Ecclesiastes Lesson 24

Surviving in Politics II – 8:1-9

 

Once again let’s remember that the book of Ecclesiastes is written to expound the meaning of the word “vanity,” to show its full force, to show what it means to be spiritually dead.  Too often Christians have flippant views of what it means to be spiritually dead.  Before you received Christ you were spiritually dead, and this book shows the great depth to which we all were; it also shows the lack of any organized framework of thinking, it shows the problems that we had as an unbeliever.  The tragedy in our day is that due to sloppy thinking, a lot of people, believers and unbelievers alike do not really realize they’re dead while they’re dead.  And they don’t realize what it means to be spiritually dead, they don’t realize, therefore, the need for the gospel.  And therefore it in the end becomes a waste of time, in a sense, to evangelize a generation that is so drugged, that is so lackadaisical that it doesn’t even realize the shortcomings of its own darkness. 

 

The book of Ecclesiastes is written to blast through the optimism of people, forcing them to see reality and Solomon is telling it like it is, for without Christ the Bible says that we are without hope, without God in the world, and this book of Ecclesiastes expounds, in very raw detail at times, what it means to be without Christ, without hope, without God in the world. 

 

In chapter 8, verses 1-9 Solomon is involved in a section of Scripture that teaches what to do under a totalitarian political regime, when you are without Christ, without hope, without any relation to an absolute law or principle.  This is how, and the most logical way, you should act.  Remember in verses 1-9 this is not the divine viewpoint, we’ll correct and give the New Testament norms after we’re done, but verses 1-9 are true if a person wants to live out of fellowship with the Lord logically.  Verses 1-9 are true if one wants to live as an unbeliever logically.  And we will see now how people, many of whom in our day, such as the many radicals on the new left, are not living logically as unbelievers; they are actually sneaking in principles that they have borrowed from Christianity and are using them, twisting them around and using them as their platform.  But that’s not logical.  Solomon in verses 1-9 gives you the true logic of what it really should be live under a totalitarian system, to live in a situation where you can’t change it, where you’re the victim of the machine and you can’t step out of line without getting ground over.  This is the logical way to behave, verses 1-9.

 

Now to get the background again we review the seven principles of the book of Ecclesiastes. We’re not going to expound these in detail, we’ll just touch on each of the seven so you might realize the steps that Solomon took to get to these conclusions.  These are very important, even though they are at first difficult to understand, I am convinced this obscure book in the Old Testament is the answer that we have been looking for in our time to understand our generation.  Our generation has gone probably further than any other generation, into the areas that Solomon had looked for in 1000 BC. 

 

The first principle that Solomon ran across was due to his negative volition in his personal individual life, it led to conflict, and I put those in quotation marks, in the Scripture.  In other words, due to negative volition we have a principle operating in the Word of God that says a person who is running away from the Lord spiritually in his life is not interested in finding out real truth, especially when it’s involved in the spiritual areas.  I have had many, many hours of experience talking with college students and people on the college campus that have all sorts of intellectual problems, but you go to the root of those problems and oftentimes they’re not intellectual at all.  All it is is that they have already decided they want to live a certain way, now they’re interested in generating some reasons, rationalization to live this way.  And hence Solomon demonstrates it as we saw it last time.  This is done through many gimmicks, it’s done in the academic classroom, it’s done in many other areas of life, where Scripture is yanked out of context and made to conflict with itself.  Solomon has illustrated that principle.

 

The second principle in the book of Ecclesiastes is one of the horrible things that comes out of this.  Many people don’t realize this, Solomon did.  Solomon was a realist and he faced up to the situation, and that is minus absolute truth.  He recognized immediately if man does not have access to revelation from an infinite God, then he can never come to know absolute truth about the universe, about himself or about anything else.  This cuts man off from any hope of having a framework for his life. 

 

Therefore we get to the third thing, that a man divorced from absolute truth is left with only two things in his life that he can use; his own logic and his experience.  But he has no way… this gives a lot of pieces, scattered pieces in his life, but the man has no way of organizing those pieces into a divine viewpoint framework; he has no way of taking those pieces and building them into the mentality of his soul so he produces what we call a divine viewpoint framework which is, God is at the center, around God we have Bible doctrine which means God’s revelation, His verbal revelation of Himself, and around that we have all the details of life, science, history, philosophy, art, music, the so-called cultural things.  We have personal things, fellowship with other believers, with loved one, with friends, with society. We have personal things such as our possessions, sex, job, health. We have all these details of life which must be structured together into a unity.  And the trouble and the paradox that Solomon had, as everyone has who rejects divine revelation from God in the canon of Scripture is that you ultimately have no framework left in which to build your life.  These are all disjointed pieces but there’s never one unifying principle to hold them all together. The closest thing that we have come in our 20th century to finding, a principle that unifies is the doctrine of evolution.

 

The fourth principle that Solomon has, and he illustrates in his book, is that experience, since he’s left only with logic and experience, this proves only one thing, minus moral law.  He says if I look at life and I look all around me, and I’m really honest, I do not see moral principles operating in society, I do not see moral principles operating in nature.  In other words, there is no evidence to my experience that wrongs are righted, in my experience. Remember Solomon is confining the data to his own experience in this life.  And Solomon is quite honest, he says there is no moral absolutes operating as I look at life.

 

The fifth principle that Solomon sees as he looks out is that as he looks at his experience he finds that man can do nothing absolutely worthwhile.  So there’s minus worthwhile activities.  In other words, he has tried everything he can to give meaning and significance to his life.  He’s tried construction, he’s tried building, he’s tried sex, he’s tried this, he’s tried that, he’s tried everything and not any of those things… oh, they give pleasure, Solomon is not denying that these things give pleasure.  What he’s denying is that they give any significant pleasure in your life; they give pleasure as long as they last, but they don’t give any abiding, continuous principle that will be with you the Monday morning afterwards.  There’s always the Monday morning hangover to these kinds of pleasures.  Solomon says everything I’ve tried has a Monday morning hangover, there’s nothing that carries through.

 

So then he goes to the sixth principle, and in the sixth principle that Solomon teaches us in Ecclesiastes is that man, therefore, after all these other five principles what is left; man is only left with his own immediate happiness. The only goal, or the summum bonum of human existence is your immediate happiness, that’s all that’s left.  The summum bonum of existence is your immediate happiness, by whatever means you can get it, however you can get it, wherever you can get it, but get it now because you won’t have it tomorrow.  That is a logical conclusion.  This is not something being facetious; it all flows out of this thing, there’s a logic to this development.  You have to see this. 

 

The seventh principle that Solomon teaches in the book of Ecclesiastes is probably more horrifying than the others, and in our 20th century we’ve seen that it’s led to some very disastrous things.  And that is that in the end, if you throw out the divine viewpoint framework of Scripture you come to the horrifying realization that there’s no real way that you can be sure that you’re anything different than an animal.  How can we really be sure that we’re nothing more than a little super animal, but that’s all; that man and animal are not qualitatively different, they’re only quantitatively different.  There’s only a shift in their degree, that’s all.  And Solomon, that’s why he says in chapter 3, he says who knows whether it really is in the end the spirit of man that goes up and the spirit of beast that goes down, how can you really be sure there’s a qualitative difference between man and beast.  So these are the seven principles that Solomon has taught in this book of Ecclesiastes.  Remember he is trying to be as logical as he can to these seven principles. 

 

Now we come to verse 1.  “Who is the wise man? And who knows the interpretation of a thing? A man’s wisdom makes his face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed. [2] I counsel thee to keep the kings commandment, and that in regard of the oath of God. [3] Be not hasty to go out of his sight.  Stand not in an evil thing; for he does whatsoever please him. [4] Where the word of a king is, there is power; and who may say unto him, What doest thou? [5] Whoso keeps the commandment shall feel no evil thing; and a wise man’s heart discerns both time and judgment. [6] Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man is great upon him. [7] For he knows not that which shall be; for who can tell him when it shall be? [8] There is no man that has power over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither has he power in the day of death.  And there is no discharge in that war, neither shall wickedness deliver those that are given to it.  [9] All this have I seen, and applied my heart unto every work that is done under the sun; there is a time wherein one man rules over another to his own hurt.”

 

The theme of verses 1-9 is given in the last part of verse 9, “there is a time when one man rules over another to his own hurt.”  Throughout this there’s almost a fatalism.  We found this fatalism back in chapter 3; Solomon sees the universe as a progressive thing that has order to it all right, it has a time and a place and a purpose, there’s a time to love, there’s a time to hate, there’s a time to live, there’s a time to die, there’s times… it all fits together.  And Solomon says it turns out sometimes what happens is that in your life, in your generation it’s your time to experience tyranny, it’s your time to live under a despotic regime, it’s your time to experience the tragedies and heartaches of political totalitarianism.  He says in that situation, given the principles I have, what do I do, what do I have left?  And verses 1-8 are counsel to this kind of a person.  These are the wisest things that human viewpoint can come up with.  I’m sure many of you when you get down to verse 8 are going to react to this, very negatively, and when we get through with verse 8 you’re going to say I could never do that, this just runs against my grain, what Solomon is counseling me to do in verses 1-8, you say I couldn’t do that.  But in the end if we really were to experience a totalitarian regime I bet you would do that if you were not solidly grounded in the Word.  So don’t necessarily reject what we’re going to go into in verses 1-8 as though you’d never do that.  You probably would.  If you did not have Bible doctrine and the indwelling Holy Spirit to carry you through, you’d wind up in practice doing exactly what verse 1-8 says. 

 

Let’s look at verse 1, “ Who is the wise man?”  It starts out many times like it always does in this book, a very difficult book to understand, it’s a wisdom, a book of wisdom literature, it’s hard anyway and then you have Solomon adding difficulties to it.  But “Who is the wise man” is a phrase which on the surface looks like a compliment and we’ve seen this phenomenon again and again in Ecclesiastes.  Solomon will start out in a complimentary way; Solomon will start out as though he’s saying boy, this is great.  Great for what?  And then he adds this last little thing and it smashes it.  And as I often said the illustration would be to walk up to someone and say you’re good, then you pause for a minute and say good for nothing.  It’s that last thing that you tack on that ruins the first thing you said.  And that’s the way Solomon is starting out.  He does this again and again, and we see him doing it again here. 

 

“Who is the wise man?” that’s a compliment, who is like the wise man he says; it starts out just like Psalm 8, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”  This is the way the Hebrew has of complimenting a person, what a wonderful person you are, who is like you?  And that’s a compliment, who is like the wise man, “And who knows the interpretation of a thing?”  And immediately when he uses this Hebrew word interpretation we know immediately that he’s talking about a court counselor, for the word “interpret” here is a word that is used in Daniel 2 and other chapters in the book of Daniel for the court wise man.  Let’s turn to Daniel to see how this is used so you can get an idea of what an oriental court was like.  Daniel is a fantastic book; the book of Daniel is one of the most fantastic books in Scripture.  Daniel was a teenager who saw his home destroyed, he saw his country destroyed, he personally witnessed members of his family slaughtered and dragged off to concentration camps.  Daniel survived; Daniel was a young fellow in his teenage years who had studied the Word of God and he specialized in one book of Scripture.  Daniel, evidently as a youth had studied Jeremiah the prophet, and he knew Jeremiah cold, and it was Jeremiah’s book that sustained Daniel under the captivity. 

 

And when Daniel got into the court, in Daniel 2:1, “Now in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams; and his spirit was troubled and his sleep left him. [2] Then the king commanded,” and this is the procedure that you’re going to see in chapter 2 was the normal modus operandi of an oriental court.  So picture what happened in chapter 2 and it will give you the background for what’s going to happen in Ecclesiastes.  “Now in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams;” so here’s the king having trouble.  Verse 2, “Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers and the Chaldeans, for to show the king his dreams.  And so they came and stood before the king. [3] And the king said unto them, I have dreamed a dream and my spirit is troubled to know the dream. [4] Then spoke the Chaldeans to the king is Syriac” or Aramaic, and this, by the way, beginning in verse 4 when you’re translating this book in the Hebrew it stops right here and goes into Aramaic, and from 2:4 on the rest of this book, up to a point, is in Aramaic.

 

“Then spoke the Chaldeans to the king in Aramaic, ‘O king, live forever! Tell thy servants the dream and we will show thee the interpretation.’” There’s the word that Solomon uses in the book of Ecclesiastes.  In other words, this word has a special technical meaning, it means that these are the court wise men that take all of the events in history, the events of the kings personal history, the events in the history of the nation and they are asked to come up with an analysis, what is going on.  The “interpretation” are these wise men’s counsel, what is going on in our generation; they are to be the analysts.  And so we have the interpretation of the dream.  [5] The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, ‘The thing is gone from me; if you will not make known unto me the dream with the interpretation thereof, you shall be cut in pieces and your houses shall be made a dung hill.’”  That wasn’t very nice of the king, but what the king was doing here is very significant.  Notice the king refuses to tell him the dream.  Now this is a test; the men come in and they said king, we’ll interpret your dream, tell us what the dream is and we’ll interpret it.  And the king says no, I want to see if you guys are really real or whether you’re a bunch of phonies so I’m not even going to tell you the dream.  I want you to tell me what I dreamed and then after that tell me what the dream means, so I’m not going to tell you what I dreamed; it’s up to you to find out.

 

Verse 6, “But if you declare the dream and the interpretation thereof, you shall receive of me gifts and rewards and great honor.”  Of course they couldn’t, and they hit the panic button and ran all around sending SOS signals throughout the palace and finally they said hey Daniel, we hear you’re good at interpreting dreams, come here, we’ve got a problem or we’re all going to have our heads rolling.  So Daniel walked up and Daniel was the one that finally gave him the dream itself and interpreted it. 

 

Back to Ecclesiastes, you see a little bit from that what happens in an oriental court.  This is what Solomon means in 8:1.  “Who is like the wise man?”  He’s saying who’s like the sorcerers, who is like these people, and who knows the dreams thereof of things.  And that ends the compliment, and now begins the sarcasm.  “A man’s wisdom,” remember these men in particular that Solomon has on his mind in verse 1 are the wise men of an oriental court.  And he says these men’s wisdom “makes his face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed.”  Now what does he mean by that?  Do you recall the incident back with Nebuchadnezzar?  What happened there?  The wise men got in a jam because they claimed too much, they claimed to be able to interpret everything and Nebuchadnezzar took them up on it.  In other words, the wise men overstepped.  And so what Solomon says here is if they’re really wise men they will shade their prophecies in very vague ways so they won’t get involved with the king. 

 

And so he says “a man’s wisdom makes his face to shine,” now that “make your face to shine” is an idiom which in the Hebrew means to be gracious.  Haven’t you ever been in a church service where the pastor said “May the Lord make His face to shine upon you,” a quotation out of the Old Testament.  That’s an idiom meaning may the Lord bless you, may He be gracious to you.  That’s what that means.  And so here when it says “a man’s wisdom makes his face to shine,” means that a man’s wisdom makes him gracious.  Except Solomon doesn’t mean it the way the priest meant it, Solomon meant it, it means the guy can walk around with a smile on his face even though underneath he is all full of daggers.  This is how to win friends and influence people on the surface, surface hypocrisy.  In other words, you can get along in the court, if you’re really wise it’ll tell you when to keep your big mouth shut.  That’s what Solomon is saying, so you won’t get in a jam, so you can go along smoothly, and when the waves hit and rock the boat in the middle of the oriental court you’ll know where to go in time of storm.

 

Then he says, “the boldness of his face shall be changed.”  And the word “boldness” here is a word which means a planned, conceiving, conniving type of person.  In other words, this wise man, we know from this, has plans; the wise man has plans.  What are his plans?  His plans are to do away with the king.  His plans are to change the court, he’s living under a despotic ruler.  So the wise man want to get around and have a coup, they want to pull off a coup. And so he says but if a man is really wise he’ll keep it to himself; he’ll keep it to himself, he’ll be smooth about it.  And this is what it means, the “boldness of his face,” that’s his inner design shall be changed, or shall be covered up.  And so the wisdom will teach him how to keep his hand to himself until it’s the right time to play the ace, and he won’t even let you know, this is the poker face in diplomacy and he says you won’t even know the ace is in your hand until you play it.  And that’s what wisdom does.  You can see the sarcasm now, “Who is like the wise man,” he says, yeah, who’s like him, a bunch of phonies, that’s all they are, a bunch of phonies that are able to put on a show in front of the people around them.

 

Verse 2, “I counsel thee,” and he’s taking up the counsel to these people so they can be like the wise men, “keep the king’s commandment, and that in regard to the oath of God.”  The first part of verse 2 is easy, he says just keep your nose clean, that’s what it means.  But the last part of that phrase has given interpretive problems, “that in regard to the oath of God.”  Some have thought that what this king is in verses 1-8 is actually God Himself; we have a whole slew of commentators that think this is God who’s the king here.  But this is too spotted to be ever used of God, it just doesn’t fit the rest of the Old Testament, they usually hinge the whole interpretation on the last part of verse 2 because they say “in regard to the oath of God,” but again if you just turn to a concordance, as I have said again and again, 90% of the problems of Bible interpretation would disappear if you just had one simple tool, a Bible concordance, and look up the phrase and see where it’s occurred elsewhere.  So, you notice the first part of verse 2, “keep the king’s commandment,” in regard to “the oath of God.”  Keep those two in mind and turn to 1 Kings 2.

 

1 Kings 2:42-43, Lo and behold, who is it that’s the subject in 1 Kings 2? It’s Solomon; this is an incident in Solomon’s own court of a man who disobeyed what Solomon told him.  Solomon told him don’t leave the city; this man was not under house arrest but he was under city arrest and Solomon says the moment you step your cotton pickin’ foot outside this city you’re going to get the ax.  And the man did it, and so here’s the scene in the court.  Verse 42, “So the king sent and called for Shimei and said to him, ‘Did I not make thee to swear by the LOR, and admonished thee, saying, Know for certain, on the day that thou goest out and walkest abroad anywhere, that thou shalt surely die?  And you said unto me, The word which I have heard is good.  [43] Why, then, hast thou not kept the oath of the LORD, and the commandment that I have charged thee with?”  It’s very clear from verse 43 that that’s an idiom, it’s a word which is used when the king gave a commandment it was given under the oath of the Lord.  And so when we come back to Ecclesiastes that helps us interpret verse 2. 

 

“I counsel thee to keep the king’s commandment, and that in regard oath of God,” simply means that this commandment was given to him, the man was bound as an oriental personage in his court to obey the king and he swore allegiance to the king in the name of the Lord.  This is his loyalty oath; this is the loyalty oath in verse 2.  So he says I counsel thee to keep it.  And it’s not that he’s dually concerned about the loyalty oath, he’s just interested in the man keeping it. 

 

Verse 3, “Be not hasty to go out of his sight.  Stand not in an evil ting; for he does whatsoever pleases him.”  Now you begin to see here why Solomon is out of fellowship.  Again and again you see it, you can’t help it, you can’t go but three verses in this book and you see that this man is giving you human viewpoint.  When he says, verse 3, “Be not hasty to go out of his sight.  Stand not in an evil thing,” you’d expect him to say, if the man had given an oath to the Lord, because of the oath of the Lord.  In other words, if you disobey the king you’re disobeying the Lord and He is going to discipline you, whether the king finds out about it or not is irrelevant.  The point is, do you live your life as unto the Lord, forgetting whether the king is there or not and to the Lord you will answer.  But he doesn’t say that; he says “be not hasty” because you might get caught.  That’s the point, very modern, very 20th century, something isn’t wrong unless you get caught.  That’s why people don’t like unmarked police cars.  I never could understand why people don’t like unmarked police cars; if I was a policeman I think it would be fun to be in an unmarked car.  You have no worry about a policeman in an unmarked car if you’re not breaking the law.  So people who usually complain about unmarked police cars are people who obviously must be breaking the law because if they weren’t breaking the law they wouldn’t worry about unmarked police cars.

 

So here in verse 3 the same thing, he says keep your nose clean because remember the power of the human king; God isn’t even in the remotest concern here at the moment, it’s just the power of the man.  And I don’t know said this, there was one famous quote in history, probably said many times, but it goes like this: when men lose their fear of God, they gain their fear of men.  And this has always been true in history.   I read to you a series of quotes about the American Puritans and I read them to have you see the historical facts of the case because you don’t get the facts in school.  In school you are taught the Puritans are a bunch of prudes and the Puritans did this, and the word Puritan is a term which is used derogatorily, and yet if you study what the Puritans really believed from their own writings, it’s true they had their idiosyncracies but their enemies said these men were perhaps the toughest men who have ever lived in western civilization.  And that was said by their enemies.   That was said by a man who lived in an age of revolution and faced many of the most strong radicals of his time and yet he could say of the Puritans, these people were tough.  Do you know why they were tough; one simple principle, they were afraid of God and when they are afraid and concerned about what God is going to do, they could care less about what men say to them.  They didn’t care; you could brandish a sword in front of their face and they wouldn’t care because they knew that behind them stood the Lord Jesus Christ.  So this is a historical example of the opposite of Solomon.

 

Verse 5, he goes into more counsel, he says, “Who keeps the commandment shall feel no evil thing; and a wise man’s heart discerns both time and judgment.”  What’s he saying here?  You have to relate verse 5 to verse 9, what’s the point of the whole passage; there’s a time when you can’t do anything about it.  There’s a time when you live under totalitarian dictatorship and it’s that time, there’s nothing can be done about it and a wise man discerns the time.  And the wise makes his plan accordingly.  A wise man sees I can’t do anything about it, this is just the way it is so I’ll play ball for now.  

 

Verse 6 and verse 7 now give four reasons why Solomon says stay with the mainstream, how to act in this situation is go along with the crowd.  That’s Solomon’s counsel, go along with the crowd and he gives you four reasons for doing this.  One, “because to every purpose there is time and judgment,” and the word “purpose” means every business, there’s this purpose behind the universe and you can’t fight it, it’s bigger than you.  This is why he said in 6:10, man can’t fight with him that is mightier than he, and so you can’t fight it so just stay with it.  You can’t fight city hall would be the way we’d put it.  The second part is the second reason, not “therefore,” but “because,” “because the misery of man is great upon him,” and here he says the second reason is that man is continually vexed in his life.  Since the fall of man in history suffering is a normality of life.  And so he says don’t be shocked that this has come about.  When the communists take over the United States or something else happens to the United States and you see the tremendous suffering, people think they suffer now, wait until then and then you’ll see some real suffering.  If that happens and you see the suffering, Solomon’s counsel is don’t be shook about it because that goes on, it has always gone in history, nothing new, there’s nothing new under the sun.  If the communists take over today and people suffer, people get butchered, they line them up and gun them down with a machine gun like they did in China, if they do that don’t worry about it, they’ve done that before and they’ll do it again so don’t be unduly concerned. 

 

Verse 7, third reason, “For he knows not that which shall be,” and the third reasons why he counsels is the people stay in the mainstream and don’t rock the boat, is that you have no control over the future; you can’t know what the future is. And you have to relate this back to verse 1 and the example I pulled out of Daniel. What does an oriental wise man do?  He was known to tell the future, he was known because he could give discernment and yet what Solomon says here, none of them really know the future.  So don’t plan a coup d etat, don’t plan a revolt, don’t plan to change the structure, don’t plan to tear it down because you can’t tell what’s going to come off. 

 

We see an excellent illustration of this; at MIT, one of the last institutions in the east that hasn’t been taken over by radicals they made the mistake years ago, and I saw it coming when I was a student there, of hiring liberal arts people to be on the faculty.  And that was the first mistake they made; MIT used to be a good science and engineering school where you could go and you’d learn nothing but mathematics, physics, science and engineering.  And when it was that it was in its heyday as far as I was concerned.  You could go there and you wouldn’t get any history or anything else because there’s nothing worthwhile learning in history unless you learn it from the divine viewpoint.  So they had no liberal arts people there.  They got some people on the admini­stration of MIT that thought wouldn’t it be nice if the students of MIT were well rounded, and we educated the whole man instead of just educating these idiot engineers.  And MIT has a reputation for that kind of thing but nevertheless the point was that these men were well-educated in their field; now they’re not educated in any field.  But they used to be at least educated in one field.  So we have the liberal arts people in there, we have a few of these ultra-lefties that get on the faculty, and they decide they don’t like it because the MIT instrumentation laboratory makes weapon systems for the department of defense.  And so they stir up all the students, actually about 2% of the student body, but nevertheless, they get 95% of the publicity and now the big thing is that the MIT instrumentation laboratory can’t make any more weapon systems for the government.  And they said oh, isn’t this good.  This is an example of this principle coming up, you can’t tell what’s going to happen because the birds finally came home to roost. 

 

Now what has MIT done?  The instrumentation laboratory was run by Dr. Draper, the man who invented the guidance system for the intercontinental ballistic missile, up to his day the only way of guiding something was to guide it before the projectile left it’s surface launch so that you had your launching system, and like a bullet from a gun, that’s a ballistic missile that is not guided after it leaves the muzzle, so all your guidance in the bullet is accomplished at the initial shot.  The other way of guidance would be by radio or you have a missile in the air and you’re sending a signal to it to change it.  Well, Draper worked out systems where you could launch, like a bullet, a missile toward its target and it would direct itself toward its own target autonomously.  And this is why the intercontinental ballistic missile was such a fantastic thing because the only way you can stop the thing is to actually physically destroy it, because you can’t jam it because it contains its own guidance system in itself.  So he designed this and he had a lot of men working under him and they said bologna, we’re going to go ahead and make all the weapons systems we darn well choose, so they did.  So now what has happened is MIT has lost their great instrumentation laboratory, it is now an independent institution and they are going ahead and making all the weapon systems they want to, and MIT is missing five million dollars a year income from the laboratory.

 

Now watch the birds come home to roost; as you go through the faculty on the college campus you have various departments; you have the biology department, the EE department, CE department, ME department, physics, etc. you have all these different departments plus you fact you have off in a little hole somewhere you have the liberal arts crowd, and now the budget for the whole institute is going to be cut five million dollars a year.  Now guess what departments are going to get the axe.  Our friends over here, they are the ones that are going to get it.  Why are they going to get it?  Because the EE department never has any trouble getting money, the EE department can have all the research equipment it wants to, industry is glad to pour millions of dollars into MIT’s EE lab, no problem there in money, the physic lab, they’re not going to lack money, so who’s going to lack the money? The liberal arts people.  So we say ha-ha to them.

 

And this is what Solomon says in verse 7, “For he knows not what shall be,” in other words, if you start something you’d better be sure where it’s going to wind up. 

 

Then the fourth reason, “because who can tell him when it shall be?” Again prophecy, you may know the future but how are you going to tell when it’s the time to play your hand.  Solomon says you can’t, you don’t have access to this kind of information so don’t try it. 

 

Verse 8, “There is no man that has power over the spirit to retain the spirit,” obvious weaknesses of humanity, you can’t tell your time to die; people are always afraid of airplanes.  What’s the problem here from the standpoint of the Christian?  Well from the standpoint of the Christian when it’s your time to go it’s your time to go, unless you’re actually committing some sin that’s going to shorten your life by the sin unto death, and you are observing the normal behavior pattern of life you don’t have to worry about when God is going to take you home.  If you have a ministry left on this earth, God will keep you here and you don’t have to worry about some airplane disaster; you don’t have to worry about that because all these things are under the sovereign control of the Lord and you can relax.  God will take you home when it’s your time to go. If you’re in the military, God is sovereign and no matter how many bullets come your way those bullets are not random; the bullets are under God’s sovereign control, and you do your job efficiently as unto the Lord.  But Solomon makes the obvious point here, he says as far as the person control it’s true, if you look at without God, verse 8 is looking at death without God’s sovereignty, it’s very scary, because if you don’t have confidence that God is in control and you know you can’t control it, who is in control?  Chance… chance, that’s all, just sheer chance and that’s all you’re left with. 

 

And there is a minor correction in the translation, “there is no discharge  in that war,” literally the word “discharge” means “control,” there’s no control in the din of battle, when all these things are happening there’s no control.  We saw this happen in history in a very pathetic way at one time, for in 70 AD a Roman general by the name of Titus moved in on Jerusalem; his father, General Vespasian had started the assault in 68 AD and he had started to move in and surround the cities around Jerusalem; he had come in closer and he had offered surrender terms to the Jews inside the city, and the Jews made a very fatal mistake.  For as the Roman soldiers marched up to the wall and offered them surrender terms, they got on the wall and they spit on the Roman soldiers.  Well there’s one thing that you never did to a Roman soldier and that was spit on him, because from that moment on Vespasian said all right, I’m going to go in and I’m going to clean these people.  I’m going to see that in Jerusalem every rock is torn down, except one, and Vespasian told his son, Titus, when he took over, for Vespasian later went to Rome to become Emperor, Vespasian told his son, Titus, when you get into that city there’s one thing I want you to save because it’s valuable and we can use it for Rome’s monument, and that is Herod’s temple. 

 

But we know from prophecy that God intended that the temple be destroyed because Jesus in the Gospel of Luke said see those stones there, see them, there’s not going to be one of those stones left upon another until they’ll be destroyed.  And so Titus had it all planned, when they were to infiltrate the city and they gradually breached the walls, the Romans were to move a detachment of men to the temple immediately to keep it from being burned by the zealots.  And they knew that the Jews would try a suicidal move in which they’d try to destroy this temple.  And so the Romans had their forces all deployed that when that breach hit, move in there and get that temple and save it.  So the breach came one day in 70 AD and the Roman soldiers went up to the temple and surrounded quickly, but then, in spite of all the best planning, and still to this day no one knows how it happened, a fire spontaneously began inside the temple that destroyed it.  God said that temple would be destroyed, no matter how many men, no matter how good the Roman military planning was, and remember the Roman military planning was the best in its time, probably the best in history, and still all of their planning went for naught because somehow, something started a fire in the temple and destroyed the temple, it destroyed some of the beams and then the walls caved in, etc.

 

So we see here again there’s no control in the war, but Solomon is not looking at it from the sovereignty of God, He’s looking at it from the standpoint of mere human viewpoint and he says God isn’t in control, man isn’t in control, it’s pure chance.  And given that situation of pure chance it’s stupid for you to stick your neck out.

 

And then he concludes in verse 9, “All this I have seen, and applied my heart unto every good work that is under the sun,” he says this is the result of my experience, my testing of life and this is what I have found, all of history is one big glob of chance and that’s all it is and you are stupid in a situation that involves totalitarianism to fight the system; stay with it.  You say well, that might be a possibility; it might be, but what you had done if you had been at the Nuremberg trial, when, for example, the trial of Adolph Eichmann, and what was Eichmann’s comeback?  This was the will of the Nazi party of the Third Reich, and I went along with it; I have to obey my superiors, my superiors give me the command to annihilate these people, to fry them in the ovens and then take their skins and make lamp shades out of them.  That was the orders of my superiors, to take the gold out of their teeth so we could get gold, all of this.  Those were the orders of my superiors and I go along with them. 

 

Don’t you see, the Nazi’s could have gone along with Solomon, verses 1-9 would have vindicated the Nazi position at the Nuremberg trials.  Verses 1-9 would have vindicated Adolph Eichmann, that’s all he would have had to have said, the commandment of the king is strong, he could have repeated when it says in verse 4, “where the word of a king is,” Hitler, “there is power, and who may say unto him, What do you do?”  Verse 3, “Be not hasty to go out of his” Hitler’s “sight.  Stand not in an evil thing,” and “evil thing” here is something contrary to what say, “for he [Hitler] does whatsoever pleases him.”  And Adolph Eichmann could have said with a smile, I follow this advice.   Truly we come to the paradox at the end of verse 1-9 is that the Nazi’s could have gone along with Solomon’s advice perfectly… perfectly; it’s the perfect vindication and if you were smart you would have gone along with the Nazi’s too, if you were smart following human viewpoint line.

 

But we have another principle and we want to conclude by turning to Colossians 3:1-3.  Here is the counter principle that clears up Solomon’s dilemma, so that if we were a Christian in that situation of Adolph Eichmann we wouldn’t have to go along with the Nazi’s and yet we would be wise as far as the Scripture is concerned.  “If ye, then, be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sits on the right hand of God. [2] Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. [3] For ye are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

 

I want to give you a dilemma now; there’s three possibilities you could have, which of the three would you take?  The first possibility is Solomon, the first possibility is that in that situation you go with the mainstream; putting it in contemporary terms you’d do what Adolph Eichmann did and get smart and be a wise Nazi and adhere the line.  You might not like it personally but you know that this is the time of the Third Reich, this is the time when the Nazi’s have the power, this is the time when you go along with them.  That’s Solomon’s counsel from the book of Ecclesiastes. 

 

There’s a second one given in Colossians 3:1-3 and that is because there is something objective in history, some evidential proof that there are things above, that Christ literally is risen with the Father and I know this by my study of history, this is not just faith in nothing, these are real historical physical facts, doctrine of the physical resurrection, because of the physical resurrection I know Jesus Christ’s body is located somewhere in the universe, and that somewhere is labeled in the Bible the right hand of the Father.  Because Jesus Christ is objectively located there and I have  objective evidence that he’s there, then I have occupation with Christ and then if Christ will’s, as the one who is ruling at the Father’s right hand, now I follow His will in that situation, I follow His will and take the consequences from the human realm and go to jail and get sentenced to the concentration camps and do that kind of thing.  That’s the second way.

 

But then there’s a third ridiculous way that’s being tried in our time.  And it’s this that I want to focus in on the last few moments, and that is the so-called radical.  The radical wants to fight the system, and he would counsel in that situation Adolph Eichmann should have fought the system, but don’t you see, the radical has no reason to fight the system because Solomon’s advice knocks out the radical.  Solomon says you don’t know what’s going to come, you have no control over history and it’s foolish for you to think that you can fight the system; you have no objective base that’s bigger than your own experience and your own experience teaches you what’s the use, what’s the value, you have no value.  Solomon says there’s no value, minus moral values, he doesn’t see any moral absolutes operating in history, experience shows this, there’s no moral absolutes operating so why sweat it.  And so Solomon’s advice knocks this out and the only one you have left is the Christian; the Christian alone in that situation has a reason to right the system. 

 

Do you know what the reason is?  The reason is that Jesus Christ is there, verse 1, “If ye be risen with Christ,” and there’s three classes of “if” in the Greek and this is a first class “if” here, and this means “if and it’s true,” “since you are risen with Christ, then seek those things which are above.”  The Christian has a base; the Christian isn’t hypnotizing himself.  A lot of the radicals say, we’re against the system, we hope something’s going to happen and you say what evidence do you have that something nice will happen?  Well, I don’t have any, they just hope it will happen.  That’s not the Christian, the Christian is I know something is going to happen because I’ve got contacts with eternity, I’ve got a solid base outside and that solid base outside is the fact that Jesus Christ has risen. 

 

You can take these principles that we’ve discovered in Solomon’s day and apply them to any situation of life.  It doesn’t have to be a totalitarian regime, it can be any frustrating situation in your life, whether you go along with it, whether you hopeless flail away at it like the radical who has no reason to do it, or like the Christian, you have the solid base, the assets of God, the promises of God, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.”  You have fantastic promises, “Casting all your care upon Him for He cares for you.”  You have the fact that Jesus Christ is at the Father’s right hand, Hebrews says, making intercession for you.  You have the promises of prayer, if you ask anything in My name I will do it.  You have all of these assets, all of these tools that are not just psychological, this is not self-hypnosis.  This is not psychological, these things are real and they’re beyond just mere inventions of the human mind, human meditations or human thoughts or some system of positive thinking.  This isn’t positive thinking, this is real thinking, thinking about the things that are really there, the risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  With our heads bowed.