Ecclesiastes Lesson 23

Surviving in Politics I – 8:1-9

In this book of Ecclesiastes we have gone through many sections. Some of these sections are very difficult to stay with, to hang in there and keep with it because the book is so depressing, and I’ve been aware of certain reactions toward the book of Ecclesiastes and therefore this morning we are going to review and apply what we have learned to date in the book of Ecclesiastes and apply it to ourselves as a congregation. This book of Ecclesiastes may seem boring; this book may seem very depressing; it is. But the reason it is is because this book reflects spiritual death; it is an exposition and a display of a dead man, spiritually. And this man is dying in the sense of phase two of the Christian life because of his carnality. Carnality always produces vanity and this book defines and gives you in detail what the word “vanity” means.

So there are many reason for studying this book and I’m going to give you at least three reasons why we should stay with it and keep the text before us; it’s a text that demands concentration on the text. Therefore this book is important, I would say for three reasons. (1) This book proves that ideas have consequences and this means that what you believe determines how you act and if Christians do not understand the generation it because they do not understand how their generation believes. People say I don’t understand why so and so behaves the way they do, or I don’t understand why such and such act as though they do. The reason is you do not understand what they believe, you do not understand what’s going through their minds. This book teaches the fact that ideas have consequences and therefore this should be a very solemn antidote to flippant views of carnality and unbelief. This book will show you, and Solomon is stressing before you, case after case after case that a certain way of belief will always result in a certain way of behavior. In absolutely almost determined way once a person thinks then the person acts and you can always predict, roughly, the way they will behave by the way they are thinking. All personal problems, all social problems basically emanate from wrong thought patterns, basically emanate from the mentality of the soul. So here we have the idea or the doctrine that ideas have consequences.

We could apply this to our own life in several ways. We could apply this to attitudes toward prayer, for example. One’s attitude toward prayer is a function, really, of your attitude toward sovereignty and free will. A lot of people can’t believe, for example, a prayer is effective. Now you intellectually will accept, of course, that God is capable of answering prayer, but you have never resolved, evidently in your mind the problem of sovereignty versus the problem of positive or negative volition. This is a problem that evidently is out of balance in your thinking. For example, if a person is messed up in the area of sovereignty and volition he will not understand, as James said, “you have not because you ask not.” There are certain things that are not being done within the realm of spiritual things today simply because Christians have not asked God to do it in the authorized fashion of Scripture. It’s as simple as that, and God is not going to do them until prayer is made toward these objectives. This explains why certain things happen in the book of Acts; it explains why, perhaps, one apostle was beheaded in the early church history and another escaped from prison. James was slaughtered in prison because evidently, as far as we know from the record in the book of Acts, no one prayed. Peter was saved from prison because people were praying.

So we have various empirical events of history that are affected by prayer, not because you have a mystical ray that comes out of your subconscious and affects people. This is not the doctrine of prayer biblically; this is the doctrine of a few psychologists or something, that you sit down and meditate and that’s supposed to help you. Prayer is not meditation, prayer is concentration upon the Word of God, and matching it with your life situation, and it works not because of a release of some latent power in your mind, it works because you have contacted the throne of grace and God Himself is moving in history to answer and respond to that prayer. So the doctrine of prayer then falls back on this area of sovereignty and free will; ideas have consequences here.

Now turn to Ecclesiastes 6:10, people who have problems with prayer obviously believe the same way Solomon believes. You might do a mental check on the way you think. “That which has been is named already, and it is known that man is; one who may not contend with him who is mightier than he.” In other words, the point that Solomon is making is that man is totally passive, he is a victim of the cosmic machine, he is ground under its wheels, he can’t fight it, so all he can do is kind of manipulate in his local situation here and there. Man is passive, totally passive in verse 10, and so this obviously must be what many people think who have problems with prayer, that man is passive, that he cannot “contend with Him who is mightier than he,” he cannot work and face the situations of life, prayer is ineffective.

We also find this in Ecclesiastes 5:8, “If you see oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice and righteousness in a province, marvel not at the matter; for he that is higher than the highest watches, and there be many higher than he.” In other words there’s a social structure that’s entrenched and no matter what the problem is in society you can’t change it, so forget it and forget about praying, forget about worrying about it.

In 5:13 we have much a similar thing; Solomon says, “There is a great evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, riches are kept for the owners thereof to their hurt. [14] But those riches perish by” a bad business deal, “and he begets a son, and there’s nothing in his hand.” In other words prayer had nothing and no effect in the person’s personal life. Here a man has all the riches that he needs and yet he is powerless to keep these riches and use it to provide for his own. In other words, we are told to provide for our families but in this case Solomon believes that we can’t really do it, all we can do is respond to the circumstances of life, we can’t change those circumstances through prayer; prayer is ineffective.

So I think from these we can see at least one illustration of the fact that if believing the way Solomon believes, one logical behavior pattern is no prayer. Now the no prayer is not due to laziness, often Christian people say well, people are too lazy to pray. I don’t think so; the reason why prayer is not being made in a systematic way is because Christian people have human viewpoint in the frontal lobe, that’s why, it’s as simple as that. It’s not laziness, it’s heresy; it’s more serious than laziness, it’s far more serious than laziness. What it is is a heretical thought entertaining of human viewpoint of Solomon.

We have another example in 5:1-7 of how ideas have consequences in our behavior pattern and that is an attitude toward the Word of God. People are flippant toward the Word of God. The Word of God is not important, it’s not THE important thing, and yet we have gone on and on and showed how you can’t move two inches in the Christian life without a divine viewpoint framework, without the fact that in the mentality of your soul, with God at the center, surrounded with Bible doctrine you have all the areas of life, you have science, history, philosophy, art, music, all the things that we identify with culture. You have your own possessions, you have sex, you have health, you have your job, you have fellowship with believers, fellowship with loved ones, and friends and society, these things which we classify as social, cultural and personal. All these activities are details of life are always structured by the Word of God.

For example, do you have the divine viewpoint of employer/employee relationship? Do you approach your job as unto the Lord? Do you apply the principles of Eph. 6 to your job? Do you apply it in labor management relations, etc. A simply answer, but the point is that you’re not observing the Lordship of Christ unless the Word of God flows into all these areas. And this is why we emphasize something that usually is not identified with the word “Lord.” Usually you’ll hear deeper life conferences say “make Christ Lord of your life,” and go through some ecstatic emotional experience and dedicate and then rededicate, and then re-rededicate, and all the rest of it. That is not Lordship of Christ. Lordship of Christ means that you are intellectually submissive to the Word of God and this sets up the categories for every detail of life and they all fit into the framework of the Word of God. That is what Lordship of Christ means.

We find this from the book of Deuteronomy, when Moses expounded the Lordship of Yahweh or Jehovah over the nation Israel, he didn’t say Israel, what you have to do is run down the aisle and dedicate your life to Christ. That’s not what he said. What Moses said is that you are going to do this, Moses gave the divine viewpoint in the area of science; Moses gave them farming techniques, conservation techniques. Moses gave them hygiene techniques, he gave them medical aid, so he had the divine viewpoint of science, a divine viewpoint of history. Moses set up a national calendar for the nation Israel so that every family in the nation, once a year, would have to repeat the entire history of the nation through the calendar by observing various days on that calendar they observed various periods in the nation’s history. So Moses gave them the divine viewpoint of history; Moses gave them the divine viewpoint of philosophy as we will see in the Song of Moses. Moses gave them the divine viewpoint of art and music for it was Moses who evidently wrote some of the first Psalms we have. Psalm 90 was written by Moses, he was the one that developed the art and the music of his time. So you see, the Word of God is built to flow into all areas, the personal level, the area of sex, the area of health and you attitude in these areas are strictly determined by the Word of God if Christ is Lord.

The Word of God has things to say, but yet we find people who have no interest in the Word, even in this congregation, we find people who have sat through this book of Ecclesiastes, one of the most difficult books in the whole Bible, difficult to study, difficult to translate, and even more difficult to teach, and very difficult to learn. We have people that aren’t interested in the Word of God and obviously it comes out of a lousy attitude and that lousy attitude comes from a view of Scripture which is given by Solomon in 5:7, for this is how he viewed revelation in his time, for this is how he viewed revelation in his time. “For in the multitude of dreams and many words there are also many vanities; bur fear thou God.” Now what he is saying as we retranslated this when we worked through it is that “in the multitude of dreams and many words there are many vanities,” in other words, the point Solomon is making is that these visions of the prophets, the writings of the prophets, basically are the prophets own opinions about what went on so therefore these writings are not authoritative; it doesn’t matter what the authors of Scripture have to say because what they have to say is their mere human opinion. This is because to a certain degree he has been influenced by a doctrine of relativism which is the most anti-Christian element in our society. I mentioned that one of the songs of our time, “Everything is beautiful in its own way” is probably the classic exposition of the doctrine of relativism for this song begins with Jesus loves all the children of the world and the next phrase, if you listen to that song it completely negates the whole force that Jesus loves all the children of the world. In other words a sweet little song, nice for the children, etc. and all the rest of it, in other words, it’s not really true, it’s just true for those people. So you have the peculiarity that truth is only true for certain individuals.

Relativism is a key doctrine that you must know today as Christians because that is your enemy; this is your enemy, not the rest of the things, the immorality and all the rest of it flow out of this one area. This is the target for you to fight as a Christian, the doctrine of relativism. And of course, people who entertain this will have a flippant view toward the Word of God because they don’t really believe that what you hold in your lap represents THE absolute truth. If this is not THE absolute truth, then the behavior pattern of flippancy toward the Bible is very true. Now the thing to do is test, do you believe in some areas of your thinking the doctrine of relativism and does this show forth in your attitude toward the Word of God. This would be a legitimate test to ask yourself. So this is one reason why we should study the book of Ecclesiastes, ideas have consequences.

There’s another reason why we should study the book of Ecclesiastes and this presses this home even further because I’ve discovered this problem and it’s rising to such a point in our congregation that as I go through this I’ll comment on how we’re going to apply this that we might be better able to communicate to our generation. If you do not understand the problems that Solomon grapples with in this book, you will not understand what young people are faced with today and you will buy this line that’s all over the place of a (quote) “generation gap” that is not a generation gap. It’s not because people are older and in one generation or another. That’s not the point. The point is that the culture has shifted, the environment in which we life has done a radical shift in the last ten to fifteen years. Therefore you have a young person, here’s his parents, say the parents are in the 40-50 age bracket, when they were teenagers the culture was different, the culture, the ways of thinking, what they were taught in school, the music, the art, everything was different, and during the years of their development this is what they had to deal with. It is legitimate, they had to deal with this. This is how they grew up and when many of them became Christians in the early teen years they fought their battle in their generation.

But what has happened in the last 10-15 years is that the whole culture has shifted and has bought many of the ideas that Ecclesiastes is presenting to you, so that if you want to understand what young people are thinking, it’s not because they’re younger, it’s because essentially they are living in an entirely different world. I’ve become more and more aware of this as I’ve pastured this church. It’s almost as though I am teaching to two different mission fields. It’s as though I were called to a missionary position and I were given a set of tribes, but because of the personnel problem in the mission I was also told to minister to this tribe over here, and it would be like I had two different tribes with two entirely different cultures, and mixing the two together and then trying to teach them. This is why oftentimes what is said is read two different ways. I can tell by the feedback cards that we have. When these come back in it’s very obvious that we have two entirely different groups of people in this congregation and they are reading what I say through two entirely different viewpoints. I suspected this but I have more and more evidence that this is true. The more I talk with the young people the more I see that their parents do think in an entirely different way than they think and there is a generation gap but it is not due to age; it is due to the fact that our culture has shifted and the people that grew up in the old culture have kept their old ways of thinking, which are valid, I’m not saying that the old is to be junked, I’m just saying that the culture has shifted, you’ve got to see where it shifted.

Dr. Frances Schaeffer who works probably most successfully with this problem said this: the present chasm between the generations has been brought about almost entirely in a chance in the concept of truth. Young people from Christian homes are brought up in the old framework of truth,” and by this Dr. Schaeffer means that in the old framework of truth you have absolutes; there are certain standards that are true not only in the United States but if you take a trip to Europe they’re true over there, they’re invariable as you go geographically. That’s the old concept. “Then they are subjected to the modern framework; in time they become confused because they do not understand the alternatives with which they are being presented.” Now that’s an important statement, this I have observed in talking with young people in this congregation, so don’t think this is just some hypothetical quote.

I’ll read it again, “in time they become confused because they do not understand the alternatives with which they are being presented.” In other words in the home they’ve been taught to think this way, they go into the school system, they go into their own peer groups and they’re taught an entirely different way and it’s a clash but the problem usually is that they don’t see where the clash is. They recognize there’s something different here, I don’t know what it is, there’s something different that bothers me but I can’t pinpoint it. And usually when you sit down with them and you say there’s the difference, and then the face lights up, I see now, I see there’s the difference, that’s what was bothering me, now I see. So “they do not understand the alternatives with which they are being presented. Confusion becomes bewilderment and before long they are overwhelmed. I must say I am deeply troubled, not only by what I find among our own western churches but also by what I come up against among Christian converts from overseas. On many occasions as I’ve been lecturing to international groups in England and elsewhere I have felt torn to bits for those from overseas, who have been educated in mission schools and then sent out naked into the 20^th century world.” And he doesn’t mean to blame the missionaries, but what he is saying is that oftentimes the missionary schools are the old culture, and they teach the children as though they’re going into the old culture and they’re not, they’re going into something now.

Turn to James 1:27 and you’ll see a practical application of this idea of communicating with our own generation. You’re going to get a new twist to James 1:27 because usually it is used to justify various forms of what we call in evangelical circles separation. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep themselves unspotted from the world.” How do you keep yourself unspotted from the world if you don’t know what the world is thinking? You can’t. You absolutely can’t, you can’t keep yourself unspotted from human viewpoint when you don’t know what the human viewpoint is. If you can’t identify and walk into a situation and say that’s human viewpoint, that’s divine viewpoint, that’s human viewpoint, that’s divine viewpoint, and separate and make a distinction in your thinking, when you walk anything, on the radio, in the newspaper, on TV, whatever it is that you come across, if you can’t distinguish you can’t follow James 1:27; how are you going to. How do you keep yourself unspotted from that which you don’t know what it is. You’ve got to know this, so you can’t really fulfill the command of James 1:27, you can’t keep yourself unspotted from the world when you don’t know the individual way how its affecting itself on you now, in this generation. So that’s the second reason for studying Ecclesiastes, that we might be better able to communicate to our generation in knowing our own culture in which we live.

There’s a third reason for this and that’s found in Eph. 2:12, a third reason why we should study Ecclesiastes; the third reason why it’s important to study the book of Ecclesiastes in our time. In Eph. 2:12 we are told about our background. Most of you today come from Gentile backgrounds; we have one or two people here who come from Jewish backgrounds but mostly you come from a Gentile background, therefore verse 12 is your family tree. “That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the common wealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, without God in the world.” This is your family tree as a Gentile. In other words, if you were to sit here and trace back to your father, grandfather, great grandfather, great-great grandfather, all the way back in your family tree, your forefathers are in verse 12. That is their destiny; that is the culture out of which you came. You may have individually come from Scotland, Europe, Germany, England, but all those cultures, all those cultures of your forefathers share verse 12, they are outside of the common wealth of Israel, and the result in the every day experience is they had no hope, they are darkness.

Now in our time this is becoming more and more evident. You see, in our time one of the areas in which we have increased human viewpoint is the fact that up until about 1950 in this part of the country we had the influence of Christianity; we had an influence that spilled over into many areas. Now it’s changing, now the results that gave hope, etc. are no longer there and so now we have the despair of the modern human viewpoint coming in, the despair is given in verse 12, “having no hope, without God in the world.” In other words, there’s no base, there’s no absolute, there’s no purpose, there’s no plan, there’s nothing there. And finally, the effects of Christianity of a few centuries ago are just dissipating, just evaporating before our eyes and now we’re getting back to verse 12 so that you might say this: in our generation we’ve got Gentiles back in the raw because here now the Gentile heritage is springing forth.

Now I’ll give you some examples close to home where this came out. When we went out to the rock festival, a common reaction among many people in this community was why waste your time with those kids when we have our kids here at home. Now for someone to object, I can see in a sense if they were thinking that we were justifying what went on there, fine, you’re right, but we weren’t, we were not justifying what went on there. But the reason we went out to the rock festival was because here we had an opportunity to learn firsthand what’s going to be all over the place in the next few years. We used this as a learning opportunity, and you may be surprised when I say this, but the thinking of the hippie, and the thinking of the normal young person is very strangely similar, closer than you think, much closer than you think. If you would talk to a hippie and understand what a hippie is, a hippie is not a person with long hair, a hippie is a frame of mind. Too often people think of a hippie as a person with long hair; you can have long hair and dress like a slob, we’ve always had slobs around. But that’s not what makes a hippie a hippie. What makes a hippie a hippie is the way he thinks. That’s what makes a hippie, the thinking pattern. So therefore out at the rock festival we studied this and we gradually learned how to communicate.

When we come to the third reason of studying Ecclesiastes we come to the idea that in Ecclesiastes we have the horror of spiritual darkness. Many of you are unsympathetic with people who are groping in spiritual darkness and it’s because you never had to grope, you never had to get down and grope. Now I’m not talking about in moral areas, I’m talking about thinking areas. We have tried to work with some of our young people in dealing with some of the questions they have in school. For example, evolution, we have worked with some of them but many times, too often, the response on the part of the parents is what are you wasting your time on that, we don’t believe it. Well, that is insufficient; you can’t tell a young person that, just we don’t believe it. Well why don’t you believe it? Well I don’t believe it? Why? I don’t know, I just don’t believe it. Now that’s not an answer and you’ve got to give them answers. They are living and groping their way through and it does no good to ignore it. You can ignore it today but ten years from now what are you going to do. Ten years from now you’ve lost them, you’ve absolutely lost them. So we’re trying to answer these questions. And it’s not that the parents are wrong, I feel in many cases the parents do not understand why it is that these are the problems of the kids in the classroom, they have no sense of the pressure that the kids are under in these points.

So these are three reasons for studying Ecclesiastes. Now I would like to run through Ecclesiastes quickly to summarize the seven basic teachings of this book. These seven basic teachings spell out our own culture of our time. These seven teachings are taught from chapter 1 through chapter 12, and I’ll briefly hit on some of the verses for your own study, to more or less summarize this thing and tie it together so that as we take our final dash through the end of the book of Ecclesiastes you will be able to take the specifics, the trees and tie them into the forest so you won’t lose the forest for the trees.

The first basic teaching of the seven basic teachings of Ecclesiastes is that all problems basically originate from negative volition toward the Word of God; all problems basically start from negative volition toward the divine viewpoint framework. How do we find this from Ecclesiastes? Turn to Ecclesiastes 2 and we’ll see where this comes out. All problems basically emanate from a negative volition toward the divine viewpoint framework. In 2:13-15, we find this because of Solomon’s attitude toward the Bible. In other words, what has happened is that Solomon said I’m on negative volition, I don’t want to have to do with God, I’m going to repress things that are associated with God in my mind, and one of these things happen to be divine viewpoint framework and therefore I don’t want any part of it. Now look what happens, right after this, 2:13-15.

Verses 13-14 is his quotation of a Scripture, “Then I saw that wisdom excels folly, as far as light excels darkness. [14] The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness,” end of quote. Then the rest of verse 14 he says, “But,” and it should be an adversative, “But I myself perceived that one event happens to them all. [15] Then I said in my heart, As it is happens to the fool,” or the idiot, “so it happens even to me; and why then was I more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity.” What Solomon is doing is quoting Scripture in verses 13-14 and saying Scripture conflicts with his personal experience, therefore Scripture is wrong. So he has a conflict, and one of the first steps in Solomon’s problem is that his negative volition toward the divine viewpoint framework automatically produces false conflicts. This is what happens when, for example, some student comes and says look, over here in one verse it says this and then if I turn over three chapters I’ve got another verse and it says something entirely different. In 99 cases out of a 100 it’s simply because they didn’t see the overall picture, they yanked a verse out of context over here, they yanked a verse out of context over there and said whoops, conflict. There’s no conflict when you take it in context. And Solomon did not take it in context deliberately because he had personal animosity toward the divine viewpoint framework. People who have animosity in this area will never take Scripture in context. This is why it’s so difficult to deal with cultists, they’ll come knocking on your door and you can sit down and they’re utterly irrational; for example, you can show Jehovah’s Witnesses that they’ve entirely mistranslated the first chapter of John, you can take them to any elementary Greek text, a first year Greek student can show the error, easy. But you can’t reason with them because evidently the whole Greek language is to be reinterpreted through them. So these people are irrational, they refuse to take the verses in context. Any cult can be dealt with if you take all their proof texts, you don’t even have to go to your own, just take theirs, take their verse and read it in context and you’ll see what is says; there’s no conflict in Scripture.

That is one of the great teachings of this book that has come out. For example, in 3:14 we find him quoting a verse out of context; “…nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it,” is a quotation from Deuteronomy 14 but in Deuteronomy 14 it’s talking about the Law, now he’s taking this verse out of context and applying it to every event in his life, and making a fatalism out of the verse. This verse didn’t teach fatalism, Deuteronomy 13 and 14 are teaching the inviolability of the Word of God. It had nothing to do with fatalism but Solomon makes the verse teach fatalism by yanking it out its context. So this is one of the key characteristics of Solomon; because of his negative volition he yanks Scripture out of context to protect himself.

Now there’s a second teaching of this book. The second teaching is a very sad one because this is basically common to all thinking today. The second great teaching of the book of Ecclesiastes is that you never can find the ultimate truth; you never can find the ultimate truth! He gives up all hope of ever finding out the ultimate truth. This, of course, sets one up for relativism, that is, minus absolute truth, you can’t really find it because you can never really get to it, it might be there but you can never really get to it. Do you want to know where this comes out in common every day examples?

Have you ever heard a person say something like this to you? You know, I think you people are pretty bigoted to think that Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation; a pretty bigoted statement. You’ve heard people say that, those of you who witness have had that thrown into your face many times, how can you be so bigoted to believe that you people have the only way, that’s bigotry. But is it? If I say this pencil is going to drop, is that bigoted? No, because it’s the truth, that’s the field of gravity and at this point in the field of gravity the pencil is always going to go down, it’s not going to go up. Now am I being bigoted to insist the pencil is going to go down? No, and if you bring this illustration up they’ll say well obviously, that’s scientific truth, of course. All right, but then isn’t there such a thing as religious truth? Just like there’s a law of gravity that says it goes down, why aren’t there religious laws that are definite and true like that. Why? Do you know why? Because the people are relativists, they don’t believe there’s such things as definite spiritual truth, that a man can only be saved through the cross of Jesus Christ. That’s a bigoted statement.

Now the only possible way a person could say that’s a bigoted statement is if you believe that you can never arrive at the truth. That’s what you must believe. If you are the kind of a person that reacts to my statement, Jesus Christ is the only way to know the Father, if you say that’s a bigoted statement, do you know what I’d say about you? I’d say that you must be a relativist, you must really secretly in your thinking, may not even be conscious of it, but secretly in your mind you believe that you never can know the truth, so therefore Clough can’t know the truth, the Bible can’t know the truth, and these Christian people can’t know the truth either, and it’s foolish for them to go around pretending they know the truth and say that this is the only way. Do you see how it rubs off; we’re not just talking about abstract philosophy up here; this rubs off in the remarks people make. So when someone says that this is bigotry, I mark them out, that person is a relativist, that person has bought hook line and sinker the concept that no one can ever arrive at religious truth.

So this is the second great truth; to see this turn to 3:11; here Solomon admits this, “God has made everything beautiful in its time; also He has set the age” or “He has set eternity in their heart, so that no man…” by the way, if you like to look at “everything is beautiful in its time” in context, do you know what he’s talking about? Verses 1-8 and look at what you’ve got there; you’ve got war, and you’ve got all sorts of things, the catastrophes of life and he calls it beautiful. All right, “He has made everything beautiful in its time; also He has set eternity in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end.” So Solomon in this verse, 3:11, one of the most crucial verses of the whole book, says that God has so structured reality that you can never find out the truth, never can find out anything, and therefore it would be bigoted to say Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes unto the Father but by Him.” That’s a bigoted statement if what Solomon says here is true.

You can see this again in verse 21-22, “Who knows the spirit of man that it is the one that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast” or the animal “that it is the one that goes downward to the earth. [22] Wherefore, I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works … For who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?” In other words, man can’t know what’s really going on and in verse 21 he’s saying you know what, you can’t even tell there’s a significant difference between you and the animals; you can’t even know there’s a significant difference between you and the animals. Man might just be a super animal, that’s all. So Solomon is led to this despair.

In Ecclesiastes 6:12 it’s the same thing, where he admits that you can’t come to know the absolute truth. “For who knows what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spends as a shadow?” In other words, you’re a parent and your child comes to you and he asks you, what is the best way to live my life? How mother, or how father, should I live my life? And you sit there and you say verse 12, I don’t know, I don’t know what is good for you, all the days of your vain life which you spend as a shadow, “For I cannot tell you what shall be after you under the sun.” That’s all you’re shut up to, that’s all you’re left with, you can’t tell because you cannot know. Now that is the despair of Solomon. This is not, of course Scriptural, as you can see, we covered this in Deuteronomy 29 and 30 that deals with this problem. So that was the second truth of Ecclesiastes being taught, that you can never find ultimate truth, you never can find what’s really there.

Now we come to the third teaching of this book. The third teaching is that man is left with only two things; man is left with (1) his power of reason, and (2) his experience, and (3) minus all revelation. He’s left with no revelation, so all he’s left with is his own power to reason and a lot of pieces called experience in his life. That’s all he’s got left. Let’s look at how Solomon developed this, Ecclesiastes 2:3, when Solomon sets forth his test, when he wants to derive a philosophy of life, since he has already given up the Word of God, he must resort strictly to his own experience, the pieces of his own experience. And in verse 3 he says, “I sought in my heart to give myself unto wine,” to lead actually means to lead my flesh and mind, “yet my heart was in control with wisdom,” in other words he wasn’t stoned out of his mind when he did this, he was just enjoying a little wine and he had discipline and he didn’t let it get to him, “and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men, that they should do under the heaven all the days of their life.” Do you see? He set up an experiment, but what did he use to find out? His experience, that’s all he had left, his own personal experience.

We see this again in 2:14b, the last part of it which we saw before, “I myself perceived also that one event happens to them all.” This is his experience and that’s all he’s got, he says all I see is the same thing happening, I don’t buy this garbage from the Word of God. I don’t buy it because my experiences teaches me thus and so. In 2:23, “For all his days are sorrow, and his travail grief, yea, his heart does not take rest in the night. This is also vanity.” That’s all he’s left with. 3:10, “I have seen the travail, which God has given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.” 3:16, “And, moreover, I saw under the sun the place of judgment, that wickedness was there; and the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there.” That’s all he’s left with, that’s ALL he’s left with. Now that’s real; you have to feel this or you will never, never, never, never, appreciate your so great salvation; you will have a flippant view to it, you’ll have the idea that boy, I can get along in this life whether I believe this or not. Now if you have that it’s because you don’t see what Solomon sees here, you do not see it and you should ask the Lord to teach you this so that you can see what it means to be spiritually dead; this is spiritual death. That’s the third thing that Solomon teaches, that man, having done all these things, is left with only his logic and his experience but he never can fit pieces together with this thing.

Now the fourth thing that Solomon teaches us in this book is that since man is left with all his experience, what does that leave us with? If we look at that experience, what do we learn from it. Well, the fourth teaching concerns this. Nothing in his experience proves there is a moral absolute working in the universe. Nothing in experience will prove to you there’s such a thing as right and wrong operating in history…nothing! Why, let’s go through it again, let’s turn to 1:15, this is the fourth great teaching of this book, that if you throw out the Bible you have no empirical evidence that there is such a thing as a moral absolute that’s operating in history. You have no base. “That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is lacking cannot be numbered,” and he’s not talking about mathematics in verse 15, that’s his expression for injustice. He says the injustice is there and the crooked cannot be made straight. Now he’s learned something that the modern day optimistic radicals have never learned; evil has never been eradicated from history and all the efforts that the radical would try have been tried again and again. But today’s radical is no radical, he’s actually a reactionary, he’s just going back and pulling out the same old bag of tricks that have been tried again and again down through history and have been chucked by generations of people. Evil cannot be eradicated from history and there is no way of doing it, apart of course, from the Biblical provision. But Solomon has dumped those.

In 2:15, he sees the iniquity operating again, he says, “Then said in my heart, As it is happens to the fool, so it happens even to me, and why was I then more wise?” It doesn’t pay, Godliness does not pay in this world. Verse 21, “For there is a man whose labor is in wisdom, and in knowledge, and in equity, yet to a man that has not labored therein shall he leave it for his portion.” In other words, here’s a father whose worked his finger to the bone to provide for his son and he dies and what does his son do? He doesn’t work for a dime, he just lives off his father’s whole inheritance and just blows it. That’s what he’s saying, he’s saying where is the justice there; there is no justice there. 3:16, “I saw under the sun the place of judgment, that wickedness was there; and the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there.”

Ecclesiastes 4:1, “So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun; and, behold, the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had not comforter,” and it doesn’t require imagination to visualize what Solomon was talking about, you think of the millions of people behind the iron curtain; tears of the people who are oppressed and have no comforter, the tears of the Hungarian freedom fighters when they were promised Americans with aid and they got out in the street, thinking the Americans were coming and the Americans never came and they were crushed. Don’t expect the eastern Europeans to revolt again, they learned from Hungary, you don’t trust the United States. So here again you have the tears of the oppressed, there’s no justice here, there’s no justice. “And on the side of their oppressors there was power but they had no comforter.” So you can you can go all around the world and find this. It’s still going on today, centuries after Solomon.

Ecclesiastes 6:2, here is “A man to 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 the power to eat, but a stranger eats it,” in other words, there’s a catastrophe in his business, there’s a catastrophe in his life, something happened and he can’t enjoy the things that he worked for. Like this tornado, one person that had built their house, put all their savings into a house, the tornado comes across, uninsured, the whole house goes; everything you worked for gone in a split second. There’s no justice, and Solomon says open your eyes, open your eyes, have the guts to walk with your eyes open and you’ll see there is no justice operating in history, if you’re confined to just your own experience. There is, if you look at it from the Biblical point of view, but he’s dumped the Biblical point of view. Looked at from outside of the Bible you cannot prove there is a moral absolute operating in history; you can’t find it and there’s no evidence of it. And that’s what Solomon says and this makes him angry.

So he moves on now to the fifth teaching of this book, again from his experience. And this is even more depressing than the fact that there’s no moral absolutes. He says not only is there no moral absolutes, but nothing in my experience the just man can do anything absolutely worthwhile. So his fifth teaching, there was no justice here for teaching. His fifth teaching is that you can’t do anything that’s truly worthwhile in your personal life. Turn to chapter 2 and you’ll see this. These are solemn lessons to learn; it’ll save you a lot of grief in your life because a lot of people always thing… always think that they can live a pleasure filled life and live to their full satisfaction outside of the Word of God and you’ve got to get cut off, and this is an easy way to learn. Frankly I’d much rather learn reading the wisdom of the Word of God than learn out getting my head banged against the wall. I admit I have to learn every once in a while getting my head banged against the wall, and you all look like you have to. But it’s a lot easier to learn if you take the wisdom of the Scripture.

In Ecclesiastes 2 he goes into this experiment, he goes through all of these possible things, in verse 4, these are the great creative things that he does, his great works, he built gardens, etc. all these things, verse 7, he had culture, he had servants and maids, he had stock, he had great investments, that’s his cattle, cattle was the method in the ancient world of earning money, there was fantastic returns on the cattle business in that day. And then you find out in verse 8 in the last part he had all the sex he wanted, all the girls, many beautiful women it says, not “musical instruments.” That’s just the King James trying to cover up the nice Hebrew thing. So here we have all of the things that Solomon tried, and look at his conclusion: I hate to disappoint you but look at verse 10, “And whatever mine eyes desired, I kept not form them. I withheld not my heart from any joy;” but then he says, “my heart rejoiced in all my labor; and this was my portion of my labor.” What is he saying there? He’s saying it was great while it lasted, but there was a Monday morning hangover after the party and I never could get rid of it. In other words he says you try to do something worthwhile apart from God’s plan, you do for a while, think it’s worthwhile, for a while it seems like you’re enjoying yourself but after it’s over it’s over, and there’s no lasting pleasure out of it, there’s nothing that lasts.

And then he also has another evidence of this; he says in verse 14, he says even though you try to do something that’s worthwhile, not only does it not give you lasting pleasure, but it doesn’t even affect your position in the universe. Verses 14-16, what’s he saying there? He’s saying it doesn’t really matter, here I go, I go through all the pains to live a godly life, I go through all the pains of trying to enjoy myself, and you know what, the same thing happens to me that happens to everybody else, it does not pay off in this life, there’s no payoff here. And he finds the same thing in various other portions of the text, chapter 6 he says the same thing.

But then there’s something else in chapter 2 that goes along with the same teaching, is verse 16 and following. Here it’s even worse. See, we’ve had a progression in chapter 2. The first thing he noted was that things are enjoyable as long as they last. The second thing he found out was, well maybe what I could do is just do things worthwhile in hopes that, as verses 14-16 would say, in hopes that maybe it would benefit me, maybe I could bribe God and get blessed in my life. But it doesn’t work. And then in verse 16, “There’s no remembrance of the wise man more than of the fool,” here he’s saying your historical memory isn’t even guaranteed, there’s not even a guarantee that when you pass off out of this life you’re even going to be remembered. That’s his point, so there’s nothing there. So concluding this teaching, the fifth teaching is nothing in experience the just man can do anything absolutely worthwhile, nothing, nothing!

Therefore we come to the sixth teaching of this book and that is that man, therefore, is left with only the goal of immediate happiness; that’s the only goal left, the only one you can invest your life in. Solomon says if you are living for your business, if you are living for some person, if you are living for some other thing, some person, forget it friend because it’s not going to pay off. If you’re living for the absolute moral right, of course apart from Christ, forget it, don’t bother, don’t waste your time and waste other people’s time.

Ecclesiastes. 2:24-26, “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor…. [25] For who can eat,” etc. You see this in 3:12, “I know that there is no good in them but for a man to rejoice and to do good in all his life.” You see it again in 5:18, “Behold that which I have seen; it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good…” what is that. Now that’s not hell-raising, Solomon is not teaching hell-raising. If you want to see that turn to chapter 7:16-18, “Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself over wise.” But on the other hand, don’t be over wicked either, golden mean, in other words he’s saying here, get immediate happiness in a sensible way. That’s his counsel for the best way of living in life outside of Christ.

So if you do not choose to live life according to the divine plan, the book of Ecclesiastes gives you the most logical way of living it outside of God’s plan. Don’t invest your life in your business or things like that, you’re going to be disappointed. You have one goal in life and that’s to get it now, that is the only logical goal for the non-Christian; get it now! That’s the only logical goal for a carnal Christian, get it now, and that’s the theme of this book.

Finally the seventh position, the seventh teaching of the book of Ecclesiastes, and that’s 3:19, “That which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts. Even one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other, yea, they have all one breath, so that a man has no pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity. [20] All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. [21] Who knows the spirit of man that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast that goes downward to the earth.” In other words, the seventh teaching of the book is terrifying. If you stop and think for a moment, the seventh teaching of this book is that you can’t even be sure that you as a human being are very valuable; that’s the seventh teaching, you can’t even be sure that people are valuable. You can’t be sure on the non-Christian base.

This is what is so absolutely ludicrous about people who are going around the world talking about let’s have world government to bring in and benefit mankind. Let’s have world government, elevate the United Nations so that we can have universal rights of man, the United Nations Declaration of Human rights, where did that come from? That’s only logical if the Bible is true, but if the Bible isn’t true I would spit on the document because that’s all it’s worth, it isn’t even worth spit because the declaration of human rights means absolutely nothing if men are just but animals. You’ve got to see and feel and sense these two distinctions here.

I hope as we’ve gone through these seven teachings of the book of Ecclesiastes we’ve drawn this whole book together so that you can sense the force of it. It’s a powerful thing. When I first read the book of Ecclesiastes I didn’t get it, I didn’t get it until the second or third or fourth time but I kept reading because I knew that the Holy Spirit had a reason for including this book in the canon of Scripture. If the book doesn’t make sense you don’t understand it. The Holy Spirit never wasted His time putting into the canon a book that was nonsense so therefore there must be a purpose here. So upon studying it, it gradually grew on me, gradually, the force and power of this book until now I come to believe that this book of Ecclesiastes is the most powerful in the canon of the Old Testament as far as we’re concerned for answering our generation. This is the most powerful book because it strips completely the hope of the non-Christian, it leaves him in darkness, it leaves him without a hope in his life except to get it now and not even knowing whether he’s really inherently worthwhile. That’s where you are left logically outside of Jesus Christ.

With our heads bowed.