Ecclesiastes Lesson 8
Don’t Fight It – 3:1-15
We have been working in this most interesting book in the Old Testament, probably one of the most interesting books of all the Word of God because this is the one book in Scripture that is fatalistic, or in some ways very, very pessimistic. You might say it is a negative form of teaching because what this book is doing to you is taking you out into the toulies and showing you that the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence. This always has to happen because every once in a while you as a believer will get your eyes on some thing, some person, and immediately a thought springs into your mind, oh if I only had that then I would be happy; or if I didn’t have so and so I would be happy and some people don’t know what they’d be happy about. So we have people all confused on this happiness issue.
And Solomon was one of the greatest men who ever lived and he had the human resources to exploit every possible means of human satisfaction possible. Therefore in Ecclesiastes 3 Solomon goes on in his series of experiments to tell us some more things. In chapter 2 we’ve worked with one of his great experiments, the experiment of pleasure and some of the conclusions that he discovered as a result of this. The great conclusion, which will be reiterated again and again and again in this book is found in verses 24-26 of chapter 2. To understand how these verses are arranged we have to understand various ways of Hebrew writing. This could be considered this way; the first part of verse 24, if you consider this 24a, and you have 24b, 25, 26. These are arranged in an a, b, c, d, pattern where a and c are parallel and b and d are parallel. This is just the way it’s written; you’ll see this again today.
So as we look at verse 24, the first sentence is parallel to verse 25; “There is no pleasure for a man, “no greater pleasure,” literally, “for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor.” That’s a; parallel with that is verse 25, “For who can eat, or who else can abstain” as we found last time, not “hasten,” “abstain, apart from him.” Not “more than I.” The newer translations have corrected this, “apart from him.” So you have the first section, section a and section c parallel. The point that Solomon is making is that if there is no God, or even if there is a God and He doesn’t talk with you and you don’t have the Word of God and you’ve put it in a basket somewhere and you have junked it like all modern theologians have, and you have gone this route, then this is all you have; as a non-Christian this is all you have. You can pretend you have all sorts of things but you don’t have anything except what you find in verse 24. Solomon says this basically is the only thing that you’ve got left, the only way that you can be happy is to be content with the relative happiness of human existence. This means eating, drinking, etc. satisfying these various things.
So therefore what he says is that you might as well forget ever trying to have perfect happiness, you might as well just give up completely ever trying to be ultimately satisfied. This is back up in verse 20, he says; “I caused my heart to despair,” that’s what is meant. After finding that there was no happiness in things, finding there was no happiness in people he said all right, what I’m going to do is to lower my sights. In other words, if you think of a bar graph he was trying to get to the top of a bar graph, he was trying to get up here to find perfect happiness, happiness which he did not find in anything he did. He had building programs, he had a fantastic treasury of gold and silver, and he wasn’t a victim of the stock market in his day because he ran the stock market of his day. He wasn’t a victim of anything else, he had his own choir, he wrote his own music, he had all the girls he wanted, more than he wanted and still he wasn’t happy, and therefore he said listen, I never can find it so therefore I’m just going to settle for something less, I’m just going to be content with eating, drinking, having a good time and getting what I can at the moment. A very modern conclusion incidentally. We found Paul came to the same conclusion in 1 Cor. 15 where he said if Christ be not raised, then we haven’t got anything, and don’t kid yourself, if Jesus Christ did not literally rise from the grave you might as well chuck everything because all you’ve got left is a concept of relative happiness that you can kind of eek out day by day, moment by moment, trying this, trying that, etc. hoping that you’ll find a little happiness here and there, but that’s about all that’s available.
Then he says, the last part of verse 24, “This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.” Verse 26, “For God gives to a man which is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy, but to the sinner he gives travail.” We found, typical of Solomon in this book, he is taking the same vocabulary that one finds in the rest of the Old Testament but attaching different meanings to the words. So “sinner” to Solomon’s mind is simply a person that doesn’t have a good time, a person that is always looking for this ultimate fulfillment, can never find it, a very frustrated individual, and therefore he’s the kind of person that’s always miserable. Solomon says the only way to get any final happiness is to forget it and then you’ll be happy with some relative happiness at a lower level. You can try and see what you get today and wake up tomorrow and see what you can eek out tomorrow, etc. that’s all you’ve got left, you have no hope for eternal reward, you have no hope for eternal blessedness, nothing left, absolutely nothing left and it’s time the Christians understood that the non-Christians have nothing, absolutely have nothing. He is completely spiritually barren, the Bible calls this spiritual death.
Now in Ecclesiastes 3 Solomon moves into a new section and from verses 1-15 he is going to give us a second report. The first report was chapter 2; the second report that he’s going to give is the first 15 verses of chapter 3. Now he’s going to give us a little philosophy. And he’s going to take us and discuss the question of our position in the universe. So we might entitle the title of this report as “man’s position in the universe.” And he’s going to describe just where you are if you are a non-Christian or if you are a Christian out of fellowship; he says this is all we have left. And in this chapter as in the previous chapter we’re going to find an amazing historical truth about this book. Solomon anticipated thirty centuries of human philosophy, for philosophy as we know it began around 600 BC on the western edge of the Asia Minor peninsula in a place called Milesian and this was the beginning of Western thought.
And this was the beginning of western thought, western Greek philosophy, and this came on down to us to about 1850 say. And from that time to this time we have the rise and fall of human philosophy, when everybody thought that man by his own reasoning powers could sort out the facts of his experience, and come up with a philosophy of life that would be absolutely true. And along about 1850 this began to break down with such men as Kant and Hegel, until we come down into the 20th century where we have despair. This is not necessarily everybody goes around with a long face, not some emotional type thing, it’s just a philosophical giving up. That’s what the word despair means; it just simply means that man has given up hope for getting real answers on the base of his own reason.
This is what Solomon anticipated; this is what’s so fantastic about this book. Here is a man who lived in 1000 BC or thereabouts, from about 1000 to 930, and yet in the course of this man’s lifetime he totally anticipated the whole thrust of human philosophy; thirty centuries of human thinking he collapsed in one lifetime. He was a brilliant man, a genius. And when he got out of fellowship he was probably the most ingenious out of fellowship carnal believer that has ever existed. Therefore if you think you can get out of fellowship with the Lord and have a good time and you think you can outdo Solomon, you have another thought coming because Solomon outdid you; he did everything possible and carried it to a far more logical conclusion than you ever could
So beginning in verse 1 we have the beginning of his philosophy. And it sounds like fatalism but I want to show you that it is not fatalism that he believes in, necessarily; not in the sense you think. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” The word “purpose” here would refer to any detail of life, eating, drinking, sleeping or anything. For every purpose of your life there’s a time. Now this does not mean, as often people take this, there’s a certain time to do something. In other words, should I do this thing at three o’clock or four o’clock or five o’clock. There’s a certain time of the day or a certain time of the week when I should do this; that’s not what Solomon is saying. What Solomon is saying is that in the design of the universe certain things appear at certain times; certain things disappear at other times. For the works you find in verses 3-8 are not necessarily admonitions for you to do something, it’s just general descriptions of human activity. In other words, there’s human activity in this area, human activity in that area, human activity in this category, human activity in that category, etc. He’s looking at the whole, all of humanity, all of the universe as one well-arranged machine, and he’s saying now every piece in this machine has a purpose and has a function. And that’s what he is willing to grant here.
Now to this point that we have to understand something again about the relation of Solomon to the Greeks. Solomon lived many centuries before the Greeks. And yet Solomon did in his own lifetime what the Greeks partially did, what we in our civilization have totally done, and that is what I would say is make a three step cycle. The first thing that Solomon did and you will see it here in verses 1-8 is that he affirmed there was order in the universe. He said the universe is orderly, that’s the first thing he did, saying that somewhere there’s order; I might not see it but it’s there. Now the reason why Solomon got this idea, incidentally, is from the Word of God. Solomon was trained by his father David; David was one of the greatest believers who ever lived. David taught Solomon a lot of things and one of the things that Solomon did learn from his father was that God created and therefore everything has a purpose, everything has a function. But now you watch what happens because it spells out a very interesting facet of our own life today.
He started out saying that the universe is orderly; the reason that he said it was is that he got it from the Word of God. He got the idea of an orderly universe, not from his own experience, he started out with this idea and he got it from the Word of God, from revelation. Now we find in history a strange thing happened. Around 586 in the city of Miletus on the west coast of Asia Minor there started to be the group the Milesians, a great group of philosophers, we don’t know why they started, you can read history books on philosophy and all you can get out of these books is that something happened in 586 or thereabouts to set off the idea that the universe was orderly. And that these Greeks proceeded on a tremendous assumption that if the universe was orderly then second step, if it’s orderly I can find it out. In other words, here you have rationalism, I can use my own mind to discover the order. If I think orderly and the universe is orderly, that means I can discover truth by my own mind. And so these Greeks started this out, and the mystery in history is why? What was it? Over centuries and centuries nobody ever conceived of this idea. The Egyptians didn’t have it; the Canaanites didn’t have it, the Amorites didn’t have it, they had all sorts of superstitious things about the gods. You can read Home and The Iliad and the Odyssey, and you read how they explained the creation of the world and everyday phenomena by God. So that history was chaotic, it was an interplay, it was a great stage in which your life was affected by what the gods did. And if Jupiter had a party last night on Mount Zeus then you had some problems the next morning or something. And if Zeus decided to send one of his girlfriends out to seduce one of the heroes then he got seduced. In other words, the facts of history were explained by what these gods were doing on Mount Olympus and other places.
So, what happened then we really don’t know historically, is that in 586 BC or thereabouts something happened to liberate the Greeks, the early Greeks, in this bondage to superstition. Now I suspect what it was, was that in looking up Miletus we find out that it was a colony. Miletus had 45 colonies that have been found today and they had commercial intercourse with a number of civilizations including Israel. And I suspect, and it’s a conjecture, but I suspect that one of the secrets of Greek philosophy is that they borrowed the idea for an orderly universe directly from Solomon and the wisdom schools in Israel. This is the only place at that time in history where you have a complete affirmation that the universe is orderly. Now watch this, this all sounds like a lot of philosophy but it comes down to a very interesting and practical point. And that is that all of western thought basically is grounded on the revelation of God. In other words, where do you get the idea that the universe is orderly to start with; it’s an assumption and the only way you get it basically is from the Word of God where it’s declared, I, “in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth,” God says. And therefore there’s order there; therefore this gives you a base for investigation.
But the illegitimate second step was made both by the Greeks and by Solomon. They illegitimately said ah, if the universe is orderly, that means now I can investigate it on my own energy of the flesh; I can take my mind, my mind thinks orderly, and I can investigate, I can be the scientist, etc. and here’s where they made number one mistake, right here at this second step because with this they chucked revelation. At this point Solomon, we found this back in chapter 2, we found it in verses 13-14, where we said that Solomon quotes a proverb; he quotes part of the Scriptures and watch what he does with it. In 2:13 he said “I saw” (quote) and he’s going to quote a proverb, “‘wisdom exceeds folly, as far as light excels darkness.” (end quote) Verse 14 is another proverb, “The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness” (end of quote). Then he adds, “But” and it’s an adversative here, “But I myself,” in other words, what he’s saying is that’s what the proverb says, “But I myself have found that the same event happens to them all.” And so Solomon is doing the same thing the later Greeks did, he’s setting up his reason over the Word of God in saying well, I don’t see it that way, the Word of God is wrong. So this was the second step that the Greeks did and Solomon did centuries before them.
The third step is, and where they get into trouble and Solomon is going to get in trouble because in verse 11 he says, “no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end.” And now he’s come full circle. He started out with the idea that there’s order in the universe; he has said all right, since there’s order I can find it by my own natural intelligence, and after trying this bruising exercise of trying is it this way, is it this way, is it that way, is it this way, is it that way, and finding out he really can’t come to a philosophy of life, he gives up in despair and says man can’t know. So you see he’s gone a full circle. He started out optimistically, oh the universe is all orderly, that means I can go out and conduct scientific investigation. He goes out and conducts scientific investigation apart from the Word of God and winds up in despair because now he feels I can’t know this, I can’t know this. So what Solomon has given you is a very precious lesson, something that every one of you as believers and if you’re not a believer you still have to learn the lesson, and that is that on the basis of your own natural intelligence, your own human research you will never, never come to a true philosophy of life. It’s absolutely impossible; you’ll come to a few opinions, a few views, but you never can reach true truth; never, apart from the Word of God.
So therefore when I hear this jazz that one school teacher told one of our young people, I don’t see why you bother to study the Word, that has nothing to do with your education, and if it had been me there I would say it has everything to do with your education. If you don’t know the Word of God, if you have a choice between being educated in the public school and learning the Word of God, do you know what you should do? Take the Word because you will be educated in the Word of God, you have to know how to read, you’ll know your mathematics, you’ll know everything by studying the Word of God. You have to to understand it. You’ll get a philosophy of life and if you have to choose, always choose the Word over an education. You’re not getting educated today; the whole system of education has left the concept of the early American idea where you could communicate content to students. Now you don’t content, you communicate experiences and all the rest of it. So if you ever have to choose between the Word of God and an education you pick the Word of God and you’ll get your education. You choose your education over the Word of God you’ll never get true knowledge; never, impossible.
So this is one of the great things Solomon has learned for you, and now as he starts in in verse 1 he is going to introduce us to what he sees as order in the universe. He says all these things have a pattern to them. He says “to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. [2] A time to be born, and a time to die,” now the word “be born” means to bear, and I want to show you something about interpreting the Word of God. We’re coming to a type of literature that has this a, b, c, d, structure again, and I’m going to make a change in one of the verses and you’re going to wonder why I do it and I’ll show you now why we’re doing it. This is the way this is set up; you have ab, cd. Let’s look at verse 2 and watch how it breaks down: (a) There’s “a time to bear,” (b) “a time to die,” a and b are opposites. Now listen to the next pair, there’s “a time to plant and a time to pluck up,” they are opposites, but if you notice a and c coincide, there’s a parallel between being born and planting. There’s a parallel here and a parallel here, so you have a parallel between a and c and b and d. This will be important as we get down through here because there’s a problem verse in verse 5.
“A time to bear,” not be born, it’s active verb, “A time to bear, and a time to die;” this is animal and human life, “a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted,” this is plant life. Verse 3, “A time to kill, and a time to die,” do you know where he got this idea? Turn to Deuteronomy 32:39. I want you to notice the difference, same idea but in one case you have Solomon saying this, the other case you have Moses saying it in a different context. Moses is in fellowship; Solomon is out of fellowship. Verse 39, “See now that I, even I, am He,” this is God speaking to Moses, “there is no God with Me, I kill and I make alive,” or heal, “I wound and I heal, neither is there anybody or anyone that can deliver out of My hand.” Now who is the One behind it? Obvious, here it’s God that is behind the order in the universe. Come over to Solomon, however, and you’ll see something radically different. You’ll see that he says God’s behind it but he really could care less whether he is or not.
So in verse 3 he says, as we continue down, there’s “a time to kill, and a time to heal;” this is part of the order which I see around me, “there’s a time to break down, and a time to build up” and of course the first part of verse 3, the time to kill and time to heal has to do with human beings, breaking down and building up has to do with immaterial things, the buildings, etc.
Verse 4, “A time to weep, and a time to laugh,” these are all the activities of man, “a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” The word “mourn” here is used in funeral processions in the ancient near east. And so it’s an intensification of that verse, there’s “a time to weep, and a time to laugh” would be the trivial things in your life, things that make you sad, things that make you happy. The last part of the verse intensifies it. “A time to mourn, and a time to dance.” Now dancing seems kind of odd, you might say at a fundamental church you have dancing, my goodness. Turn to 2 Samuel 6: we’re going to look at David, when David did his little jig. He had a problem with his wife when he did it, but I want you to get this because this is one of the cultural ways in which the word “dance” was used. It was a ceremonial term used for the expression of joy. The dancing described in 2 Samuel is single, the only unfortunate part as far as you people are concerned is that it gets a little gross, but nevertheless, this is the way David would express joy. So the word that Solomon is talking about, “a time to mourn, and a time to dance,” and a time to weep and lament, he is talking about this, an outward expression.
So in 2 Samuel 6:12, “Now it was told King David, saying, ‘The Lord has blessed the house of Obed-edem and all that belongs to him, on account of the ark of God.’ And David went and brought the ark of God from the house of Obed-edem into the city of David with gladness. [13] And it was so that when they bear the ark of the Lord they had gone six paces, he sacrificed oxen and fatlings.” David is excited that at last the very presence of God is going to be in the city of Jerusalem. Verse 14, “And David danced before the Lord with all his might, and David was girded with a linen ephod. [15] So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet.”
Here you have this great religious procession and then you have his nitwit wife looking out the window, verse 16, “And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal, Saul’s daughter, looked through a window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD, and she despised him in her heart,” obviously out of fellowship, couldn’t take the positive volition of her husband at this point and so she got all shook about this. Therefore, verse 20, David comes home after the party and she’s waiting at the door. “But when David returned to bless his household, Michal, the daughter of Saul, came out to meet David and said, ‘How glorious,’” see, this is how ladies operate when they’re out of fellowship, sarcasm, “How glorious was the King of Israel today, who uncovered himself today in the eyes of his handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows who shamelessly uncovers himself. [21] And David said unto Michal,” he cuts her off fast, because at this point she is out of fellowship, just completely out. And she’s got all upset because David carried things to a little extreme but David was on positive volition at this time. So verse 21, David says, “It was before the LORD,” see, it wasn’t any of her business to start with, “It was before the LORD, who chose me before your father,” you can see maybe this wasn’t the happiest of marriages here. But nevertheless, he tells her off, “It was before the LORD, who chose me before your father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the LORD, over Israel; therefore I will play before the LORD. [22] And I will yet be more vile than this, and will be base in mine own sight, and of the maid servants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honor. [23] Therefore Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child to the day of her death.”
So here’s a problem where Michal didn’t get with it as far as the Word of God is concerned, but that’s the word “dance” and how it was used in Israel. It is a form of religious joy that was expressed, usually not in partners as we consider dancing today but in single, a group of people dancing but usually in single form.
Now we come to verse 5, “A time to cast away stones, and a time together stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.” This is an enigma, we don’t know what the first part of that verse means, it’s just a guess. But we can guess from the last part of the verse. Let’s go back to our ab, cd structure for a minute. Every one of these verses, except the last one, has this structure. All right, let’s apply the analysis to verse 5. “A time to cast away stones,” whatever that is, we’ll put “cast” up here for element a, “cast away stones.” “A time to gather stones,” that’s b. And then the bottom part of the verse, “a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing, and this, of course, has sexual connotations in marriage, this is embracing and not embracing. So therefore what is the first part; it obviously must have something to do with the sexual activities of marriage, we don’t know exactly what it means, it’s an idiom nowhere else found in the Word of God.
Verse 6, “A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.” These refer to possession, in other words, at times in your life you’ll have many possessions, at times you’ll have very little possessions. Verse 7, “There’s a time to rend [tear], and a time to sew,” the word “rend” here was used for mourning, though not necessarily at a funeral. This would be just agony over some spiritual reversal in the nation and you expressed your agony by tearing your clothes. And of course the tailors must have had a lot of business in those days but every time there was some agony to be expressed you tore your clothes. Now it’d be interesting, I guess that’s why they had a lot of long clothes and a lot of material to tear. But after they got through, then they had to sew it back up together again, and that’s what it means, “a time to rend” means a time to tear, I’ll tear my clothes, and then there’s a time to sew it up after I’m finished.
If you want to see how this goes, turn back to Genesis 37:29, here is the sad situation of Jacob, the father, who had many sons, and some of the older fellows couldn’t stand Joseph and there’s a reason for this. Now don’t blame the brothers completely for what they did to Joseph; they got tired of little baby brother and they dumped him in a pit, and of course everybody in Sunday School they always learn oh, those nasty brothers of Joseph. Well if you could study the original language you’d see that Joseph was one of the spoiled brats of the family. Everything his brothers would do he’d go run and tell mama. He was a tattle tale, “I’m going to go tell on you” and all the rest of it and so finally his brothers had just had it and so they said we’re just going to get rid of this little kid, we’re just going to have an little accident. Things can happen out here in the pasture so we’re just going to arrange a little convenient accident. And they bumped him into the pit and then sold him to some merchants. And they decided to do away with the evidence, they’d take his coat, which was not of many colors, but they’d take this coat and they’d rub it in some blood and then they brought it back to Jacob and said I’m so sorry, but that little monster met up with a lion out there or something, too bad. So they bring it back, and verse 29, “Reuben returned unto the pit, and behold, Joseph was not in the pit,” see Reuben was one of the henchmen in this deal and he kept warning them, let’s not do this because it’s going to break our father’s heart if we do it. Reuben was the oldest fellow there. And so he comes back to the pit after they’ve sold Joseph to the Midianites, and taken his clothing to Jacob, and when he saw that “Joseph was not in the pit, he rent his clothes.” See, it’s an expression of sorrow. It was in that day automatic, you feel sorry, start tearing. That’s how you expressed your sorrow.
Back to Ecclesiastes; so that’s what “rend” means. It means to [can’t understand word] and it doesn’t mean Solomon is taking up sewing in verse 7. It means that this is a simple rending, expressing sorrow, and a time to sow back up; “a time to keep silence,” and the word “silence” here again is in a time when people are emotionally upset, it was used in Job. Remember when Job had his problem and his three friends came to him and it says for seven days they sat there and kept their big mouth shut, because when people are emotionally upset there’s nothing you can do with them, absolutely nothing. The best way of counseling to a person who is emotionally upset and completely at the end of their rope is just let them say anything, but you just be quiet because nothing you say is ever going to be heard anyway. And if you do say something it’s going to be taken the wrong way. So the best procedure is just to zip up your mouth and keep it shut until they calm down. And that’s the procedure that was used in counseling in the Old Testament. So here they say there’s “a time to keep silence,” in other words, when these people are emotionally upset, just keep silence, be their express your friendship to them, but don’t bother them verbally, “and a time to speak,” and of course the time to speak is after they’ve settled down and you can speak to them again.
Verse 8, “A time to love, and a time to hate,” then intensified, second line, “a time of war, and a time of peace.” But notice it’s reversed. Here you have ab, dc. You see, the last line is reversed, so you go like this: “A time to love, and a time to hate,” and it should be “a time of peace and a time of war,” but the Jewish people had a very interesting thing, they always wanted to end their poems on an optimistic note, and so this last line is switched, so that poem will start off with an optimistic thing and conclude with an optimistic thing, a time of peace.
Now in verse 9 Solomon is going to conclude. From verses 2-7, which incidentally is seven lines, number seven is the number of completion in the Word of God; every time you see seven in the Bible it speaks of perfection. So Solomon is giving you seven lines of poetry to express order in the universe, the total order in the universe, and he says now look, what is my conclusion. Verse 9, I look out on this order and yet this is what I say: “What profit has he that works in that wherein he is a laborer,” literally, nothing counts. You see, he rejected the revelation after accepting order in the universe and you just left part of the order; if the universe is a well-arranged machine, guess what? You happen to be one of the gears in the machine. That’s what Solomon is saying. Everything has its purpose, you have your purpose, I have my purpose, but we just kind of go on and nothing really matters, there’s nothing really personal about us. We’re just numbers and cause in the machine; very modern, incidentally. He had the concept that a lot of young people have today, we’re just numbers in the whole deal. And that’s what Solomon said, he said I look on this, there’s order there, but where do I fit in, there’s nothing personal, so “what profit.” And the word “profit” in this book always refers to ultimate happiness, when someone spiritually meets with God and has a personal living relationship. That’s what Solomon is hungering for; he says “what profit,” there’s nothing, there’s no profit inside, in all this order that’s going on.
Verse 10, “I have seen the travail, which God has given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.” God has given this in the sense that God has given certain things in your life to make you and bring you to God-consciousness. See, here’s your soul; you have volition, personal affections, mentality, bodily affections and over here you have a human spirit. That human spirit has God-consciousness inside at some point in your life, Romans 1; usually when you are a young person, a very young child, say four or five, you begin to get conscious of God’s existence. And so God deliberately brings things into your soul through the mentality, through the emotional pattern, etc. to get you shook up so that you will recognize that God does exist. That’s Romans 1:18 and following. And He’s constantly trying to call you to Himself. And He does it by many things; Solomon doesn’t see it, and he kind of, in verse 10, blames God for it. He says all this order here, he says God did it, God gave it; see, this is operation patsy, blame it on someone else, God did all this. Well, in a sense he’s right, God did do it, but this business of God giving something in this book always means he’s just describing the word “God” through the order that he sees outside of himself.
“I have seen the travail,” and that’s all it is, it’s just labor, it’s just toil, because I have no living vital relationship with Christ, my whole life is just vanilla, no taste, no color, nothing, just black and white, that’s all, it just goes on and on and on and on and on, just travail.
In verse 11, the word “beautiful” means well-arranged. “He has made everything well-arranged in its time,” in other words, there is order out there, “He has made everything well-arranged in its time,” and now we come to the most profound verse in this book, “He has made everything well-arranged in its time; also he has set the world in their heart,” now what does this mean. The word “world” is the same word for age or eternity. And what he has done is put a fifth column inside you, so that if you are a member of the human race, and everybody here looks like they are, if you are a member of the human race it means that God has put deep down in your heart a crying need for absolute truth, for absolute right and wrong, for a relationship with God that makes sense. God has put that in your heart, you can’t deny it because God has put it there and you’re never going to be satisfied until it’s dealt with. That’s what Solomon is saying.
“He has made everything in its time and He’s even set eternity into the hearts of men,” by this he doesn’t mean that men are eternal; he means there’s a craving to know what lies beyond, in the future, how did I get here from the past, and you want the big picture. You might put it this way, translated in contemporary English, God has put in your heart a desire for the big picture. That’s what He’s done, and if you are a thinking person you recognize that. There’s a hunger deep down for the big picture and Solomon says that God has put that in your heart. But then he adds, “yet” and there should be a “yet” there, this again is an adversative type construction, “yet no man,” NO man “can find the works that God makes from the beginning to the end.” “From the beginning to the end” is eternity again. And it means that although God has put this crying need in your heart to know the big picture, you can’t find the big picture.
And what he says here is no man is able to get the big picture. Now this is the most frustrating thing of human life. I come into this life and I need to know what is right and what is wrong, and I’m not satisfied because my father or my mother said it’s right and what’s wrong, or the law said what’s right and what’s wrong, you know that. You’re not satisfied because a human authority tells you something’s right or something’s wrong; you’ve got to know for sure that it is right and wrong, or that this is true or false and you’re not satisfied until you find that out. And that’s what Solomon says, and yet he says the paradox is that God has put it in our hearts like he’s tantalizing us, just waving the carrot in front of our face. He’s put this crying desire in and yet he says “no man is able to find it out,” “NO man is able to find it out.” And this is why Jesus Christ said again and again, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” This is why the Word of God has been given to you, and that’s the only place you are going to find the answers. You are incapable of finding answers by yourself, you have got to come to the Word of God to find the answer; that’s what Solomon says.
Now Solomon doesn’t come to the Word of God because he’s rejected the Word and that’s left him out in the toulies with no answer; he says I have this deep crying need. Paschal said “a God shaped vacuum in the heart.” And Paschal was saying exactly the same thing that Solomon is saying here, this thing is in there, I can’t deny it, but why can’t I fill it; I’ve tried everything, I’ve tried people, I’ve tried education, I’ve tried degrees. This is one thing that led me personally to Christ, I didn’t have to be a genius to realize this. I set goals in my life in high school and when I was a Senior in high school I fulfilled every one of those goals; I had a scholarship to one of the greatest colleges in the United States doing exactly what I wanted to do and yet I would wake up and find myself the same person. I had all these things, everything; some people come to Christ in deprivation; I came to Christ through blessing because God gave me every goal that I wanted and yet it didn’t satisfy.
You see, no little detail, no one person can ever fulfill what Solomon says God has put in your heart in verse 11. He has put eternity into your heart and it takes eternity to fill it. You can try from now until you go to your grave and you can try to fill it with your business, and you can try to fill it with some loved one, you can try to fill it with your family, you can try to fill it with politics, you can try to fill it with anything and you aren’t going to fill it because it’s eternal, it’s an infinite dimension and only God Himself can fill that vacuum. That’s what Solomon is saying.
Now you can sense the frustration of the man. Here he is, he’s like believers today; today we’d express it this way, when you receive Jesus Christ God puts you in union with Christ; that’s your legal status in Christ, that never changes, that’s good forever. But you live in the old creation and this circle represents the will of God for your life, and you’re either in that will or you’re out of the will; if you’re in you’re filled with the Spirit, if you’re out you’re a carnal Christian and you’re not enjoying life, you’re miserable and you’re not a testimony for Christ and you know it. In fact, you’re an embarrassment to Jesus Christ because if you’re out here in the carnal toulies out here, you’re not showing anything except your sin nature and everybody around you has a sin nature, they don’t have to see yours. So here you are outside this bottom circle. Now that’s where Solomon is and he’s saying look, even as a carnal Christian I’m outside and I still, as a carnal Christian can’t even fill that vacuum.
See that “eternity” mentioned in verse 11 is something… it gives you the peace and the joy and makes you know when you are filled with the Spirit. When you’re filled with the Spirit there’s an inner abiding peace; “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, long-suffering,” etc. All these things. Why? Because when the Holy Spirit is controlling your life this vacuum, this eternal dimension inside is filled; that’s what it means. And so there’s satisfaction down there. It doesn’t mean you walk around like a zombie and float from room to room; it just means that there’s a deep inner peace there. And those of you who know this know that it can’t be duplicated by any psychological gimmick and you wouldn’t trade it for the world. So that’s what Solomon says, and he says I know I need it and yet I can’t find it.
So verse 12-15 is his conclusion again, same conclusion. “I know there is no good in man,” in other words, the word “good” here is another connotation in Solomon’s book, it means pleasure, that’s the same way it’s translated in 2:1, pleasure, there’s no pleasure in man, absolutely no pleasure in man. He says I’ve got a heart and it’s got this eternity, this need for eternality in it, and there’s nothing good in it, I just can’t fill it, I can’t find pleasure inside myself. And so the only thing I have left is “for a man to rejoice, and do good in his life,” that’s all. It’s the same conclusion he reached in verses 24-26, he says that’s all you’ve got left, is to get what you can at the moment.
Verse 13, “And, also, that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labor, that’s the gift of God.” And it’s not the sense of grace, it’s the sense of verse 26, in the sense of understanding how Solomon uses the word “God” he’s simply saying look, the Lord has allowed you at least to get a little pleasure eating and drinking and having a good time, so just take advantage of it, be content with it, forget about trying to fill this vacuum, and just go on. Now that’s his advice, and that’s basically the only advice, tragedy upon tragedy, that is the only advice available to 90% of the human race today. It’s sad but it’s true. That is the only advice I could give to most people in the city of Lubbock. Do you know why? Because they have not personally trusted in Christ, that’s the only advice I could give; if you want happiness, all you’ve got is to go out and get what you can each day and stop trying to live a good moral and ethical life because it doesn’t count. If you haven’t received Christ I don’t know why you’re wasting your time trying to live the good moral and ethical life for; it’s not going to count. So the only advice you can give is what Solomon gives here. It’s the only tragic logical conclusion.
Verse 14, “I know that, whatsoever God does, it shall be forever; nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it,” see the cosmic machine goes on by itself, “and God does it, that man should fear before Him,” and even here Solomon goes into despair because at this point the word “fear” is usually the word for trust, it’s tragic what’s happened to this man. He’s all fouled up. The word “fear” in the Bible is a precious word which means when God reveals Himself to you, when He shows you about Himself through the Word, you respond to Him. That in the Old Testament is called “fear,” “the fear of God.” It doesn’t mean you’re afraid God is going to come after you with a big stick; that’s not the fear of God in the Bible. The word “fear” in the Bible means God suddenly reveals Himself through His Word to you and you submit… you submit, that’s fear. That’s what the fear of God is.
But what is this a response to? This is a response to God’s revelation of Himself. Turn to Exodus 20:20, you’ll see the fear of God. I want to take you to this because maybe some of you have this thing in your mind, you’ve heard this business about “fear of God” and unconsciously you’ve said that means that I’ve got to be afraid that God’s going to beat me down. I want to clarify this; this is not right and the Old Testament and the Bible doesn’t teach this; you’ve got this from somewhere but you didn’t get it from the Bible. Exodus 20:20, the scene of the Ten Commandments, God has just given a spectacular scene where millions of people at the foot of this mountain actually heard God’s voice. If you were there with a tape recording you could have taped it. God spoke the Ten Commandments verbally, audibly. Then in verse 20 the people are afraid. They are afraid in your sense, those of you who think that God is after you with a big stick.
They’re afraid that God is going to kill them and Moses says: “And Moses said to the people, Fear not, for God has come to test you, that His fear may be before your eyes that ye sin not.” You see, there’s two different fears in this verse, there’s the wrong kind of fear in the first part, you’re afraid that God’s going to hit you. Christians have that fear, that’s why many Christians don’t trust the Lord with their life. They say I’m not going to trust the Lord, good night, He might send me down with Wycliffe some place, He might send me out into the jungle somewhere, I’m not going to… I don’t dare to trust God with my life. Well you don’t have to feel this way; Jesus said look, if you fathers, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give good things to them that ask Him. God isn’t going to take away something, slap your hand or something. This is just a Satanic delusion that you’ve picked up; you haven’t gotten it from the Bible. You probably got it from some mixed up preacher some where but you haven’t got it from the Bible.
And it’s tragic, because this I feel, is one reason why many Christians do not give their life to Jesus Christ completely in the sense of making Him Lord over all their activity because they’re afraid; if I do this maybe God will make me single for the rest of my life or maybe God is going to do this to me or maybe God’s going to do that. You analyze that for a minute, where does that thought come from. Is the God who died for you on the cross that kind of a God, like to play with you like a puppet on the end of a string. No, that doesn’t come from the Bible, that comes from Satan. And here Moses says look, I don’t want you to fear, God doesn’t want you to fear, He’s come and given you this revelation of Himself, His Word, that you may fear in the sense that you might not sin. That’s his point, that you might trust Him at His Word.
Now come back to Ecclesiastes and what has Solomon done with this very precious truth? He’s turned it completely around in his mix-up, in his carnality, he’s completely confused and he’s completely reinterpreted it. So in verse 14 he says, “I know that, whatsoever God does, it shall be forever; nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it; and God has done it,” past tense, has done what? Has revealed Himself to me? No, Solomon has dumped revelation. What has God done? Verses 2-8, He’s created an orderly universe; Solomon’s made the whole universe one big machine and do you know why He’s done it, so you’ll fear Him… so you’ll fear Him. This is a crude forum, very crude response and it’s because the Holy Spirit has preserved this inspired text of the Word to let you know what it is to be a thorough going carnal Christian.
Finally in verse 15, “That which has been is now, and that which is to be has already been; and God requires that which has been driven away,” literally, or the past. God chases Himself in a circle, like a dog chasing his tail, that’s what he’s saying. And it just goes on and on and on. Remember what we said when we introduced the book? Go back to chapter 1, “vanity of vanities,” he says, [2] “one generation passes and another comes, the earth stays forever. [3] The sun rises, and the sun goes down.” Verse 6, “The wind turns to the south, turns to the north,” verse 7, “the rivers run into the sea,” the same old thing, day after day, it goes on forever, no change, man isn’t significant, nothing happens, it’s just black and white life, just blah in other words. And if your life is like this you have some serious examining to do because Christianity was never, never, never designed to be blah. It’s blah because you are out of it somewhere along the line or you don’t understand something. Maybe you are or maybe you are not at fault but Christianity is not designed for a blah existence, and if your life is that way don’t you blame it on God. Blame it on me, blame it on somebody else, but don’t you dare blame it on God. God has not designed the Christian life for you to be that way. God has designed the Christian life to be a time of joy.
We can see this in Ephesians 5. You see the Bible, from beginning to end, says one thing about you; you’re significant, you really count. And I want you never, never to make the mistake, when the Word of God calls you a sinner, and when the Word of God calls me a sinner, and it calls everybody a sinner, that’s not saying that you are worthless material. That is not what it’s saying, any more than it would mean if you have a loved one in the hospital and you said to someone else, that loved one is sick. Are you calling the sick person that you love junk? No, what you’re saying is that the person is there and they have an affliction; the word sick means that they are afflicted. You haven’t called the person a piece of junk that’s left there on the bed, that’s not what you’re saying, not if you really love the person. It’s the same thing here, the Word of God isn’t calling you a piece of junk when it calls you a sinner, it’s saying that you have a fatal illness, but you’re not a piece of junk, you’re very much in God’s thoughts.
The Bible starts out in the book of Genesis and what does it say in Genesis; it says that God made you in His own image; that image, though marred, still persists today for James says that you can still kill a person made in God’s image. So the image of God does persist in you today. Do you know what the image of God in you is? That you have volition, you have the right to choose, God chooses; you have conscience which corresponds to God’s righteousness and holiness; you have emotions and God has emotions, that’s what makes you in the image of God. And the Bible also says not only were you made in the image of God but you were given in Adam a chance to choose for or against Him and you blew; I blew it. How did we blow it in Adam? We don’t know exactly but in some way we were there, “in Adam” the Bible says and when he sinned, we all sin in him; doctrine of imputed sin. So we come back here and we find out that the fall, at the fall, that makes you significant. You say well I don’t like the fall, that’s something bad. Oh no, that is something bad but look what it did; one man, just think of it, one man sins one time in a split second and looks what happened as a result of it in the universe, death came in. Paul says in Romans 5 death came by man. In 1 Cor. 15, so as by one man death came, so also righteousness will come.
So because one man, ONE man on this planet sinned, bang, within a split second you had a biochemical change occur, you had all sorts of physical changes occur, you had death starting in the human race, do you see how significant it was to make a decision like that? Your decisions are very important and if you’re here today with Jesus Christ, you have another equally fantastic decision. In a moment of time you personally can trust in Jesus Christ. It means you can go on in your life, go on like this, and then you come all of a sudden to the realization that you look up at God and you see that God is righteousness and justice, and you say oh-oh, standards, absolute standards and God doesn’t play games. And here I am down here, and your halo is bent, so you are here and you look up at God and He has righteous standards, and you fall short of the righteous standards and you say oh-oh, barrier, I have sinned. Then you look again and you say oh-oh, justice, what does justice do when righteousness is violated? “The wages of sin is death,” justice always swings in action and says death, so now you’ve got another problem, death. And then you look up here again and you say not only have I sinned but I can’t even find one act of obedience, so now we’ve got a third problem, no righteousness.
Now God comes along with the gospel; He’s done something for you, but God is a gentleman and never twists your arm. God was a gentleman and didn’t twist Adam’s arm either. God was a gentleman because He sat by, and though He loved Adam dearly, and though He knew that the moment Adam died, His Son would have to go to the cross, He stood by and let it happen. Do you know why? God always treats you as a gentleman, He doesn’t pound you over the head, He gives you the issue and you can accept it or you can reject it and that’s the story of the gospel. Here you are, behind this barrier and Christ has come along and removed the barrier, but God says I’m not going to apply it to you automatically, you don’t become a Christian because you were born in the home of a Christian; you don’t become a Christian because you’ve been a member of a church, you have become a Christian just like Adam became a sinner, by your personal choice. And do you realize what happens? I just told you what would happen when Adam fell. Immediately all over the earth there was a biochemical physical reaction.
Do you realize that in a split second of time when you put your trust in Jesus Christ things happen. Jesus Christ died and removed the sin, but He has to solve these two problems for you, the problem of spiritual death answered by regeneration, and so we now come over here and we look at this moment. Suppose it’s Sunday morning and you trust in Jesus Christ as Savior, what happens. Immediately many things happen; the first thing is that the Holy Spirit puts you in union with Christ. The Holy Spirit regenerates you; what is regeneration? It means that God the Holy Spirit changes on the inside your human spirit so that now you know these things are true, and now He can guide you. And that operation called regeneration cannot be done psychologically. There’s not a psychologist or a psychiatrist that you can pay enough to ever cause you to be regenerated, and yet this phenomenal supernatural miracle occurs at the point you receive Christ.
The Holy Spirit comes to indwell, you say oh, I haven’t got any friends, nobody likes me, and you’re in a self-pity spiral, and yet God says listen, I don’t care what a louse you are, I will come to indwell you, that’s the doctrine of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Baptizing, that is not some emotional experience, it means God the Holy Spirit put you in union with Christ, 1 Cor. 12 and He seals you. And this means He puts His little stamp of approval on your life, not because He likes you personally but because now you have credited to your account the righteousness of Christ. Now isn’t that fantastic? All that happens in an instant of time when you receive Christ. So you’re not one of the cogs in a machine, like Solomon is saying, where there’s a time to do this and a time to do that. Always there’s an opportunity to appropriate God’s grace.
And in Ephesians 5 you have another choice, if you are a Christian already you have another choice facing you. You’ve already made the decision of all decisions, and so you are now in union with Christ but you have another decision to make and this decision is made time and time again, found in verse 14, “Therefore, he says, awake thou that sleeps,” now this is spiritual, those of you who are sleeping now just relax, it’s not talking about physical sleep, “wherefore, he said, awake thou that sleeps, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” That means spiritually. A person who is out of fellowship is considered to be asleep. When you’re asleep what is it like? When you’re asleep basically it means that you have no contact, your conscious mind is out. Now that’s the way the Christian is as far as your spiritual consciousness, it’s out, and you’re walking around just like the natural man.
Christians are beautiful imitators of the unbeliever. You know, every time you’re out of fellowship with the Lord you’re just walking like an unbeliever, you can’t tell the difference except you use the vocabulary. So here it is, you are out here somewhere and the Word of God tells you “wake up, and Christ shall give you light. [15] See then that you walk carefully, not as fools,” carefully, and this means again the Christian who is out of fellowship is very careless, sloppy, he could walk through 10,000 opportunities for the Lord and never see one of them. So there’s a sensitivity that’s spoken of in verse 15. Verse 16, “Redeeming the time,” ever count up the number of hours left in your life? Now when you come down to your grave it’s going to be bad news for you because if you haven’t been redeeming the time it’s too late then. So the time to redeem the time, making it count, is what it means, and the word “redeem” means to buy back that which is not yours. It’s a very interesting word for “time” here in verse 16. What Paul says is that when you are walking in union with Christ, when you’re abiding in Him, the time that you live is counted for your eternal record; otherwise it’s not, it’s just as though you never even lived.
So when you look at your life and you can think back, here’s your life from the time you received Christ till right now, here’s the present, some of the time you’re in fellowship, some of the time you’re out of fellowship; as far as God is concerned, the in fellowship, that’s the only time you’ve lived spiritually, the rest of it is just a waste, absolute waste. So only that time when you have been filled with the Spirit and walking in His will is the time that really counted.
Verse 17, “Wherefore, be not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.” Isn’t that interesting, another feature of walking in God’s knowledge is that you understand what He wants you to do. Do you know it’s possible to know God’s guidance. And it’s possible for you to know where He wants you to be and what it is that He wants you to do; techniques of divine guidance.
In verse 18, summarizing the whole thing, “Stop being drunk with wine,” and I believe this is not only literal but an idiomatic expression, considering the idioms that follow here, this idea that you’re outside here it’s just like you’re dead. When one is inebriated, putting it in mild language because I don’t want to shock some of the people, when one is inebriated what is it saying as far as your senses are concerned? Insensitive, and you’re floating around halfway between the floor and the ceiling and you don’t have any concept of what’s going on. Now the filling of the Spirit is exactly opposite; that’s what the contrast is here in verse 18. “Stop being drunk with wine” where you’re just floating around, just like in verse 14, the person was asleep, “but be filled with the Spirit.” And although it does mean control, the contrast here isn’t one of control necessarily, the contrast is one of effect. When the Holy Spirit controls your life all of a sudden you’re sensitive, you’re alert, you can think doctrinally, you walk into a situation in life and you say oh, I can see the scriptural principle here applied, bang, bang, bang and you’re alert, that’s the filling of the Holy Spirit.
So then we have the conclusion to Solomon’s case here, you don’t have to be part of the machine; there are two things facing you this morning. If you are a non-Christian you have an opportunity to make a decision that takes you out of the machine and gives you a wonderful personal existence in Jesus Christ. That’s salvation decision and that’s the greatest decision you will ever make in your life. The second decision as a Christian, right now is whether you are filled with the Spirit. And you can be filled with the Spirit instantaneously by simply confessing your sins, acknowledging to God that you are responsible and that you want to do His will from this point on. Not that you’re going to, in the energy of the flesh, but that you confess and now you want to get back in fellowship, you can’t get back in fellowship by your own means, and you present yourselves, living sacrifices, holy and acceptable unto Him. With our heads bowed.