Ecclesiastes Lessons 3

A Comprehensive Examination of Carnality 1:12-18

Ecclesiastes is the only book, it’s a rather strange book, but it’s the only book in the Bible that is pessimistic. Every other book gives you promises, gives you an answer to life, it gives you something to go and this book tears you apart. And it’s deliberately put in the Bible for a reason, to cure a tendency every one has known in the common vernacular that “the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.” So therefore this book takes you over on the other side of the fence and sees just how green the grass is. We have seen from verses 1-11 that basically we have here the prologue of the book in which Solomon describes to you what vanity is. The word “vanity” is the key word for this book and it means two things; it means something that is unsubstantial and the second meaning, derived from this, is that it does not endure.

Solomon is going to take us through various areas of living; he’s going to take you to some of the solutions that you’ve tried to get happiness out of life; he’s going to take us probably to every major idea that has ever been tried by man to substitute for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And he’s also going to take us through these ideas for the benefit of believers because believers always have the tendency after a while to say well, this Christian life business just doesn’t work, I’ve got to try something else, it’s Christianity plus something. They always like to fill in this blank after the word “plus” with various ideas that they have. Solomon does this for you. So if you pay attention very carefully as we go through this book, you can prevent a lot of sorrow and misery in your life for we find in the Word of God that most suffering for Christian’s experience is purely your own fault and you needn’t blame God for it, you needn’t blame your pastor for it, you needn’t blame your parents for it, they dropped you on your head when you were a baby or something and you didn’t come out right in life, etc. We have various excuses. Yet the Bible puts the blame where it belongs, solely up to you. Therefore we have a term that I use, SIM and it’s not Sudan Interior Missions, it’s self-induced misery. That’s what it means, just misery that you have brought on yourself by your own lousy attitude and by your rejection of the leading of the Lord in your life. This always leads to these things; always will, always has.

Now in verse 12-18 Solomon is going to summarize the method of this book. In verses 1-11 he summarized the result, vanity, and he explains in those first 11 verses what vanity is all about. Now beginning in verse 12 and running through verse 18 Solomon is going to brief you on the method that he used to find the result of verses 1-11. And he’s going to give you the rules by which you yourself can perform these experiments if you want to. I presume after you get through with the first couple of experiments you won’t want to but nevertheless, there’s always that tendency, I have it so I know you have it, so you don’t have to look at this with this “who me” look because you all have it. We all have a sin nature, I know mine, you know yours, and hopefully we know not one another’s. But nevertheless we have a tendency to search out all these things and to desire solutions and makeshift, human good makeshifts, to the filling of the Holy Spirit.

Beginning in verse 12 Solomon tells us the background for his experiments. “I, koheleth, and the word is not “preacher,” the word is koheleth; if you want to insult me just call me preacher. The word koheleth means one who brings together or gathers together. It was used of Solomon in a political sense in that he would bring the nation together, under him, unified politically under his kingship, but it would also mean that Solomon was a wisdom teacher and he brought people together for Bible class and he taught them, except he didn’t teach them out of the Bible; he taught them from his own human wisdom. And this book is apparently a notebook and I’ll point this out again and again, there are sections in this book that are put together as though they are notes that his students took in his class as he was teaching.

Verses 12-18 is an introduction, the notes begin in the second chapter which we’ll start next week, the first experiment. But verses 12-18 are methods. So he says, “I, koheleth, was king over Israel in Jerusalem.” The point of emphasizing Jerusalem again and again is to show you the man’s assets. This is to show you his assets and this is to give you an idea that this man, when he performed an experiment could run that experiment out far further than you ever could. Solomon, from one source alone, had twenty million dollars a year in income; that was his personal allowance, that was his spending money. On tope of that he had all the taxation from his kingdom. So I’m sure if you have a personal allowance of twenty million, and by the way, that was before the IRS, if you had an allowance of twenty million dollars I’m sure that would give you a lot of latitude to throw your money around and live it up. Solomon did and this is his report.

Verse 12 is put in here to show you that when he’s going to conduct these experiments they are comprehensive experiments, they are not just some little five minute job that he thought of and a sweet little reminder to write in here for thoughts of the day. That is not the concept that Solomon has; he has run a comprehensive set of experiments. Now because we have a lot of young people interested in this kind of thing, as I go through this book, as I always do, when I come across a verse we’ll take a little pause and I’ll point out some problems in these verses that liberals like to pounce on you with. When we come to some of these verses I’ll always point this out, this is one which the liberals love to jump all over and they say oh ha-ha, you dumb fundamentalists, you believe Solomon actually wrote the book of Ecclesiastes when here in verse 12 it says “I, koheleth was king,” past tense, “was.” And therefore since Solomon was on the throne until he died… he sat on the throne until he died, therefore there was no time in Solomon’s life when he could look back and say I “was” king. So therefore they say, look at no time in history could Solomon ever have said “I was king.” Therefore, Solomon did not write this book, therefore whoever wrote this book along about 300-400 BC, that’s about six centuries after Solomon’s life, somebody impersonated Solomon and thereby wrote this text. But this again is because of their presuppositions toward supernatural inspiration and it does not proceed out of any scholarly reason as I am about to show you.

Turn to John 17:4 and I’ll show you how the same kind of verb form can be used by a living person to refer to something that is still going on in his life and yet is a past tense. Here’s the problem, there’s a past tense here, “was,” “I was king,” as though he isn’t when he says it. Does this show that he wasn’t king when he said it? Not necessarily because if you look in John 17:4 the Lord Jesus Christ in what is really the Lord’s prayer, this business of “Our Father, who art in heaven” etc. is not the Lord’s prayer. The Lord’s Prayer actually is in John 17, and in verse 4 it says, “I have glorified Thee on the earth,” I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do.” Now is that past tense? Yes. Was the work finished when this was prayed? No; this work wasn’t going to be finished for days. First Jesus Christ had to go to the cross and die for our sins; all the sins of the world, past, present and future were dumped on Him that they might be judged for God can never break the rule, “the wages of sin is death.” Never! Some of you think God can forgive sin; yes He can but He can never break the rule that “the wages of sin is death” and so if your sin is going to be forgiven it has got to be legally transferred to someone else or some other site where the judgment of death can come down upon it, and that’s why you have forgiveness, because Jesus Christ took the wrap for you.

Now, this means that Jesus Christ’s work was not finished. In fact it really wasn’t finished until he rose from the dead because it wasn’t until he rose from the dead that we really knew that he had been successful in His cross work, that the Father really accepted Him. So it wasn’t finished for four days and yet here in verse 4 of chapter 17, in the Garden of Gethsemane when he prays, “Father, I thank you because I have finished the work which You have given me to do.” Now why does He say “finished?” Because He’s looking forward and it is a principle of verbs called aspect, that you can use a verb because of the way in which you look at the situation. In other words the tense, the thing that controls the tense of the verb is not necessarily reality; you have reality out here but reality does not control verb tenses; it is how the author uses the verb that controls verb tenses.

For example, imagine if you had been President of the United States or something and you were sitting down to write your memoirs. Now suppose you still were in public office and you wanted to write a report; now in your mind consciously what are you thinking of? You’re thinking of the future generation that’s going to come along and you’re addressing that future generation and so you say “I was President.” Now why do you say that, because you are no longer President? No, because what you’re trying to convey is something to a future generation that has not yet come and so you will use a past tense. Therefore, turning back to Ecclesiastes 1:12, the fact that he says, “I, koheleth, was king over Israel in Jerusalem” simply is an address to us, generations of believers who come later in history and he says “I was king over Jerusalem, this identifies him. It has nothing to do with whether he literally was king or was not king at the time this verse was made.

Verse 13, “And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven; this severe travail has God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.” This verse, verse 13, gives you reams of information about Solomon. The first thing it tells you is that he says, “I searched,” he says “I gave my heart,” that’s a decision, he has volition, I chose to do this, “to seek and to search out,” the word “seek” means to study, it means to go in depth on something and the word “search out” is really a verb in the Hebrew which means to make a reconnaissance, and it’s horizontal so you’ve got two dimensions here. He decides he’s going to have an in depth study, but then he decides it’s going to be a comprehensive study; it’s going to cover many different subjects. So he uses these two verbs together to direct your attention to the fact that this is going to be one of the most comprehensive experiments ever ran in history.

“I am going to give my heart to seek out and search out,” now some of you have had philosophy but you will never sit in a philosophy class that will be equal to the philosophy class that Solomon had. Solomon actually and personally generated his own philosophy, a total philosophy, and you will get it in this book. How did he do it? “By wisdom” and the word “by wisdom” is instrumental, in other words, by means of wisdom. And in order to understand “by wisdom” we want to study the word “wisdom” a little bit, chokmah. The word looks like this in the Hebrew, phonetically, it’s kind of a German “ch,” chokmah and it’s a word that does not mean exactly what the word means in English; that’s why I want to pause here to clarify some air. Some of you have an image of the word wisdom; you hear the word wisdom and immediately in your mind you have a connotation of some wise man or some philosopher, something like that, some old man that’s wise in various things. But the word “wisdom” in Hebrew originally meant technical skill. It was a word which we best would translate as just a skill.

For example, we find in the tabernacle in Exodus 25 and 35 when the construction workers come to work on the tabernacle the men who do the sewing on the cloth are said to have the spirit of chokmah; that sounds a little odd to have a tailor who has a spirit of wisdom but it’s talking about the fact that God supernaturally enabled these men to not only design the tabernacle, actually God gave them the blueprint, but to build the tabernacle. If you are not familiar with modern construction you can’t appreciate that. But I’ve had a lot of businessmen and a lot of friends who’ve been involved in getting somebody to build them something and if you tell the architect you want four walls you’d better look twice because when it’s done it’ll probably have three walls. Or if you want two windows in the building he’ll put five. Or if you want a light switch on the top of the wall they’ll put it on the bottom of the wall, and this is the way it goes in construction. So God wasn’t going to have any of that funny business so he said all right, I’m not only going to give you the blueprints, I’m going to inspire the carpenters, I’m going to inspire the tailors, I’m going to inspire every craftsman on this job and we are going to get it done and it’s going to be done on time on contract.

And that’s the way God built the tabernacle. So He used the word chokmah and from this we know therefore that the word means skill or technical art. Now it later came to mean, and carry over, things that were composed skillfully, such as the song; songs are said to be songs of wisdom. It doesn’t mean necessarily that the content of the song is wise, although that may be true, the point is that the song was skillfully arranged, and so we say it is a wise song, well composed. And later on, of course, it came to mean teaching attitudes of success in life. You can see how this word developed, first it starts out as skill, then it means various special skills, and finally it comes to mean skills that if you master these you will be successful in life. And that is the Hebrew concept of chokmah, and incidentally, as far as the Hebrews were concerned in the Old Testament you were not an educated person until you had chokmah. And they didn’t care how much modern mathematics you learned, how much history you learned, unless you learned the subject of their own nation, but you had to know chokmah, and a person, a young man became an adult, he transferred from teenager to adult at the point he had chokmah, he had wisdom. Wisdom would include how to get along with authority, how to get along with people, how to get along with the Lord in life, knowing Bible doctrine. This was chokmah to the ancient Israelite and this was a prerequisite for being an adult in that nation.

Now what Solomon does is that he is going to perform an experiment by chokmah. Now what does this mean? Let’s test the word; if it means skillful, and if it means things in real life it means that this is going to be a skillful, and it’s going to be real, in other words this experiment is not going to be performed in the ivory tower, this experiment… we’ll see this again and again throughout this book, Solomon gets down and rolls in the mud if we might use the term; he gets down there and works with the material. If he goes out and lives it up with the wine, women and songs as he’s going to do in the next chapter, he lives it up, he doesn’t send his cronies out to live it up and report back. He says if there’s going to be some wine, women and song I’m going to enjoy it, and so I’m going to go out and do it myself. And that’s how he runs the experiment; he goes out here and he does various things, etc. and we will find those things out.

But my point is that when he says I’m going to do it by wisdom it should signal two things to your mind. First it should signal the fact that he’s going to think this through very carefully and we’ll see this again. For example, he’s going to get involved in alcohol; we’ll have a little discussion on the Bible and alcohol. But he’s going to get involved with alcohol; now that may shock some of you who every time you think of the word alcohol you think that’s some sin. And of course with the alcoholic content of the beverages of the United States it might be. But the point is that in the Bible they had fermented juices that they used, this wasn’t grape juice that they were using back then for your information. They used fermented juices. Now what is Solomon going to do; it involved an experiment with alcohol with himself but he’s going to be able to take it, he’s going to say I’m going to take alcohol but it’s never going to get to me. And so he runs his experiment very carefully and maintains control over himself. In other words he doesn’t get blown out of his mind; he never allows himself to get blown out of his mind, he keeps control, with everything, whether it’s involved in alcohol, whether it’s involved in money, finance, construction, women or anything else, he always maintains control. That is the hallmark of the book of Ecclesiastes. Why? Because how else is he going to report back to you what it’s like? In other words, he’s got to maintain control because that’s how he’s going to take notes on this thing and file it with us.

So verse 13, “And I gave my heart to make a comprehensive and diligent search by means of wisdom,” by actually doing this in life. Now a lot of people have theoretical knowledge, but Solomon had practical knowledge. When you get through with this book you’re going to have the benefit of a man that had practical knowledge in every one of these things. “…concerning all things that are done under heaven,” now I’m going to comment and come back as I did with verses 2-11, our procedure in studying the book of Ecclesiastes will be to first go through the passage and glean the interpretation of that passage, study what Solomon is trying to say to us; then after we study the passage of what Solomon said then we’re going to come back and put that passage into the New Testament and study how we as believers should look at those same issues. So you’re going to get the wrong answer; we’re going to go through and study the error, we’re going to study how not to do it in great detail, and then we’ll come back to the New Testament and find out how really to do it. So that’s going to be our procedure and I will not comment therefore what’s wrong about these things until we finish the whole passage.

Verses 13, “…concerning all things which are done under heaven,” these refer to the works of men that are “done under heaven; this sore travail has God given to the sons of man to be occupied [exercised] therewith.” Now he brands this thing the “sore travail” as not as the things done under heaven but the search. In other words he says I’m starting from here and I’m going to go out here and I’m going to perform a reconnaissance and everywhere I go I’m going to stop here, he’s going to go out on this reconnaissance patrol and he’s going to stop here and he’s going to do an in depth study, and then he’s going on down the road and stop here, do an in depth study, then he’s going to down here, stop here and do an in depth study. And this is the way he’s going to do this thing for us. And so he says that this is a “sore [severe] travail,” in other words this is a very sorrowful occupation. He says it’s frustration, frustration, frustration, frustration and you should learn from this when you think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. This is one agonizing frustration that Solomon has, point after point after point on this trail.

Then he blames it on God, notice, “this sore travail has God given to the sons of man to be occupied therewith.” Now of course at this point he’s doing what a lot of believers do, when they get in trouble it’s God’s fault, God did this to me; God gets all the praise, God gets all the blame, usually it reverses in Christian circles, man gets all the praise and God gets all the blame—why did this happen to me, and it’s God’s fault or something. So this is typical carnality, blame it on God. God has given this. Now we know from the Bible this is not true for we know in Genesis 1:31 that when God finished creation it was very good. This means that all physical and biological decay, as well as spiritual decay, is rooted and grounded in the fact of the fall. This is grounded historically in the fall so that if you were there with a movie camera you could have recorded it; that’s what I mean by historical literal fall of man.

And if you don’t have a fall of man you don’t have any solution to the problems of this world; you don’t have any solution for suffering, you can’t diagnose suffering, therefore you cannot prescribe any remedy for suffering. But the Bible diagnosis all of our sufferings, our bodily sufferings, tonight we’ll see the doctrine of sickness and see that sickness comes from the same thing, that basically what we face as human beings is a fallen world, but it wasn’t fallen when it left God’s hand, that’s the point, because in Genesis 2:17 God said “in the day that thou eatest thereof you will surely die.” So when God left the whole thing it was okay, perfect; when man got hold of it, exercised negative volition then things became fouled up. And this is basically why we have this search in verse 13, the search is caused, not by God, it is caused by the fact that man himself has gone on negative signals toward God with the result that he’s precipitated the whole world into catastrophe, disorder and chaos. That includes biochemistry, physics, as well as spiritual principles. That includes a physical decay as well as a spiritual decay.

Therefore what does this mean? It means that Solomon is ignoring human responsibility and you will see this is a hallmark of the book and every time you see this word, “God has ________” (blank) you watch it because the tendency if you are a believer is to misinterpret it. The tendency if you are a believer is to look at this and say oh, God did that, great, and accept it uncritically. Remember the kind of book you are reading and remember that these words are redefined according to his carnality. For example, when you are carnal you know that you can say the proper clichés; you can walk into your Christian group and put on the glad hand, etc. You’re using the words but they don’t mean the same thing to you when you’re spiritual and when you’re walking with the Lord, then the words have content, they have meaning. When you’re carnal you, subtlety inside you [can’t understand word] up and you may shake someone’s hand, give them a nice smile and inside you say you clod, so the glad hand doesn’t mean anything, the smile doesn’t mean anything, it’s just phony. This is a carnal Christian operation.

Now when we have a spiritual Christian operation then the word means a little different thing, it has more content to it and that’s what Solomon is getting at in verse 13. “God has given,” now technically yeah, God has given in the sense that God set up the universe to run this way. You see if you’re a little more acute philosophically at this point you’ll come back at me and say oh, yes, but God is ultimately responsible for it isn’t He? Isn’t God ultimately responsible for the fall, didn’t God design creation so that it would fall, even though He didn’t cause it to fall, and that’s right. And do you know why? Because God respects volition over happiness. And that’s a principle you’ll find again and again in Scripture, that He put personal responsibility over and above personal happiness. Look, if God’s highest goal were personal happiness He could make everybody happy, just cut out volition and then we wouldn’t have any choice. But He has made us with volition and the moment that He has given you volition it means that you now have a choice to suffer; you can make the wrong decision and you will have suffering; suffering, misery and sorrow. Why has God done that? Sometimes people will experience suffering and say oh God, why did you ever give me even volition; I even hate to have volition because it caused this suffering in my life, because I’ve made the wrong decision. And God says sorry, that’s the way I designed creation, I have designed it so that you will be a responsible creature. Now he has provided for your misery because if you are suffering either spiritually or physically, remember the plan of salvation takes care of this, so it’s not that you have to suffer. People who suffer suffer because they want to suffer, not because they have to suffer.

So we have volition and this is the big principle in creation, always this and this is what is wrong with a lot of our political and social thinking today; we want to eliminate suffering and sorrow from society at the expense of annihilating volition. Now you watch that, all these big programs that are going through to stop so and so from killing themselves, to stop so and so from starving themselves, etc. It’s not that God is not concerned with this and it’s not that we be cold towards this suffering; that’s not the point. The point is that whenever God works in history he always works so that at the end of His working a person is responsible; he has had a choice. He may have blown it but he has had the opportunity to choose, and therefore any program, any work that you’re involved in ought to be tested by the criteria, what place does it put on volition. That’s why here at Lubbock Bible Church I will never have an invitation to come down the aisle because it violates your privacy. I’ve seen young people’s meetings where they say everybody that has a father step forward, etc. then we have everybody down front and they’re supposed to make some big decision; do you know why they come forward? Because their friends are coming forward. False motivation, because you’re putting group pressure on them and you’re creating a false issue. You have the right to sit there and go to sleep if you want to, like some of you are. If you want to sleep fine, I realize that sleep is difficult, Lubbock is getting noisier all the time and we have a quiet church and if you can’t get your sleep at home feel free to come here, just don’t snore too loud so you bother the next person. We have people that sleep and you can come here and sleep if you want to, it doesn’t bother me, except if you bother other people.

My point is that you have volition and you have the right to choose. Some of you obviously have come in here this morning because somebody has twisted your arm and you’ve had your volition interfered with, and you’re glowering at me and looking at your watch and saying oh God, when is this service going to be over, etc. I know that somebody has coerced your volition, it’s written all over your face. I can’t communicate the Word of God because you’re so negative it would never get in, if we had an amplifier with 50 amps right in your eardrum it wouldn’t communicate because your volition has been marred. Only if a person has positive volition toward the Word of God are you ever going to communicate, and this is why we do our utmost never to coerce volition. You have the right to take it or leave it, that’s your responsibility.

So Solomon denies this and he says God has given this sore travail, and it’s not true that God has given this sore travail; this sore travail has come into history because man is fallen and it has resulted in this kind of thing, and so therefore we come now to why He has “given it to the sons of man to be occupied therewith.” The word “exercised” means occupied. What do we mean by the fact that man is occupied continually by this searching? What does this mean?

Let’s go to the doctrine of heathenism; this is “what about those who haven’t heard?” You always get this when you present the gospel to somebody, well what about the hotten-tots, what about the Ubangis out in the middle of Africa somewhere who have never heard. By the way, the Ubangis probably have a better chance of hearing the gospel now with the missions than you do. So don’t feel sorry for the Ubangis, they’ll have the gospel presented to them.

The point of heathenism is this, that God has so designed your environment that you cannot escape Him, and that He’ll keep pestering you and pestering you and pestering you, now obviously you can be pestered with people and I’m not talking about some loud-mouth Christian that butts into your life; that’s not what I’m talking about. But I’m saying that God will arrange things in your life and you can’t avoid it, that’s the doctrine of heathenism. And He’s going to keep after you and after you and after you and when you get to the judgment seat you are never going to have the opportunity to say well God, I’m sorry, I never had an opportunity to choose. And God will say oh you haven’t, have you, what about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc.

So let’s go through the doctrine of heathenism and see what God has done to keep after the sons of man so that they’ll constantly be irritated. Why constantly irritate someone? To make them aware of the gospel issue, to make them aware that we are lost men, not that we’re junk, the Bible never says you are a piece of junk, the Bible says you’re a very wonderful person made in the image of God, but you have a very disastrous problem. You’ve got heart disease, spiritual heart disease and therefore God is going to keep after you until you recognize that you have spiritual heart disease.

So the first area of heathenism is that God is sovereign. Therefore since God is sovereign He designs history deliberately to annoy you. He designs both the large scale history and your personal life, to bring events and people across your path that are going to cause you to think going to irritate you enough so that these things will work together so that you will at least be aware of certain things. This is spelled out in Romans 1:18 and following; it is also spelled out in Acts 17:28 and following where God says He has determined the times before appointed and the bounds of the habitations of all nations that they might seek after God. And there it gives you the criteria of historical organization throughout the time. This is the sovereignty of God; it means He keeps after people.

The second thing we know about God, He’s righteous and just. What does this mean? It means that salvation, when it comes to any individual of the human race, can only come to satisfy this standard. Whatever the means of the salvation it must satisfy God’s righteousness and justice. You’ve got to see that the God of the Bible has guts, He has moral character, He has righteousness and justice, and therefore He will never compromise these standards. Therefore since He has righteousness and justice if we are to have fellowship, if I am ever to have fellowship with Him I’m not going to come walking up to God’s presence and say I’m Charlie Clough. Big deal! That doesn’t mean anything. One thing he’s interested in, does Charlie Clough satisfy My righteousness and justice, that’s the point. And we know from the Bible, from John 14:6, Acts 4:12 that there is only one means of salvation; “There is none other name given among men whereby we may be saved,” and John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes unto the Father but by Me.” I used to think of that when I became a Christian in college, actually before I became a Christian, that was the most annoying statement you could ever make to me, the fact that Christianity has all the arrogance to say that it is the only way, until I realized that God is righteous and just, and if I am to be saved, if I am to have fellowship with that kind of a person I’ve got to have fellowship on His terms. What are His terms? The cross of Christ, therefore salvation can only come by Christ. E= mc², it’s just a law, it’s a rule, and it’s not being dogmatic, it’s not trying to be bigoted in any way, it’s simply announcing the truth.

The third thing we know about God is that God is love, and because God is love He not only condemns the entire human race for the fall of Adam, etc. but He has provided en toto for every man. We find that He has unlimited reconciliation, 2 Cor. 5:18; God has reconciled the world unto Himself, the world, that includes believers and unbelievers; He has made total provision for the salvation of every member of the human race. We find not only unlimited reconciliation but we find unlimited redemption, 2 Peter 2:1 where unbelievers are said to have been bought by the blood of Christ. This means that God in His love has provided for every member of the human race. We find in 1 John 2:2 unlimited propitiation, “Jesus Christ is the propitiation not only for our sins but also for the sins of the whole world.” This means that there will never be a member of the human race who will stand before the Great White Throne in Revelation 20 and say Lord, I’m sorry, I wanted to know you but You never provided a means for my salvation. And God says oh I haven’t, what do you think My Son did on the cross? So God in His love has provided means for all salvation. Therefore the issue for every member of the human race is gospel hearing. That’s the issue, how are they going to hear the gospel.

This introduces us to the fifth point, there are two categories of men; those who can’t and those who can hear, and here’s the one who have no ears and those who have an ear. What are those that have no spiritual ears? These are infants that are die before the age of accountability, 2 Sam. 12:23; it includes idiots who do not have the spiritual capacity to believe. Now you take infants or idiots who do not have this ability to believe, God does not hold them responsible, this verse clarifies exactly the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ’s atonement covers them automatically. Now we have those who can hear, what about these? The Bible tells us in Jeremiah 29:13, if you seek Me with all your heart you will find Me. John 7:17, if your will is to do God’s will you will know of this doctrine, whether it be of God or whether it be of myself.

In other words, if a person wants to hear God is obligated to get the information to that individual. We find a historical example; do you know one of the best examples in the Bible of this is Cornelius in Acts chapters 10 and 11; Cornelius was a godly unbeliever. Ever hear of a godly unbeliever? Well he was one; he was one who recognized that God existed; he recognized that he had a problem and he recognized that there had to be someone to step in and be his mediator to save him. But Cornelius didn’t know, he didn’t know the gospel, he couldn’t believe and he was not saved, so therefore what did Cornelius do, he did the only thing any intelligent unbeliever could do, He asked God for some information and so God says okay Cornelius, I’m going to give you some information, and he worked it out through Peter and other believers that they came and witnessed; and bang, they no sooner finished their presentation of the gospel and this person believed automatically. Why? Because he had been prepared. So any unbeliever out in the thousands of miles away who wants to know, God will get him the information, we have that assurance in His Word. That does not excuse, incidentally, you from your obligation of personally witnessing; it means, in fact, that God just might pick you to be the instrumentality of letting that person hear so don’t let this be an excuse to destroy evangelism.

So that’s heathenism and this is what we mean by “God given to the sons of man to be occupied therewith.” He has so set up history in your life so that you will continually be occupied. This is why if you ever met unbelievers and got to really know them you find them miserable people, miserable people. You find Christians who are not following the Lord, on the outside they may be ha-ha-ha but after you get to know they they’re just miserable, no joy, no peace, nothing because God is continually after them, do you want to chose Me, do you want to choose Me, do you want to choose Me.

All right, verse 14, this is Solomon’s result. Verse 13 is what he intended to do, what he set out to do, verses 14-15 summarize what he found. “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and, behold, the thing is vanity and preoccupation with wind [all is vanity and vexation of spirit].” If you want to check that translation change check any modern translation, RSV, ASV, Amplified, what have you. It’s not “vexation of spirit,” it means chasing, literally, after wind and it means the same thing as vanity, as we explained last time. This is what he found out. So verse 14 announces the conclusion that was expanded in verses 2-11.

Then he comments and adds and he develops what vanity means in verse 15, “That which is crooked cannot be made straight; that which is wanting cannot be numbered.” That is not a lesson in geometry; he is not talking about mathematics, he’s talking about injustice in the world. The word “crooked” always is used for something which is short of +R or God’s absolute standard. For example, in Job 8:3 we find this, “Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert righteousness?” Here you have two occurrences of the word crooked, to make crooked. It’s translated in your King James as “pervert,” and you can obviously see the context has nothing to do with mathematics; it has to do with justice. So therefore it says here, “Does God make crooked judgment? Or does the Almighty make justice crooked?” In other words, does He bend His standard, does He compromise His standard? That’s the point. We find other passages in the Bible: Lamentations 3:23 and Amos 8:5 are instances where the word crooked is used, obviously not in a mathematics context but in a simple justice, moral ethical sense.

Back to Ecclesiastes, “That which is crooked,” in other words, something that is unjust, “That which is crooked cannot be made straight,” he says, “and that which is wanting [lacking] cannot be numbered.” That which is wanting refers again to lack of justice in society, individually and personally, they are all included in one big ball of wax here. Everything that’s unjust, that strikes your mind as unjust, he says not only it can’t be changed but it’s so widely prevalent that I can’t even count it. And he says the whole old creation reeks of injustice, lack of justice. Now he makes a statement here that a lot of modern people would contradict but I want you to notice it because it’s absolutely true. “That which is crooked cannot be made straight,” cannot be made straight.

Now I want you to look at that long and hard because we have a group in our society today that think they can bring in social justice by human means and you never can do it. You don’t have to go very far to see how this works out. You can go back to Berkley when we had the free speech movement. We want free speech for ourselves and no one else, and so under the guise of free speech they have appealed to people’s conscience, and so everybody says that’s right, we should have free speech, but it was just psychological manipulation; they weren’t interested in free speech, not in the least were they interested in free speech and the test is why is it that these men can’t testify to the gospel on the campus? They’re not interested in free speech; it becomes a device of manipulation. I’ll give you another device in manipulation you’re going to see right before your eyes and that’s this new [can’t understand word] thing that’s starting up on the college campuses; they have already scheduled a nationwide demonstration for March 27th on every college campus and they are going to start out a demonstration, and that’s Good Friday and they’re going to parade war crimes all over the nation, that’s the big plan, and what they take Christians, and on Good Friday what do you think, you think of the cross and the crucifixion of Christ, so very cleverly they pick that day to bring in this issue of war crimes, just because some Lieutenant is doing his job over in Vietnam he gets a court martial for it. But they bring this issue of war crimes in and they bring this along and they deliberately try to manipulate the Christian conscience.

Now I have very little patience with these kinds of people. If you want to appeal to my moral and ethical principles you go ahead and appeal, but brother you’d better not manipulate me. And you’d better not come to me with this song and dance that you’re all interested in free speech when all you’re interested in is getting an emotional response out of me to sympathize with you, to give you some political power so you can get going with something and that is exactly what is happening in our country. And do you know what the tragic result is going to be? People’s conscience become hardened to this tactic after a while and after a while we have Christmases and New Year’s Days and Thanksgiving Days and we have our Good Fridays taken up by this crowd of hooligans. What’s finally going to happen? Finally people are going to turn off every moral issue and then where are you set? Have you made the crooked straight? No, you’ve left it just as crooked as it ever was because you’ve totally annihilated the conscience of people. After while people say they can’t stand this thing, I won’t even hear it, and so when a bona fide gripe tries to get aired they’re not going to hear it. That’s what’s happening; the crooked is not being made straight and the groups that protest the loudest are the ones that are making the most crooked.

Verses 16-18, the end of this, this is a recapitulation and this is a form or a structure of this book that you want to see. Solomon does this every once in a while in this book and it’s something that will help you and in the interpretation of it if you catch it. What he’ll do is first announce the whole thing, sort of like a news reporter, he gives you the whole story. Then he goes back and recapitulates and runs it through again for detail. So what he has done in verses 12-15 is give you the whole story. Now verses 16-18 he goes through again and gives you certain details.

Beginning in verse 16, “I communed with my own heart,” that answers to the same as verse 14, and he says, “Lord Jesus Christ, I am come to great estate and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem;” literally it means I’ve increased wisdom more than anybody over me before Jerusalem, “yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” This means that he had seen a lot of wisdom and knowledge in his day.

Verse 17, “Therefore,” this is a result clause, this is what he found and so he says, very pathetically at the end, he says so look, this is what I’ve done, I’ve given my heart and all its effort and what have I found, “to know wisdom and knowledge, that they are madness and folly,” now that translation is different and let me explain it. The verb “to know” in Ecclesiastes frequently takes two objects. So let’s look at it carefully, “I gave my heart to know,” what is it to know? To know wisdom, there’s your first object. “And knowledge,” the “to know” in the Hebrew is da’at, and it’s a Hebrew infinitive, actually it should be “to know,” there should be a Lamed here but there isn’t any Lamed it’s just this and this can be a noun as well as an infinite; so we take that “wisdom and knowledge.” “To know that wisdom and knowledge, that they are madness and folly,” and you’ll see this translation justified later on in the text. I have discovered this as a result of this, all the wisdom and all the knowledge that I’ve had, all this experience that I’ve had running this experiment, what has it yielded? It’s yielded nothing but madness and folly.

What do the words “madness” and “folly” mean? These are synonyms for vanity again; the word “madness” is a Hebrew word, hard “h”, halal, and it means to holler and shout and obviously one who is crazy is hollering and shouting, whopping around, etc. “I gave my heart to know wisdom and knowledge that they are madness,” this means shouting, confusion, I would translate it craziness, just craziness. “And folly” and the word “folly” means foolishness; it is used in the Old Testament when prophets would make a prophecy and they were false prophets and so God would say oh, I’m going to fix you people, you’re going to make a prophecy are you, okay, you go ahead and make your little prophecy and then the Lord comes around and manipulates history so that the prophecy doesn’t work and it is said by the prophets that these prophets were made foolish. In other words ineffectual, just a lot of hot air, that’s all it is, just hot air. And that’s what his point is that this is all I’ve found. After all the years of this experiment in this book, verses 17 is a summary that the whole thing is just craziness and hot air, just totally ineffectual, very unreal.

Verse 18, “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.” Apparently he’s quoting a proverb here which he does oftentimes throughout the text, there should be a quotation mark before the word “in” and a quotation mark after the word “sorrow,” for that is really a quote of some other proverb that Solomon picked up. So he says, that proverb is really true, “in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.”

Now let’s look at this from the Christian point of view. Let’s look at this as a spiritual Christian; here we are as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, and we have a choice at any given moment of being carnal or spiritual. Here’s our soul, body and spirit. There’s the carnal Christian, operating in the energy of the flesh, on negative volition, personal affections unstable, mentality confused, bodily affections uncontrolled. That’s the power of the flesh operating. As a Christian he has the indwelling Holy Spirit operating through his human spirit, through the functions of guidance, worship and conscience, and when the Holy Spirit is cut off through the flesh, channel two is clogged, so therefore the flesh controls you and you are operating in the energy of the flesh and you’re producing human good and personal sins; that’s all you can produce when you’re out of fellowship with the Lord. You can produce a lot of good things but its all human good, it doesn’t count.

The Christian turns around, confesses his sin, is now filled with the Spirit. The Holy Spirit moves through on channel two and begins to affect volition, it begins to strengthen your volition so that you’re not a weak Christian, so that you have determination and persistence and when the going gets rough you keep on positive, positive, positive, positive, no matter how much the pressure still positive, positive, never swayed. The Holy Spirit affects your personal affections so that now the thing that turns you on are the things of the Lord Jesus Christ; it doesn’t mean you don’t have emotions toward people but it means that those emotions are now under control; mentality, it means that you’re now living in the Word, you have a relaxed mental attitude, no worry. And you have personal affections that are under control, empowerment for service. That’s the filling of the Spirit. And a Christian at any given time has a choice of these things.

Now let’s go through this passage very quickly and summarize what should be the proper attitude on these points. The first one, verse 13, where you read the fact that “this sore travail God has given” remember I said that said that you’ve destroyed volition, that it negates the whole idea that your choice means anything. And one of the greatest things that you can say as far as a believer is concerned is that if you are a believer in Jesus Christ today when you make a choice to be filled with the Holy Spirit, or when you make a choice to go carnal, that choice affects your eternal destiny in the sense of reward and so on. If you are an unbeliever and today you choose to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior, do you realize that that utterly changes, that one decision utterly changes completely and forever your eternal destiny. So I want you to look at life if you are a Christian, the Bible tells you this, don’t look at life as though verse 13 is true, that everything comes from God, can’t do anything so I’m just going to sit back and fuss about it. Nonsense, God has given you a volition, He’s given you 7,000 promises in the Word of God, and when these situations come your way you don’t whine and crybaby around; oh God did this to me. You trust the promises and you have a way out. You do have a way out and you can change your circumstances, not by your own power but by trusting the Lord Jesus Christ and His promises and He changes the circumstances. So verse 13 is not true if you are a believer.

Secondly, it says “I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things done under the sun.” What should you be searching out? Do you know what you should be searching out? Not things done under the sun. If you are a believer what you should be seeking is the Lord’s will and searching out the things that He has done for you. This is the prayer of the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 1, he says look, I pray that you Ephesian Christians not be nitwits for the rest of your Christian life, that you go through the Christian life like spiritual morons. I pray that every one of you believers would have the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him and that you would comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and the height and the depth. Now that’s not a prayer for seminary students, that’s a prayer for every believer, that is regardless of your education and your soulish IQ. When God says that I have revealed things to you it doesn’t mean that you have to have an IQ to understand it. It means that God provides for your spiritual IQ and you can understand it. Paul would never, never have prayed that prayer if he had not intended it to be prayed and answered. He prays that every saint would know the whole counsel of God.

So instead of wasting your time like verse 13 and Solomon of searching around what so and so has done, you talk to your neighbor, he’s got a boat and he went to the lake and had a good time, so maybe I should get a boat and I’ll have a good time. So you get a boat and the first time you go down to the lake the thing tips over and you swim to shore, the motor gets wet and you have to pull it out, etc. So that doesn’t turn out, besides you don’t like boats. Then you talk to someone else at work and he has a blast at some cabin some place, and you go up there and you get sick so you don’t like that. Instead of wasting your time looking around for panaceas if you will spend your time searching and seeking out the things of the Word of God I will guarantee that you can have a happy, sustained Christian life. And that’s to be the object of your search, God’s will for you.

What do you see then? Do you see the works “done under heaven” as Solomon did that really turned him off. No, because if you are going to search out God’s will for you do you know what you’re going to see after while; if you have positive volition toward the will of God and you come to the Word of God not saying I want to memorize 200 pages today or something, you just say look, I want to know, what is it Lord that you want me to do? And if you come with that attitude you’re going to find things happen in your life and you’re going to discover that what you are looking at is not the works of man any more; what you’re looking at is God the Holy Spirit working from the new creation into the old. Here’s your position, when you receive Christ you are put in union with Him; above this line is the new creation; below this line if the old creation. Here you are, and out here Solomon says is nothing, absolutely nothing that satisfies, the only place of satisfaction for you is in the bottom circle.

So what happens, you start walking as a Christian filled with the Holy Spirit and you begin to see God the Holy Spirit work things from the new creation into the old and they’re exciting; you see people’s lives changed, you see whole families change and it’s not the works of men any more and that’s what excites you, you no longer see the works of man and so you don’t say with Solomon, I saw all the things done under heaven, and he means all the things done by men under heaven; you see the things that God is doing right before your eyes.

Verse 15, you can’t say this any more either; you can’t say that the crooked can’t be made straight; if you are a believer… I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience as a believer, if you haven’t you should, some of you have no sympathy whatever for a nonbeliever, it’s tragic, you don’t know the agony that a nonbeliever has; in one way I’m glad I didn’t receive Christ until college because I know what it is to go out in life as an unbeliever, and don’t think I suffered from a material point of view, I didn’t. I was led to Christ through prosperity, I had every one of my goals in high school fulfilled, I had a scholarship to MIT, I had everything I wanted and I found out something, that the more things I had it was the same Charlie Clough underneath and they didn’t satisfy inside. So I was turned on by prosperity, prosperity did not satisfy and I was quick enough to see it. You can take all the prosperity in the world and it didn’t interest me in the least because it never satisfied; it never changes you on the inside, you’re the same old person. So therefore you realize these things and therefore you see the crooked can be made straight, you see an unbeliever whose life is a wreck, you see him trust in Jesus Christ and his life changes. Yes, the crooked can be made straight.

And you look at the other part of that verse, “that which is wanting cannot be numbered,” oh it can’t. Think about God in His omniscience, do you think God in His omniscience doesn’t know every little thing that’s wrong and that’s one of the glories of Bible Christianity because we have a coming world judgment. Most Christians are apologetic about a coming world judgment but do you realize that if you don’t have a future judgment over the world, all of the injustices that have gone on in history are meaningless. What about the people that suffered in concentration camps? Do people get away with doing that? What about all that, does that all go on in history and is just totally meaningless; that’s what you’ve got if you don’t have a judgment. And yet we find as Bible-believing Christians that God in His omniscience has a record of everything and it is not true that records can’t be kept, God has a perfect record of every sin that has ever been done, and so therefore He took all that sin and poured it out on the cross of Christ and the greatest tragedy of history is going to be in the future when individual people, the crooked people, the people who have made a mess of their life are going to come up before the Great White Throne and God is going to say all right, on what base do you claim right for eternal fellowship with Me. And they’re going to say God, I did all these good works, you see, I helped old ladies across the street, I gave to the United Fund and I worked with the Boy Scouts and all the rest of it; I did all these good works. Those works are good, but if they are done out of a false motivation it’s wood, hay and stubble, it doesn’t count and God just ignores it and these people are cast into the lake of fire, not because of their sins, Christ died for their sins. They are cast in the lake of fire for their one sin basically, the unpardonable sin of rejection of the cross and substitution of their own works in place of Christ’s work.

Now I don’t know about you but if you’re here and that’s true of your life as we’ve been going through verses 12-18, you have some self-examination to do. And I’m not going to pester you and I’m not going to ask you to come down the aisle, raise your hand, sign any card, I’m just challenging you that if this is true of your life you ought to be sharp enough to realize that that’s not the way God designed life to be lived and you ought not to be going on and just walk out of here with a well, I’ll think about it next month attitude. If you are a Christian, if you have trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior you’d better get straightened out on some Bible doctrine because your life is not meant to be this way. Your life is meant to be a testimony for Christ. And do you know what it is? If this is true of your life you’re a detriment to Christ, you ought to just hide until you get straightened out because you’re an embarrassment to Jesus Christ. And if you’re an unbeliever then I have good news for you too, you don’t have to go on this way either, Jesus Christ died for you on the cross, and you don’t have to join Lubbock Bible Church to be saved; you have to simply put your trust in Him and He’ll do the rest. With our heads bowed.