Sermon Transcript May 28, Ecclesiastes: Getting the Most Out of Life. When Life Doesn t Add Up Ecclesiastes 7:15-8:17

Transcription

1 Sermon Transcript May 28, 2017 Ecclesiastes: Getting the Most Out of Life When Life Doesn t Add Up Ecclesiastes 7:15-8:17 This message from the Bible was addressed originally to the people of Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church on May 28, 2017 at 511 Maple Street, Wethersfield, CT, by Dr. Scott W. Solberg. This is a transcription that bears the strength and weaknesses of oral delivery. It is not meant to be a polished essay. An audio copy of the sermon on CD is available by request at (860) An audio version of this sermon may also be found on the church website at 1

2 Sermon Text Ecclesiastes 7: In my vain life I have seen everything. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing. 16 Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? 17 Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? 18 It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them. 19 Wisdom gives strength to the wise man more than ten rulers who are in a city. 20 Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins. 21 Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. 22 Your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others. 23 All this I have tested by wisdom. I said, I will be wise, but it was far from me. 24 That which has been is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out? 25 I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. 26 And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. 27 Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things 28 which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. 29 See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. Ecclesiastes 8: Who is like the wise? And who knows the interpretation of a thing? A man's wisdom makes his face shine, and the hardness of his face is changed. 2 I say Keep the king's command, because of God's oath to him. 3 Be not hasty to go from his presence. Do not take your stand in an evil cause, for he does whatever he pleases. 4 For the word of the king is supreme, and who may say to him, What are you doing? 5 Whoever keeps a command will know no evil thing, and the wise heart will know the proper time and the just way. 6 For there is a time and a way for everything, although man's trouble lies heavy on him. 7 For he does not know what is to be, for who can tell him how it will be? 8 No man has power to retain the spirit, or power over the day of death. There is no discharge 2

3 from war, nor will wickedness deliver those who are given to it. 9 All this I observed while applying my heart to all that is done under the sun, when man had power over man to his hurt. 10 Then I saw the wicked buried. They used to go in and out of the holy place and were praised in the city where they had done such things. This also is vanity. 11 Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. 12 Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they fear before him. 13 But it will not be well with the wicked, neither will he prolong his days like a shadow, because he does not fear before God. 14 There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity. 15 And I commend joy, for man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun. 16 When I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, how neither day nor night do one's eyes see sleep, 17 then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out. Introduction Buddy Stride and Don Saunders were lifelong friends. They did everything together. Listen to how John MacArthur describes the extent of their togetherness in a sermon he preached in He says, "Together they grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, high school classmates bound by their faith and determination to spread God's Word. Together they went to seminary in California, and then last summer headed to Philadelphia to find a congregation to lead together. At Bethany Baptist Church in Fox Chase, Stride became pastor and Saunders assistant pastor. Together they lived in a small stone house in Willow Grove. Stride, his wife and four children took the upstairs, Saunders and his wife, the basement. Together they dreamed of some day training ministers in France. 1 I remember meeting these two young men when I pastored in the Philadelphia area. They were in the next town over from where I was and you could tell that there was something special about these two 26 year old men when you met them. 3

4 It was their habit to spend Friday nights together. On one particular Friday night in February, 1998, they were off to get some donuts for the rest of the family and were just two blocks away from their home when tragedy struck. They were hit by another car and together both died at the scene of the accident. Buddy s two year old son was in the car as well, but he survived. According to the report from the accident, Buddy died with his son in his arms. As he handed him over to the firemen at the scene he said to his son, You go with the men. I m going to go see Jesus. 2 I remember getting the news of this horrible accident. I knew the church well. It was a church that had a storied past. Nate Saint, one of the five missionaries martyred by the Auca Indians in 1956 grew up in this church. His death, along with his fellow missionaries, gave birth to the modern missionary movement. I remember seeing a plaque at the back of the church in his honor. But like many churches with a storied past, this church had struggled in the past few decades. Buddy and Don coming to this church was such a breath of fresh air and after meeting them, it wasn t hard to imagine that good days were in store for this church. And though I didn t know them well, I had met them. That alone, for me, made this tragedy more than just a news story that unfolded somewhere in the Philadelphia area. Instead, it hit close to home. It was an incident that didn t make any sense to me. It bothered me. I couldn t understand why this would happen to these two young men of great promise, let alone to a church that had already been through so much. I must confess, I questioned God. I couldn t understand why God would allow such a thing to happen. This is the incident that came to my mind when I read our opening verse this morning. In Ecclesiastes 7:15. Qohelet, the Preacher, says, In my vain life I have seen everything. [I ve seen it all!] There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evil doing. In other words, as he looks at life under the sun he sees a certain inequity to life. The good often die young while the unrighteous prosper. What is up with that? Other biblical writers have wrestled with this enigma of life as well. In fact, in Psalm 73 you have the honest cry of the heart that even wonders if living for God is really worth it. In Psalm 73:12-14, the psalmist cries out, Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning. Rabbi Kushner captured the perplexity of this enigma in his famous book titled Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. This is part of the hevel of life. It is these enigmas of life that remind us that life doesn t fall into nice neat patterns. To be honest, these enigmas of life are common occurrences. 4

5 And so this Qohelet makes it his ambition to understand these things. The word wisdom is used quite often in this passage. For example, he writes in Ecclesiastes 7:25, I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things. In the next chapter he says in verse 9, All this I observed while applying my heart to all that is done under the sun. And again he says in verse 17, I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done under the earth. In his quest to understand these things, he did gain some wisdom to help us navigate these enigmas of life. But as we get ready to see what he discovered, I want you to be prepared because he doesn t answer the question you were hoping he would answer. It is the question we always ask when these things happen. It is the why question. Instead, in his quest for wisdom, he discovers some helpful things about God and how we should and shouldn t respond to God as we wrestle through these issues of life. Very simply, he tells us three things we can t do with God as we wrestle through these enigmas of life. But he then tells us one thing we must do. We can t answer the why question. But we can answer the who question. In that very same psalm, Psalm 73, where the equity of God was being questioned, the psalmist lands where we want to land this morning. In Psalm 73:26 and 28 he concludes, My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever... But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the LORD God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works. May you find your rest in God this morning, even within the enigmas of your life. That is where true wisdom will lead us. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the LORD. You Can t Obligate God You might find Qohelet s first reaction to the enigma of life a bit perplexing. I did, when I first read it. After just observing the seeming inequity of life where the righteous suffer and those who have nothing to do with God seem to prosper, he says something that on the surface comes across a bit cynical. In verses he says, Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? On the surface he seems to be saying that since the righteous don t always prosper, don t knock yourself out to live a good life. Since there is no guarantee that it will pay off for you, be not overly righteous. But, at the same time, don t swing the pendulum to other side and be overly wicked either. Just be middle of the road. Philip Ryken says that those who believe these verses are cynical are saying, Look, if the righteous perish, while the wicked live to prosper, then don t try to be a goody two-shoes. If only the good die young, then there is nothing to be gained by trying to be good. 3 And yet, clearly, this way of thinking is 5

6 contrary to what we read all over Scripture. Over and over again, we are called to keep the commandments and to pursue righteousness. Jesus said in the Beatitudes, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Therefore, I don t think that he is being cynical here at all. Rather, what he is doing is exposing the extreme reactions we can have in response to these perplexing enigmas of life. When observing that the righteous suffer, it may be tempting for you to just throw all caution to the wind and live anyway you want. But he says, Be not overly wicked. Why? This would be foolish. In spite of the enigmas we see from time to time, there is a general reality that is true. There is blessing in following God and there is trouble in turning away from God. The house that is built on the rock will stand in the storm. And the house built on the sand will fall during the storm. So don t react to these enigmas of life by rejecting God. The other tendency is to double down and to strive to be overly righteous. The point he is making here is the motive behind this kind of action. The reason why this person thinks some of those bad things happened to those righteous people is because they weren t righteous enough. And so they strive for this righteousness, what Qohelet call overly righteous - thinking that they in some way will obligate God towards them. This was the mindset of Job s miserable friends who came to comfort him in his suffering. Even though Job couldn t think of anything he did to cause this suffering, they shook their heads and said, you must have done something wrong to deserve this. Driving this way of thinking is the thought that if you double down and pursue righteousness, then God is obligated to bless you in some way or another. This way of thinking is imbedded in us more than we care to think. It is the cornerstone to Prosperity Theology that says if you plant your seed of faith then God must come through for you with a blessing. Or, I see this thinking emerge when someone goes through a hardship or a trial and views this hardship as a sign that God is displeased with them for some reason or another. Or when we respond to our trouble by responding with our arrogant cry, Why me? Ryken suggests, it is often tempting to say, God, I don t deserve this. Don t you know who I am? And it is only a short step from there to saying, Who does God think he is? 4 Or as Greidanus puts it, Since even the most righteous people are sinners... And since God has set the time to be born and the time to die, trying to prolong our life by being superrighteous would be arrogant. 5 It reminds me of Romans 11:33 that says, Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? The answer is, no one. So the first lesson we learn as we face these enigmas of life is that you can not obligate God to anything by the way we live. 6

7 You Can t Blame God The second thing you can t do when these enigmas of life emerge flows out of the first point. It is the faulty premise that bad things happen to good people. What is the faulty thinking of this premise? It is not that bad things happen. The faulty thinking here is that there is such a thing as righteous people unstained by sin. Look what he says in Ecclesiastes 7:20, Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins. Take notice how he exposes the sin of our hearts in verses He says, Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. It is so easy to see the splinter in someone else s eye. We easily see the one who curses us while, Your heart knows the many times you yourself have cursed others. In other words, when you appeal to your own righteousness as a reason God should be obligated to you, take pause and look at the sin that is in your own heart. If you are honest with what is in your heart, you should find it more perplexing that God s mercies are new everyday. And yet, it is a common knee jerk reaction for us to respond to our suffering and trouble by blaming God for all the trouble we encounter in life. And so he says in verse 25, I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters... the sinner is taken by her. A couple years ago we were in the book of Proverbs where we saw wisdom and folly pitted against each other. In Proverbs, women were used as a personification of both wisdom and folly. For example in Proverbs 9, at the beginning of the chapter he refers to the way of wisdom and he says, Wisdom has built her house.. she has also set her table... And then in Proverbs 9:13 he introduces us to The woman Folly. When we came to the end of the book and looked at the virtuous wife we saw that this too was a personification of wisdom and a final appeal to marry wisdom over foolishness. The same kind of thing is happening in our passage this morning. When he speaks of the woman whose heart is snares he is personifying the gravitational pull that temptation has on an individual. It is everywhere. It is outside of us and inside of us. Greidanus observes, In our world there is a great danger of falling into the hands of wickedness. In today s context we can liken wickedness to a black hole in space. A black hole gradually sucks in and destroys everything that comes within range. 6 Thus he observes in verse 27, Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher... One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. This is a poetic figure of speech to suggest that he looked around this fallen world and could 7

8 barely find one righteous person. It is not the intent of this verse to point us to Jesus, but we could take some allegorical license based on what we know from Scripture and apply it to Jesus. Male or female, there is no one righteous, no not one. The only one who can claim such a title is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He alone is righteous and through faith in him who died on the cross and rose from the dead, his righteousness is freely given to us. Grace is unmerited favor. Mercy is God withholding what we deserve. God s grace and mercy are the realities that ought to cause us to cry, Why me? Why has God been gracious to me? Why has God been merciful to me? He comes to the main point in verse 29. See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. When he says, this alone I found he is indicating to the reader that this is the point he wants to make from all of this. When God created us, he made us upright. But it was man, in Genesis 3, who rebelled against God and we have been scheming against God ever since. The curse of the fall of man is that this world is filled with suffering and death. Death, the curse of sin, is our enemy. I often say at a funeral that death is not a biological issue but a theological issue. All creation groans as it falls victim to the curse of sin. As children of God, we still live in a broken and fallen world. And so when these tragedies strike close to home and do not discriminate between the righteous and the unrighteous, God is not to blame. You can t blame God for the suffering that is in this world. It was our own doing. God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. You Can t Understand God When you fast forward to the end of this passage in Ecclesiastes 8:14-17, once again he brings up this seeming inequity to life. Once again, in verse 14 he says that There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity. As we already noted, he is on this quest to understand the ways of God in these matters. He says again in verse 16, When I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, how neither day nor night do one s eyes see sleep. That is how hard he tried to understand the ways of God. Day and night he sought to understand the ways of God and why certain things happened. Do you know what his conclusion was? Our wisdom can only take us so far. Three times in verse 17 he confesses that man cannot find out the work of God. Then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However 8

9 much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out. This is the third thing you simply cannot do. You cannot know the ways of God. I think of those famous verses in Isaiah 55:8-9 that remind us of this truth. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. This issue of suffering is one of those issues that often creates a crisis of faith. It is a crisis that can emerge in the heart of both the religious and irreligious. For the religious, suffering has a way of testing and refining us. For the irreligious, suffering can often further harden the heart against God. Often a hard heart against God will look at suffering and come to the conclusion that God can t be all good and all powerful at the same time. They will say your option is either that God is all good but not powerful enough to stop evil. If that is the case, he is no God at all. Or, that God is all powerful but is not all good. If that is the case, who wants a God like that? But the option posed here has a flaw to it. The flaw is what Qohelet confesses at the end of our passage. Our wisdom can only take us so far. Our finite minds cannot understand the ways of God. We affirm this morning that God is all powerful and all good. We also affirm our limitations in understanding how these two things come together. That is not a philosophical cop-out. Rather, it is intellectual honesty that acknowledges our limitations of understanding. It maintains the Creator creature distinction. In other words, once again, I am not God! Here is what we know from Scripture. Our trials and our sufferings, on the one hand, are the result of living in a fallen and broken world. At the same time, God is sovereign over the affairs of this world and over the details of my life.... even the trials of my life. Not only is God sovereign over the affairs of my life, God is using these hardships to accomplish his work in me and his work through me. Joseph is a classic example of this. He was sold into Egypt by his brothers. This was an evil deed committed against him. And yet, God used all of that to accomplish his purpose for Joseph and for his redemptive plan through the nation of Israel. Later, Joseph was able to say to his brothers, As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. And of course, the death of Jesus on the cross captures this reality as well. Peter, preaching on the day of Pentecost, says of the cross in Acts 2:23, this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. How do you bring these two realities together? We can t know these things. But this thing we do know. My suffering is both the result of living under the curse of sin, but with God it is also a redemptive instrument in my life. It is comforting 9

10 for me to know that in the pain of my suffering, God is working all things out for my good. It is comforting for me to know that what may have caught me by surprise, God has ordained for my good. It is comforting for me to know that in my weakness, God is made strong. It is often through suffering that God causes me to look upward. You Can Worship God So we know that when we observe these enigmas of life that we can t obligate God to respond to us by being superrighteous. Nor can we blame God for the suffering in our lives. Nor can we understand the ways of God. So what can we do? Once again, Qohelet says that the response to all of this is to worship God. Several times in this passage the call to fear God is given as the only fitting response we can have towards God. The word fear simply means to reverence or to worship God. We see in Ecclesiastes 8:12-13 that though the wicked may seem to prosper, in the end those who fear God will do well. He writes, Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they fear before him. But it will not be well with the wicked, neither will he prolong his days like a shadow, because he does not fear before God. This call to fear God is anchored in the events of the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus, the Son of God, stepped into this world of suffering and death. The God-man tasted death on the cross. He who was without sin came under the curse of sin. This past week I came across a series of videos put out by Fuller Seminary interviewing the singer Bono. In these interviews, he is reflecting on the Psalms. He made a comment about the cross that was one the best comments about the cross I ever heard. Recounting a family pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he recalls going to Golgotha, where Jesus died. He said, There is where I had some time alone, where death died. He said, Wow! There it is, where death died. It has no power over me. 7 That is the message of the resurrection. Death is defeated. The curse of sin has been broken. This past Thursday was Ascension Day. It was the day that commemorates the ascension of the resurrected Jesus to the throne of God. He is in the process of reconciling all things to himself and someday this broken world will no longer experience the suffering that is part of our common experience. In the meantime, our only fitting response is to find our rest and our hope in God. Put your faith in Jesus. He has conquered sin and death. Because of Jesus I know that it will be well with those who fear God. 10

11 Conclusion MacArthur continued in his tribute to Buddy Stride and Don Suanders by saying, Together they were laid yesterday in identical bronze coffins topped by identical bouquets and set end-to-end in front of the pulpit of their church. Their wives, Lois and Dixie, eulogized them as men of character, integrity and faith who shared passion was to touch people with God's message... At the funeral Lois said she was overwhelmed by the response of the people. The small church was packed with people sitting in the choir loft and balcony and standing in the aisles. He had a passion to be a minister since he was twelve and being here finally was a dream-come-true for him. He would want us to be happy, she said, even though it's sad. Don's wife said he would say...be strong! Be confident! Stand for the truth!... And then Lois said, "We're grateful the Lord took them together to glory. As much as we would like to have them back, it was utterly fitting and proper and very good of God to take them together." 9 We don t know why, but we do know who. Because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, we know that all things will work together for good for those who love God. So turn in faith to Jesus. He is our hope. 1 John MacArthur 5 Reasons To Preach the Word March 8, 1998, 2 Ibid 3 Philip Ryken Why Everything Matters: The Gospel in Ecclesiastes (Scotland: Christian Focus, 2015) 4 Ibid 5 Sidney Greidanus Preaching Christ From Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) Ibid., MacArthur by Dr. Scott Solberg - All rights reserved 11

12 Sermon Title: When Life Doesn t Add Up Sermon Text: Ecclesiastes 7:15 8:17 Sermon Date: May 28, 2017 Getting To Know Me Questions 1. Share one thing you are looking forward to this summer. Why? 2. Share with the group a current hardship or struggle you are facing. How would you like the group to pray for you? 3. What insight did you gain from the sermon this past week that you found helpful? Diving Into The Word 4. Read Ecclesiastes 7:15 and 8:14. How do you see these verses to be true to life? Read Psalm 73: Do you ever feel this way about the suffering you see and experience? 5. Read Ecclesiastes 7:16-18 and Romans 11:33. What are some of the subtle ways we think God is obligated to bless us? What is wrong with that kind of thinking? 6. Read Ecclesiastes 7: Why is it wrong to blame God for our suffering? Do you ever struggle with the desire to blame God? Why or why not? 7. Read Ecclesiastes 8: Do you find any comfort in knowing that we cannot understand the ways of God? Why or why not? 8. Read Ecclesiastes 8: Why are we sure that it will go well for those who fear God? How does this promise point us to Jesus? Taking It Home 9. What is one thing you learned about God through this study that will help you deal with your own suffering and trials? 12