Ecclesiastes Lesson 31

Youth and Old Age – 11:7-12:7

Ecclesiastes 11, today we come to the end of Solomon’s message. The rest of the book after verse 8 of chapter 12 is a summary and it reviews, repeats and applies the contents of the entire book. Today we are finishing up, for all practical intents and purposes an exposition of Solomon’s thoughts. Next week we’ll be summarizing the book and applying it as it shifts radically after 12:8. But from 11:7 through 12:7 we have the closing portion of Solomon’s exposition. It began in chapter 2; chapter 1 was the prologue and summary of the book; chapter 2 was a report on the discoveries about the individual life; chapter 3-4 was the second report concerning man’s position in the universe, and chapter 5-7 dealt with human viewpoint proverbs, and the rest of chapter 7 and chapter 11 up to verse 6 dealt with the second set of human viewpoint proverbs.

Now we come to the final end of his exposition and appropriately the topic is death. The top is the end of life and how to live in view of death, certain death. Solomon, throughout this epistle has said again and again that starting from human viewpoint, without benefit of the Word of God, you are left in a dilemma. And as I have said again and again, and will say again and again in other books, you as a believer in Jesus Christ ought to be aware of this because if you are not then you will malign the Word, you will avoid the Word of God in every way you can, and you will have no respect for the Word. You have to understand that if you start out without the Word of God there’s a certain definite cause/effect chain that is set up; ideas have consequences. And human viewpoint means that you’re cut off and left only with your logic and your experience and that is all; you have nothing else, you have minus revelation, no revelation, therefore you are left with only these two, logic and experience and on the basic of logic and experience I challenge you to find any purpose for living. Solomon says you can’t find any purpose for living that is absolute, that is enduring, that would command allegiance of any thinking individual.

And this is why we, in our day, live in such a dilemma in our “Christian America” (quote, end quote) where we, in the past have absorbed Bible doctrines into our community life and our individual life, and yet today we live in a cut flower situation where the root has been destroyed and we are existing on the momentum that was built up 200-300 years ago. That moment is about to go to zero in our generation. We live in a collapsing generation, a generation that despises the Word of God, a generation that has ridiculed and laughed at it; and incidentally a generation therefore that is paying the consequences by God’s judgment upon society. Never think that a society or individuals can get away with it; never, they always reap the consequences and we today are reaping our consequences.

Beginning in 7:11 Solomon now deals with old age and in verse 7-8 he talks about the older person and his delusions. There is always a tendency on the part of elderly people to become sentimental and to lose grasp; they have tired of conflicts throughout life, obviously, and as we saw in Titus, the New Testament and the Old Testament are particularly concerned about the problem of the mental attitude of the elderly person. There’s a loss of militancy, there’s a “give-up-itis,” there’s a tendency of compromise that often creeps into the elderly and therefore the New Testament says be particularly careful of putting old people into administrative positions that demand a militant attitude. Reason: because the tendency is for them to give up and to lose this militancy, it’s not talking about senility, it’s talking about militancy, the idea of adhering to certain principles regardless of the cost. And people, particularly those who have fought out the battles throughout their life become tired, they become exhausted and they tend to toss in the towel and say it’s all over before it is over. So there’s a tendency at the end of life to relax and to sentimentalize, etc. And what Solomon is going to do in verses 7-8 is tear off the mask of sentimentalism off the elderly person.

In verse 7 this person is said to say: “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.” And here the hypnotized elderly person looks back on his life and says all was a bed of roses; everything was wonderful and I’m happy to live and all the rest of it, etc. a very sentimental attitude toward his life. I enjoyed so many things in my life and did this and did that, etc. And the tendency, then, is to misrepresent life and so therefore this elderly person is being looked upon by the younger and in the Bible this is one of the ways in which the young people are educated. They are educated by mimicking their elders. It’s a principle throughout the Word of God. This is why, for example, the Passover feast is set up. The Passover feast is set up so that the father of the family begins to run through the episode and go through all of the sequence of the Passover, and his son will stay by the table as he watches his father do this. And at certain key times that son in the Passover ceremony says to his father, father why are you doing this, what is that for, why are you doing that, and the father then deals with the question his son has. But please notice, the questions his son has are a direct function of reacting to his father’s behavior. In other words, the father sets the model by being the priest of the family in conducting Passover. The son watches his father and then begins to ask. And after the son has asked, then the father teaches. In other words, the main form of teaching was in the home.

Then verse 8, here is where Solomon hits back at this sentimentalistic view of life. He warning the young person, basically, he says don’t listen to these old people that talk about life is sweet and all the rest of it, and life was a bed of roses and it was all great, etc. He says it’s a bunch of malarkey. Verse 8, “But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all,” and here’s the person in verse 7 that’s doing it, he’s living many years and rejoicing, “let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many.” In other words, he’s saying when you hear someone sentimentalizing about life, how great it is and all the rest of it… now he’s talking about things from the human viewpoint, the average human viewpoint operation. He’s saying when you see that happen, and you see a person who is not a believer or a person who’s a rather defeated Christian and he says his life was great and all the rest, don’t you believe it; he’s giving you a story and he says let that person “remember the days of darkness.”

“The days of darkness,” what are they? These are the days of sorrow, of heartache, of frustration, of adversity; these are the trials and the tribulations that that person had in his life. And he says if you really want to be honest, for remember Solomon demands honesty in the face of experience, no glossing over the facts, and he says if you really want an honest picture of life from an elderly person, ask him to also tell you the trials, the pressures, the heartaches, the sorrows and the despair that he had in his life; then you’ll get a true picture of life, but don’t buy this line of verse 7, “truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.” He says that is a sentimental line and if you believe that you’ve only got half the story.

Now it’s very important because Solomon addresses this entire passage on old age not to the elderly; he’s addressing it to the young people because there’s a principle of behavior that the young mimic the old. The young pattern their lives after the elderly; we find this in our Sunday School. We find children of parents who should know better walking into Sunday school without their Bible; we find kids walking into Sunday School that have been out to a party late Saturday night and the kids fall asleep in there, they’re so tired because they were out so late Saturday night. We are operating on the principle of verse 8, that the young pattern their life after the example of their parents, and if their parents could care less about the Word, and it’s very obvious, their children will care less about the Word. So this is how we intend to operate, functioning along these same principles that Solomon is developing.

Now in verse 9 and going through the first part of verse 1 in chapter 12 Solomon makes an exhortation to the young. In these verses Solomon is going to address the young and he is going to tell them certain things to do. He isn’t going to tell them why yet but he’s going to tell them a set of exhortations. Beginning at verse 9 there is a set of imperative mood verbs, “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment. [10] Therefore, remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh; for childhood and youth are vanity. [21}1, “Remember now thy Creator,” these are all exhortations, again based on human viewpoint, based on the fact that there is no ultimate purpose for living, except to get your own pleasure, then it would logically follow that youth would be the best time to enjoy it. In other words, take advantage of the opportunity while it’s facing you.

So in verse 9 he says: “Rejoice, O young man,” and the word “young man” here is a word which means adolescent, it’s the word which has to do with the teenage years, and it means a person who is in his physical prime. In other words, after about 25 or so the physical body deteriorates in its capacity to withstand stress and strain, and so this word refers to that peak of physical development in the young man. “O young man, in thy youth, let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth,” and then he follows it with two imperatives. And these imperatives have to do with a direct contradiction between the Law of Moses and Solomon’s human viewpoint. “Walk in the ways of thine heart,” he says, “and in the sight of thine eyes.”

Turn to Numbers 15:39, here explicitly in the Law of the Old Testament, it is said, referring to the priest, “And it shall be unto your for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD, and do them; that,” notice the purpose clause, “that ye seek not after your own heart, and your own eyes, after which ye used to go a whoring,” or you go into apostasy. And the point of verse 39 is that a person who is on negative volition, or a person who is operating on the basis of human viewpoint because he has no divine viewpoint framework for reference, he has nothing with which to gear his life, to measure it by, if he goes subjectively by his heart he’s going to go into apostasy. That’s what verse 39 says.

Now Solomon says… obviously Solomon has to say go on the basis of your heart, he doesn’t have any sphere of reference, there’s no absolute principle to control the life, and so therefore here in Numbers 15 what Moses is trying to get across is look, if you were left by yourself with no help from the Word of God, if that were really true, then what would happen. You would be left without a standard; and if you were left without a standard the inevitable tendency of man, as we will see tonight, is to go on negative volition. Unless he is constantly clobbered with common grace, unless God’s grace constantly bangs into his life to remind him, our tendency as sinners is to go on negative volition in which case we go into apostasy. And of course men go into apostasy whenever they go thinking human viewpoint. And you will think human viewpoint any time your mind is not controlled with the Word of God. So Moses makes his point here.

Now if you’ll turn back to Solomon, what he’s saying is that young man, who is rejoicing, you have nothing else to go by, except your heart, you have nothing to go except the direction in which you will walk. And so Solomon’s advice conflicts with Moses but please remember the reason it does is that Moses starts out with divine viewpoint, Solomon, for the sake of argument in this book under the Holy Spirit is starting out with human viewpoint. You start out from two different positions you’re going to get two different answers. If I start out my mathematical system with 1 + 1 is 2 and you start out 1 + 1 is 3, we’re going to wind up with some different calculations on down the line. And it’s not because either one of us is wrong, it’s because we started in different places, and so Solomon and Moses are both absolutely consistent to their starting point. Solomon starts in one place, Moses starts in another and so here, what he is left with is to walk subjectively, do what you think is right. In other words, here is relativism all over again.

“And know thou, that for all thee things God will bring thee into judgment.” Now this sounds like, well God is going to judge this person. But again, the rule of interpreting God’s Word is to interpret it in the context in which it was written. So let’s go back and find out every time God judges in this book and see how it’s used. First turn to 2:24, “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. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God. [25] For who can eat, or who can abstain, apart from Him” the original says. [26] “For God gives to a man that is good in His sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy; but to the sinner He gives travail,” in other words, in this connotation Solomon means by judgment that God has designed man to function for his own pleasure and if you do not see this as the summum bonum of existence, from the human viewpoint, God can only be looked upon as bringing man about to enjoy things of the moment, the temporal things of life. And he says if this is really true, then it’s a judgment.

Let’s see this again in 3:13, “that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labor, it is the gift of God.” In other words, God holds a man responsible to enjoy himself, that’s what Solomon says. This is how he has distorted divine judgment. God holds a man responsible to enjoy himself.

In 5:18 we find the same thing that Solomon is doing with this doctrine of judgment in this book. Verse 18-20, “Behold that which I have seen; it is good and comely” or beautiful, “for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labor that he takes under the sun all the days of his life, which God gives him; for it is his portion. [19] Every man also to whom God has given riches and wealth, and has given him power to eat thereof, to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labor, this is the gift of God.” You see, the point that Solomon is making is that God has made man to function in history but the only thing that man finds available, if he’s denied the Word of God, is his own immediate pleasure. If that’s the case then, how stupid not to enjoy yourself. If you’re cut off from the Word of God, you’re ridiculous and idiotic to sit around fretting about something, getting all upset about something, it doesn’t make any difference, your life is going to be over, you might as well enjoy yourself while you’re living and go on living. That’s Solomon’s point. Now to a certain degree, of course, he’s right.

Turn back to chapter 11, verse 10, “Therefore,” don’t cry over spilt milk is what he is saying, “remove sorrow from thy heart; and put away evil from thy flesh;” now if we left it with that we’d say this is a good classical piece of wisdom, certainly this is divine viewpoint, that’s right, “remove sorrow … put away evil,” but then it’s spoiled by the last phrase, “for childhood and youth are vanity.” You see, he always put the spoiler in the text, and that’s always your hint and your clue when you’re moving through this book as to how to interpret it. There are all these clauses that spoil it. It’s like you are reading the book of Proverbs with little injections put in, and this is Solomon’s frustration, “childhood and youth are vanity.”

Well, let’s see what he means by “vanity.” “Vanity” is the Hebrew word habel, you know a man who is named this in the Bible, the second man who was a member of the human race who was born, Abel, you know it in your King James Bible without the “h”. Abel was named for vanity; by the time Eve had this son she recognized that the fall had taken place, and that the inevitable result of the fall, the historic fall in history, was to make human life vanity, that’s all, dissipating, nothing of substance. And the word “vanity” means, in this context, brevity; it means that youth and childhood are over, quickly; you might as well enjoy them while they’re there.

If you turn back to 9:9 you’ll see how this habel has the connotation of brevity, just like a vapor in the air, as James says, and it’s blown and dissipating into the wind. Ecclesiastes 9:9, “Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest,” again, if you stopped there it would sound like good advice, and then it says, “all the days of the life of thy vanity, which He has given thee under the sun, all the days of that vanity; for that is the portion in this life,” “the days of thy vanity.” In other words, days in which you have no solid ground for existence, no solid purpose for life and no enduring reward from life; that’s what vanity means, it’s nothing solid or enduring. Vanity would be better translated in our Bibles by the word “vapor,” by the word “steam” or “clouds.” It just is there and it’s blown, it has kind of an appearance of substance but not real substance that you can get your teeth into.

Turn to Psalm 144:4 you’ll see where this comes out again where habel is specifically used for the brevity of life. “Man is like to vanity; his days are as a shadow that passes away.” Now you may react deep inside against this; as you read these texts of Scripture something within you should say no, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, because you’re a human being and there’s something inside you that says no, life is more than just this thing that we have here. But if you are without the Word of God you have no way of answering that desire. In other words you have an inner desire and that inner desire is to exist forever, to be significant, etc. And there’s not a person sitting in this room that if you were honest with yourself would admit that he does not have this desire, a desire to be significant and have a purpose for life. And only in the Bible do you find an answer to that innermost desire. Solomon says if you leave the Word of God out here, and try to live independently of the Word, you can never, never satisfy that desire.

So then he says in 12:1, the first part, “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,” …remember now thy Creator. Now in context what does this mean. A lot of Christians have gone to verse 1 and said watch, that’s a good gospel invitation, “remember thy Creator,” when if they studied the context carefully nothing could be further from the truth. “Remember thy Creator” means to remember thy created design, remember how God set you up in history to just be absent from Him, not know anything solid about your life, have no absolute truth, but just to kind of float along. Remember the fact that you’re a floater; remember the fact that life is a vanity, that’s how God made you, remembering all these things, then live out your youth, remembering this. How do you respond to this, well live it up while you’re young would be the obvious deduction from this text.

But in the word “Creator” we have one of those hidden [can’t understand word] words in the Bible that point to something. These are little hidden slips that I don’t believe Solomon was conscious of this when he did it, but the Holy Spirit so worked around Solomon when he was enscripturating this text that when he went to spell “Creator” he slipped, and made it a plural. And so in the original Hebrew the word “Creator” here is plural. “Remember now thy Creators in the day of your youth,” now why is this. This is because in the Old Testament God was not looked upon as a solitary lone individual that existed off in cloud 99 somewhere all by Himself. God was looked upon in the Old Testament as One, but within that oneness there was a diversity of personality. We would say the Trinity; the Trinity is present in the Old Testament. The Trinity is present in the very word for God which is Elohim, and “im” in Hebrew means plural. And it means that although on the surface they were worshiping one God, they recognized that you cannot have solitary personality. There’s no such thing as solitary personality. When God created Adam what did He say after He created Adam? He said “it is not good that man be alone.” And so He made a woman and he’s never been alone since. The duality here, the fact that there’s more than one person shows and proves that personality is multiple, it can never exist alone.

This is why people who do not believe in the Trinity, in the end in history, have always wound up denying a personal relationship with God. This is why in Islam, in heaven you can enjoy yourself in the material areas but you never, never, never actually get into a personal relationship with God. Never! Why? Because God doesn’t basically have a personal relationship to get into. You lose personality and the only way you can keep a personal God is to have multiplicity within the Godhead and this is why in the New Testament the doctrine of the Trinity is such a profound thing, and why Christians are so hasty to chuck it overboard and they fail to realize that they’re going to lose everything; they’re going to lose the entire personality of God, and in the end if they’ve lost that they’ve lost their own personality. So this is a very crucial doctrine, and this is one of the places in the Old Testament where it’s there in kind of a hidden form, it’s not explicitly stated, but it’s there in a hidden form.

Now some people would say well, look, what that really means is the plural of majesty, and this is the way it’s usually explained in liberal circles; what this is is a plural of majesty. In other words, God is so great that they speak of Him as plural. Now this is a circular argument because you ask them why do you believe that it’s a plural of majesty, and they say because everywhere it’s plural it’s talking about God, and God is majestic so it’s a plural of majesty. But my point is it can also be a latent form of the Trinity. The proof that it is and it is not a plural of majesty, it is not a grammatical accident, but it’s a true prophetic fore view of a revelation of the Trinity in all its fullness, turn to Genesis 1 for just a moment.

Genesis 1, and you’ll see here that this is not a plural of majesty. Maybe to help clarify in your minds the liberal argument against the Bible at this point, if you can think of the editorial “we,” for example if you’re writing, oftentimes in formal areas, you’ll say “we say” such and such. And you don’t mean “we say” because there’s only one person, you. But instead of saying “I say,” you say “we say,” the editorial we. You change the grammatical number to fit the situation, and that’s what they say the Old Testament is doing when they refer to God as “God speaks” it’s plural. But it’s very interesting in Gen. 1:26, after it says “God,” and it’s God in plurality, Elohim, then it says, “Let us” plural “make man in our” plural “image, after our” plural “likeness.” In other words, here in Genesis 1:26 as well as other passages you have not only the word, the noun form plural, but you have the verb form plural, and that proves certainly that the noun is not one of these ambiguous plurals some place. This shows definitely that in their mind there was more than one in the Godhead. They couldn’t understand it yet, they weren’t clear on it yet, but they knew there was more than just bare lone solitary personality in God. There’s no such thing as solitary personality.

One of the conclusions of this, incidentally, is the doctrine of love. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just and God is love. If God was all alone for all eternity, who was the object of His love? And this is also why in Islam God doesn’t have an attribute of love, He can’t because He’s solitary personality. And these all hang together logically, when you see that a loving God must have multiple personality so He can love, He has to have an object for His love. And if you say that He has an object for His love in creation then you’ve got a finite object for infinite love and infinite love can never be satisfied with a finite object. So therefore you’ve got a tremendous problem to say that God is one in personality. God is multiple in personality, He’s three; three in personality, one in essence.

Let’s go back to Ecclesiastes, we just wanted to take you out on a little exposition of the word “Creator” to show you that even in these so-called “boring” passages of the Word of God you have sparkling gems of tremendous truths that occur in the text. You just have to be sensitive to these little points. “Remember now thy Creators in the days of thy youth,” now he enters a long dirge, and beginning at the end of verse 1, continuing on through verse 7 we have a cycle in the text. And he divides the text like this: in verses 1b and 2 he speaks of life; in verses 3-5 he speaks of death. In verses 6 he speaks of life, and in verse 7 he speaks of death. Life and death, life an death it’s a monotonous dirge that he sets up and if you read it in the original it’s there in a very emotional way. Solomon gets emotional at certain points in this book and here the very fact of the decay and the sorrow and the heartache of death bears in upon him and he reacts against this, and you can almost sense the man is in tears at this point; life and death, life and death, life and death, and notice how, for example, he balances the text. Only one and a half verses with life and then he’s got four verses to death; life and death, and he ends on death.

So let’s look at this outline, verse 1b and 2, “while the evil days come not, nor the years draw near when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; [2] While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, and while the clouds dissipate [return] after the rain.” The word “return” is translated “return” because obviously the translator didn’t know meteorology; the words “cloud return” here doesn’t mean return after the rain, that wouldn’t make sense. The first of verse 2 means work while you’ve got the opportunity, in other words, the sun is still light, there is light, the moon and the stars are there, have opportunity. It wouldn’t make much sense to say “while the clouds return after the rain,” while it’s cloudy. You know there’s something wrong with the translation just by the fact it doesn’t fit in the parallelism of the proverb. So the verb “return” if you look at it in a concordance and check it out, is used when the clouds dissipate, or they return to their normal status after a thunderstorm.

For example, you have a cumulus cloud, it starts building up and gradually becomes a cumulus nimbus, after the cumulus nimbus sets up then the top breaks off like this and then it goes back to a small cloud, and that’s what he means the “clouds return after the rain.” They return to their original form. And while it’s not raining, while it’s still light, work, take advantage, and this becomes therefore the teaching, to take advantage of the opportunity while its there.

Now let’s back up a verse, and go up to the last part of verse 1, “while the evil days come not, nor the years draw near when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.” In other words, take advantage of your life now before you get old. And I want you to notice that in verse 1 we have a very clear indicator of what evil means to Solomon. Beware of reading your Bible as though the same word has the same meaning in all points of Scripture. That’s not true. If you are a sensitive student of God’s Word, you will try your hardest to understand how the individual authors are using the vocabulary.

And when we come to Solomon and we see evil, our tendency is to say oh, Solomon means by evil just like Moses meant. But Solomon has a different connotation to evil that Moses. It’s not just breaking the Law to Solomon; it’s much different than that. To Solomon evil means things that you do not enjoy. Good means the pleasurable; evil means the non-pleasurable things. And here you have a clear cut case. “While the evil days,” there’s one side of your parallelism, see, “the evil days have not yet come,” “nor the years draw nigh when you shall say, I have no pleasure in them,” in other words, the evil days or the evil years are those years in which you can’t enjoy yourself. So “evil” means no enjoyment. And that’s what Solomon means, and this is why throughout this epistle you’ve got to watch it that you don’t start reading in moral meanings to these words, “good” and “evil” here. Solomon has changed the meaning because he started off… the whole premise of this book is these are the thing “under the sun.” In other words, as though we live in a room with a ceiling, we don’t go higher than the ceiling, we just live “under the sun” Solomon says. If this is true, and we only live “under the sun” then this is all we’ve got; we don’t have any morality, we don’t have any absolute rights and wrongs, all we have is pleasure or no pleasure. And so here is no pleasure or life, or the conclusion of life in old age.

So in verses 1b and 2 is an exhortation to life, take advantage of the opportunity while you can.

Now, here begins his famous dirge, verses 3-7; this is cited in literature all over the world as one of the great summaries in classical literature of old age. It is an area that you’ll see quoted many times in reading, etc. So now you’ll be an educated person, next time you’ll say why, I know that came from the book of Ecclesiastes, and probably somebody that don’t even know what the book of Ecclesiastes is, probably will think it’s Volume X of the Encyclopedia Britannica or something.

Verse 3, “In the day,” here’s the death now, “In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease,” now what kind of an illustration is this? What kind of an illustration is “the keepers of the house?” You have to catch this illustration; this is how it’s set up. He’s thinking of an estate, a country estate; he’s thinking of a mansion, just imagine in your minds a country estate with servants, with employees on this estate, and you have this great wealthy estate, but it’s deteriorating, perhaps the owner of that estate has died and his property is falling into disrepair. Now he’s using this as an illustration of life. He’s using one illustration to illustrate something else. So “in the says when the keepers of the house shall tremble,” the “keepers” are the men who used to guard these estates, the guards. There was no police force, no department of public safety or something and they had to have their own guards. And in ancient Israel they had these men that would guard the estate. So they were the “keepers.” “…the keepers of the house shall tremble,” it means these men are old, it means they are no longer secure, and it means that the ones that do the house, that keep it up, the maintenance as well as police protection, all these people are getting old, the estate is deteriorating.

Now in the ancient Jewish commentaries on Ecclesiastes these keepers were taken over to refer to not just to the estate but they were taken to refer to the arms and the legs of a person. And it refers to the fact that when a person gets to old age, “the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves,” and this refers to the arms and the legs, in other words, decreasing facility use of the body, “and the grinders cease because they are few,” the “grinders” is a word which was used for the female slaves in the ancient world and we have some pictures in my office of these slaves, they would take a long flat rock and this rock would be worn down so it was kind of like a bowl shape, and then on top of this rectangular rock, from the top it looked like a rectangle, they would take a roller and you’ll see pictures in the archeological [can’t understand words] at the library you can get pictures of the ancient near east and you’ll see pictures of these, the women rolling, by the hour they’d roll on this grain, crushing it on this thing. And these are called the “grinders” and this is how grain was ground in the early days of the Bible. And they’d hire these female slaves by the hundreds to do all the grinding, all by hand. “…and the grinders cease” in this rich country estate, and this came to mean a picture of peace.

So the ancient Talmudic rabbis, who would comment on this passage would say these grinders refer to the teeth of the person, as the person gets older he loses his teeth. “The grinders shall cease” means the teeth decay and drop out. Incidentally, an interesting archeological note, it’s been recently found that in ancient Egypt they drilled and filled teeth. They found some of these mummified Pharaohs and they broke open the mummy and sure enough, the guy had fillings in his teeth. So it shows that even back two millennia before Christ they knew how to drill teeth and had a very advanced form of medicine. There’s no such thing as ancient primitive civilizations as evolutionists teach. So here we have the grinders cease, these are the teeth. [“and those that look out of the windows are darkened.”]

Verse 4, “And the doors shall be shut in the street,” now what’s the street? The street is a forum and here we have the fact that this estate must be located in kind of a semi-urban situation, so you have a large forum in the city. These forums were sometimes a quarter mile wide, and it would be like kind of having… some of the towns in Texas have a country courthouse in the middle. Well, they wouldn’t have anything in the middle, they’d just have an open market and they’d have these estates built around the open market. And the more wealthy people would live right on the open market, and they’d have their home back here, and the front of their estate would border on this forum. And at the front of their estate they’d have places where they’d sell off the produce from their farms, and so their house and their estate, bordering on the forum, would act as a storefront also, so that they would sell.

Now the illustration is that “the doors shall be shut to the forum,” in other words, there’s no communication with the outside world, a person that gets old tends to become isolated. There’s no commerce, no exchange going on, no production. “…when the sound of the grinding is low,” now this refers back to the grinders of verse 3, and incidentally at the end of verse 3, “those that look out of the windows” is a beautiful commentary on women in the ancient world. Women in the ancient world, for the benefit of some of you women who are with all of the deal with women’s rights and so on, you ought to remember where you got your rights from; the men didn’t give them to you, Jesus Christ did. Jesus Christ historically was the One who gave women their rights.

In the ancient world those who looked out of the windows were the wives and the women, they were not allowed out and so they had to stay in the house most of the time. Well, women are curious, they always have been, and of course the fastest way to get to a woman is through her sense of curiosity. Satan realized that and that’s how he pulled one off on Eve. See, hey, maybe God’s slipped one over on you Eve, so he stimulated her curiosity and got right to her, and so similarly women have always been curious. So women in the ancient world always used to look out the windows. Well, the men got kind of hacked at this and so when they built their homes they didn’t want other men looking at their wives, so what they did was they boarded up the windows with lattice work; it looked something like this, and in other ancient places it looked something like a jail, they had horizontal bars going across. And they’d have all sorts of decorations on this, but the women were curious to peak out, and so throughout the Bible we have various humorous references to these women peaking out through the lattice work. See, they always want to know what’s going on out there. So they’ll talk to someone, hey, find out what so and so is doing, etc. They had this and the women used to gather as a group before these windows and peak out.

For a humorous illustration of this turn to Judges 5:28, you’ll get some background in Bible life. Here’s a curious woman looking out through her window. And that’s why the “lookers through the windows” were actually the women in the ancient world. In Judges 5:28 we have a man by the name of Sisera; Sisera was one of the Gentiles who made things rough for Israel, and he was kind of a mama’s boy, he was a spoiled brat, and of course Israel took care of him after a while, but he couldn’t go anywhere without his mama. He had to have mama along and he had to report in everything he did to mama, and so she got a little shook up because he’s dead in verse 27 and she doesn’t know it. “The mother of Sisera looked out through a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of his chariots? [29] Her wise ladies answered her, yea, she returned answer to herself,” and so on. There you have one of the situations where she is not able, here is a woman who was a very wealthy woman, a woman of very high estate and yet she can’t go out, she stays inside and must look through the lattice work. So you feel cooped up ladies, with your housework. Just think of the poor ladies in the Bible.

Ecclesiastes 12, see husbands I’ve just given you some ammunition. Ecclesiastes 12:4, And the doors are shut in the forum; when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird,” now this means that his extent of hearing, he can’t sleep well, and the least little noise disturbs him, but then it’s followed, “and all the daughters of music shall be brought low,” that means made indistinct. And so here is a man who as he gets older, on one hand he doesn’t sleep well at night, he’s always waking up, and they didn’t have sleeping pills in those days and so every time some bird would get up early in the morning everybody would get up, including these old people that couldn’t sleep. But, although his hearing was acute when he was sleeping, the problem was that it wasn’t acute enough to distinguish frequencies of sound and so when it says “the daughters of music shall be brought low,” it’s referring to the fact that his hearing becomes of low quality. So all he knows is there’s a sound there, and he can no longer distinguish the different notes, it becomes indistinguishable.

Verse 5, “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high,” this is a phobia of heights, “and fear shall be in the way,” the word “fear” here means despair or dismay, and it means the fact that the normal activities of life the older person finds frustrating. Here’s an older person who just to labor to get their meals is a frustration now; everything is a frustration. Before when they were younger they could go through life and take it; now as they get older everything becomes a frustration. “…and the almond tree shall flourish,” the almond tree was a tree used in the ancient near east and it blossomed white before all the trees would, and it became a symbol in the Talmudic interpretations of wisdom literature for white hair, “the almond tree shall flourish,” it refers to white hair, “and the grasshopper shall be a burden,” now the grasshopper was a way in which they would facetiously refer to light weight, in other words, evidently in the idiom, as near as we can tell from the Scripture, they must have had an idiom in that day, we say it’s light as a feather, they’d have light as a grasshopper. So that was their idiom.

So Solomon says well, even that grasshopper shall be a heavy burden, in other words, general weakness and debilitation of the body. “…and desire shall fail; because the man goes,” now here is a future participle and it’s the kind of participle that means he’s about to go. Here is a picture of a man who is just about to die and the funeral arrangements are all made; Solomon creates an ironic picture. Here’s this man suffering from all the problems of old age and it’s as though the funeral director is kind of knocking on the door, when are you going to kick off so I can get my deal, etc. In other words, everybody is waiting for this guy to drop dead. And so he says he is about to “go to his eternal home, and the mourners are already going about the streets. And the word “mourners” here are the professional mourners that families hired. Instead of a procession of Cadillac’s down the street with their headlights on these people had these mourners and they’d go mourning around for so many days. If you wanted mourning for five days, fine, sign a contract, and these professional crybabies would go up and down the streets for five days. And talk about crocodile tears, they were paid to cry. I often think this is a great profession and we should have about 20% of some Christians go into this profession of being professional crybabies, then they could cry and get paid for it. Think of that. These were these mourners that went around the streets and these were the paid funeral attendants.

Verse 6, now he snaps back to life again, “While the silver cord is not loosed,” there’s a negative prefix to verse 6, “or ever,” it’s not clearly translated as such but you have to understand these verbs are negative. “While the silver cord is not loosed, or the golden bowl is not broken, or the pitcher is not broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern,” and now Solomon has a view of the well, and the well… wells didn’t look like ours, they had some rocks piled on them like this, here’s the ground, and deep down this well would go and they would have various ways of getting the water up. Some ways they had were through wheels, great long wheels with little buckets on them, and what would happen is that they would have the water manually lifted from the well up into a pan, a reservoir or a reservoir pan up like this, the water would be manually raised to this point, and then they’d have long sluices that were used to irrigate their fields, and these wheels were pedaled by slaves, they had something like a bicycle chain and these slaves would sit here and pedal this thing and make these wheels go and that’s how they lifted the water up into their sluices to distribute it across the fields. They didn’t have pumps in those days, they had human beings that served as the pump. But he says in verse 6, “the silver cord,” that’s the thing that the bucket is tied to, it’s broken, “the golden bowl,” the thing that lifts the water up, “is broken, the pitcher is broken at the fountain,” the pitcher are these little cups on the wheel; and finally, “the wheel broken at the cistern.” The whole mechanism for generating water, for bringing water, which is necessary to life, is done.

And then ironically he quotes Genesis 3:19. Verse 7, you see, is the dust, see how cleverly this is woven together. The fountain is destroyed, water is gone and the land turns to dust. That’s the picture; with the water gone the land turns to dust, and he has a beautiful illustration between water and life and dust and death. As the life goes death comes; as the water goes the land is dusty, and he says man goes back to the dust. A terrific picture. [7, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God, who gave it.”]

Now let’s turn over to the New Testament to give the New Testament answer to Solomon’s dilemma. Solomon has concluded on the vain note of death and he said that everything tends toward death and decay. In the New Testament, in John 11:43 we have one solution to death, the resuscitation solution of Lazarus, not resurrection, Lazarus was not resurrected in John 11. Resurrection means I have my resurrection body minus my old sin nature plus my rewards, etc. all these things happen, particularly resurrection body. Resurrection body can’t die, it’s eternal and so we have immortality; our bodies are not immortal, the resurrection body is immortal. But in John 11:43 Jesus deals with Solomon’s problem, death. And in verse 43, “And when He thus had spoken, He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth.” Remember this man had been dead for a number of days. [44] And he that was dead came forth bound hand and foot with graveclothes; and his face was bound about with a cloth. Jesus said unto them, Loose him, and let him go.” And from this point on you never read again about Lazarus except he had a time in chapter 12 and that’s all. Why? Because the emphasis in the New Testament is not on this miracle of raising the dead; it does no good to raise the dead; Jesus did it here to prove a point but Jesus didn’t go and empty all the cemeteries when He was conducting His ministry. Why didn’t He? That’s not the solution; resuscitation is not the solution. I often think some people at funerals would pay lots of money to have someone resuscitated; now it’s ridiculous. Resuscitation never solves your problem because resuscitation means that you will die again.

The permanent solution to death and a solution which adopts Solomon’s very analogy of the fountain of water is John 7:37. It’s ironic but Jesus almost appears to have this in mind, although He may not have; the way He sets Himself up in John 7 to teach eternal life through water is a direct analog in reverse to Solomon. Solomon taught us death through loss of water, the breaking of the fountain, and the turning of the land back to dust. And Jesus teaches the contrary. In John 7:37 Jesus is at the Feast of the Tabernacles. Now we’re going to have to go into some background here to appreciate verses 37-39 but let’s read those three verses first: “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried,” an the word here is yell out loud, “Jesus stood and yelled, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. [38] He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his stomach [heart]” or innermost being, “shall flow rivers of living water. [39] (But this spoke He of the Holy Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because jess was not yet glorified.)” At that the Holy Spirit had not yet come, it was not yet Pentecost.

But what Jesus is doing here at the Feast of Tabernacles is He is performing a most astounding confrontation with the clergy of His time. The Feast of Tabernacles we now know had a daily water drawing, this has just been found in examining ancient Jewish writings. In fact, it’s clarified the whole problem of John 8, chapter 8 you remember is a chapter in John’s Gospel, it doesn’t always occur in this place, and people have wondered whether it fits, but we now considered it all together because of the research that’s been done. The Feast of Tabernacles, it was the following ceremony that was performed each day in Jerusalem. All the Jews would come to the Feast of Tabernacles, what would happen is that every night they’d have a party that would go into the early morning hours. This is why in John 8 the woman caught in adultery is brought by the men, that is a result of that party. You notice in John 8 the woman is brought in the morning, and Jesus says to them, “He who is without sin cast the first stone at this woman.” Now Jesus isn’t saying don’t judge people. What He’s saying there is that you men, I know where you were last night and you were doing the same thing so if you think that you have the right to condemn this woman for adultery suppose we have a trial for you all and see how you make it. That’s what Jesus is talking about, “He that is without sin cast the first stone.” In other words, you guys that were at the party last night, you cast the first stone.

So they had a party and it all started in the evening which was the beginning of the Jewish day and they’d have this big long blast that would go into the early morning hours, but two people always were assigned to stay out of the party. In other words, everybody could drink it up and booze it up all they wanted to, but there were two men that were always picked that could not touch a drop of liquor all that night, and these were the two priests. Two priests would stand up on a high parapet, overlooking the inner temple where all this crowd was gathered and having a blast all during the night and these two priests would stand up on that parapet overlooking the crowd and the job of these two men was to spot the time of the first crowing of the cock. And this, by the way, has repercussions later in the Gospel of John about Peter, why it is said the cock crow three times, and so on.

But these two men were to signal when the merry-making was to cease. They were to ring the gong when the first light of sun was to rise and they would sound great trumpets over this foyer where these parties were going on, everybody was half stoned out of their mind, etc. yet these priests were able to stop it. They blew their horns early in the morning and the crowed got together in a long line, they assembled up in a long line and began a procession. The two priests would carry between them a large golden vial and they would carry this golden vial and behind them would be strung out all these people. The vial would be empty, this golden bowl rather, and they would go down to the pool of Siloam and at that pool these two priests would dip this golden flask down, fill it with water, put it up and reverse, do an about face in this crowd, the same crowd that followed them down to the poor of Siloam would come back to the temple, again behind the priests but they would have the water.

Then they would take the water and do a strange thing. Turn to Isaiah 55:1, they would chant this verse, as they came with this great vial and the crowds behind them, they would take this long golden bowl and they’d take it over the temple and walk up into the holy place and they’d take the water and they’d throw it down on the stone floor, and it was reputed to be in the temple of Herod a great pit that the water would go down, they believed into the depths and the bowels of the earth, down to the center of the earth, and these priests would take this water and pour it over and it would cascade down over all these stone altars that they had in that particular temple and gradually seep down into the floor, and as they’d do this the crowd would stand around and they’d start chanting, “Ho! Every one that thirsts, come ye to the waters; he that has no money, come ye, buy and eat. Come ye, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” And you see, they had just been partying the previous night, they had to have wine, they had to have food for the party. To that party you had to buy things but to this party with the water, “Come,” it’s free, and this party you wouldn’t have to buy your food, you didn’t have to buy your drink, you didn’t have to do this, salvation is grace, salvation is free, and you don’t have to get it by buying your way in.

And so the party in the morning was a refutation of the party in the evening; in the party in the evening everybody had to buy their wine, they had to come with their food, now they chant as the priests drop this water which symbolizes everlasting life, and they’d pour it down in the… and they’d say, Ho! Everyone that thirsts, come to the waters; he that has no money, come and buy,” and you think of this whole crowd chanting this. And then, out from the crowd steps a man who says, Come to me for I am the One who can give you the water.

Now put that remark in that context and you see why Jesus Christ could not have been anything except what He claimed to be or a nut. Imagine, thousands of people chanting this, “Come ye to the waters, come and drink,” and Jesus says “come unto Me and drink.” And He yells it right in front of the whole crowd, right in the middle of this ceremony. Now do you see how the remark of Jesus takes on full force. And it wasn’t just given to a Sunday School class out in the middle of the temple some morning in quietness. It was done in the midst of tremendous rabble among a tremendous crowd, and their tremendous singing and chanting of Isaiah 55:1 over and over, and then suddenly, He must have shouted so loud that thousands of people in the middle of that ceremony suddenly stopped and they heard Him.

Turn back to John 7, and you see the reaction. Now the reaction is understandable, why the people reacted like they did. Verse 40, “Many of the people, therefore, when they heard this saying, said, Of a truth this is the Prophet.” In other words, the whole conversation in the middle of that crowd, they were chanting at one moment Isaiah 55:1, Come ye to the waters, come ye to the waters, and Jesus gets up and shouts and screams to the crowd, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” And after He shouts that, suddenly the conversation in the crowd shifts, no longer are they chanting Isaiah 55:1, He’s turned them into a mob that debates. And from John 7:40 on and following you find the whole crowd suddenly is broken up, the religious ceremony has been dissipated. And now they start fighting among themselves, who is this Jesus, who is this guy, who does He think He is [can’t understand word] up this thing, is this man a prophet or isn’t He, He’s some guy from Galilee. You can just see the crowd, the whole religious ceremony came to a screaming halt.

Now that is the effect that Jesus Christ had in His day. And why Jesus Christ wasn’t some little sweet man that walked around patting everybody on the head. Wherever Jesus Christ was there was controversy and He didn’t do it out of civil disobedience. Jesus Christ preached Himself, and He preached Himself in such a way that you could only come to one or two conclusions: this man was blaspheming by identifying himself with the waters of eternal life that could only come from Jehovah, or He was the Messiah; that’s the only choice. With our heads bowed….