That’s the total production of their life.
Now what’s going to happen? Verse 19, “Who, being past feeling,” now this means by this time they have gotten so shorted out that their human spirit with epignosis and God-consciousness is absolutely ineffective in their life; they have just completely shorted it out and now therefore they “walk in the vanity of their mind,” and verse 19 they are “past feeling,” so what happens, they “give themselves over to [lasciviousness]” seek happiness, that’s the point of verse 19. They are on a mad search for happiness; they want happiness in things, they want happiness in people, they may have been married 2 or 3 times and they still have the idea if I could be married to the right person then everything will be all right, if I could go to the right school everything will be all right, if I could join the right club, if I got in the right business, etc. everything would be all right. And that’s the frantic search for happiness that goes on in verse 19. They’re just greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy.
And what these poor people never realize is that when they get there they still don’t have happiness. That’s the message of Ecclesiastes. You may think you’re going to get happiness out of something in life but unless it’s the will of God you’re never going to get happiness and you can try, try, try and you’ll still never get happiness, a very frustrating life. What’s the answer, the conclusion of this thing today? Verse 22-24, here’s the solution, how happiness can be obtained. Verse 22 describes your past history and what God did for you at the moment of salvation, He “put off,” aorist tense, once and for all, “concerning the former behavior pattern the old man, which is corrupt, according to the deceitful lusts.” This functioning system that you have is the old man, that’s what the Bible means by the old man, it means your flesh and your flesh operates and controls your volition; you have negative volition, personal affections, mentality and bodily affections are all energized, distorted and controlled by the flesh.
Now verse 24, we’ll get to verse 23 in a moment. Verse 24 is what the Holy Spirit has done for you in the positive sense; verse 22 is negative. He has crucified that, Romans 6 tells you that, you don’t have to be crucified or you can’t crucify yourself, so when you read devotional literature, you’ve got to crucify yourself, that’s not found in the Bible, it’s misreading, the Holy Spirit has crucified you, He has removed this operation from you in the sense that He now makes it possible for something else to happen and that is for the indwelling Holy Spirit to move over and begin to influence your soul. Now this is the operation of the new man described in the Word of God. Let’s look at it; when you become a Christian the Holy Spirit indwells your human spirit; I have not filled in the whole human spirit because I want you to see that this is a function of your maturity, you are either at one time controlled by the Holy Spirit or you’re controlled by the flesh, it’s one or the other; there’s your absolute as far as walking by the flesh or walking by the Spirit. However maturity is shown by the degree of what the Holy Spirit has over all areas of your life.
For example, the indwelling Holy Spirit needs to build up your human spirit, it needs to edify it and the building up process in your human spirit is epignosis. It means as a Christian you will take in Bible doctrine through your mentality and when you are controlled by the Holy Spirit the Bible doctrine flows over to the human spirit, is processed by the indwelling Holy Spirit in your human spirit and gnosis becomes epignosis. And that is the building up process that goes on and is a function of maturity. This explains why people can sit through Bible class after Bible class and still be spiritual idiots because they are walking in the energy of the flesh; even when they are in Bible class they aren’t filled with the Spirit so Bible doctrine goes into the mentality of the soul and stays there; it never gets transferred over to the human spirit. And so they have a lot of natural knowledge about the Word of God and it doesn’t help them a bit. They say why do I know all these doctrines and I can’t apply them. It’s simple, because the doctrine has never got over into the human spirit; the Holy Spirit has to take the doctrine and has to make it part of you. I have called that digestion of doctrine but that’s what has to happen in order to make the doctrine real. And this is your maturity, not how much you know of the Word of God but how much epignosis you have, how much of that doctrine is processed by the Holy Spirit in your human spirit.
Now let’s see what happens. When the Holy Spirit indwells your human spirit He’s always there, if you get out of fellowship and you’re controlled with the flesh, the Holy Spirit still indwells your human spirit. You do not lose the indwelling upon breaking fellowship with God in time. However, let’s look at what happens when the Holy Spirit is able to control your life. Here’s what happens in the filling of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit indwells; He sets up these three functions going in your human spirit; now He quickens your conscience so you should become more and more sensitive. This, by the way, is one of the keys to divine guidance; you have guidance and you have worship, you are now able to worship the Lord Jesus Christ, and not put on a phony front. You don’t have to go to a church meeting and have your emotions jacked up by singing, etc. If you want real worship then you have to have people filled with the Spirit so as the Word of God is taught that Word will become absorbed and the Holy Spirit will make it a part of the human spirit.
When the Holy Spirit controls your life, here’s what happens. A whole new channel is opened up, channel two is opened up and between your human spirit and your soul you have two channels operating, you have the old channel one which is there just to give you physical and soul life but now you have channel two opened up and channel two now gives you spiritual life and now the eternal life that God gives you is able to flow and affect your soul, and here’s what it does: Positive volition, personal affections, instead of being uncontrolled your personal affections are now under control. Instead of being occupied with all sorts of things, materialism lust, approbation lust, etc. you are now occupied with the person of Jesus Christ. So your affections are now set off by things that Jesus Christ does for you. That’s what gets you excited now, not all the rest of the junk that goes on in life but you are occupied with Christ and so one of the things that triggers your emotions… it doesn’t deny that you have emotions, but that your emotions are now triggered by spiritual truth and that’s one of the signs of the filling of the Holy Spirit, do you get emotional… you can get emotional about many things, but if you’re not getting emotional about Bible doctrine there’s something wrong with your soul. And I can tell you what’s wrong; it’s all controlled by the flesh. If Bible doctrine is dull to you then it indicates that you are a carnal Christian or that you are an unbeliever, one or the other.
Now let’s see what the filling does to the mentality of the soul. The Holy Spirit in the mentality means you live in the Word now, you take in Bible doctrine, you go to Bible class, whether here or somewhere else, on tapes, somehow you’ll get Bible teaching. This is the most important food for your life; you need Bible teaching. So we have living in the Word, that’s one of the functions of the filling of the Holy Spirit.
The next function is a relaxed mental attitude, and it means here is a Christian under the filling of the Spirit who can relax; that’s one of the greatest assets of the Christian life, is that because once you get your eyes on Jesus Christ you don’t care what other people think about you any more, you care about what God thinks and what He does, that’s it. And what the other person thinks, so what; if someone doesn’t like the way you operate that’s too bad, you operate to satisfy God, period, not people and not organizations. You operate to satisfy God as you know Him through the Word. What does it do to bodily affections; bodily affections come under control, your body becomes empowered for service.
So that’s the choice before you and the problem that we’ve got in Solomon’s day, and the problem we’ve got in Ecclesiastes is the flesh controlling the soul and out of this comes nothing. If you are a Christian do you know what happens when this happens? Human good and personal sin, that’s all you produce—human good and personal sin. If you’re filled with the Spirit you produce divine good; that’s the choice available to you. You have an old sin nature; out of its area of strength comes human good, out of its area of weakness comes personal sin. Jesus Christ paid for your sin on the cross; Jesus Christ on the cross rejected your human good. What is human good? Human good is anything that’s not a sin but it’s not done in the energy of the Holy Spirit. In other words, you’re still basically sinning, you’re out of fellowship, but the action itself is not a sin, going to church, doing nice things in life, living a good life, moral and ethical life, etc. You don’t cheat in your business, you don’t cheat in your marriage, you don’t cheat in the various areas of your life, you’re living a good life and yet it’s all vanity, it’s doesn’t excite you, life’s lost its luster. Do you know why? Because you’re not filled with the Holy Spirit, that’s why, all of it is human good and God is not impressed. A lot of Christian activities are done and it’s all energy of the flesh and it’s all human good. Oh, we evangelize, we talk to so many people about Jesus Christ—energy of the flesh if it’s not done out of proper motivation.
Do you know who is most afflicted by human good? The mature Christian. You see, it’s very interesting, you start out the Christian as a young believer and your problem is with personal sin, you’ve inherited these sin patterns from your background and you struggle and struggle with these things in your early Christian life and finally through maturity you are able to spot these things and they are no longer a problem for you. But then you’ve got another problem, as a mature Christian you’ve got the human good problem. Now you’ve learned the vocabulary, now you’ve learned what’s expected of you, you’ve learned how to operate in an acceptable way in Christian circles and just because you’re accepted by other Christians you think you’ve got it made. And that’s not true; you can be so out of fellowship it’s pathetic and you’re cranking out human good, human good, human good, and you get the approbation of all the Christian groups, everybody thinks you’re a great person, you stand up for great moral issues, etc. and yet you’re not being daily guided by God, the Holy Spirit, you’re not taking in the Word of God, spiritual truth doesn’t affect you in the least. And it’s all human good, rejected, absolutely rejected.
So this is the problem of Solomon and here’s why Solomon got in trouble, “vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,” the reason, because he’s out of fellowship. Of course it’s all vanity, it’s all human good. What is not personal sin produced in the energy of the flesh is but human good.
With our heads bowed.