Ecclesiastes Lesson 17

More on Materialism Lust – 6:1-9

Solomon is a section in this book of cautioning the person who would live on the non-Christian base to avoid getting involved in any activity that requires planning of any sort, the reason being that he has two purposes behind this book. In chapters 1 and 2 Solomon has found that no matter what you do as an individual, apart from God, you can’t satisfy the vacuum on the inside. You can try and fill it with materialism and you can try and try and fill it with wine, women and song, you can try to fill it with whatever you want to and it never is filled. Solomon gives you the classic experiment in chapter 2 where he does everything that you could possibly dream of. He had the resources to do it.

Then in chapters 3 and 4 he went further and found two items of interest to him, one was that there is a purpose to the universe, he thought, but he couldn’t know it; he believed there was but he couldn’t find it, and so he said an undiscovered purpose, and the emphasis is on the “undiscovered.” The point being that there’s no purpose, no plan, for the whole thing that we have. Then he found something else, he found inexperienced justice, [can’t understand words] comes at the right or wrong but they just weren’t experienced. Giving this, chapters 1-4, then in chapters 5-7 he begins to give his own positive philosophy of life, what to do then, in the light of all these things.

In chapters 5 and 6 he’s been saying the most logical thing for you to do if you do not have fellowship with God and if in the mentality of your soul you have no divine viewpoint framework, if you are minus that, then the most logical thing for you to do is avoid getting entangled with any activity of life, such as, and he gives three examples, religion, social justice movements or government, and business entanglement. He says all three of these basically represent a waste of your time, you’re just going to get hurt by them and there’s no sense fiddling with them because they will not and cannot give you peace and joy in life. And so he’s saying look, exercise moderation, don’t get involved in these things, let the world go by but don’t you get personally involved, get involved only to the extent that you derive impersonal and immediate pleasure from these things. Now that may sound to you wrong; it is, but if you have not the divine viewpoint framework of life and you are disconnected from the Word of God, then it’s the most logical thing to do… it’s the most logical thing to do!

Now in chapter 6 he’s summarizing this problem of not getting involved in business. In verse 1 he summarizes it; in verse 2 he gives you an illustration; in verses 3-6 he gives you a comparison between a zealous life that a person gets because he’s always craving absolute fulfillment, running around getting involved in business, the motivation behind all of this at all moments is that I want total complete fulfillment; he says you can’t get it because you’re cut off from God and since you can’t it’s kind of stupid to live your life that way. Then verses 7-9 are certain proverbs that he gives stressing the lack of joy in this kind of life.

Let’s look at verse 1, “There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men.” Again notice the phrase “under the sun,” this occurs again and again in this chapter; in verse 12, the last phrase of the chapter is “under the sun.” That is the way the book of Ecclesiastes must be understood; it gives you the framework for the book, it is written from the viewpoint of one “under the sun,” that is, one who is operating on what we would call a human viewpoint model. In other words he is at the center of his life, self, and that represents an aberration because God should basically be, as Creator that’s His right to run your life, not in the sense that you’re a robot but He is the One whose will should be at the center of your life, just by virtue of His creationship, but self is at the center and when self is at the center then we have all the activities of life trying to line up, you try to line these things up but you know, because of your conscience, that this is wrong. So what’s happening here is saying that your self protects itself by repressing material that would threaten your position.

You see, the non-Christian and the Christian out of fellowship is in a very threatened position. He is sitting in a place he should not sit and so therefore unconsciously things in life that would remind him of his position are blotted out or repressed. And so the non-Christian or the Christian out of fellowship spends a lot of time and a lot of his energy erecting barriers to suppress data from his life that would afflict him. This is what we call the concept between individual volition and common grace but the individual is actively rebelling at all moments, even though it’s subconscious and he may not consciously be aware of it, he’s expending energy to repress common grace as it comes to him. And so Solomon says that this kind of life is “under the sun,” in other words, one who lives with his framework no higher than the sun, it’s completely enclosed in a naturalistic framework. To such an one, he says, I see an evil, and this is what he says “is common among men” and literally it “is great upon mankind.” The literal rending, you find this in the RSV. “It is great” or “heavy upon men.” All men everywhere experience this thing, and what is this.

He’s taking one of these [can’t understand word] that’s going on in the life, he’s saying that on one hand you have business, you have your job, you have possessions out here and all these things are fine, the Bible says there’s nothing wrong with them. The thing, however, is that if you have these out here you know by your conscience that unless God’s will is being fulfilled in the guidance, in getting a job, in changing jobs, in using my possessions and gaining my possessions, and getting rid of my possessions, since I’m not using the will of God, a guilty conscience tells me you’d better start covering up here. And so certain things go into action, almost unconscious to our minds, and these things begin to function. And one of the ways in which this functions is that it forces to crave joy or fulfillment; we want this fulfillment, we need it, we can’t get it from God and so we try desperately to manufacture it through some use of these things.

So this is what he’s saying and verse 2 is an illustration of one of the great frustrations that men have, “A man to whom God has given riches, wealth, and honor, so that he lacks completely nothing,” it’s a participle here, it means he continually lacks nothing, “for his soul of all that he desires, yet God gives him not power to eat thereof, but a stranger eats it; this is vanity, and it is an evil disease.” In this verse Solomon is doing what he has done again and again in the book of Ecclesiastes; he’s taking words that mean a lot to you and to me, but he’s changed their meanings around; he’s shifted them into his own framework. You’ve got to master this trick, it’s being used all over the place, it’s being used by the non-Christian, it’s being used by clergy speaking from the pulpit, taking Christian words, twisting them and setting them into new contexts so you think, oh, I heard him mention salvation, I heard that man mention the gospel, I heard that man even mention evangelism. And yet when you dig down you find out, wait a minute, he didn’t mean by evangelism what you mean by evangelism; maybe he by evangelism he meant just go out and start a riot, or by salvation he meant a certain psychological state of mind or something like that. Now that’s not what these words mean in the Bible; this why you have to take the words in the Biblical context.

So here in verse 2 you have to watch out when Solomon says “A man to whom God has given riches,” and then later on in the verse “God has given him not,” now Solomon is referring to the outer experience which must be from God. In other words, he’s saying look, here I am, I exist in the universe and things happen out here, these are experiences that happen to me. He just flatly and categorically labels all experience of life as from God; in other words he does not recognize that there is a combat going on in the universe, that there are competing forces for our life; but he just blatantly and fatalistically, this is fatalism in one degree, of just accepting everything that comes your way and say well, I’ve got riches and I’ve got all these things, and God gave them to me and now I can’t seem to find time to enjoy it, God hasn’t given me the time. See, it’s kind of a passive thing in which he blames God for everything that happens.

Now this is a trick that I notice Christians are involved with; they come and they ask what’s God’s plan for my life, how can I know God’s plan? And I begin them to ask them well how do you usually depend on God’s plan for your life, how have you been doing this. And very frequently I get back the answer, well, I kind of go by the open and closed door method, so that if there’s an open door I take that as from God and if it’s a closed door I take that from God and I move accordingly. But you see, your whole life is a robot, you’re accepting experiences blindly without a value [can’t understand word], that’s Christian guidance. Satan can close doors and Satan can open doors and if you are going to be guided by open and closed doors you are headed for disaster in the Christian life. You can’t be guided by open and closed doors apart from the Word of God, together, mix and analyze with the Word, yes, but not just open and closed doors.

For example, I heard it said I started to come to Bible class and I got out and my car wouldn’t start, so I took it that God didn’t want me to come to Bible class. I could cite other examples of a completely passive stance in which you blindly accept everything that comes your way. That is not divine guidance in the Bible, that is fatalism and the difference between fatalism and Biblical sovereignty is this: fatalism says basically that man has no volition, minus volition or minus responsibility; sovereignty says that there’s an overall plan under the design of God, this plan includes a measure of volition for man. So you have sovereignty here, and by the way, let me remind you that no system of thought has ever solved the problem of determinism versus indeterminism. The only real solution that you get is found in the Scriptures where you have the Creator/creature distinctive, the Creator is sovereign and the creature has volition underneath the sovereign plan of the Creator.

Now that is the difference between fatalism and sovereignty and if you look carefully you will never see a fatalist truly live up to his fatalism because three times a day he eats and that’s an act of his volition. Now isn’t that interesting, if fatalism really is true then no matter what I do I shouldn’t have to worry because my life will not come to an end before it’s my time and yet a fatalist will say well, I still have to eat. Why do you have to eat? You don’t really have to eat, so the fact eats and chooses to eat, he chooses to stay alive, he’s exercising his volition. And so when you really get down to the nitty gritty you begin to see people live just as though the Bible were true anyway, even though they say I can’t accept this, in practice, if you look at any man’s life you’ll notice that at times he lives as though the Bible were true.

Now Solomon at this point is saying in verse 2 that God has given riches, and he’s doing this in a fatalistic sense, whatever is is. Turn back to chapter 3 and you’ll see how he developed this further back there. “To everything there’s a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun,” he’s saying there’s a design to the universe around, I don’t know what the design is he says, but it’s there. “There’s a time to bear,” not a time to be born, “and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted. [3] A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. [4] A time to weep, and a time to laugh,” etc. and he goes on down. In verse 11 he concludes, God “has made everything beautiful,” and the word “beautiful” again is “set in order,” “He has made everything set in order in its time,” and then he explores it when he adds, “and He has set eternity in their heart,” man’s heart, “so that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end.”

He’s saying here’s a paradox, there’s a purpose for everything under the sun except one thing that is frustrating, and that is that it seems that God has put the desire for eternity in man’s heart and yet no matter what men do they can’t fill the vacuum. And he isn’t that interesting, of all the things that work, everything fits together really, except that. Man has this desire in his heart and he can’t fill it. And so this, then, is one of the great statements of Solomon’s philosophy in 3:11, that there’s a purpose, we desire a purpose and yet we can’t find it. Those of you who became Christians later in life know what I mean; I became a Christian in college and I can distinctly remember the tension of 3:11, I can distinctly remember there must be a plan, there must be a purpose of the universe and somehow I must fit into it, but I can’t find it out. That’s how you must feel and you must have felt if you become Christian later; if you were raised in a Christian home maybe what you’ve had to do or will have to do is go through a period where you begin to examine this until you feel the tension also. The non-Christian is under tension, and if you haven’t been under the tension you have no sympathy for it because you’ve never experienced it. A non-Christian has a battle before him and the Christians are stupid; they don’t see it.

So that’s in verse 11 of chapter 3 and that is the statement that Solomon is trying to make here, everything has a purpose but it there’s one thing that kind of grinds the gear, and that is how come I’ve got this tremendous desire for God that can’t seem to be satiated by any created thing, and I can’t fill it.

Back to chapter 6, he says this is “a man to whom God has given riches, wealth, and honor,” in other words, we would translate verse 2, if we wanted to be real contemporary and honest with the language, we would drop God out of the verse entirely and say “fortune has given riches, wealth, and honor to this man, so that he lacks nothing at any time.” So we’d replace the word “God” with the word “fortune” because that’s basically the way Solomon is using it here. “…so that he wants nothing,” and the word “want nothing” means that he never lacks, it’s a Hebrew participle, motion picture tense, it goes on, he never lacks anything, not one time in his life does he lack anything. Basically he’s talking about himself, “for his soul of all that he desires,” and the word “desires” is a play on a verb tense here. He says “he continually lacks nothing and whatever he might desire he has it.” To see this turn back to chapter 2 for a moment, remember the experiment of Solomon in chapter 2. This man had more wealth and resources than probably any single individual since that time relative to the economy of his age. He was the stock market; there was no Wall Street, Solomon was the stock market, when Solomon bought and Solomon sold that was the thing that determined the economic picture. Solomon, from one resource alone had twenty million dollars a year in gold. This is the kind of man he was, fantastically wealthy.

In chapter 2 we have the things that Solomon did to fill his vacuum. Verse 4, “I made me great works, I built me houses, I planted me vineyards,” you see the “me” in there, it’s kind of awkward when you read it in your King James but that’s the only way the King James translators had of trying to convey to you the force of the Hebrew here. It’s all I, I, I, I, I, I, the whole thing, look at it. “I made me great works,” if you want to get the force of this circle every time you see the word “I” or “me” from verses 4 on down, “I made me great works, I built me houses, I planted me vineyards, [5] I made me gardens and parks,” literally, “I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits, [6] I made me pools of water, to water… [7] I got me servants and maidens, and I had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of herds and flocks above all that were in Jerusalem before me.” In that day that was the way of investing your money, in the cattle business.

Verse 8, “I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces; I made me singers and women singers,” here he designed his own choir, couldn’t have stereo so he designed his own system. And Solomon was so brilliant that he’d write his own music and then he’d teach the choir to sing his own music. And then he said, “and the delights of the sons of men,” and this is many beautiful girls, the last part of verse 8, and I won’t give you the literal Hebrew but that’s what it means. In verse 8 the King James translators in their Victorian prudishness got into that Hebrew and they just couldn’t take it and so they covered it up and said this is musical instruments; you could say they make the music but it wasn’t on musical instruments. So in verse 8 he is talking about all the things that he’s got, that he tried to fill his life with.

But then in verse 11, “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do, and, behold, all was vanity and chasing after wind, [vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.]” That was the outcome of the experiment. You see, it’s great while you’re doing it but you don’t get any lasting benefit from it, not at all. You can try anything, you can try music, you can try sex, you can try booze, you can try anything you want to but you’re never going to get any lasting benefit out of it. And that’s Solomon’s point here.

Back to chapter 6, here’s “A man who whom God has given riches, wealth, and honor, so that he lacks nothing for his soul of all that he desires, yet God gives him not power to eat,” and the word “give not” means that it’s all future, in other words he keeps thinking today, today at last I’ll have happiness, and then sun down, and I got no happiness today, it didn’t come today. So then you get up in the morning and you hope, tomorrow will be different, tomorrow will be something different, tomorrow I will really discover what I’ve been lacking, and then the sun goes down and you still haven’t discovered it, and then you try for the next day and this goes on day after day after day, searching for something that will fill that inner vacuum. And he says nothing fills it, “God gives him not the power to eat of it,” in this particular situation in verse 2 he’s specifying it even more stringently, he’s saying here’s a guy that has all the material wealth he wants and what is happening in his life…again, remember the word “God” here is synonymous with the word “fate,” that he never gets “the power to eat thereof.”

What does he mean by this? The next clause explains it, “but a stranger eats it,” the word “eat” means he devours or consumes it, and he “has not power to eat it” mean domineer or use it, in other words all his life he’s accumulating wealth but he never has the time to sit down and enjoy it. It’s very hard to do this in the business world today with the government breathing down your neck, every time you want to cut your fingernails you have to sign a form in triplicate. So this has gone on and on and he was the government in that day so he couldn’t blame it on somebody else, but he says look, here you go and you’re busy, busy, busy, busy, gathering this, gathering wealth, first you gather your possessions and then you’re worried about Uncle Sam taking them away and then you get all this and you say where can I put that in a tax shelter, and where can I put this and how can I avoid that, etc. He says you’re not enjoying it, you’ve got it, but you never enjoy it.

And finally he says a stranger is going to consume it, and the stranger means there’s some catastrophe that comes into this example he’s giving in verse 2, whether it’s a foreign power or whether it’s simply a member of his own family that inherits it, but he himself never gets to enjoy anything of his possessions. He never gets to enjoy it, and so he says “this is vanity” and then he says, “and it’s an evil disease.”

Then in verses 3-6 he’s going to run a comparison, a strange comparison until you understand the word at the end of verse 3. He starts off with an “if,” he’s going to give you an example and he says look, if your life is such, lived on a non-Christian base or a Christian who is out of fellowship, remember at the time you receive Christ God the Holy Spirit puts you in union with Him; this is something you do not feel, you don’t feel being born physically, and you don’t feel being born spiritually, although later there may be emotional reactions to this. However, you are entered into union with Christ and that never changes; that never changes! You have the lower circle of experience and you’re either in the circle or out of the circle at any given moment; that’s the thing that changes. Solomon was an “out of it” believer at this time, he was out of the bottom circle. And so he says, if this is my life, I’m not interested in the will of God, I’ve repressed it, and everything to do with it I’ve repressed, and I want to live my life my way, and I’m using a lot of energy to repress this other stuff, but I want to live my life my way. He says here’s the way to live it if you want to do it: don’t sweat the problems of trying to get total fulfillment because you’re never going to get. And he says if you think you’re going to get total fulfillment or if you think it’s going to be in the future you’re wrong, you might as well get it now. He says if you live this way, that’s this man in verse 2, you can maintain wealth and possessions because he says someday he’ll sit down and enjoy it, but he’s not yet sat down to enjoy it; if you think this way, you ought to do some serious examination because it’s kind of stupid to live your life that way.

So in verse 3 he gives an interesting example. He compares this man of verse 2 with an aborted fetus, with a person that never lived at all. So in verse 3 he says, “If a man beget an hundred children, and live many years, so that the days of his years be many, and his soul be not filled with good,” and “filled with good” here means to be satisfied, this is the fact that here he has a problem of his soul, volition, personal affections, mentality, and he says there’s a vacuum in here. And what Solomon has said, I can’t fill the vacuum totally, but at least I can have relative fulfillment. That’s what Solomon’s point is, relative joy, or relative fulfillment. But this man doesn’t even have relative fulfillment, he is so busy, busy, busy, busy, busy doing things that he never has a chance, even as a non-Christian to enjoy himself. So he says this is kind of a stupid way to live.

So he says look, just suppose a man has all the wealth, he “begets an hundred children” which you may say ye gods, who would want a hundred children, well in that day it was a blessing, things have changed. But in that day a hundred children was considered a sign of prosperity and a sign of blessing, and they had the economy that you could afford to. So “if a man beget an hundred children, and he lived many years, so that the days of his years be many, and his soul be not filled,” so this goes on and his soul is never filled, “and also he has no burial,” now the word “burial” here means an elaborate burial. It means… when a person has an elaborate burial it means that there is a rejoicing, that at his funeral at least from the temporal point of view, from his life, from the time he was born to the time he dies, he had some relative joy, and this is celebrated at his funeral. But you see, this man didn’t have any relative joy to be remembered at his funeral because his soul wasn’t satisfied, he came down to the day of his death and still he had no elaborate funeral. “…I say,” Solomon says, “an untimely birth is better than he.” The “untimely birth” here is a miscarriage.

And here’s a point of departure from our text because I want to pull up one point that’s under controversy today; is the fetus of an unborn infant technically alive or is it not, and the Bible clearly says it is not. The unborn fetus of a child cannot be… we have this problem today going through if certain forms of therapeutic abortion is murder; it may be wrong but not because it’s murder. Turn to Exodus 21:22, this is an important piece of legislation because it shows you how, under the Law of the ancient nation Israel, they regarded a life, to catch the force of verse 21-22 you have to examine the idea of capital punishment. Capital punishment was the only punishment for the taking of a nephesh, nephesh is our word translated “soul.” A soul in the Bible is either an animal or man; where you have spirit in union with matter. Plants are not said in Hebrew to have nephesh, so even though biologically today we draw the line between the living and the non-living at the point of organic compounds, etc. the point is that in the Bible this is not true. The Bible draws the line between the living and the non-living and the death and not death between plants and animals, because animals have spirit as well as man, a certain kind of spirit. They are said to have nephesh, this is why animals in the Old Testament are used for sacrifices for sin and not plants. This is why Cain and Abel, Cain was rejected back there, this is not just a sweet Sunday School story, there’s a meaning in that; the point was that Cain offered a non-living sacrifice and the point the Bible makes over and over that the soul has an infinite price. That’s the price of a soul, the sign of infinity, and you can’t price life.

So in the Bible, say, for example you kill something; there are two options, suppose this man… and you’re just standing right here and the policeman comes along and it looks like you may have killed that person. There are two things that could happen and only two things that could happen in the Old Testament. One thing could happen is that if you were found guilty of murder, then you had to pay with your life. If, however, it was an accident, if it wasn’t your fault, then it was what we call manslaughter and you did not even have to pay a fine. You say those are two extremes. Yes, but do you see the point? If you are fined, what is it implying? It implies that the life is worth that much. Suppose you’re fined $2,000, well that means that man’s life is worth $2,000. In the Bible a fine was never put on a life taken; either you paid with your life because your life is infinite or nothing was paid at all. In a manslaughter case it was taken care of by an animal sacrifice. So nehpesh throughout Scripture means that it must be paid one way or the other, and there’s no exception in any part of the Bible to this rule. It holds, you can study all the passages in the Law, in Numbers, and Leviticus, and Exodus and Deuteronomy, it always hold true.

Then we come to Exodus 21:22, “If men strive,” and struggle “and hurt a woman with child so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follows; he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. [23] And if any mischief follows, then thou shalt five life for life, [24] Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, [25] Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” That is technically known as lex talionus, it is not valid in the Old Testament times, it became… it can be shown that this was an expression for compensatory justice; it’s just a way of expressing compensatory justice.

But notice in verse 22, we have a struggle here; in the middle of this struggle, where these men are, a woman is injured who is present with child; she loses that child before the child’s birth. Now you would say here’s the test; if the child is nephesh, if the child is life, then you would expect the man to pay with his life that did it. But isn’t interesting, “the fruit depart from here, and yet no mischief follows;” now what does that mean? That means that the fetus is aborted but the woman herself is not critically injured. That’s the point that’s being made here, that in the strife, etc. that excited the premature birth of this infant and it’s ejected.

Now, that’s what this means that she lost her fruit, but the next phrase, “yet no mischief follows,” and then verse 23, “If any mischief follows, then thou shalt give life for life,” etc. it’s saying that as far as damage is concerned to the woman, if she dies, if the woman who is carrying the child dies then the man has to pay for his life. This is the classic passage in the Old Testament that shows that under the Old Testament law an unborn child was not considered to be nephesh. There are a lot of other evidences of it, in Genesis 2, until it breathes, etc. But this should give perspective on why the controversy is going on as far as the Bible is concerned, that in the Old Testament, and it’s not amended and changed in the New Testament, is that the unborn infant is not considered to be a living person.

Now that does not mean a woman who is carrying a child has any right to do what she wants to. That is taken care of by Psalm 139. There’s a balance. In Psalm 139 beginning at verse 13, David tells, through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, about his own time in his mother’s womb. In verse 13 he’s talking to God and he says, “For You possessed my kidneys,” literally “thou hast woven me together in my mother’s womb. [14] I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are Thy works, and that my soul knows right well. [15] My substance was not hidden from Thee, when I was made in secret, curiously [intricately] wrought,” and the word “curiously wrought” is the word that the Jewish women would use when they would embroider something. And it means that God embroidered, and it says “when I was embroidered in the lowest parts of the earth, [16] Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unformed; and in Thy book all my members were written,” this phrase is mistranslated, it should be “and in Thy book all the preordained days were written,” in other words, God was developing in the womb of his mother a body that would act, and pieces of the soul if you want to visualize the soul that way, He was building into his life in her womb the body of a man that would behave in a certain way. The Bible recognizes that there are hereditary things, that we inherit things from the parents; it’s very physically minded, the Bible is. But it says also that this is a precious time when God is forming, and He’s working in a unique way, and you can’t tamper with it without affecting the life of that infant.

But this must be used in balance with Exodus 21; Exodus 21 says there’s no life yet present but Psalm 139 gives you the balancing factor and that is that it is a very, very important time when God is working in preparing and setting up that child, which will be a child, for his life. So the Bible isn’t flippant about the unborn child, but on the other hand you can’t say that the destruction of that unborn child is murder; not from a Biblical point of view. It is only murder if the child is a living nephesh, which he is not according to the Scripture.

Back to Ecclesiastes 6. So Solomon continues and he’s making an analogy between this man who has materialism lust, he’s trying to fill the vacuum with his possessions, and the child that never lived. And he says, [3] “If a man begat an hundred children, and live many years, so that the days of his years be many, and his soul not be filled with good, and also that he have no burial; I say that an untimely birth is better than he.” An “untimely birth” is a miscarriage, “I say that a miscarriage is better than he.”

Verse 4, “For it,” literally, not he, “it,” the miscarriage, “has come in with vanity, and had departed in darkness, and its name shall be covered with darkness.” Now to understand what’s said in verse 4 you have to understand what many times the word “name means in the Old Testament, a fantastic thing, “name.” I’ve often wondered at what time the parents in the Old Testament named their children because they named their children after the character or the essence of their child. You have Isaac and he was named because his mother laughed when God said that she would one day conceive and she went ha-ha back in the tent, so God had a sense of humor and He said you’re going to call your child ha-ha because Yitzhak means laughter. So every time this woman had to go out and call the child she said “here laughter, come here,” she’d have to remember her flippant attitude to the Lord’s promises. But except in cases like that, usually names mean the essence.

For example, Daniel, take Daniel, what does it mean, “el” is God; “Dan” comes from the word which means to judge, and it means “God is the judge.” And what did Daniel’s whole book do? God is the judge of history. And so these men’s names mean something. When you see the word “name,” for example, God says in the temple, “I put My name” in that temple. It means His essence is somehow present there in a special way in the temple. “Name” is identical to character. For example, many of you have sung in Handel’s Messiah and you know that place where it’s a quotation of Isaiah 9, where it says He shall be “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,” and so on, if you look at that carefully it’s what we call a [can’t understand word] or a listing of Messiah’s names. Messiah names indicate Messiah’s character or His essence. And so when we read there He is called “Wonderful Counselor,” it means that He is the One who will have infinite wisdom to counsel. His name shall be called “Mighty God,” and that shows you Isaiah clearly saw Messiah as God, his name would be called “Mighty God.” And it’s not “Everlasting Father,” the word there in the Hebrew means “Father of Eternity,” and so when Messiah is looked forward to in Isaiah 9, when he looks forward there the looking and branding His character by His names, so when you recite the names you are describing His character.

Verse 4, so he’s saying that this name, however, is going to be covered in darkness, never going to have a name… never going to have a name, it’s going to be covered forever. And it means that he has no character, he has no essence, nothing. And the other thing about a name is that it is built up inside history. This is another thing, the Old Testament goes on is that you manufacture your own personal history. The Bible does not look upon you as a robot or an automaton, where you sit here and God sort of flips his levers and if God wants you to right you go right and if He wants you to go left you go left. That is not the way your life is run in Scripture. And the Bible offers you the proposition that you personally manufacture your own eternal history.

This is one of the great sobering things about the Bible and volition. When you stop and think of it, your volition, the way you choose, manufactures your personal history and that history goes on and on and on and on and on for all eternity, and the only release you have from your personal history, the only possible release you have is for the sin record to be removed, for human good to be removed, and you can’t remove it because it’s history that you’ve manufactured. When you get before the judgment seat of Christ as a Christian you’re going to have piles of human good, I’m going to have piles of human good, we’re all going to have our piles of human good, parts of our personal history that we ourselves have manufactured and brought into the system, and it’s going to through eternity unless it can be somehow removed.

And this is one of the great things about judgment, believer’s judgment, is that the human good is removed and that personal history is blotted out, and that’s why God says in the Old Testament, I will blot out your sins and will remember them no more. Why did the Jew in the Old Testament see this as a fantastic thing? Why is this one of the greatest promises you can look forward to? Because the horrible things, things that we have done, this own personal manufactured history will be wiped out of the way, and thank God we don’t have to live with it for all eternity. Now that’s the kind of salvation the Bible gives you and that’s why it’s something tremendous when it says “I will blot out your sins and remember them no more.” Because if He doesn’t, you always remember them, and this is one of the horrors of hell, that a person who has rejected Christ will remember these things, he will remember his personal history, though of course the sin problem has been taken care of, but he still remembers his defiance, that one unpardonable sin, the defiance against the grace of God and trying to counterfeit the plan of salvation with his own human good.

So when he says in verse 4 that “his name shall be covered with darkness,” he’s simply saying that this infant has no history, he manufactures nothing, he sets nothing into history. Verse 5, “Moreover, it has not seen the sun, or known anything; this has more rest than the other. He’s saying a person without a life is better than you if you don’t have some joy in life. Then in verse 6 he concludes the example by saying, “Yea, though he,” that’s the rich man of verse 3, “Yea, though he live a thousand years twice,” and the reason why Solomon picks a thousand is because this was the age of the antediluvian people of Genesis 5, if you take a piece of graph paper and average it it comes out 930 years, which is approximately a thousand; he says though he live two times of the antediluvians “yet has he seen no good.” And then in the middle of the sentence he stops, and here you have one of the poignant expressions of Hebrew; we would translate this as a dash, “yet has he seen no good,” and it sounds like he’s going to finish the sentence, but there’s a dash, and then he says oh, what’s the use, “Do not all go to one place?”

This is a tremendous graphic moving picture of Solomon here, he just throws up his hands and never even finishes the sentence. He starts it, “yet has he seen no good,” and it sounds like he’s going to… because the whole sentence is conditional, “though he live a thousand years twice, yet has he seen no good,” then what’s going to happen, I don’t know, he gives up and he says they both, “Do not all go to one place,” death where there’s nothing. So he says look, look at your life; here it is from birth to death. Now this is looking at life “under the sun” now, within the human viewpoint framework, here’s your life, the only thing you produce here, he says of work, is relative joy; the ancient had none, but neither did the man who lived two thousand years, he didn’t have any either. So he says what the heck, they all go to the same place. And he just despairs of the whole point.

I want you to see this; the men of the Bible are honest, and that’s what our generation is not. How many times have you personally talked with people who say well, I believe in the golden rule but I don’t believe in this; I believe in this but I don’t believe in that. Pick and choose, pick and choose, they like this part of the Scripture but they don’t like this part; they like this but they don’t like that. What right do they have to pick out things they like from Scripture and dump the things they don’t. They have no right and if you’re in a conversation with a person like that you ought to challenge them right there. The moment you see someone picking and choosing Scripture you ought to say now wait a minute, why is what you like any more valuable than what you don’t like. A person says we should love everybody, well why do you love anybody? It’s not an obvious why you should love anybody, sometimes it’s a downright pain in the neck, so what’s so obvious about that; it’s not obvious. And that’s where you have to challenge people, stop them from picking and choosing. Take it all or junk it, but don’t pick and choose. And that’s what Solomon is doing, and when he winds up in verse 6 he’s winding up as honest man should wind up. He says I have thrown the whole thing out, I have chucked it. And this is what I’ve got left. Now that is what should happen, but very few people have the guts to do it.

Verses 7-9, these are the proverbs, he’s going to quote a set of proverbs. Each of these verses is a concluding proverb. “All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.” And the word “appetite” is the word “nephesh,” soul, and here’s one of those instances where it proves from the Scripture that the soul to the Jewish mind in the Old Testament included physical desires. You [can’t understand word] this soul business making it totally immaterial is not true. In the Old Testament you have spirit and body together making soul, nephesh includes physical desires. In verse 7 he’s essentially said that this is the physical appetite and yet my appetite is never really fulfilled. Here I am with my soul, and I have volition, I have personal affections, I have mentality and I have bodily affections; it’s these bodily affections he’s talking about, I have a hunger, desire for food, and he says I eat but my soul is never filled because my appetite desires personal relationship, my mentality desires a divine viewpoint framework and I don’t have it; personal relationship, if you don’t have a personal relationship with God you are always, always, sooner or later, going to be disappointed in your relationship with another person, because you’re going to have a close personal relationship with this other person and sooner or later you discover that person has what we call an old sin nature.

And sooner or later, after you have hung everything on this one personal relationship that you love, that you enjoy, then it all falls through. This is why we have divorce all over the country. They get married and after about two weeks they discover this other person has a sin nature, I didn’t know that, and it’s so discouraging, I’m going to look around for somebody that doesn’t have a sin nature. So they go out and marry somebody else, and they discover they have a sin nature. And they have divorce because they are trying to hang everything on a personal relationship. You can’t hang on a personal relationship with another person what can only be hung in your personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the personal relationship that’s fulfilling you and if you have that you’ll have stability; if you don’t have that you’ll be one of these unstable people that’s always running around and you get your feelings hurt, then you get your feelings hurt and you whine and you cry, and you get on the phone and tell two thousand people about your trouble and all the rest of it. It’s all ridiculous; you don’t have to whine and cry; big news, you live in a fallen world and people have sin natures, and somebody stepped on your toe, it happens all the time. You’re going to go through the same old thing of disappointment, disillusionment, etc. because of this thing and it’s all because you refuse to accept the teaching of Scripture that every person has a sin nature. And if you want the perfect personal relationship get one established with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Verse 8, “For what has the wise more than the fool? What has the poor, that knows to walk before the living?” He’s saying in the end, like he did before, he says what good does all this human viewpoint wisdom do that I have, it doesn’t do anything for me and I might as well be the world’s biggest idiot. At least he says the idiot doesn’t know his problems; I know my problems and that’s worse. As an idiot I may be dumb and I may not know my problem but at least I can go on, you know the expression, “fat, dumb and happy,” well, that’s what he’s saying, he says it’s better to be fat, dumb and happy and just walk along in life and not know what’s hitting you than to actually go out there and intelligently [can’t understand phrase] and you find out I’ve got on solution to life. Who’s more miserable? And he says here, what good is the poor, “that knows to walk before the living?” The “poor” is the man who has no material wealth and he can’t get any relative joy out of life because he has no riches at all, this is the other end of the economic spectrum. What good is wisdom going to do to the fool, he can’t enjoy himself, he has all this wisdom in his brain but he has no material possessions to enjoy himself.

Finally verse 9, “Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire,” “desire” here is nephesh again, soul, so what is he saying in verse 9? In verse 9 he’s saying the sight of the eyes is that which you possess now, the immediate, better to have it right in front of you where you can see it now and enjoy it, than wandering around, wandering around, wandering around, wandering around, trying to find something that’s going to fill this vacuum on the inside. So he says basically get it now while you can get it. “This also is vanity and vexation of spirit,” the word “vanity” is the theme of this book, it means a mirage, human viewpoint is like a mirage. You go out here on a hot day and you can see mirage, you’ll see water in the street, so-called, and you get down there and it disappears, it’s a simple a mirage; it’s a super-heated layer of air in the street a couple of inches deep, and this layer of air has certain refractive qualities and so what you’re looking at is not water, what you’re looking at is the sky, and the sky is reflecting off of this heat layer and you see this as water. Now this “water” that you see, (quote, end quote) is a mirage. And it’s the nearest illustration I can think of of the Hebrew word habel, vanity.

Let’s go over in the New Testament and look at the solution. We never want to get left with Solomon’s hang-ups, so turn to Luke 12. You should stay with Solomon and not go the New Testament if you have no personal relationship with the Lord or if you are a carnal Christian. You have a right to come over into the New Testament and see what’s there if (1) you are a Christian, and the Holy Spirit has put you in union with Christ, and (2) if you are a Christian you’re in that bottom circle. If that’s true, then you have a right to come into the New Testament.

Luke 12:16, the Lord is blaming a rich man who had many things and he says in verse 15, “A man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses. [16] And He spoke a parable unto them saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plenteously, [17] And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do because I have no place to bestow all my crops” and so on, he said I’m going to do all these things, and then finally in verse 19, he says, “Soul, thou has hast many goods laid up for many years,” so let’s retire, let’s “take thine ease. Eat, drink, and be merry. [20] But God said unto him, You stupid idiot, this night thy soul shall be required of thee; then whose shall these things be, which thou hast provided?” He says this is the kind of dumb way to run your life, very dumb, because this person couldn’t even enjoy his riches from the non-Christian point of view, and now he can’t even enjoy them from the Christian point of view because he’s going to face judgment.

And this is the correcting doctrine that you have to add to what you just saw in Ecclesiastes. In the New Testament we face judgment. What does judgment mean? Often times you’ve heard some evangelist ring the changes for hellfire and brimstone, etc. Well, there is room for visualizing judgment of hellfire but too often this is used as an emotional club to bang people over the head to get them to come forward; that’s the wrong use of this doctrine.

There’s a good part to the doctrine of judgment and the good part is this; the very fact that God judges your life means He holds you accountable for the decisions you make, which makes those decisions tremendous; it means that the decisions you make today God holds you accountable and when you know that someone has you accountable doesn’t it produce an awareness in your heart that boy, I’d better decide right. It like when I was an officer in the Air Force, I had gone through training and training and training on forecasting weather. I knew all the theories, and then when I was in the service and I got into a position where all of a sudden, one night I was in a situation, I was on the west coast, I happened to be on duty when the only hurricane hit the west coast. And so here’s the west coast, and we have Seattle up here, all the way down to San Francisco, and every military installation in our area at night is protected by one weather station and the only person on duty that night in that one weather station as a forecaster was Yours Truly. Now all of a sudden I realized that Uncle was going to hold me accountable for the decisions I make tonight; now what did that do for the theory that I’d learned. All of a sudden it became very important, all of a sudden all the principles began to gel, and when the pressure and heat is on, like the forecaster out here at the airport when this tornado went through, it must have been the most frustrating thing, I can image his position, where you know what’s happening and you can’t get the word out because it’s at night, people are asleep. So here we had a similar situation, you know it’s coming, you try and get the word to people but they don’t listen, the lines are jammed or something. But at least you exercised your responsibility. The pressure of the situation forces you to realize this is a momentous decision.

That’s the way the Christian life is; every decision really is a momentous one because Jesus Christ Himself holds you accountable. That is the idea behind judgment, and instead of seeing this hellfire and brimstone thing, which is there, there is a lake of fire, but the point that is trying to be made is that the decisions that you make are important and crucial.

Now let’s see one more point in the New Testament, John 16 for the doctrine of joy in the Christian life. Remember Solomon’s point is that he wants joy, he wants your life to have joy, and so he says look, if you’re going to live your life “under the sun,” living under the sun I can’t get absolute joy, I can’t get total fulfillment, but maybe I can hack out a little relative joy. And that’s what Solomon is aiming at, how can I get relative joy living under the sun. Now watch what the Lord Jesus Christ does in John 16:21 to answer to Solomon. “A woman, when she is in travail, has sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembers no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. [22] And ye now, therefore, have sorrow; but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, ad your joy no man will take from you. [23] And in that day you shall ask Me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatever you shall ask the Father in My name, He will give it to you. [24] Hitherto have you asked nothing in My name; ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.

Then finally in verse 33 at the end of the chapter, Jesus says, “These things I have spoken unto you, that in Me you might have peace. In the world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” You see the two positions, “under the sun” is “in the world” and He says no matter what happens in the world you are going to have tribulation, you can’t avoid it. But “in Me,” in this position, “in Christ” there is peace, there is joy and there is a joy that no man can take from you. Do you know what that means, translated? It means that no man can bug you; now you can let a person bug you, you can surrender ground that Christ has given you, but the ground that’s so fantastic and the assets so great, that no personal relationship can frustrate the joy that He has given. Oftentimes you read that verse and you read through verse 22, where it says “I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no man takes from you the joy” you read that as though he kind of psychologically psyches you out. But just think of it in terms of normal every day life; no man can take that joy from you.

What is joy in Scripture? The joy that Jesus Christ is talking about here in John 16 is inner mental stimulation. It means the joy that you have because of the truth, and the joy that is mentioned here in verses 20 and following is a joy that is based on the real redemptive work of Christ. It is not a psyched out type of thing where you sit down and say I’m going to have the joy, joy, joy, joy, and I’m going to psyche myself up and I’m going to hypnotize myself until I produce this psychological joy on the inside. That is not what is represented and this is why it bugs me to have these Christian hymns that… what it amounts to is a self-hypnosis session. We sing these great emotional hymns and get everybody psyched up, oh, the spirit is really moving. Well, the spirit is moving but not the way you think. That is self-hypnosis and sheer subjective psychological joy; that is not what Christ is talking about.

What does He say in the analogy of verse 21? He’s referring to birth of a child and that’s not imaginary, ask any woman; that’s no imagination, that not a subjective experience; it’s an objective thing, something really has come into the world that’s new. And similarly He says I am going to set up something new and that something new is the new creation, it’s real, it’s true, and because that has come about in history, now you can have joy. And it is not a psychological, psyched up self-hypnotic type of joy; it is because you comprehend what’s really there and that gives you joy. Notice, it is beyond the framework of “under the sun.” Solomon is a man who lived no higher than the ceiling; Christianity says come above the ceiling and up where the Lord Jesus Christ is, there is where the true thing is, and because He is there, and this new thing has come about, now we can have joy. That’s His whole thing, it’s not based on feelings, it’s not based on psychology, it is based on subjective truth. With our heads bowed.