Ecclesiastes Lesson 5

6-29-97

This Sunday we’re going to finish our five part series on the book of Ecclesiastes by skipping all the way to the end of the book. In the bulletin insert you’ll see that there is a review at the beginning because we can’t really learn without repetition and we usually can’t get enough of it when it comes to the Word of God on the basic foundational truths. So there’s two things before we go any further in the book that I would like to draw your attention to. One is that throughout this entire book of Ecclesiastes there’s an issue that has developed over the character of God. God stands behind this book much as He stands behind the book of Esther, unspoken, not really emphasized in the forefront but powerful because it’s precisely that style, the way the book is written, that points indirectly to God.

And one of the things that we’ve seen about our God is that He has these attributes and these attributes are all infinite and one of them is omniscience. This omniscience that God has is all-knowing knowledge, the fact that God has never learned anything but has always known everything about all possibilities of history, a God who has created by means of His thoughts and words, whereas we have to use our hands and tools. God doesn’t do it that way, He speaks and it is done. So He has unique ways of projecting His thoughts and those thoughts cause things to happen. But God, in His omniscience, is utterly unlike man, who is made in God’s image, who has knowledge and it’s precisely this issue that’s addressed in the book of Ecclesiastes, showing that our knowledge, no matter how complete, can never be identical to God’s knowledge. His omniscience is pitted against our human knowledge. His plans are hidden from us, unless He chooses to reveal. He says in Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us and our children.” But then He says in Isaiah that “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My thoughts higher than your thoughts.

So there’s this discontinuity between God and man; we are eternally blocked from ever having identical knowledge to God. In fact, the Bible argues that it is sinful, it is rebellious on our part to seek total knowledge. It is the lust to be gods ourselves that motivates us to want total knowledge, if we have total knowledge we don’t have to trust Him. So the issue then comes in every day life. One of the applications of this book of Ecclesiastes is that in all the details of life, whether it’s the death of a loved one, whether it’s some adversity, whether it’s even some blessing, whether it’s some decision that we have to make that’s impending in front of us, whatever those details of life are, He has a plan and the plan is perfect. The problem is we don’t know what the details are in His plan and we are left, therefore, having to trust Him.

And it boils down to this: we have to trust in His character; we have to trust in the trustworthiness of God. And that’s always the issue, moment by moment in the Christian life, to trust Him. We’re not without a God, we’re therefore not without a plan; we’re therefore not without reason, we’re therefore not without truth, but we have to trust Him with these details. Moreover we have to trust that He has good motives toward us, that He is for us.

So those are the issues that are involved and we called this the idea of God’s incomprehensibility. It doesn’t mean we can’t know Him; it just means our knowledge cannot be on a one to one relationship to His knowledge. He is ultimately incomprehensible, and therefore we must trust.

The second thing we want to review is we want to show how this life, this life that Solomon speaks of, this life that is “under the sun” is not eternal life. He’s talking about the life in the here and the now, this mortalized abnormal life. And he is arguing that it is hevel, the Hebrew word “vanity.” We’ll see a little bit in the passage today about the translation of that word that we started the series with. The word, unfortunately, is not well translated, even in some of the modern translations. The word means transient-ness, it means vaporous-ness, it means that all of life is unsubstantial, it doesn’t last. Life is unfair.

Let’s turn to Ecclesiastes 11, we are on one of the famous sections of the book; even people who have never read the book have, if they have read somewhat in literature, are familiar with this area of the Bible. This section, there are famous sections of the Bible and I think as Christians we really need to know these. One of the great political sections of the Bible is 1 Samuel 8, it’s a classic, it was known for three or four hundred years, people all over Europe argued about 1 Samuel 8; it’s actually not Thomas Paine, it was 1 Samuel 8 that was the background for the American Revolution. So these are famous sections and the section that we are looking at today in Ecclesiastes, the last part of chapter 11 and chapter 12 is one of the most famous passages on old age that has ever entered the corpus of world literature; it’s a very famous section. So we want to work through that and one of the discoveries that I made while I was preparing was the fact that it so dominates the passage, for example, chapter 12:2-7 is the center of that ode to old age, that the passage really isn’t addressed to older people, it’s addressed to young people and that’s why it’s talking about old age. You’ll see why in a moment.

In the bulletin, the first section on youth is chapter 11:7-10, so the first section on youth; let’s look at that in the text for a moment. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun. [8] But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many. All that comes is vanity. [9] Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, and walk in the ways of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes; but know this, that for all these things God will bring you into judgment. [10] Therefore, remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh; for childhood and youth are vanity.”

Let’s go through this passage and look at how he addresses young people. This is to put life in perspective and therefore Solomon is going to do a number of things. One of the things in verse 7 that he starts out with is the metaphor of light and the sun. We’ve seen this before, “under the sun,” etc. he’s talking about the day of opportunity. And he says that here in the present life, between birth and death, is the time for your choices; choices that have eternal repercussions. That’s why this life, though it’s unfair, though it’s transient, though it’s unlikable in many areas, it is extremely important. And there’s nothing in this book that takes away the importance of this life because it’s in this life that we make decisions that last for eternity and when death comes the day of opportunity is gone forever and ever. So this life has tremendous importance, it’s just that it has to be put into perspective.

So he argues in verse 7, “under the sun” now is the time, he says, to enjoy it while it lasts. And he argues in verse 8 that if a man should live many years and maybe he won’t, maybe he will, “but if a man does live for many years, and he rejoices in them all, let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many.” Now “the days of darkness” refer to death. And this is how an Old Testament saint looked at death. In the Old Testament the riches of the New Testament had not yet been revealed. This was a great saint, a man who knew the Lord, and he looked upon death as a time of darkness. If that seems strange, just remember that in the book of Psalms it’s the same thing. David says O Lord, why’d You take my life; if I go to the grave I cannot praise You from the grave, so it is a common view of the Old Testament, not having heard Jesus, not having heard the message that He rose from the dead and the resurrection has now begun, that the new universe is now coming into existence, now populated by one human being at the Father’s right hand, to be eventually populated by every person who has trusted in Christ and those Old Testament saints who have believed in Jehovah.

So the man here looks with Old Testament perspective and he warns the believers living to live your life in the light of its transient-ness, its shortness. All that comes is hevel he says. And this is that word that we have seen over and over again. Just to show you that I’m not making up the meaning of that word I went back to a Hebrew lexicon and even though some of the translators who have access to this particular lexicon, why they have translated that word, I think it’s the NIV, everywhere you read it it says meaningless. Now if you look at verse 8 where vanity is used and you look at verse 10 where vanity is used, if you try to translate that by meaningless you get in deep trouble fast. Because what nonsense would you have in verse 10 if you translated it, “for childhood and youth are meaningless.” It can’t be meaningless, childhood and youth are transient, they are short but they’re not meaningless. So the word “vanity” doesn’t mean that, and sure enough, here it is: the word hevel means vapor or breath, and it has the idea of that which is transient. So we want to be sure we’re correct and we listen to Solomon carefully as to how he uses his vocabulary.

He merges, then in this passage, in verse 9 and 10, with a series of imperatives. These are addressed to young people; in fact this whole section is addressed to young people. So young people, you want to pay particular attention. Verse 9, it says, “Rejoice, O young man, in your youth,” and there are actually four things that are commanded in verse 9 if you count them: (1) rejoice in your youth, and then parallel to that, (2) let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, (3) walk in the way of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes, (4) know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment. Those are four imperative addressed to the young person whose life is basically ahead of them.

If you look no the backside of the bulletin you’ll see a graph that I drew, the burn rate of life which is a graph just as the percent of life for the next year that you lose. You’ll notice, obviously this is why young people always think of themselves as immortal because their life is not moving relative to their age very rapidly, and as you get older you see the curve speeds up and speeds up until the last years before you die. So there’s a tendency since we all think we’re going to live to long old age, never thinking of the fact that we can die early in life, we think of that curve as very flat, as very slow and I think we all remember growing up we always wish we could be a year older because of the big kid and we wanted to be older and older, so that kind of reverses after you get to be 20 or 30, but at least in those young years life is slow.

This is addressed, and it says in verse 9, in the light of that, “let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, walk in the ways of your heart and your eyes.” Now people and commentators have had a problem with verse 9 because it appears to conflict with Numbers 15:39. In Numbers 15:39 it’s almost directly… it says I, the Lord, have given you the Torah and I ask you to submit to the Torah, lest you walk in the ways of your depraved heart and in the sight of your eyes. So it sounds like we have a conflict between this passage and what the Old Testament warns against. People who have a problem with this violate a very simple rule of Bible study. When you are in doubt about the meaning of a passage, what do you do? Look at the context and in this case all you have to do is go one more clause and pick up the next verb, and the next verb is “and know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.” Now this isn’t a killjoy command here; all he is saying is go ahead and enjoy life young person, but in the backdrop keep in mind that your life will be evaluated on an absolute perfect scale. Have that in the background and then go ahead and live the way of your heart and in the sight of your eyes.

And in verse 10 he commands don’t be hung up on the sorrowful things of life, you will see as you go on in life you will see horrible things, unfortunate things, but he says remove sorrow, the word “evil” in verse 10 here refers more to the results of evil. You see, the idea behind this in Scripture is that our life according to the Bible, and we’ll compare… we’ll do a little quick review of something because here’s where we have ideas in collision and as Christians we surely want to understand something. On the diagram that I’m showing there are two views of life. One view on top is the Biblical view of life; the view on the bottom is the pagan view of life. Both have adherents, many people, probably more people believe in the one down below than the one above; we are in the minority. But at least we want to understand what it is that we believe and why we believe it and the behavioral implications.

Look carefully at that first one; the first view of life is the view of life that comes from belief in a Biblical God, the infinite personal God who created all things good. So at the first point in the span of life we have a period in history when life was good, when it left God’s hand there was no sorrow, there were no tears, there was no death, there was no sickness. God did not make a world of sorrow, that’s Genesis 1 and 2. This is one of the fallacies of the pagan view that has become wrapped around the axle with evolution. If you think about it, what evolution says is that life comes from death, that it’s the struggle for survival that produces progress. That’s exactly opposite from the Bible, couldn’t be worse, it’s 180 out, “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Darwin says blessed are the strong for they inherit the earth. You can’t have it both ways.

Now in the Christian view God created life good and it is imaginable, if we could take a time machine and go back to the Garden of Eden and interview Adam and Eve before the fall, it is imaginable to talk to human beings that would never have had to die. Imagine that! Physiologically death was not at work, they had no genetic distortions in their bodies. They were a perfect couple living in a perfect environment, and that is physical life as God created it. The Christian message is that there came a point in time when all this changed and Adam and Eve fell and that was the introduction of sorrow and death. Now what we have in the world that we call life is abnormal life compared to the first state. The first state in Eden is the normal state; the state we are used to from the very time of our self-consciousness on to the time we draw our last breath, this life that we know, Biblically is abnormal. That’s why one the most uncomfortable things that we all have to face is looking at another dead person. There’s probably nothing that creates more internal revulsion than looking at a corpse because we are reminded that that’s us, that’s part of our humanity that we see lying there.

So death is abhorrent and the reason it strikes us as abhorrent and why we are inwardly revolted by it is because we weren’t made originally for it; that feeling that you get is the feeling of seeing something that ought not to be. That’s correct, because of this view of life. And once we have good and evil coexisting in history we have a problem and that’s the problem Solomon is getting at here. If you are ever to resolve this problem, what do you have to do? What’s the prerequisite for the solution in this view of life? The prerequisite is you’ve got to somehow separate good and evil. Right? If evil brings in death and suffering and you want to get rid of death and suffering and you want to restore some aspect of normality to the universe, what must you do? You must tear apart good and evil. Now that tearing apart of good and evil the Bible calls God’s judgmental intervention and saving work in history. That’s precisely what God is doing. Every time we pray “thy kingdom come” in the Lord’s Prayer we are asking for the separation of good from evil, we are asking for the end of history as we know it; that is a prayer for the destruction and the eradication of evil.

But you see, in the Christian view of life there’s a problem here and it’s that problem that we have to understand why the sorrow. God can’t do this without sending people to hell before the time, so the time of separation cannot be just any time; it has to be when the maximum number of people in God’s plan have had the opportunity to trust in Him. So it is postponed, and postponed from our human perspective. Oh Lord, when do you bring in your kingdom, when do you bring in “Thy kingdom come, Thy kingdom come, Thy kingdom come,” we want to get rid of this, we want to get rid of the pain, we want to get rid of the sorrow, we want to get rid of the suffering. Of course we do, but understand, if that prayer is ever answered it means the end of grace. You can’t have it both ways. If you want to eradicate evil then we have to end grace and then history draws to a conclusion in the judgment of God. So that’s the dilemma, and so God obviously in His wisdom has chosen to postpone this moment, this final moment, to give every person an opportunity to trust once again in Him and His grace.

Now the non-Christian has a very bad problem here. For the non-Christian who doesn’t accept the Scripture, with a pagan background, and many of you have come out of this background, some of you are still thinking in terms of this background, to you life never started the way the Bible says, there never was a fall, life always has involved death, life always has involved struggle for survival and fitness, life always has involved the shedding of blood. If this be so, then life is inconceivable without that and what we see in death and sorrow and disease is not abnormal. In a pagan view that sort of life is normal; that is life, life always must have evil with it, it always must have death, it always must have sorrow.

Now you tell me, which view has hope? You see, on the non-Christian basis and on the pagan basis the only hope you have if you really believe that, some have said we can be reincarnated, but if you be reincarnated on the reincarnation cycle you come right back into this world again to go through the same cycle all over again. And so that’s why the perceptive people in the Orient who have traced this out to its logical conclusion finally say salvation on the non-Christian basis really means suicide of the soul, where the Buddhist gives the idea of the water dropping into the ocean and you dissolve, you no longer exist; that’s the only way you can get off of the wheel of reincarnation and keep coming back to this horrible world. It is only in the Christian view where we have a judgment and a separation, a cataclysmic separation of good and evil, only then do we have hope.

So Solomon is saying, against this background he is saying in verses 9-10, put away those sorrowful things. One of our Christian teachers did a survey and I reviewed some of the results of this survey; this morning I want to return to that survey because it was done here in our country among 14-18 year old boys and girls. And these folks were able to state their hearts. This Christian let them say in their own words what are the most powerful influences on your life. I’m going to read some of these and I want you to just listen in light of what we have stated in the book of Ecclesiastes, lest you think of this book as some sort of abstruse piece of literature in a Bible class some place. This book is an exposition of the Word of God about this life here and now. Does it or does it not fit what I’m about to read?

Here is the answer to: what single event in your life so far has had the most impact on you? Losing my grandma to bi-polar disorder; my house burned down; my parents divorced; the divorce of my parents; when my granddad died and my grandmother had to be in the hospital because of it; when I lost vision in my right eye; when we suddenly were struggling to pay the bills; the passing of a dear friend of mine and my uncle’s death; my parents getting divorced; when my parents got divorced; being abused by my adoptive parent when I was seven—enough said; finding out that my grandmother has Lou Gehrig’s Disease; when my grandfather died; my brother’s death because it was the first severe loss I ever experienced in my life; when my dearest friend got extremely mad at me; yesterday I was in a car accident where no one was hurt, thank God, it made me realize how important all the little things are in life; when my best friend said she hated me and she turned most of my class against me; middle school, when I started getting peer pressure on drugs, alcohol and sex; the constant ridiculing my peers give me; when my grandmother had open heart surgery and she almost died; my grandmother’s death, we were really close; my grandmother being diagnosed with cancer; my parents divorce; my granddad died and it made me realize I did love him and he loved me; the death of a close friend, he was hit by a car; when my great-grandma died because I found out that you only live once; when my father died.

Is this what Solomon is talking about? Of course, because that’s the real stuff that life is made of. You see, this book is a real book because the Scripture is sufficient unto every good work and therefore the Scripture has to come to grips with life, not like we would think it might be but life as it is. So as Solomon proceeds we move to the next section because he’s going to conclude at the end of verse 10, he says do these things, set these things aside, don’t be overcome with bitterness and sour grapes because a few bad things happen to you; they’re going to happen, expect them to happen then when they happen you won’t be shocked. It’s not being cynical, it’s being realistic. The Bible teaches realism; the Bible teaches the fact that we have screwed up the universe by our sin and we are living in the shadow of Eden and we take that shadow very, very seriously. We are not cynics; we are NOT cynics! We are realists. And so he says childhood and youth are transient. Understand it isn’t going to last forever and as the years tick off you have less and less opportunity to head the course; you have less freedom; you actually as you get older you have less freedom than you do while you’re young. While you’re young you can make decisions and they have a tremendous influence for years later. When you’re old you’re cut off because you don’t have time, you don’t have time to correct bad decisions, you don’t have time to learn how to cope so you start while you’re young says Solomon. See young people, the only difference between you and older people are that we older people have had a chance to live and make thousands more mistakes than you’ve ever made.

In chapter 12 we come to old age; this is a graphic illustration, one of the finest in the world’s literature, from verses 1-7. It starts off by justifying the commands given in verses 9-10 to the young person. He says: “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,” and the word “Creator” is a noun form taken from the verb of Genesis 1:1; it’s not the normal word for God here. It’s deliberately chosen. “Remember now the barah,” the one who barah-ed you, the one who brought you into existence, and it refers to Genesis 1, and not only that, but this particular verbal form is plural. It literally could read: “Remember now thy Creators,” plural, just as the word Elohim in the Bible is plural because it leaves open the wonderful setting for the truth of the Trinity that will be revealed in centuries to come after Solomon. “Remember now thy Creators in the days of thy youth.”

Now there’s a form to this passage and we want to examine how this is set up so let’s look at these verses for their structure and then we’ll come back and go through them verse by verse. Verses 1-2 deal with life; so we draw the structure out, it looks like this, one and two equals life; that’s the issue there. Verses 3-5 deal with death; verse 6 goes back to the theme of life and verse 7 deals with death. So that’s the structure of the passage, now let’s follow the structure.

Verses 1-2 he is saying, “Now,” this life, “Now is the time to remember your Creator … while the evil days come not, nor the years draw near when you shall say, I have no pleasure in them.” Verse 2 continues, “While” in this youth, the time of life, “While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, are not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain.” There’s metaphor in this so we want to go through this carefully so we get the force of it. Solomon was a Leonardo DaVinci, he was … [Tape turns] and he uses all kinds of tools to attack the whole problem of error in this life. So we want to look at these metaphors; obviously in verse 2 is the day of opportunity; when in the ancient world would you farm? While it was raining or after the rain stopped? Obviously after the rain stopped. So he’s giving here in verse 2 the metaphor of farming and life in general. This is the day of opportunity, the sun shines and the rain has ceased, now take advantage of the opportunity, seize this day, not in the existentialist sense but seize it with a backdrop of the Creator.

And then in verses 3-5 he launches into a series of illustrations of death and aging. We want to look at those. “In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows are darkened, [4] And the doors shall be shut in the streets; when the sound of grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low. [5] When they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail; because man goes to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets.”

This is an allegory of dying, aging and death. In verses 3-4 here’s the picture. The picture is a wealthy mansion in Solomon’s culture. He’s looking a house, a million dollar home where you have a staff to maintain it, that’s the problem with wealth, you get it and then you have to hire more people to maintain it. So here we have this mansion and it has a staff to maintain it and it has a security guard. They had to have security; they had a security group, private policemen that protected estates in those days. So “in the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves,” this is the weakening of security around the mansion, no longer can afford qualified police, and so we have amateurs doing it, people that don’t know what they’re doing and it’s a picture in Jewish tradition, the commentators in the Jewish tradition have always taken this to mean the human body; this estate that is collapsing because of poverty and decline is a picture of us in our bodies and the picture there of the day when “the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves” is a picture of the arms and the legs, the ability to do work, the ability to protect.

And then it says, “and the grinders cease because they are few,” it’s a feminine word and it’s speaking of the slave women that would be grinding the flour to prepare the food and now he can no longer hire these people and they’re leaving. And it’s a picture, of course, in the analogy between this estate and the human body, what is the grinder? What grinds flour? What is the common analogy between that function and our bodies? It’s our teeth. So it’s a picture here that “the grinders cease because they are few.” And it’s a [can’t understand word/s] the weakness of the arms of the legs and the teeth go. “…because they are few; those that look out of the windows be darkened.” The picture in the estate is young ladies were not allowed on the street but they would peak out, being curious creatures they would want to see where the guys are so they’d peak out through the blinds. But the structure of this says it’s not the estate and the window that’s collapsing, it’s the ones looking through the window that are weakening, and so obviously what analogy in the body would correspond to that in the estate? What peaks through the blinds? The eyes, vision. So now here is the loss of vision in old age.

“The doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low.” The picture there is “the doors shall be shut in the streets” is how else would you communicate with what’s going on? You go through the door, it’s the story of intercourse with the rest of the world, with society, and that’s coming to a halt, as in aging there’s less and less interaction as the aging process and senility sets in, and the inability to interact with the surroundings. This is a very depressing thing but Solomon is going to tell us why in just a moment. And he goes through this litany, this recitation of all the undesirable things that happen in aging. Of course when you’re 17 you’re immortal and this is all irrelevant. “When the sound of the grinding is low,” and there is the idea of just the death solution, the idea again, using the analogy of the estate and human body, “the sound of grinding is low” the inability to digest food, the diminishing of activity.

Then it says, “rise up at the voice of a bird,” it means he likes sleeping, can’t sleep for long now. Now when you’re young you can just zonk anywhere, and then all of a sudden you get older and you have a hard time sleeping. So at the voice of a bird he rises up, so sleeplessness. And then an interesting comment, “all the daughters of music shall be brought low,” the King James says but what that is is the singers; singers that would have been coming to entertain. And what would singers do in a grand estate? They’d put on a show, you’d have a dinner, a supper and it’d be sort of like a party and entertainment, and the singers, it says, “shall be brought low,” meaning that you can’t hear, and so here’s the failure of hearing; the failure of sight, the failure of peace, the failure of the whole body breaking down.

Verse 5 continues this but now abandons the metaphor of the estate, “when they shall be afraid of that which is high,” and this is the person who, as they get older they become frail and they have a fear of falling, a very good fear. My grandmother fell down and broke her hip two or three times and my father almost went bankrupt paying for her medical bills, didn’t have Medicare then. So people are naturally afraid as they get older, it’s not that they’re afraid in the sense of being afraid, being a coward, it’s just they’re afraid because they’re smart, they know one mistake is going to cause a problem. So that’s what meant, “they shall become afraid of that which is high.”

And young people, read this with understanding because if you want to minister to older people in your family, this is a description of the trials that they face. You don’t face those yet, but they do; just imagine how it would be going out and playing ball with one hand tied behind your back. It doesn’t mean that you don’t want to play ball; it means that you find you can’t play ball. It’s not that older people don’t want to run down the block, they would love to run down the block. Their body can’t let them run down the block, understand that of older people you young people.

“…the almond tree shall flourish,” the almond was a tree that gave out pink blossoms which gradually became white and the commentators here generally take this to be the rise of white hair. Now the next one is a difficult one, it’s subject to all kinds of things, but “the grasshopper shall be a burden” is sort in the King James a translators attempt to translate what’s called a hiphel stem in the Hebrew, which is a reflexive stem. Literally it reads, “the grasshopper drags himself,” now I don’t know if you study grasshoppers, I’m not a biologist here but the idea there is a grasshopper if you watch him trying to walk, doesn’t really look like he’s in too much system of coordination, he’s dragging around, and the idea here is that’s the gait of an older person. Their body doesn’t work the same way, the parts are wearing out and so just as the grasshopper has a very unusual and awkward gait, the grasshopper drags himself around.

And then, “the desire shall fail,” this is a delicate reference to sexual potency, “because the man” and now the reason for it, “because the man is going to his eternal home,” and it’s a participle, meaning aging is a slow dying, “the man is going,” it’s a process that takes time. On that graph in the bulletin it’s where that curve goes up, during that brief period of 10-15 years at the end of your life when it’s going rapidly, this is where that verb he “is going to his eternal house” and then there’s irony at the end of this verse because of the way Solomon selected the word. He says, “the mourners go about the streets,” and of course this is a funeral, but the word he chooses for “mourner” isn’t the word for family mourning in grief, it’s the word that was used for commercial people that you hired to go weep and wail. It would be like going to the funeral home and buying services. So he says while this dying process is going on the mourners are going about the streets, meaning they make money on this. That’s not to say that that’s wrong, it’s just saying there’s an irony to this. All the pain and the depression of having to go through this old aging process and then it’s not the people that love you that are doing the mourning, it’s the professional staff that was hired to do the mourning. And this reflects some of the poignancy of old age.

We said the structure here was verses 1-2 was life; verses 3-5 is death, now he comes back to life and then he concludes with death. Let’s watch. In verse 6 it’s linked with verse 2. Verse 2 starts off, young person, do this while you can. Verse 6 is the same thing, except in verse 6 the emphasis is far more not on aging as do this before you die. “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.” Instead of the metaphor of the estate this is a metaphor of a drinking fountain, of the fountains that they used in the Middle East to get cold refreshing water out of it. And of course, any of you who are sensitive to the Bible and have read it seriously for any number of years, you know very well that that image of the fountain is very profound. The image of the fountain is speaking of life and salvation, and it comes directly from Eden because there in Eden where did the water come from? It came up from out of the ground and watered the Garden. And where does the water come from in the book of Revelation? It comes from up out of the throne of God and waters the face of the earth. So it’s a profound imagery here of life itself. And he’s using the apparatus that was used in this fountain to lower the bucket to get the water; the whole thing breaks. And it’s a wonderful picture because the life is down in the well and to get it I’ve got to have the tool to go get it; I don’t have the fountain in me, the fountain is down here and if I lack the tools I’m cut off. And so it’s a wonderful picture, he says do this folks, before you die.

And verse 7 he quotes Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 and here’s where Solomon brings back the concept that we studied earlier, that he is using very consciously the Bible’s picture. This is a man who is not making this up, this is not disconnected with the rest of Scripture. He says, verse 7, “Then the dust shall return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God, who gave it.” The dust, obviously referring to Genesis 2, what did God say, He made man out of the dust of the ground. And He said on the curse, you have sinned against Me unto where shall you return? To the dust you shall return. Was that originally in the creation? Was that part of this? No it wasn’t, he quotes verse 7 and refers us to Genesis so that we can understand that we are living in times of abnormal existence, an abnormal existence brought into existence by our sin, by rebellion against the Creator who made things perfectly. And who messed it up?

I look at verses like this, and of course the modern skeptic laughs at the Bible, it’s a bunch of stories, etc. Of course I laugh at him when I hear some of this ecology nonsense, like global warming and a few other things that nobody has ever proved. And we have all the legislation being promoted for this and that and the other thing, and we’ve got to be sensitive to our environment and we have Mother Earth day and all the rest of the pagan festivals, and we come down and laugh at the Scripture but I ask you, if this view is true, what is the greatest ecological disaster that was ever perpetrated in the universe? And the answer is, the Bible gives it, we have screwed up the environment far more than the most rabid ecologist could ever imagine; it was the sin of the man that caused the environment to go bad in a far more profound way.

So Solomon returns in verse 7 to that last and final truth. And then he concludes the book in verse 8 with this memory of chapter 1:1 when he says, “Vanity of vanities … all is vanity.” This is the conclusion of the actual text. Now we want to at this point stop a moment and look at something. What Solomon is saying is answered in the New Testament. What does the New Testament say to Solomon? The New Testament is advanced revelation. Basically what Solomon is saying is that mortal life has no value in and of itself. If you look at life that we know as life it always results in death. Now you can take vitamins and live two extra years but the point still is that you’re going to die. Everybody is going to die; we are all under capital punishment by virtue of our sin. So life leads to death. Our knowledge is perpetually uncertain because there are all these surprise effects that occur in the universe that are unpredictable, take it from me, I try to predict the weather.

The value, where do we get value from, and the only source of value is no basis. You see, every time you go into the market place and you may have something you want to sell, maybe a house, it may be a craft, it may be something else, what’s the price you can charge for that? The price you charge for it is what other people value that. If you charge too high a price you’re never going to sell it; you charge a low price you sell it. So the price of anything is determined by whom? It’s by the market, and who’s the market? Other people like you. And therefore where’s value coming from? It’s coming from human beings. Now here’s the problem. How do we know that their evaluation of this or that or anything else is correct? We don’t; we don’t! Thankfully in an open market free economy we have many, many people giving an evaluation of a substance called a free market and we believe that that’s the most fair because at least somebody is going to get it right. If you have a bureaucrat sitting in some ozone layer of management trying to decide what it is that’s valuable, like the communist did and ruined one of the finest countries in the world, the Soviet Union had more resources than any other nation that ever existed and they can’t even farm potatoes and get it right. Here you have senior level management who do not have omniscience trying to make omniscient value evaluations. And that’s the problem of a controlled economy; it always fails because when a controlled economy fails it grossly fails because there were foolish decisions made, but what the Bible says is that neither the senior level management nor the market place can make the final evaluation; that is God and God’s alone.

So what Solomon is doing is he’s saying if you look at mortal life in and of itself it’s a big zero. The only solution, he says, is to bracket mortal life with the God who is your creator. Now we bracket the whole thing, we get the big picture, the God behind the scenes, and what happens now to life? What does God promise about this messed up dying life? What did Jesus Christ do on the third day? He rose from the dead. So we have an answer to death—physical resurrection. What do we do about knowledge? God has designed the universe, we know that there is truth out there, we discover parts of it and He is also gracious to reveal more of it to us and therefore the anchor of knowledge is His revelation which is the Word of God.

So we answer the issue of life with resurrection; we answer the issue of knowledge with the Word of God, and we come to the value issue. What is our life worth? What is your life worth? What are some of the things we do in every day worth? That will be answered by God in judgment, and God will have the perfect evaluation of everything, every thought, every word in every deed of our life. If that terrifies you it should because when we think of His holiness and His high standard of valuation we know we will come short and that’s why Jesus Christ died on the cross, to provide a method of dealing with the issue of value.

We want to look at something else; turn to the New Testament and we want to go through three passages of Scripture because before we conclude this book, we want to not leave you hanging. So let me point to three New Testament passages that address this dilemma. Romans 8:22, this passage directly handles the issue that Solomon raised. In Romans 8:22 Paul says: “We know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain,” see the Bible is not naïve, people that say the Bible is naïve must have a problem reading or something, “the creation groans and travails together in pain until now. [23] And not only they,” but notice in verse 23, “we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves.” Why? We are waiting for what? We are “waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.” So what’s the answer to the issue of Solomon back here? The answer is resurrection, and if Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead we have a very big problem.

Let’s look at the problem. Turn to 1 Cor. 15:32, the second New Testament passage you want to be aware of, pointing to the fact that if the Bible is not wholly true, then it’s not at all true. In 1 Cor. 15:32 Paul says: “If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage to me if the dead don’t rise,” if there’s no such thing as a literal physical resurrection, Paul admits in verse 32, and look at this because it’s clear evidence, clear evidence in the New Testament text that the New Testament writers knew very well the consequences of the fact that if the Word of God wasn’t true then was the result. The New Testament writers are very conscious of the consequences and here’s a classic passage. Paul admits in this passage that if Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, if the Bible historically is not correct, then let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. That is not a wrong philosophy of life IF the New Testament is wrong. That is the only answer to life is the New Testament is wrong; you can play religion all you want to but if it’s not grounded on truth and fact it’s just a mirage.

There’s one further passage, 1 John 2:15 let’s look at it and see if it doesn’t have a little more oomph to it now that we’ve gone through Ecclesiastes. Do you see in verses 15, 16 and 17 why the apostle John could say what he did? Does it hit you with more force now that we’ve listened to Solomon? Here is what John says. “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Now look what he says of the world, “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the Father, it’s of the world” and what does he say about the world in verse 17 that reminds you of that hevel word, that all is transient? He says, “The world passes away and the lust thereof, but he that does the will of God abides forever.” What’s the only foundation? It’s the God of Scripture and the God of redemption.

Let’s finish now the book of Ecclesiastes and look at the conclusion. The conclusion apparently was not written by Solomon. It was written by an editor who took Solomon’s notes, put them together and put them into the canon of Scripture. Verses 9-14, “And, moreover, because the Preacher was wise,” the “Preacher” was the word for Solomon, Ecclesiastes, that word, Ecclesiastes is the Greek, Koheleth is the Hebrew, Preacher is the English, and “Koheleth” or “Ecclesiastes was wise,” that means the man who gathered the assembly, the ekklesia, the assembler of the ekklesia, “the Preacher was wise, he continued to teach the people knowledge” and the idea here is that it was continuous teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, over and over and over and over and over, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. Why? Because we never get it the first 14 times, we have to have it 15, 16, 17, 18 times before we remember. We are all built that way and so this teacher kept on teaching and teaching and teaching and teaching.

And then it says he did three things. It says he evaluated, “he sought out” or he questioned, and he “organized many proverbs.” The evidence if you wish to look at it some day, some Bible verses that point to that is Proverbs 1:1 and 25:1. They are references to this collecting activity mentioned in verse 9. And it’s a notice that he had an extensive effort in assembling what, thankfully the great books of the wisdom portion of the Old Testament canon.

Verse 10, “The Preacher sought out to find acceptable words,” the idea is specialized vocabulary. What did we say the very first lesson? We said one of the critic’s problems with this book is it has an unusual vocabulary and they always want to late date the book. The problem is it was a late appearing vocabulary because Solomon originated most of the words. He sought out the words, he had a special vocabulary that he devoted to this in order that the words would be “written uprightly, words of truth.”

Verse 11, “The words of the wise,” now this is just sort of a summary, it’s a proverbial statement about this kind of literature. “The words of the wise are as goads,” you see, the problem with proverbial literature is it’s not easily understood. For example, what do you do with this one? Someone comes up to you oh, I’ve found a place in the Bible that’s a contradiction, it says “answer not a fool according to his foolishness:” (colon) “answer a fool according to his foolishness.” Now you look at that verse and you say wait a minute, we’ve got a conflict here. No, let’s not be stupid, I mean the guy that wrote this knew that. Why did he deliberately write two sentences in direct conflict? To goad us. What is the goading? To make us think. See, they didn’t have television, thankfully, because it’s a visual medium and visual mediums are really not too good to think; they’re great for illustrating things, I’m not knocking the visual medium, I use the visual medium. But if you rely on a visual medium you will find that you have not engaged your mind like you do with a verbal written medium.

That’s why children need to be taught to read early; the earlier the child begins to read and begins to work that, he works this little thing up here and he begins to think and the more he thinks the sharper his conscience can be as a Christian, because he can think his way through. Someone was telling me this week, facing a death trial in their life, and somebody said something to them and they got into a depression, and do you know what they told me, how they got out of that? They reasoned through and said where is this coming from; what is this plugged into? Why, this is just unbelief. What am I trapping myself into here. You have to think your way out; you don’t feel your way out, you don’t look at television and get your way out. You think your way out and that only happens if this works; and the only time, if you notice it yourself, when you’re tired, what do you want to do? Flip on the tube. Why? Because the tube doesn’t demand anything of you. It’s exactly the times that you’re mentally fatigued that you love to watch television.

So there’s a built in thing here, and here, what Solomon is saying, “the words of the wise are a goad” he wants to give you just one sentence and think about, that’s how the learning occurs. “…as nails fastened are the chief collections,” and you wonder what is this all about. The idea of “the chief collection” here are the collections of proverbs and the nails that are fastened, these are the nails that were used to hang things on. Now what do you think that means? The collection of proverbs are as well-driven nails, or hooks. It means that they give you reference points to handle the problems of life; you have a hook here, you have a hook here, a hook here, a hook here. We know certain things about suffering, we now know that every time we encounter life and we are tempted to make this life the center of action we realize wait a minute, this life is a life of aging and death, this life is an age of uncertainty. This life has no real value in it, so we think and identify the problem. So that’s the idea that we now create hooks in our soul.

Verse 12, “And furthermore, by these, my son, be admonished: of the making of many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” Now be careful about that. Verse 12 can be misinterpreted. It is arguing that there is a useless form of study but clearly in context it can’t be study of the proverbs because the proverbs are mentioned in verse 11 so he can’t be in verse 12 undermining what he just taught in verse 11. So what is it? Well, the secret is found in the first few words of verse 12 when it says, the King James Version, “by these, my son, be admonished.” Literally it means “beyond these be warned.” What he is arguing for here is that when you establish the hooks in your soul and you have the doctrines and the truths of the Word of God that directs you and points you to Christ, when you have that structure built in, don’t bury it with a bunch of garbage by going beyond it; make those your authority. Work out from there, study things, etc. that’s fine, but don’t cover up the hooks. You don’t go beyond the Word of God for your authority. It’s not the Word of God and something else, the Word of God plus something else. The Word of God is sufficient unto all good things.

Verse 13-14 if we had any doubts that this was a pessimistic book answers those doubts for us in these closing verses because he comes back, the editor of this says he sees nothing heterogeneous about this book, he sees nothing heterorthodox, he sees nothing about false doctrine. He concludes verse 13-14 just as smoothly as he began, “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.” Now he can say that; why can he say that? Because he indirectly, all through this great wisdom book he has taken the opposite. You want to not fear God, you want to not keep this commandment, you want to make this life the center of the arena, go ahead, look what it does, take a good look. Now he says, after you take a good look [Tape abruptly ends].