Ecclesiastes Lesson 3
6-15-97
We want to review just a little bit. If you’re like most people you don’t get things the first time around, I don’t get things the first time around, second time around, third time around and God has a method of His teaching throughout the Word of repetition. This morning I want to repeat a few things in the review because as we go to the passage we’re about to go to this morning, it behooves us to be careful about how we use words and the meanings behind those words. This is not an easy book to go through, it’s kind of difficult. So I don’t want to give false impressions; this is a book that is very easy to falsely interpret and get the wrong idea from.
First in our review is to review what wisdom is. Remember that in the Old Testament there are three parts to the Old Testament canon, The Law, The Prophets and The Writings. All the books in The Writings are wisdom books of some sort, what we know as the Psalms, the Proverbs, books such as Daniel, as 1 and 2 Chronicles are all classified by the Bible as wisdom, not prophecy, not the Torah. And there’s a reason for that and here’s what it is. What is wisdom? Wisdom is skill in living in this mortal life. It’s being “street smart” in God’s creation. Wisdom is in the Scripture to make it balance. In other words, God tells us about Himself, He tells us about His great works, He tells us about how He created the universe, how He redeemed us, and those are all big ideas. The problem comes when I apply those ideas as to how I raise my children, how do I prioritize my family budget, how do I make career choices, how do I cope with adversity. When I get into those kinds of details I need more than the sentence “God created the world.” That’s good to start with but that’s not enough. And that’s why we have wisdom in the Scriptures; wisdom takes those big ideas that are pounded into us throughout history and says here’s what it means in this detail, this detail, this detail and that detail; that’s the role of wisdom.
Wisdom presupposes a structure and I want to review that structure because if we don’t remember this as we get into the end of chapter 2 and the beginning of chapter 3 we’ll surely lose it. So in your bulletin you’ll see some diagrams that I put there because I want to review a little bit about what these wisdom books assume. God, when He spoke through different authors of Scripture, He can’t put everything in every book so He distributes the truth. And it behooves us, particularly us because most of us, if you’re like me, you came to know the Lord and you were raised in a typical church and in that typical church you probably heard 90% New Testament and 10% Old Testament. That’s because the Old Testament is quite demanding in its background to understand and there’s a lot of it. But the Old Testament is necessary. I put it this way; we often become Christians backwards forwards. We become Christians reading the New Testament and then we go back to the Old Testament. If we had come out of a more Jewish Biblical tradition we would have started with the Old Testament and come to the New Testament.
There are two ideas that we want to review about the basis of wisdom. One of them is that top diagram, the fact is that throughout Ecclesiastes, remember this is the book that modern skeptics say proves modern skepticism. They say here’s a man who lost his faith, here’s a man who is a pessimist, here’s a man who is like the 20th century existentialist writers, here is a person who doesn’t believe there’s any purpose, rhyme or reason to life and so everything is an irrational, skeptical cynical dead-beat world view. That’s not true; that’s misreading this book. Solomon never gives up this fundamental belief, the Creator/creature distinction.
And I want to make clear a little bit more about what we mean by the Creator/creature distinction. To think Biblically this is the starting point of all thought, whether I’m talking about math, whether I’m talking about science, whether I’m talking about literature, whether I’m talking about marriage, whether I’m talking about any area of life, we start with the Creator/creature distinction. That’s always implicit, that’s always the ground rule; never given up, and this is why we can say that outside of the Bible everything else is pagan. Now I know when some people hear the word “pagan” it kind of makes you angry or frustrated or you think it’s name calling. It’s really not, look it up in the dictionary, a pagan is somebody who does not believe in the Biblical God, usually defined to be not of the Judeo-Christian, Muslim tradition. Everything else outside of that tradition is classified as pagan. Why is that? There’s a reason, there’s a technical reason. Pagans do not accept this, that’s the difference. Biblical thought says that there are two levels of reality, the God of the Bible and the creature. Now I’ve indicated four contrasts, four parallels in that diagram. There’s four attributes I’ve listed, there are hundreds you could say of God, and I’ve listed in small lower case four attributes of man. I’ve deliberately set four against four so that you can notice that these attributes correspond. It’s the correspondence between what you are like and what I am like in our souls that makes possible for us to have fellowship and communion with God. It also leads to frustration and it’s the frustration of having these four things about our soul that Ecclesiastes is talking about.
Let’s look at those four attributes of God first: sovereignty, holiness, love, and omniscience. The first one, the fact that God is sovereign, this means that God is in control of the universe. And that’s hard for a modern person to understand, that at the helm of all the molecules, electrons, protons, neutrons, all the atomic structures, all the cosmic processes, black holes, white holes, galaxies or whatever, God, a personal God of the kind you can talk to is at the steering wheel. He is at the helm of the universe. He orders every molecule at every point in every time frame. So that’s what we mean by sovereign; God is the hyper cause of all things.
Second, God is holy and we could go into a big long thing about that, we’ll just summarize it, He has integrity, He is the source of righteousness and justice. All integrity comes from God.
Third, God is a God of love. He “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” that was an external manifestation of His love. Now when we say that God is love we also want to distinguish that from human love. The difference between His love and our love is that He can love perfectly because He’s perfectly secure. You and I cannot love until we are secure and we only love relative to our security. If you are insecure, if you’re doubtful, if you’re fearful, you’re not going to love. It’s very simple, and the reason is that you can’t; it’s psychologically impossible to love when you’re in fear. This is what 1 John is talking about. And the reason is that when we’re fearful and when you’re under the pile and you’re faced with a total uncertainty and you have that fear gripping your heart your first and only concern at that point is your self-protection, the exact opposite of love, self-defense, not giving somebody else is the issue at that point. Well, God never gets Himself in that situation. God can be outside of the universe, outside of the flow of time, not trapped in circumstances and therefore He has perfect love.
He is also, and this is important for chapter 3 that we’re going to see this morning, God is omniscient, which means that He has through perfectly everything… everything! Every detail, every event in your life, every event in everybody’s life fits into a pattern that He has through. There are no random elements in God’s mind; everything is 100% rational, therefore He is the source of all thought and language.
Now if you go down and look at the corresponding elements inside us; we experience something every day in our lives called choice. And it’s but a finite analogy to what He experiences in His sovereignty. Our choices are very limited and Solomon is going to deal with those limitations on human choice.
Our conscience is a faint mirror of His holiness. We learn as we grow in wisdom what is right and what is wrong; we don’t always learn, we aren’t always accurate. Conscience is not infallible; conscience is not the source of righteousness, it’s the receiver of righteousness. It’s the one who is like a gyro or a compass, it’s set in motion but it’d better be set right initially.
Love, human love is a faint, finite limited analog of God’s love.
And our knowledge, our knowledge even of God is but a faint knowledge of His knowledge. We could spend hours and hours developing this Creator/creature distinction; we obviously are not going to do it but that’s in the background of Solomon and in a nutshell what you have in that first level of thought, that Creator/creature distinction is this, and you’ve all heard this before but I’m going to come at it with a new word just to make people think a little bit.
The Bible says we are made in God’s image. We’ve heard that since we’ve been new Christians. If you’re a non-Christian, you’re well read and well-educated you know that that’s the Christian tradition, that man is made in God’s image. What happens is we tend to reverse that; we have God over here, we have man here with his finiteness and then we like to in our arrogance project over here and say well, all those thoughts of God are just anthropomorphisms, that is they are just things that correspond to us and so subtly the moment that we do that we make man the measure of all things and then we measure God by our standards. So I have coined a new word, not new to me but I use this word to get the point across about what the Bible is saying: man is a theomorph. It’s not that God is anthropomorphic, man is theomorphic. Man is made in God’s image; it doesn’t say God is made in man’s image. It goes the other way; so we are theomorphs; we have a pattern to our souls, to our lives that mirrors God.
Now the second idea and one we want to look at carefully on that diagram; you’ll notice where I’ve defined three different ways you can look at life and Solomon is going to use one of these three ways, not three of the three. So the book of Ecclesiastes is going to look at life in only one sense, so let’s define our vocabulary. The first two points we see its potentially immortal, that goes from Genesis 1 to Genesis 3. That’s the time period in history when Adam and Eve could have lived forever, they had been created they had been given the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and had they reached out, the Bible says, and touched that something would have happened to them. They would have been immortalized.
So at that point they are potentially immortal but not actually immortal. They did not know death; this is the offense of Scripture, this is what the Scriptures say, you can say its mythological, it’s a fairy story, but we can’t say the Bible doesn’t say it; the Bible says that man was created without death, without sickness, without sorrow, there’s no need for medicine in the Garden of Eden. Medicine is like policemen, there was no need for it. The reason we have medical help and police help and all the rest of it is because of the fall but potentially immortalized needs none of those kinds of wisdom. This is a perfect environment in which man fell. It’s also the answer to the argument that you hear all the time that all we need to do is put man in the perfect environment and everything will be fine. The counterpoint to that thought is man was in a perfect environment and he screwed up, so perfect environment doesn’t solve problems, never has, never will. And that’s the answer to the political utopias that are always promised. All we have to do is fix this, fix that and everything will be fine. Bologna!
Now we go from Genesis 3 to the end of the Scripture and this is the life, this is what we experience as mortal life; that’s what we know, life with death, with sorrow, with pain. This second type of life is what Ecclesiastes defines, so if you’ll draw two lines down from those points I want to show you something. Those brackets, the boundaries of mortal life, now that and that alone is what, apart from God’s grace, a person who is spiritually blinded, this is how he defines life and that’s the only thing he knows; he knows nothing of category one life because he doesn’t accept the truthfulness of that report of history. So potential immortal life is out of the question, it doesn’t exist, never has, and so forth.
The third kind of life beyond here is the resurrection and that is the Lord Jesus Christ is the first one to experience that life, no one else has and then of course comes the rapture of the Church and the Second Advent and the end of history and then we have immortal life. Those ideas are given by the Apostle Paul in 1 Cor. 15. So now we have three kinds of life. Immortal life means everything is fixed, there is a horror to immortal life and here it is. There’s a blessedness but there’s a horror because once we are immortalized we can never change sides. Let’s go back to Genesis and we’ll see this for a moment. God was very gracious to Adam and Eve when He kicked them out of the Garden. In Genesis 3, a little passage in verse 24, the last verse of chapter 3. An emergency had occurred in the Garden of Eden. We now have man in disobedience, man who has spiritually died. But he hasn’t physically died, so he has this spiritual problem but not a physical problem yet. He’s beginning to die, and in verse 24 it says, “The LORD God drove out the man and He placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubs and a flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life.”
Man is excluded from the Garden at that point. And that means God was protecting him from becoming heir of immortal life by eating that tree. Had the horror ever occurred that Adam and Eve reached out and ate of that tree while they were sinners, they would have forever been unsaveable. Once people are immortalized… that’s why Jesus is saying there’s a resurrection of life and there’s a resurrection of death and once that happens you can’t shift from one side to the other; there’s no repentance in other words, there’s no salvation, there’s no grace, it’s all over. So then, to the right of this bracket, this is something the world knows nothing of apart from what they consider to be just a rumor that Jesus rose from the dead, we don’t consider it to be a rumor that Jesus rose from the dead but it’s one of the most significant aspects of history. We have proof, the resurrection isn’t an idea, it’s something if you had a video camera in the city of Jerusalem on the third day you could have video-camed this event, that’s what we mean by a real physical resurrection. Jesus Christ is the first man who ever experienced this. He experienced this and He continues to experience it at the Father’s right hand.
So from category one life which is not believed to category three life which is not believed, unbelievers and non-Christian and those who are outside the Biblical pail live in this category two existence. And Ecclesiastes is addressed to that existence. On the bottom of this diagram that’s why I have grace and sorrow; this category two life is characterized, number one by God’s grace because God could have judged Adam and Eve right then, completely. But He kept them alive. Why did He keep them alive? Because 2 Peter says, not wanting any, but all should come to repentance. So there’s a gracious period in history open to belief in Jesus Christ and in the Old Testament the pre-Christian view of salvation.
So we have this mortal period bracketed and sustained by grace. The problem is that grace has another side to it and that is if God in His grace perpetuates the condition then we have the condition perpetuated which means sorrow and pain and death. How often have you said this, and I know we all have had this point, when something bad happens you say well why did God let this happen and if God were really a loving God He would have stopped this. He would stop war, He would stop sickness, He would stop death. Think about what you are saying. You are asking God to terminate history and immortalize everybody. Suppose He did that; where is the day of salvation. It’s excluded. So the cry to end evil is wrapped up with a cry for judgment and that’s why every time we recite the Lord’s prayer, people don’t notice this but think about what you’re saying when you say the Lord’s prayer, that “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That is the prayer, “Thy kingdom come,” it’s a prayer for the end of evil and sorrow in history, but the prayer says that “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” So that’s a prayer for immortalization.
If that’s the background for wisdom, we want to go to point two in our review and that is Solomon and remember who Solomon was. He was the smartest man who ever lived apart from special cases like Paul and the Lord Jesus Christ, for Jesus said “one that is greater than Solomon is here.” But Solomon did an experiment; we studied that last week, verses 12-18, in which he reports back on his life. Solomon received a sentence; remember he built the kingdom of his father, he had watched his father David conquer, his father was a military genius, a battle-proven king, and David was called in the Bible a bloody man. David had the principle that we have, or used to have in this country, where there is no substitute for military victory. No substitute, you cannot have freedom unless you have military victory or the resolve to use victory to attain that freedom. David carried out those military campaigns and secured the kingdom. He gave it to his son, Solomon. Solomon prayed that he would become a genius, a Leonardo DaVinci, and he was.
We studied how Solomon was a botanist, he was a psychologist, he was a psychiatrist, he was a student of zoology, he was a student of every area of life, an expert in every area. He was a commercial genius; he had two fleets, a Mediterranean fleet to go to the west; he had the southern fleet in the Gulf of Elat where he could trade to the west. He built up a tremendous treasury for the land of gold and silver; he financed this massive kingdom structure. His name means peace, he is the kingdom of peace, as his father had been the heir of the kingdom of war. All could have come about that the kingdom of God could have flourished but we know that Solomon compromised; he compromised the Creator/creature distinction, he cut the heart out of the presupposition of Biblical faith and God said to him, through a prophet, the kingdom is going to be removed from you and it was.
So Solomon, early in Ecclesiastes, if you turn to Ecclesiastes 1 we’ll go to the verse where he announces his own doom. He submits to the sentence of God and in verse 12 he says, “I, the Preacher, had been,” past tense, “king over Israel in Jerusalem.” He looks now upon his life as over; everything he worked for, everything he worked for is gone down the drain. God said I’m going to remove the kingdom from you and so here’s a man old in life and he could become a very bitter man because he had seen everything that he worked for… it’d be like a businessman who had developed this whole business, put his heart and soul in his business and then all of a sudden the whole thing goes down the drain. Everything he’s worked for is gone. And he’s shattered.
So he looks back and he says now I’m going to make a report and I said last week that what Solomon does here is he pulls another version of what Samson pulled. These men, they got to the end of their lives, God said your life is over, like Moses, you can’t go in the land, Samson messed around and got his eyes punched out and then there came that famous evening when they paraded Samson inside the temple of Dagon with both of his eyes knocked out and he whispered to the boy, the guard next to him, he says put my arm around this pillar and the boy unintentionally thought that Solomon was apparently just holding himself up. And Solomon prayed that fantastic prayer in the book of Judges, Oh God, empower me one more time that I can take vengeance upon my enemies and with that he pulled the temple down, destroyed himself in a mass suicide and killed three thousand men, women and children. That was the end of the Dagon cult and it was the start of a war between the Jews and the Canaanites.
Well Solomon does the same thing except it’s not war; it’s in the area of ideas. The book of Ecclesiastes totally takes apart number two life; Solomon is going to say I’m going to look at this in the most thorough way that any man has ever looked at life before and the most thorough way any man will ever look at life and when I get done with my memoirs there will be no excuse for any person on earth, any member of the human race, to deify and give themselves to the details of life. I am going to expose the details of life for what they are. He’s not going to say life isn’t worth living; he’s going to say that life isn’t all there is, number two life apart from God.
That led to his first investigation which is point 3 of our review and that is he explored the issue of pleasure. Solomon had enough wealth that he could have farms, he could have land in verse 4-7 of chapter 2, notice the list of everything he did, all of his projects. He was an architect, he designed pools, pools which the Turks replaced in 1917, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cubic yards of water stored in these massive pools, they are still with us. He had all kinds of trees. Verse 7 he had his parties, verse 8 he had a lot of men, he had men singers, women singers, he could put on a party, according to the Queen of Sheba when she sat there and she watched this party go on she grew faint in her heart. And here is a woman who probably was out of the royalty of Egypt, who had seen the biggest palace blowout in the ancient world and when she came to see what Solomon put on she was absolutely snowed out of her mind, you can read the report of it in 1 Kings.
So Solomon did everything, but his conclusion to that section, verses 1-11 was that the pleasure… he wasn’t denying that there wasn’t pleasure in number two type life, he’s simply saying it never lasted. He says I’m an old man and I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t sustain me to know what a great Saturday night party I had in my palace, that’s not going to sustain me. And as we grow in the Christian life you will realize more and more that it’s going to be only your knowledge of God that sustains you. When someone has to face a cancer crisis it isn’t because they went out and had fun times; those are fond memories, but that’s not the kind of thing that gets you through. You can’t use those things, those are wonderful things of life but don’t overuse them. And that’s the argument of Ecclesiastes.
Today we’re going to begin the second part of the book, 2:18-6:9, that’s basically all to do with some aspects of labor in this category two life. Obviously with only a few Sundays we’re not going to be able to go through all of this verse by verse so my method is to choose sections. You already know this is investigation three and if you’re observant I’ve only covered investigation one so what about investigation two. Sorry folks, that got skipped. So what we’re going to do is look at pieces of investigation number three into labor. We’re going to start in 2:18 and the first section goes from 2:18-26, the end of chapter two. This is the first excerpt and the summary thought of this section deals with death; it deals with the fact that life cannot be carried into eternity. And it’s a solemn critique, it’s something that Solomon says I’ve learned personally and if you don’t learn this you’re wasting your time because you’re going to over invest in things that don’t count.
Notice in verse 18 he uses the terminology, “I hated all my labor which I had taken under the sun, because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.” Let’s look first at the phrase “under the sun.” Those of you who study the Bible seriously, remember one of your techniques for reading the Scriptures carefully is always look for repetitious words and phrases. Now if you observe what do you see in verse 11? You see “under the sun.” What do you see in verse 17? You see “under the sun.” What do you see in verse 18? You see “under the sun.” What do we see in verse 19, in verse 20, “under the sun.” What do we see in verse 22? “Under the sun.” Do you think he’s making a point? In other words, that’s defining what life it is he’s looking at, life here and now “under the sun” which God in Genesis 3 said in the sweat of your brow under that sun you will struggle to work, produce out of the earth as it rebels against you because you rebelled against me. So it’s that life, the life “under the sun.”
And in particular in verse 18 he has a thought that comes to his mind and he’s dealing with a father/son issue. He says, “because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me. [19] Who knows whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? Yet shall he have rule over all my labor wherein I have labored, and wherein I have shown myself wise under the sun. This is hevel” and we defined hevel, means temporal-ness, non-lasting. Well, who was this man that he’s talking about in verse 18-19? Turn to 1 Kings 11:11 for some background and we’ll see who this man was and we’ll explore what a father and a son did in history.
The Davidic family is a very interesting family to study. First we have David and he managed to get a few wives and one of them was Bathsheba, which he committed adultery with before he married her and later Bathsheba had Solomon. But David had other sons and Solomon had to fight those guys and was selected by the prophets to be king. He inherited the dynasty from all the other boys that were born into David’s house. So Solomon had, shall we say, a dysfunctional family, to use modern terms. And he grew up in this dysfunctional home and he survived the dysfunctional home, went on to become a great king and then the Lord knows how many children he had but he had 700 women and 300 concubines so he had quite a choice.
In 1 Kings 11:11 God says “I’m going to rend the kingdom from you and I’m going to give it to your servant, [12] Nevertheless, I will not do it for your father’s sake,” the Davidic Covenant, “but I will rend it out of the hand of your son.” Solomon knew this; he knew that his son was going to face disaster in his time. He realized there’s no way that kingdom is going to go out of my son’s hands without either a war or some sort of national calamity. The Davidic dynasty is going to collapse in my son’s generation. And he’s lamenting in Ecclesiastes, he doesn’t even know whether his son is up to it or not. And that’s the way with all parents, you get so guilty because if your child does something. Think of [Timothy] McVey’s parents, they’re sitting there in the courtroom watching their son who just blasted a hundred and some odd people into eternity, and I am sure that his parents are sitting there wondering to themselves what happened, what could we have done that was different. And every parent faces this and you take the guilt on yourself.
Well sometimes we are to blame as parents but sometimes we’re not and in this time what’s going to happen here is going to be all of God, God is going to choose this but it’s going to be very, very painful for Solomon to live through this. Fortunately he’s going to die before most of it happens.
Turn to 1 Kings 12:1, now we read about his son. This is one of the low points of the history of Israel. “Rehoboam went to Shechem, [for all Israel had come to Shechem to make him king]” and this is after his father died, and they were going to have a big coronation ceremony, a coronation. We’ve never seen one because we don’t have pageantry and majesty in our country but if you’re old enough you may remember when Queen Elizabeth was coronated in England and they had it on television and it was this massive and pompous celebration. Well, “Rehoboam went to Shechem, for all Israel had come to Shechem to make him king [2] And it came to pass when Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who was yet in Egypt heard of it, [3] they sent him and called him.”
Now Jeroboam is going to become the arch-antagonist of Rehoboam. Jeroboam was a guy who fled during his father’s reign and now he’s come back to get revenge. He’s already been told by a prophet that I will give you ten, possibly eleven of the tribes of Israel, now you just play ball with me and that amount of the kingdom will be yours. So Jeroboam says it’s payday and he comes for a little visit. And he gets with all the tribes and stirs them up into discord and he presents a little platform. Verse 4, and they come and they give Rehoboam an ultimatum as he is to accept the crown, “Thy father made our yoke grievous; now, therefore, make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter and we will serve you.”
Verse 4 describes the result of centralized power. One of the great political documents that’s in the Scripture, never of course covered in social studies classes because it might interfere with the separation of church and state, we have to be careful there, we can have condoms but we can’t have the Word of God. So in verse 4 the point is they are referring to political results of centralized power and the document that shows you that this was going to happen that should be read by everybody, at least every American ought to read this, just for our own general education, is 1 Samuel 8. That is a classic Biblical statement against centralized power. It predicts every centralized government has always done the same thing that Samuel says in 1 Samuel 8; that’s the wisdom of God. And verse 4 shows you what happens, tax, tax, tax, tax, tax, loss of freedom, this is always the corollary and people are fed up with it in verse 4 and they give an ultimatum to Rehoboam. Verse 5, “And he said unto them, Depart from me for three days,” and I’ll come to you.
Verse 6, “And King Rehoboam…” now here’s where Rehoboam became an idiot; it three days this man just blew it, he lost everything his father spent his entire life building. This clown ruins it in 72 hours; amazing! So the man who comes after Solomon turned out to be an idiot. “King Rehoboam consulted with the old men who stood before Solomon,” these are the men who had the smarts, “his father, while ye yet lived, and said, How do you advise that I may answer this people? [7] And they spoke unto him, saying, If you will be a servant unto this people this day,” notice the preface, “if you will be a servant,” now what’s that mean? That you will obey what God said the king is, the order for the king in Israel is given Deuteronomy 17, a whole passage there about what he’s supposed to do. “…if you will be a servant unto the people, and will serve them, and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be thy servants forever. [8] But he forsook the counsel of the old men, which they had given him, and consulted with the young men who were grown up with him,” now this is classic politics.
You have some young leader, some guy that’s hot on the polls, and he comes into office and he brings his cronies with him, which you can say okay, that’s fine, he trusts these people, he’s worked with them. And he brings these guys in but what happens? They lack understanding of the past. This is happening to corporations in America right now, kick out all the old men, get them to retire early so we can be as stupid as possible in all our corporate knowledge, and then we can make all the mistakes all over again. This is why, for example, the United States doesn’t have a weather satellite; we went through an era in this country when four or five years ago the United States of America had no weather satellite. Satellites we had made from 1960, they’d made satellites all the time, some of them up in the air, and all of a sudden we couldn’t make a satellite and I was sitting at a conference in Washington one time and I said, for crying out loud, how many years is it going to be, we’ve already asked the French to move their [can’t understand word] satellite west across the Atlantic so we can watch the hurricanes, we’ve asked the Japanese if they would please loan us another satellite so we can watch California, we’re borrowing from the French and the Japanese so we can’t make a satellite, I said what’s going on. He said it’s very simple, the guys that made the satellite got early retirement so they’re not around; nobody knows how to make satellites. So we’ve got 25 year old engineers and they’re learning all the lessons these guys learned 30 years ago, except now it’s costing more. So after five to six billion dollar cost over-runs we started getting satellites again because we had to pay for the learning curve of all these young guys.
So here we go again, verse 7, he’s not going to pay attention to any of the older men and in verse 9 he comes up with this, this is a ripper, talk abut public relations. “And he said unto them, what counsel do you give me.” Verse 10, “And the young men who were grown up with him, spoke unto him, saying, Thus shalt thou speak unto the people,” here’s what you’re going to say to the people, “Thy father made our yoke heavy, but thou make it lighter unto thus; thus you will say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins. [11] And, now, whereas my father did lay on you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke; my father has chastened you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.” And the “scorpion” there is the whip that had wire in it so every time you’d hit somebody it tears off skin. And that’s their answer to the situation so obviously there’s a rebellion that occurs, there’s civil war that starts and never ends for the rest of the Old Testament. This is the split between the northern and southern kingdom and we know it, if you read your Bibles, from this point on two words, Israel and Judah, and they do not mean the same thing. Israel are all the tribes that split, Judah is the tribe that was left. And that was the beginning, it happened in 930 BC, that civil war and it went on and it went on and thousands and thousands of people died. And finally in verse 19 the summary of that war is given, “So Israel rebelled against the house of David unto this day.”
Now back to Ecclesiastes and with that background read verse 18-19. Here he is toward the end of his life and he has this son; probably he’s already seen the crowd his son is hanging out with and has a pretty good idea where they’re going to take the nation. That’s why in verse 19 he says, “Who knows whether my son,” the man who is going to sit on the throne after me, “shall be a wise man or a fool” and whichever way it is he’s going to inherit everything that I’ve poured my life into, I have to turn it over to him, and it’s his to take it or lose is.
There’s some principles here that we want to understand of wisdom. The only thing that lasts in our lives is what God ordains to last. You can have all the insurance policies, all the trusts you want to design, all of the legal conniving to save your business, and it will go right down the drain, watch it happen. There is nothing that you can leave on this earth to your children that you can be positively certain of; nothing! And here’s your archetype example, Solomon. This is what James says when he says your life is a vapor that passes away.
The second principle: the courts call this, and they have a term for it, this has come up again and again in litigation in America, schools that Christians sacrificially gave millions to, the equivalent dollars, Harvard, you can go on the Harvard campus and you can see, and I still remember it because many times I used to go to Harvard when I was getting trained at MIT, you’d see it right there in the building, of all the things quoted, John 8:32, “know the truth and the truth will make you free.” People don’t know how to read the Bible up at Harvard, let alone quote a verse out of it. But do you know why that verse is on that building? Because Christians sacrificially gave their money to Harvard University years ago to train men in theology to teach in the Massachusetts Bay colonies. And then Yale, and then Princeton, Princeton was a bastion of Presbyterian conservatism in the 19th century and later it was taken over at the beginning of this century and there was the famous liberal/modernist/fundamentalist controversy, it came out of Princeton, another institution, sacrificially supported by Christians, many of whom didn’t have a lot of money, they gave their money as to the Lord to this institution, and it went down the drain.
Well the lawyers have a term for this; it’s called “the dead hand doesn’t rule.” The dead hand doesn’t rule, in other words, regardless of what the originators or endowers of any group says it’s up to a contemporary court to determine the intent of that document and that means it’s up for grabs: the dead hand does not rule. Jesus advised, “lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt.” Same principle.
Now in verse 20 Solomon goes on to say, “Therefore I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labor,” now that can be misread so I want to be careful here, when he says “I cause my heart to despair” he’s not talking about what existentialism is talking about. He’s not saying that the universe has no purpose and I’m going to commit suicide, so to speak; that’s NOT what he’s saying. What he is saying in verse 20 is I am trained now, now that I see the transitoriness of life I direct my thinking, I revamp how I look at life, and I am not going to load the details of my life with eternal [can’t understand word]. I will live my life as unto the Lord but my kingdom is not going to be eternal, my Mediterranean fleet, my southern fleet are not going to survive forever and I’m going to have a new perspective on the details of my life. Said another way, I’ve learned a lesson; you can’t take it with you. That’s what he’s talking about. And in that context he says in verse 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,” and that shows you he’s not in despair, I saw this “from the hand of God.” God wants us to recognize the transitoriness of life, James again says your life is a vapor; if you have a plan you should say if the Lord wills we will do this or that, if the Lord doesn’t will we will do this or that. It’s called humility, humbling yourselves under the mighty hand of God. So the maxim in verse 24 is not sinful; the maximum in verse 24 is not anti-biblical, it’s not like John Paul Sartre’s literature, that’s wrong; what it’s reading is put life in its perspective.
We now come to a larger question. Solomon, if it’s true that death has this cutting across, what do you do with the rest of the details of life. I said we have a teacher that handed out a survey to her students in the high school; 103 kids age 14-18. If we plot their answers to the questions that she found, one of the questions was: identify the three most important things to you. These are kids that are raised in a “Christian culture,” (quote-unquote), and some of these answers are find. But here’s the top three: the most important thing in this survey, family, 33% of them family was first; friends, 20%; money, 12%, and God of course down lower. By the way, it’s interesting, for every girl that said the most important thing was her boyfriend there were 2½ boys that said the most important thing was his girlfriend, that’s kind of interesting, gender difference. So after we see these things these are the things that are most important. But let’s look at this in light of what we’ve just learned in Ecclesiastes. Let’s do some application.
Three common things everybody would without thought say those three things are important, no problem. It’s not that they are evil, but if they are of the ultimate importance, now you set yourself up for something. If you’re going to make those three things the most important things in your life, you’ve got a built in vulnerability and something’s going to happen and you’ll become a very bitter and disillusioned person because you just put all your eggs in a basket and somebody is going to drop it. Now an interesting question that was included on this survey was two other questions, follow up questions to the first one. Here’s one question: what single event in you life so far has had the most significant impact upon you. Second question is: what historical event in the entire range of known time do you think was the most important or significant.
So I went through all the responses and I wanted to see what happened. And sure enough, here’s what they said were the most important; here’s what they caused them the most, shall we say revelation, things that cut across their lives. By far, and of course age bracket, 14-18, most of them wouldn’t see their parents die so that wasn’t an experience of most of the young people, but who in their family would they see die if they were this age? Grandparents. And so the number one thing, the most significant event in their lives was the death of one or both grandparents. That was interesting. And what does that answer to? The fragility of the family. Your family means everything to you but your grandparents are dying. Is that important? Yes it is important because that shows you hevel, it is the word from which we’re studying the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon says yes, that’s what life is all about, it ends in death, look at it; therefore you can’t load your family with your total trust, effort and devotion, it’s got to be something higher than your family.
What was something else that these kids said? The second one, a comment on our society today, the most traumatic and most important thing in your life, what do you suppose it was? Divorce of my parents. Divorce doesn’t affect kids, that’s not what the kids are saying. And the third, war and the fear of it. This is kids in our county, 103, good sample. Do you notice a correlation between the most important event and where they’re putting their trust? What they’re learning between ages 14 and 18 is exactly what we’re talking about here, category two life, mortal life. As their grandparents die, and there’s nothing, probably as traumatic as sitting there watching a corpse, I can’t stand funeral viewings, sit there and watch somebody’s body; it never impressed me because number one, it they’re a Christian they’re not there anyway. I never forget my own father’s funeral, we sat there and he was a Christian, I didn’t know whether my mother was or not, my mother sat there and fell all apart and wanted to know where my father was and I said well, he’d been going to this particular church for some 35 years and you don’t know where he is? Now’s the time to apply a little something here, we’re in the middle of a crisis and we’re worried about where he is. What happened to all our faith? What happened to all our teaching here? Not that you shouldn’t be grieving, obviously there’s grieving but when you get into the place where grieving becomes hysterics and people fall apart, it shows you something. It’s pretty sad spiritually.
So Solomon goes, in chapter 3, and we’re going to go though this quickly, we’re going to go through the second excerpt, this is an enlargement of the first one. And it’s this thing where probably one of the most profound passages in all of God’s Word. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Now if you’ve got a modern translation you’ve noticed that in the modern translations verses 2-8 have been translated correctly as poetry. What you may not notice, however, is that this particular poetry has a certain structure to it; each verses, let’s just see one verse, notice, look at verse 2 just to see the principle, a is to b as a prime is to b prime; look at the structure there in verse 2 because we come to a translation problem in a moment. “There is a time to be born, and a time to die;” a is being born, a time to die; “a time to plant, and a time to puck up that which is planted.” Do you see the parallelism? How many verses are there here? There’s seven and inside each seven there are two pairs of antonyms. What he is saying is this poem of seven elements covers all of life and he’s going to sample things, “a time to be born and a time to die,” that’s animal life; “a time to plant and a time to pluck up” that’s plant life. So verse 2 describes the cycle of life and death in the area of physical life.
Verse 3, “A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down” or destroy, “and a time to build up.” There he’s talking about what men do and what men build, that’s the men’s rule, man’s rule in verse 3. Verse 4, “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” There’s the parallel, that’s the psychology, the range of emotions of the human soul faced with life. Verse 5 presents a translation problem, “A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.” If you’ve been watching the structure you’ve got a problem here because it doesn’t seem to follow, and here we come across the same thing we came across in chapter 2. Unfortunately for Christian decorum the Hebrew text in the Bible is quite the language that communicates and it’s not afraid of communicating different things on different metaphors. We know what the parallelism is in verse 5 because the verb “to embrace” is used in the Song of Songs for making love. So now what are the stones? The stones are a metaphor of making love. So verse 5 is talking about the idea of making love and not making love.
Verse 6, “A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away. [7] A time to rend [tear], and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak” here’s another translation problem in verse 7. Why you have sewing in verse 7, part a b, and keep silence and speaking in the second part of that verse. If our structure is correct we’ve got to find the parallelism there and it doesn’t strike you. Well, “a time to rend” is a time to tear, and a time to sew up the tear. This appears, we can’t be dogmatic here but this appears to refer to Jewish funeral customs. In a time of grief what do the prophets do in the Old Testament? They rend their clothes, and after the mourning period is finished, obviously they sew their clothes back together again, so that makes sense because it parallels.
Verse 7, the last part of it, a time to keep quiet. You know when people are in deep sorrow, and I’m sure the pastor and elders have had this, when people are so deeply grieving over a loss you can’t come flitting in and quote John 3:16 to them. This is really not what they need there; what they need is just the presence of somebody, don’t even say anything, just the presence, a time to shut your mouth and a time to open, that’s what he’s saying, a time to go to the funeral and a time to forget the funeral. Verse 8, international relations and personal relations, “A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
Now the conclusion; in these last verses of this section, running down to the end of verse 15 Solomon is going to state one of the greatest principles in the Word of God. It is this principle that goes back to the diagram on the back of the bulletin; this is the reason why we as Christians must trust the Bible as our ultimate authority. Watch the logic.
Verses 9-10, “What profit has he that works in that wherein he labors? [10] I have seen the travail, which God has given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.” And God has given it; God has given number two category life. Why? So that we understand him. And then he says in verse 11 that statement that has been used in songs, “He has made everything fitting,” not beautiful, the power of the vocabulary there means it fits into his plan. God has made everything fit into His plan. And then he says “He has also set” the King James puts “world,” I think your modern translation write it as eternity, “He has set eternity in their heart,” the Hebrew word means the idea of seeing something and you can’t see the end of it. So it’s a big horizon, you see over the horizon. “He has put this ability in our hearts,” and then this paradox; the paradox of verse 11, look at it, it’s a purpose clause. One thing, he says He’s made everything fit, but then He has put in our hearts a sense of eternity, “but so that no man can find the work that God makes from the beginning to the end.”
Turn to the bulletin just for a moment and let me show you what he’s getting at there. If you draw a line between God’s omniscience and man’s knowledge you’ll see one has something, the other doesn’t. In omniscience God has 100% rational, everything fits, everything fits together, there are no random events. If a baby suffers a horrible disease we get angry at God for this. Why do we get angry? What’s in us? Conscience, we have a sense that there must be a righteousness here, it’s being violated by this thing and our heart cries out about that. That’s our conscience working. The problem is, we don’t know what the detail is in this baby’s life that led to that and that’s the frustration, isn’t it. You get into a disaster or you get into some horrible thing; you have this sense, even a non-Christian has a sense… do you know how we know that everybody at bottom knows very well that there’s a plan behind everything? Who gets cursed when something goes wrong? What’s the epitaph always? Who gets the blame when something goes wrong? Well, if He gets the blame and He’s cursed, what does that imply? That I really believe that He’s behind it and there’s a plan. So stop this I don’t believe God exists… what do you [can’t understand word] every time something goes wrong? Sure you believe God exists, you’re just sleeping, that’s all, haven’t woken up. God exists and He has this plan and you’re angry, and we get angry that we can’t figure it out. Human knowledge cannot comprehend His knowledge and that’s the tension. And that’s what Solomon says in verse 11, “no man can find the work that God makes from beginning to end.” Verse 12, “I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life,” and he goes on to describe this.
Now in conclusion, what do we do as Christians? Why does it say that God has done this? What is he driving at? Turn to Romans 8; we can just peak ever so briefly and just take a look at how the New Testament responds to this. There’s a little verse in here that describes something. What we have looked at, the door that Solomon has opened to us is God’s incomprehensibility. No matter who we are we cannot peer inside of His heart and know everything He knows. If we could we would be God and we have to take our place as creatures. In the military one of the first things you learn is to salute and say “yes sir,” and “no excuse, sir.” Some sergeant doesn’t want to hear a litany of why you couldn’t shine your shoes yesterday. He doesn’t want to hear five excuses why that bed isn’t made up. All he wants to hear is that you assume responsibility and so you say “yes sir, no excuse sir.” That’s the way it is, and that’s what God wants. That’s called humility, the creature before the Creator.
In Romans 8:26, an astounding verse, as you go on rocking along in the Christian life, the Holy Spirit is constantly praying about you, about me, about everyone of us, and I want you to look at one little word in verses 26-27, “the Spirit helps our infirmities, we know not what we should pray for as we ought,” the details of our sanctification are so complicated we can’t sit there and figure it all out. “We know not what we should pray for, but the Spirit Himself constantly makes intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered,” and look at verse 17, “He searches the heart and knows what is the mind of the Spirit because He makes intercession according to the will of God.” In other words, the perfect plan of God guards our life and we don’t even know about it. We know this issue and that issue, but for every one issue we know about how God’s working in our life there are probably 108 other ones buried down here, we’re just walking on like people half awake. And all the time the Holy Spirit is praying, pray for this, pray for this, pray for this, praying for this, I’m praying that this happens, I’m praying that that happens, I’m praying for protection over here, I’m praying for protection over there, I’m praying for this and praying for that, thousands of prayers being prayed all the time by the Holy Spirit and we think that our prayers are the main movers in our Christian growth. No. Why? Because we are finite, we are limited; we cannot know the work of God from the beginning to the end.
With our heads bowed…