Ecclesiastes Lesson 4

6-22-97

This morning we come to the fourth part in our series on a portion of the wisdom literature of the Bible. I want to remind us that as we approach this kind of literature that there are certain styles, certain ways the Holy Spirit expresses Himself in wisdom literature that are a bit different than He does with other kinds of literature. One of the ways, which we’ll see and we’ve already seen it a lot but I want to emphasize it this morning, one of the tools that is used in wisdom literature is the rhetorical question. Wisdom literature largely ministers to our heart indirectly; narrative literature in the Bible ministers to our heart in a direct way. Truth is mentioned, truth is clear, truth is forthright and directly presented. But in wisdom literature truth comes in the back door and the style of wisdom literature you can understand a little bit, maybe, from the story Nathan once told David.

King David had committed adultery and then had murdered the husband of the woman he had a relationship with and he was going to be confronted, but as sinners so often are, we’re not in a hearing mode, we’re in a transmitting mode and therefore we’re not ready to hear. So the prophet, Nathan, was guided by the Holy Spirit to tell David a little story. And he said David, there was once a rich man who had many, many sheep and there was a poor man who had only one sheep, and this one sheep became the pet of the family, he ate out of the same bowls that the family did, he was treated by this man as his own daughter, very close bonded pet. And there came a traveler to the rich man’s house, and the traveler had to be fed and so the rich man, instead of sacrificing any of the lambs of his flock, took and he killed the lamb, the pet of this one poor man that worked for him. And David became so incensed as a result of this that he pounded the table and he said that that man should pay four-fold. And then Nathan announced, David, you’re the man and you’ve just uttered your own sentence. And David paid four-fold and that’s the book of 2 Samuel, the last part of it.

Well, that was the way of wisdom, that is how the prophet used a wisdom approach in a human situation to get the truth in by an indirect way. Many of you remember from childhood the story, many of Aesop’s Fables, and one of them is called The Emperor Has No Clothes. And it’s a story that is very parallel to the book of Ecclesiastes because in this fairy story the Emperor has no clothes and he goes on a big parade and everybody stands there in the parade, not willing to say anything that this guy has no clothes on, except this one child, who blurts out that the Emperor has no clothes. The parallel to the book of Ecclesiastes is this is exactly Solomon’s approach to the system of the world, the cosmos. This is a critique, saying that anybody who is foolish enough to build your life on just this life, just the present life, from birth to death, this mortal life, if you’re that foolish to ground your foundation and build your entire hopes and aspirations and dedicate your life to goals that are contained just inside this mortal life you are like the Emperor who has no clothes. And it’s an unmasking of the world system.

I want to review briefly three principles before we continue our exposition of the text. One of those principles we covered last time in great detail and I want to just review it once more because there’s going to be a passage that we’ll run across today where this becomes important to know. We’re talking about the Creator/creature distinction and we want to see that as human beings we’re made in God’s image. And that means that you in your heart, I in mine, everyone, believer or unbeliever have certain traits and characteristics. It doesn’t make any difference whether you go into Africa, into Mexico, it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re going to see Eskimos, it doesn’t matter; every son of Adam and daughter of Eve have these traits because in the last analysis we are not evolutionary products. We are not apes who have given up bananas; we are people who are uniquely created in God’s image. Therefore we share with God certain analogous traits. God has sovereignty and we have choice. God has holiness and we have conscience. God has love and we have a weak analogy of it. And God has omniscience, He has a lot of other things, but He is all-knowing and we have human knowledge. We are a finite replica of God; we are, as it were, theomorphs, made in God’s image.

And that means that every person that breathes and walks has several things about him. Let’s look at two in particular because they’ll come up this morning; one is conscience and one is knowledge. The sense of conscience that we have is a sense inside that cries out for God’s holiness. It’s like a template, it doesn’t have holiness in itself but it cries out to know it; it’s like a compass that seeks magnetic north. So every person has this.

The second thing that we have is we have a sense of reason; we want things to have reasonable explanations. It upsets us to see something just happen without an explanation. We want to know why did something happen, and we are correct in that. And the heart must be satisfied in these two areas. In fact, the heart must be satisfied in both of these areas for you to believe. When you first trust the Lord Jesus Christ God the Holy Spirit does some epistemological miracle in the heart that we don’t understand, but somehow if we really believe, what has happened is that we have a sense of God’s righteousness being satisfied in the person of Christ for us. How that happens theologians have talked about for centuries; there are all kinds of theological theories about that happens, but that happens. The second thing that happens when we really believe is that we know it’s true. We’re not going to be intimidated because somebody with five PhD’s laughs at us and our faith, because we know that he is the fool, not the Word of God. So there is that quiet inner assurance; how that happens nobody knows, but it happens, and it happens because these two things are satisfied by the Holy Spirit. And that is why whenever the Word of God is preached or taught or whenever you happen to be witnessing to someone you want to be careful and not pressure people to believe on the basis of peer pressure. If someone makes a profession of faith because of peer pressure, they’re afraid of what their girlfriend is going to think or what their boyfriend is going to think, that’s all peer pressure. And what that does, it precipitates what looks like a profession of faith but it doesn’t come from the heart, it’s just response to peer pressure and we want to avoid that.

So the first thing we want to understand is this Creator/creature distinction. A second thing that we want to understand going into the text this morning is we want to review and understand what Solomon’s purview is or what his vision is for life. Remember we divided life into three classes: life as it existed from Genesis 1 to Genesis 3; that was when the human race potentially, in Adam and Eve, lived in a state of potential immortality. That was no sin, no death, no disease, whatever this genetic thing that has happened to us, it’s in our genes, in our environment, that causes us to die the moment we are born; we begin to age and we begin to die when we take our first breath. There’s a dying process about us; in some of us it’s further along than others but nevertheless it’s there. We’re all under a sentence of capital punishment. That was not true under this first life. Solomon is not talking about this life; that’s gone forever with the fall of man.

We could also talk about the life on the other side of the resurrection, and that’s the life that first was observed in the world when the Lord Jesus Christ on the third day after he died walked out of the tomb, one of the most amazing events of the universe. The first piece of the new universe coexisting with the rest of the universe walked out in the presence of a person, a body that is so mysterious it can appear and disappear, it can move through matter, it can move through energy, and yet it stays and retains its identity; it’s a body that eat and yet a body that has no blood, a body that has flesh and bones but no circulatory system. How does it work? We don’t know, there’s only one example of it and that’s Jesus Christ and He’s sitting at the Father’s right hand. But there will be future instances of this when the dead in Christ shall rise again and when those who are without Christ also rise.

But Solomon is not concerned with that. Solomon is concerned with this life, the life that begins at birth and that ends with death, and during this period of time there are features to this life that weren’t there from the beginning. Originally in the Garden there was not sin and there was not the consequences of sin, but now there is and so since these consequences, the state of consequence is there we have something the Bible calls grace. God is graciously extending life; He could have done away with it but God extends it. “God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” He’s holding off justice in order that grace may prevail for a time, but not forever.

And Solomon also points out and he will emphasize that coupled with this grace is sorrow, sorrow and sadness because this life is an abnormal life. You see, as Christians who believe in the Bible when we look out upon life one of the characteristics that we see about life that our non-Christian friends can’t appreciate is we consider this life abnormal. Fallen life is an abnormal life when viewed from the standpoint of what it could have been had the fall of man not occurred. So Solomon’s perspective is mortal life.

A third thing that he asserts is the fact that this mortal life, because it’s so fragile, because it’s so temporary, is characterized by the word “hevel” or “vanity” as it’s translated. I think the NIV translates it meaninglessness which is a sad translation. But the Hebrew word is hevel. And it’s a technical word; it’s a key word throughout the book. A picture of what hevel is you can see from the James 4 passage, etc. the idea is like smoke, like breath, it appears for a moment to have substance but then quickly dissolves; there’s no endurance. The word hevel does not, as we said the first time, have any connotation about being evil in and of itself. It has to do only with that which is not eternally secure.

We’ve been going through the book of Ecclesiastes and we’ve gotten to this section, using excerpts because that’s all we have time for is to do some excerpts in this book, we came to chapter 3 last week, so turn there, at least we’ll be using a portion of our Bibles we don’t normally use. Ecclesiastes 3:9, this passage, this excerpt runs from verse 1-15 and we hurriedly finished it last week and I want to go back because there’s some powerful truth in here. This is one of the highlights of this book. This book, as I said, masks or unmasks the world system. It basically says the world system has no can’t understand word, the world system has no substance, all the allure that Satan has is tinsel, it’s hot air, it’s false advertising and this is the unmasking of that false advertising. And it comes to a pinnacle in the end of this section, so I want to go carefully through verses 9-15 again and we want to draw some conclusions to this and some applications that we can use in our lives. If nothing else, to fortify our souls against deception, particular those who are entering the university life, those of you who are in the classroom, those of you who are in business, being forced to make decisions, crucial decisions. We can get warped; we can get off-compass if we get totally enamored with the things of this life.

So here is the rhetorical approach of Solomon. For example, in verse 9, this is one of those great wisdom approaches to the truth; it’s truth through the backdoor. Now people always think Solomon comes through the backdoor and they draw the false conclusion that this book is pessimistic. The book isn’t pessimistic, it’s saying look at this life and looking at this life don’t you get pessimistic. And the implication of a rhetorical question is there is an answer to it, but he plays with us for a little bit, he wants us to conclude yes, it is pessimistic if I just look at this life, therefore what do I do? I look at another life; I look at the eternal plan of God, that’s the implied answer to the rhetorical question in a wisdom approach.

In verse 9 here comes one of the rhetorical questions: “What profit has he who is working in that wherein he is laboring.” And obviously it’s playing with us, what value, what price do you put on your labor? How much an hour, in other words, that’s what it’s asking, a pricing structure, an evaluation. And he’s asking for a sober consideration, given all these other things, and the other things we said looking at all of verses 2-8, those fourteen different contrasts that depict the whole realm of life, from the standpoint of a genius, Solomon remember was a botanist, he was a zoologist, he was a psychologist, he was a sociologist, he was an international politician, he was a statesman, he was an engineer, he was an inventor, he was a super Leonardo DaVinci and all the verses from 2-8 summarize the length, the height, and the breadth of life. He is saying whatever area you say, I take it in its totality and I conclude go whatever you want to, and verse 9, in the end what value do you put on it. And the answer, of course, is that it’s really not worth anything eternally in and of itself.

Verse 10, “I have seen the travail, which God has given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.” The travail he speaks of, going back to our review, is this: from birth to death he says God put it there. God did God put it there. Let’s look at that verb, “God” is the noun, God “has given” is the verb, “God has given” this at a point in time. When did God give this life? He gave it actually in two parts. The first part came at creation, when He created us in His image; then life was created still as derivative, as transient, as a time of probation, but at least without sin, death and sorrow. And so God gave part one at the creation.

Then Solomon said but He’s also given “the travail, which God has given to the sons of men,” and when did that happen? That happened at the fall, when Adam and Eve fell, taking the human race down with them and the sentence of death and sorrow was pronounced, not only on man but also on the universe. Given that background, he says in verse 10, God has given it, God is sovereign over history. So in verse 10 we have the first instance where the word “God” is used in this particular passage. I want you to count the number of times the noun G-o-d occurs; let’s look. There’s one occurrence in verse 10, in verse 11 there’s another occurrence, in verse 13 a third occurrence; in verse 14 two more occurrences, that’s five, and finally in verse 15; six times “God” is used. Again, when you study the Bible look at the frequency of use of words. Prior to this passage and all the way from verses 1-9 you don’t see God’s name used once because he’s looking at this life.

Now all of a sudden he comes and in verses 10-15 he’s drawing conclusions, and he says God, God, God, God, God, God, six times he is relying upon this. Why? Because he brings up the Creator/creature distinction. He’s not looking at life as a pessimist. He is saying in light of the fact that God is the Creator, that God has done all these things, then what are the conclusions for me, in my life.

So in verse 11 he enters this fantastic verse, “He has made everything,” the King James says “beautiful in its time,” actually the word “fitting” is more appropriate, “He has made everything fit in its time,” everything that is in verse 11 applies in context to verses 2-8. So the “everything” in verse 11 reverberates back to all those 14 things mentioned in verses 2-8; all those things, he says, “He has made fitting in its time,” that is, we can conclude, says Solomon, that when I look at life, life has a plan and life has a purpose. We may not know it, we may not like it, but the big thing about this verse is there is a plan for everything in the universe; EVERYTHING, including death is included in that plan, a comprehensive plan of all things. This is why this book is not like 20^th century existentialist literature that you read in the average English literature class. People try to make this analogy; it is false. The modern writers do not start in the place of the Creator/creature distinction; they are writing from a wholly foreign perspective. This is Solomon’s analysis of all of life; he undoubtedly and certainly argues that everything, including the most miserable experiences of life, fit into a plan.

Look at some of those in verses 2-8: verse 3, “a time to kill,” there is a time to kill he says, killing has meaning inside the plan of God as bad as it may be. In verse 8, “a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.” All of these fit together in one comprehensive plan. Now we want to review something at this point because I want, at least those of you who are in high school, in college, those of you who do a lot of reading, I to speak to you now about something. As Bible believing Christians we want to be aware of this so let me give you in four simple steps an outline of history from the time of Solomon to the 20^th century. I’m going to do it with four steps.

The first step is this, that prior to the revelation of God through the nation Israel we had in human history the paganization of culture. That is, that all during this period from Noah and his sons who got off the boat, they had the Word of God, every tribe, every nation, every language on earth at one time had Genesis 1-9. It is not true that there are tribes who have never heard. That’s just a lot of bologna, there never has been a tribe that has not heard and the reason we know that is because God holds everybody responsible. How can you hold somebody responsible who has never heard? Obviously they have heard and they have heard by transmission, some of the memories have become corrupt and faint; that’s why the gospel is sent out into the regions unknown. But the world had paganized and part of the paganization of the world outside of Israel was a total collapse in their hope, a total collapse of values, a total collapse of any belief that there’s a plan, purpose, behind life. That had been given up and you can read about it in the pagan literature of the time. One of the greatest antidotes, by the way, to unbelief is read it; don’t just hear about it, if you want to read about unbelief go ahead and read and then compare it with the Scripture. Read them side by side. In the Framework series what did I do? Start out with Genesis 1-2 and right next to it I read the Babylonian Enuma Elish epic. Read them; do you think the Bible is barred from this stuff; put it side by side and compare.

So the first step in history is a paganization. Now God is a gracious God and so He chose to work through a national culture called Israel. And Israel became a custodian down through history, Romans 9, Israel became the custodian of the Word of God through history and through Israel the world was introduced once again to the Word of God that they had lost. So you have the Word of God first through Noah, that was lost; it is replaced by the Word of God now through Israel which we have and we call it the Bible, so the second time the human race hears. And the human race at the time of Solomon, which is between 900-1000 BC, Solomon leads Israel in the application of the Word of God to every area of life and he transmits that. Remember he has his fleet in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, they go all over Africa, possibly to Australia, seeking resources and raw materials and gold and silver for trading. He also has fleet number two in the Mediterranean that goes out, possibly through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic Ocean. Solomon spreads forth this knowledge. There are Jewish crewmen on board who are trained in the Word of God, they stop in port city after port city, they do their trading, they do their business, they sit down, they eat with people, they discuss with people and people around the world suddenly hear of the fact that there is a God over the universe, a God that we have long since forgotten in our culture, a God who has a plan and a purpose that everything fits into His plan. So this spreads across the earth.

Step number three: the pagans remember this and there comes a time in a subset of Solomon’s sons, the sons of Japheth, we know them as the Greeks, there are two, three or four people down in the Greek called the pre-Socratics that drives to develop what is later called Greek philosophy. Nobody has explained Greek philosophy. You can take all the graduate courses you want to in philosophy and you know what they finally tell you. We don’t know what happened but at some point in Greek history this idea came about that the universe is reasonable. Before that it was considered hopeless. Where did the idea come from? Nobody has ever suggested it; did these guys just dream it up? Or did they engage in commerce? Now Greece was a naval shipping group; they still are. The Greek fleet and a lot of flagships are with the Greek flag. So the Greeks were shippers, the Greeks transported stuff all through the Mediterranean; they never came in contact with the Phoenicians and Solomon’s fleet in their ancestors? This was never spread? I doubt it! I suspect that the Greek philosophy arose out of the Word of God; it was the Word of God that gave the sense that there was reason and purpose in history. And so there arose out of Greek philosophy modern science and some of the blessings that we have in our culture.

Now in our time, beginning in the time of the 1700’s, there arose a man by the name of Immanuel Kant, who later on with Hegel, and later on with existentialists said wait a minute, something’s wrong. What they said was… it’s a profound moment, they said how can we be sure that the universe is rational and reasonable when man’s experience is limited. How, they said, given this diagram that we’ve looked at before, if that contains all of human knowledge, how can we be sure what’s beyond the boundaries of human knowledge. How can we really be sure that there are such things as absolutes and truths out there? And so Kant and others began to psychologize, that is, they made human knowledge a function of the brain; it’s a phenomenon that happens here, this is where human knowledge is located, not out there. So when we talk about truth, we talk about what’s here, not what’s out there. And this is a tremendous shift, and again in the history of philosophy it’s called the Copernican shift with Kant. Today the degeneracy that you see in music and the arts and everything else falls out of this idea being taken to it’s slowly inevitable consequence, that if truth is only up here, what is the consequence. It means your opinion is as valid as my opinion and there’s no arbitration. Anybody can have their own opinion because all truth is what’s going on inside the brain. It’s not related to external objective truth.

So oddly enough we come down now at point 4, with existentialism, back to the old paganization. That’s what’s going on today. We are re-paganizing the globe. The grand experiment is gone; the Word of God once came to the entire human race through Noah and his sons as they populated the continent. It was lost because men are inherently sinful; we don’t want to know the truth so we deliberately forget the truth. It is convenient to forget because if we forget it we are relieved temporarily of responsibility before God for our lives. There’s a powerful motive in the sinful heart to forget the Word of God. As long as my conscience is pricked by the Word of God I’m under His authority and held accountable for my actions and my thoughts. But if I can somehow convince myself that it’s not really true, oh what relief I have for my sinful depraved heart. Now I can live like a king, I can build my reality. The problem, of course, is what happens when I go to my neighbor and he’s a king that’s building his reality. Where’s my court of appeal? Gone! So the whole culture has become more and more and more subjective and that’s the story and that’s what’s happening. So we’re going through the second phase in history, the first phase was the loss of the Word of God through Noah, now we’re getting the loss of the Word of God from Isaiah [?], people will talk about the Bible, people will use Bible words but it’s basically pagan in content.

So Solomon in verse 11 anticipates our time; he anticipates through the Holy Spirit what is going to happen and he announces it here. He says God has made everything fitting, but unlike the Greeks Solomon has a subject to the plan. Notice in verse 11 Solomon says God has made this, and this goes back to our review; what did we say that God had that man [tape turns] infinitely man thinks limitedly. So therefore God made everything beautiful in His time and He can because He’s omniscient, He has total knowledge. There’s a place for total knowledge if the Bible is correct. But the philosophers that came later said we’re not sure the Bible is correct, so the pre-requisite for knowledge and truth is to have total knowledge, man doesn’t have total knowledge, so there can’t be any truth, everything is just subjective. And that’s the game that is being played.

But Solomon says in verse 11, he warns and anticipates this collapse in our time. He says, “He has set the sense of eternity,” or “the world in their heart,” yet, with the consequence, this is the consequence, a result clause at the end of verse 11, the second half of that verse, look at the result, “so that no man,” Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Kant, “can find out the work that God made from the beginning to the end.” Why can’t Aristotle, Plato and Kant find out? Because of this, the plan is omnisciently created by an infinite reasoner, and therefore a finite reasoner can’t grab it. But because I can’t grab it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Let’s bring it down to a practical level. If a disaster hits in my life, and we’ve all had it; in a group of believers the size at any week there’s at least three or four catastrophes that are happening all the time, all the time: sorrow, heartache, surprises, and no matter how much of the Word of God we know, we don’t know exactly what God’s doing. How many times have we said why does God do it this way? Why doesn’t He do it that way? We all know that experience. Okay, now we have an opportunity at that point; we can conclude with a modern person, well, then there is no plan, rhyme or reason, forget it. Or we can say I surely can’t figure it out but I know that there is one and I have to wind up trusting the character of God, the trustworthiness of God, knowing that He has a plan. Now how do you cope in life if you don’t do it this way? So that’s what Solomon is saying; he’s warning us in verse 11, don’t ever think you can figure it all out, he says. That does not mean that there isn’t something to be figured out, God has figured it out, God has created it. So verse 11 saves knowledge and truth but it also warns us about becoming or trying to become gods ourselves.

Now in verses 12-15 he concludes this section. Look at his conclusions and see if you don’t think they’re reasonable. He says: “I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life; [13] And, also, that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labor,” and notice what he calls it in the end of verse 13, what does he say all of life is, what does he say this opportunity is, he’s going back to a truth that we examined earlier. What did we say is true of mortal life between birth and death, it has two characteristics; because man is sinful why does God keep it going, “He is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance,” there’s a period of grace on earth. In verse 13 Solomon is talking about that right here, he says this “is the gift of God.” In other words, I have a certain room to enjoy myself, even in spite of the sorrow, even in spite of living in a world that’s dying, even in spite of living this side of Eden, there are graciously provided to me these things. And he lists them in verses 12-13. But they’re inside of a frame of reference of the Scriptures.

Now in verses 14-15 he ends, and unfortunately at the end of verse 15 we have a translation problem like plagued us earlier. But let’s go through this carefully. In verse 14, “I know that, whatsoever God does, it shall be forever; nothing can be put to it, nothing can be taken from it; and God does it, that man should fear before Him.” Now you have a little margin reference in your Bible and you check that out, and somewhere in your translation or the version of the Bible you use there should be a key to that section in verse 14. You should see a marginal reference that points you to Deuteronomy 4, because it’s an allusion to the Torah, which by the way shows you that Solomon knows the Word of God very well, this is not a departure from the faith, “nothing can be put to it or taken from it” is a citation of Deuteronomy 4 which states that when God reveals His plan, because he is totally sovereign and He is omnipotent that nobody, no creature is going to take it away; it’s specified, sovereignty, it means that God is omnipotent, it means that it is a perfect plan and man cannot add to it and man cannot detract from it and therefore we don’t amend the Bible.

Well in this context, in verse 14 he’s saying and we can’t change history. God has His plan. The purpose in verse 14 at the end is “in order that,” purpose clause, in order that what? Why go through this bizarre sorrow and suffering period in history between the birth and death. Why? “That men should come to a respect,” the word “fear” means respect for God’s authority. He is saying that the purpose of all of it is to make us come to Him. After all, that’s why He’s perpetuated history. Finally the reason for all the death, for all the sorrow, for all the blessings, for the good times, the bad times, for all those things in verses 2-8, the ultimate purpose is “that men should fear before Him.” That’s the big idea of this life. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” see, he’s defending that axiom of the book of Proverbs.

Now verse 15 has a minor problem in it, in that verse 14 and 15 are parallel, both of them summarize a passage, both of them conclude with a purpose clause, and the purpose clause is mysterious at the end of verse 15 and doesn’t seem to fit, so let’s deal with that one just a little bit here. “That which has been is now, and that which has been has already been,” in other words it’s a repetition of the truth of verse 14. Verse 14 ended with a purpose clause, “that men should fear Him.” Now verse 15, if you have the king James it’s something like this: “God requires that which is past.” I’m not familiar with what some of the modern translations have. And this is an enigma because it should match the end of verse 14, these are parallel constructions again. So what do we do with that one? Well, if you look at the original, the word in the original language, the word “that which is past” isn’t past, it’s the word for drive away or persecute. It is in the passive voice which means whatever this is its something that is being driven away or persecuted or suppressed. Now what makes sense if you make it parallel to verse 14? Humility before God. God requires, He seeks that which men drive away. He seeks hearts that will submit to Him; that’s the purpose of life he says.

So the conclusion to this excerpt, back down to verse 15 is that we were born with a sense of God that manifests in our quest for reason and our quest for a sense of justice, the whole environmental history of our lives, is designed with the purpose of bringing us to this humility, basic cardinal virtue, basic faith, prerequisite of faith. Jesus said how can you believe if you seek glory for men and not for Me. We cannot believe as long as our hearts want to suddenly erect human authority in the place of God. We cannot believe, we can go through motions, we can have religious experiences, we can go through hoopla, but we don’t have Biblical faith. So that’s the purpose of life.

Now we come down to the third excerpt beginning in 3:16 and running through 4:6. This deals with another side of life, and I have entitled that: we have to work in a world of death and injustice. So what he’s going to do is he’s going to make another set of observations, not stressing so much the unknown-ness of life, this time he’s going to stress the injustice of life or said another way, life isn’t fair. You bet it’s not fair. Do you know what it would be if it were really fair? We’d all go to hell. People always wonder, how can a loving God send people to hell? How can a just God send people to heaven? Turn the question around, it’s got another side to it. How come we never ask that side of the question? How can a righteous holy God send sinful miserable rebellious people to His presence forever and ever? How does He do that? Isn’t that just as big a question as a loving God sending people to hell? So there are two sides to this and Solomon deals with this whole issue of injustice.

Verse 16, “And, moreover, I saw under the sun,” remember “under the sun” is a phrase, it refers to life in a fallen world, it harps back to Genesis 3 when God said in the sweat of your brow you will work under the heat of the sun. So Solomon repeats under the sun, under the sun, under the sun, to emphasize the sweaty character of work. And remember, this is in the tropics, this is in the low latitudes of the earth and the sun is very brilliant and very hot, “under the sun,” it’s being uncomfortable, no air conditioners, even Solomon didn’t have an air conditioner. “I looked under the sun at the place of judgment [justice].” The place of judgment is a civil courtroom; it’s the place that God ordained in the Noahic Covenant for justice and he says, lo and behold, “I looked in the place of judgment, wickedness was there; and the place of righteousness and iniquity were there.” People argue, see, that can’t be Solomon the king talking in verse 16 because he was the place of judgment. Oh yes it can be, Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, wrote while he was Emperor, his meditations and he spoke of the ills of the Roman court system and he was responsible for it. So yes this can be Solomon in verse 16, he did not have a perfectly righteous administration. And he looked at it and he sees wickedness and he sees unrighteousness there. That’s his observation, verse 16. Now his conclusion, verse 17-18, what does he do about this, he said “I said in my heart,” so he’s responding to the observation. Now you can be bitter about the people that get off, you can be bitter about the injustices that are done, some poor guy that can’t hire a five million dollar attorney gets thrown in jail for the rest of his life and some white-collared guy that rips off half the investors on wall street goes free because he can afford the lawyer; we can all get angry about that sort of thing. And that’s what Solomon is saying, but in verse 17-18 he’s modeling a response, “I said in my heart, God is judging the righteous and the wicked; there is a time for every purpose and for every work.” Now watch it carefully in the text, there’s a word there that I didn’t read you, so let’s read it very slowly at the end because there’s a place…the subject of this whole passage is the place of judgment or civil authorities for correcting evil. He says in the last part of verse 17 that there’s “a time there for every purpose and for every work.” There “there” refers back to the place of judgment.

Now the place of judgment is a place where God executes His righteousness. God has done this in several means. Let’s look at them. In Genesis 1 and 2 God threatens justice directly, “in the day that you eat thereof, you will die,” and I will administer justice. In Genesis 3 He introduces a second source and that is angels. Angels apparently carried the power of capital punishment from Genesis 3 to Genesis 9. During this period of history anybody who moved into the Garden of Eden would be killed, it didn’t matter whether he was a believer or not a believer, if he transgressed that boundary in the Garden of Eden a cherub was there and he’d chop him up, that’s it, a sword went every way. Why? Because God delegates His righteousness and His judgments to angelic authorities.

In Genesis chapter 9 it was given to the civil government, and from that point on until Jesus Christ comes and assumes the sword, who, by the way, He rules the nations with a rod of iron, it is not done away, we have capital punishment. It’s the basis for all civil authority. You can’t have the military, you can’t have the police, unless you have capital punishment. That is something God has given the human race. The whole purpose of the military is to destroy the enemy; the whole purpose of the police and court function is to destroy evil. Yes, it’s imperfect. Do you know the greatest injustice ever done in a courtroom? The trial of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now did God consider that an accident? When God instituted capital punishment He knew in advance His own Son would die through a miscarriage of the very thing he ordained and He went ahead and did it anyway, so there goes the argument that you can’t have capital punishment because it’s unjustly administered. Of course it’s unjustly administered; all justice by human fallen man is unjustly administered, but that is the reason [can’t understand word/s] of the civil state.

So that’s what Solomon is talking about here, he’s saying it’s wicked, it’s evil, but his resolution in verse 17 is there is a time coming and there will be a place when God will judge and He will judge perfectly, He will clean house. He will exalt righteousness and that day is coming when Christ shall come.

In verse 18 he said another response is the observation of verse 16, not only he says is there a time coming when this whole issue of injustice is going to be dealt with but he said verse 18, in the meantime there’s a reason for it. Why does this keep on going on and on and on? Why do people suffer miserably and horribly under armies that have lost control like they have in Africa; armies that have lost control like they have in Yugoslavia, with soldiers raping and pillaging and destroying people, gone crazy, lost all control. Why does this go on you say? There’s another reason. “I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, that they might see that they themselves are,” and he uses the Hebrew word “cattle,” not beasts, just not any animal but cattle. Why cattle? Because cattle were an asset to be traded around in that time and day.

Verse 20, “For that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts. As one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other; they have all one breath, so that a man has no pre-eminence above the beasts; for all is vanity.” We all, trapped in this number two type life, we all suffer, we all are going to die. Do animals die? Yes. Do people die? Yes. Do we have mortal bodies? Yes. Does your dog have a mortal body? Yes. Does your cat? Yes. Does your cattle? Yes. Do you? Yes. They are all the same. It’s Solomon’s rhetorical way of saying wake up, look at what has become of life, “the emperor has no clothes” and you’ve got to therefore put your hope in something else and that’s the theme of this book.

So he goes on and he concludes in 4:1-6. He says I saw “all the oppressions that are done under the sun; and, [behold, the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power, but they had no comforter], there was no one to comfort them. We have a person who’s an executive in a firm and one of the problems is the workers getting downsized and you get your pink slip and boom, you’re out. You thought you had a career for 20 years in this group and then all of a sudden it’s all gone, the speed of society changing like crazy. But it’s not just the person getting fired; oftentimes it may be a believer who has to do the firing. Here’s what one man told me: in this era of downsizing I had to let several people go; the company wanted to earn more money, even though they are profitable; knowing that people were losing their livelihood this was truly a burden to me. And he had to do it, and Christians who are in these positions are faced with this every day and are going to be increasingly faced with this. This is a real life problem. And Solomon’s answer is you can’t go into the fine skilled details because you can’t know but you can get the big frame of reference right and that’s what he’s saying in verse 17, 18, 19 and on down in chapter 4. The big picture is not shaken.

“So I returned” and he said there’s no comforter, verse l. Verse 2, “Wherefore, I praised the dead,” and he really gets very solemn here in verses 2-3, look at what he says here, again, this is “the emperor has no clothes” tactic. Here he says “I praised the dead who already are dead more than the living who are yet alive. [3] Yea, better is he than both they, who hath not yet been, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.” In other words, there’s something very distasteful, depressing, and horrible about this kind of life. You can’t make it the final goal.

Verse 4, “Again, I considered all the travail of men,” this is an attack, some people say well I like to do crafts, well that’s fine, the words, however, in verse 4, “I considered all travail, and every right work” in the King James, it means craftsmanship. Recently a lot of vocabulary work has been done on that particular word; it’s used for the God of crafts, etc. And literally it says “it is the envy of a man over his neighbor.” A lot of what you call pride in workmanship, when it’s done in the energy of the flesh, is really not pride in workmanship. Do you know what it is? It’s just my way of showing up somebody; I’m going to show I’m better than somebody else. And that’s what it is. Is this truthful? Of course it’s truthful, we all know that intuitively. So Solomon is just simply saying as he observes all the fallaciousness the tinsel and the hot air of life.

Verse 5-6 he quotes two proverbs in his concluding statement. He says, “The fool folds his hands together, and eats his own flesh,” that’s one approach to life, it’s called the passive approach, depressed approach. The other guy is the anxious one, this is the go-getter type, verse 6, the end of verse 6, “[Better is a handful with quietness, than] both hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.” He’s the go-getter, both of his hands are full, the fool has folded hands. And in the first part of verse 6 the third alternative is “better is a handful of quietness.” See the contrast; the first contrast, verse 5, the hands are folded, passive; verse 6 the last part, both hands are out grasping, grasping, grasping, grasping, doing, doing, doing, and then the in-between in the sandwich of contrast, “better is he that has one hand with some quietness.” See that’s his counsel for life in a fallen world.

So the summary of this third excerpt is that mortal life, life God sends upon the sons of Adam for their sin, is full of injustice and full of death. We cannot fight through it, we can only live with the consequences of it. We must, therefore, do something that Paul says do in Romans 8, to which we will turn in conclusion. In Romans 8:18 Paul concurs with Solomon; he says “I reckon that the sufferings of this present time,” does he admit that there are sufferings in the present time? Yes, that’s the subject of the whole thing. But what Paul does, he brings into the whole discussion something Solomon didn’t even know about and that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, who now has given physical, empirical, historical evidence there’s something better coming, and he says “I reckon the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us, [19] For the earnest expectation of the whole creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God.” Notice verse 20 and think of Ecclesiastes, “For the entire universe was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him who subjected the same, in hope [21] because the creature itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption to the glorious liberty of the children of God. [22] For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now. [23] And not only this, but we ourselves,” does he agree with Solomon? Does he agree that there’s pain and sorrow and heartache? Yes he does, but what he counters and how he copes with that, that’s the key. How do you cope with it, Solomon? How do you cope with it Paul? He says “we have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan inside, waiting for the adoption and the redemption of our body.”

Do you see what he’s doing? The third kind of life, this life, Paul says get your eyes on that. You have to endure this but this isn’t the whole story, there’s another chapter coming. Yes it’s sorrowful, yes life isn’t fair, tell me another story. But don’t, therefore because it isn’t fair, because it is full of sorrow, don’t make this your final parking spot. That’s what he’s saying, move on. At least in your mind’s eye you have the Word of God, you can become preoccupied with that; your eyes can be on a distant target, on a distant mountain, something that’s coming and you anchor to that and then you walk through the muck. But at least you’ve got a compass now, at least we have a hope, and it’s not just the hope of a book, it’s the hope of something that happened in history because Jesus Christ literally rose from the dead.

I want to take you in conclusion to an application, so if you’ll turn in your bulletin I want to show you one example of what we’re talking about, lest it be unclear in some people’s minds how to take advantage of Ecclesiastes. Here’s what I’d like you to do, you can do it privately to yourself, it’s not anybody else’s business, this is just between you and the Lord. Someone you have befriended… this is just putting yourself in a situation, think of something in the past in your life, something that you have done for someone else, it might have been loaning money, it might have been giving money, spending time with them, teaching them, counseling them, mentoring them, something you have done for somebody. Put that down and label it #1. Now come to the next part, that would be the area of life, it may be business, it may be school, it may be sports, it may be some area or activity of your life, it may be marriage, put that #2. Someone you have befriended or whatever, in some sphere of life as prospered beyond all expectation. He or she has surpassed you in whatever the activity was you helped them in, it could have been an investment, money, skill, sales, in performance in sports, whatever it is, whatever you’ve helped in #1, whatever that resulted in, they surpassed you, put #3 there. And they have displaced you in, and that’s just a repeat of #2, the sphere of life. Moreover, he or she doesn’t seek your friendship any more, so they’ve cut you out of the picture, you’re a “has been” as far as they are concerned. You’re just out of it, they don’t want your friendship, they could care less.

Now that’s the situation. The first part shows you how the flesh responds to this kind of approach and I facetiously repeat the multi-syllable words that are being used these days for common sense things, you know, it used to be called people were crazy, then it was manic depressive, and now it’s a bi-polar disorder. So we have poll and we have the second poll. One of them is Romans 1 and the other is Romans 2, Paul talked about bi-polar disorders long ago and by the way, it’s free. And here is what some symptoms this response of the flesh looks like. The person in Romans 1 basically is “the fool that eats his flesh” in terms of Solomon; it’s a depressive response, I’m a loser, life is irrational, God, if he exists is far from me, I’ve got to do something to forget and I’ll go tie one on or go get high or do something. That’s one approach, that’s the Romans 1 approach to life. Romans 2 approach is he’s the go-getter, he’s got both fists full of stuff, I’ll get even, life’s a game to play and I’m going to win, God will prosper me and if He doesn’t I’m going to do it myself, of I’ve got to do something to get back. We all know this, come on, big revelation of our sinful hearts.

So one way we do it and another way we do it; one is Romans 1, one is Romans 2; one is a licentious approach, one is a legalistic approach; one tends to depression, one tends to zeal; one is irrationalism, one tends to rationalism, but both are arrogant in pride and both mean that I as man, I am determining the nature of reality, I am dictating what is good and evil for me. I am my own final authority and I, thank you, will run my life my way. Even the person who’s depressed does this; think about it, because they’re saying there’s no hope, Jesus Christ can’t help me. In other words, whatever approach we take, whatever poll, it’s us dictating the nature of God, the universe and life. Think of how arrogant that is, and we get trapped into this stuff.

Now down below you see the hand of quietness that Solomon is talking about, a Spirit infused pattern of creature humility before God. The area I was suppressed in, take that #2, that area that I was suppressed in is part of this mortal and normal life that is passing away like a vapor, I can’t take my achievements in whatever area with me when I die, nor can I leave it in tact with my survivors. Remember we learned that from Solomon; try to legislate endurance of your great accomplishments. My achievements probably won’t even be remembered in years to come, I’ll be a little photo album in somebody’s attic. What counts is how God views the matter and my responses, that’s what counts. And what is the truth that you’re trusting right at that point? That success, whether it’s sales, performance, whatever it is, loving relationships, that it ultimately is vanity; man does not determine good and evil. [Tape abruptly stops]