Grace Evangelical Free Church // Wyoming, MN

Ecclesiastes 6:10-7:2 Whatever has come to be has already been named, and it is known what man is, and that he is not able to dispute with one stronger than he.

11 The more words, the more vanity, and what is the advantage to man?

12 For who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow? For who can tell man what will be after him under the sun?

7:1 A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of birth.

2 It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.

As I’ve mentioned to you before, preaching through a book of the Bible is somewhat like having kids. It takes a lot of preparation, it’s a lot more work when you’re in it, and it’s always hard to be done, but it’s more than worth it. In other words, for everyone who preaches weekly, the book of the Bible we’re in is a big part of our lives, usually for a significant length of time. And for that reason, a normal question when pastors gather is, “So, what are you preaching on these days?”. Their answer is an important window into their lives.

In that vein, when I tell people that I’m in Ecclesiastes, they tend to chuckle. To know much of anything about the book is to know that as helpful as it is, it’s all over the place. It’s written from below and above the sun perspectives. The Preacher jumps from one subject to the next without any obvious rhyme or reason. He returns to subjects already addressed to add just a bit more detail. The tone changes consistently (albeit usually a bit defeatist sounding). It sometimes reads like a narrative, sometimes like a letter, sometimes like a memoire, sometimes like a report, and, as we’ll see this morning, sometimes like a chapter in Proverbs.

And to that end, if you have an ESV Bible, you can see from the different formatting that 7:1-13 contains a collection of proverbs. What our ESVs don’t reflect, though, is that the proverbs probably begin in 6:10.

Practically, that means the Preacher provides us with a batch of wise sayings. Like the proverbs in the book of Proverbs, they are usually not promises to be trusted in, but descriptions of the way things ordinarily work. They are things that are generally true in this world.

We’ll make our way through a handful of them this week and another handful next week. Our aim is to gain from the Preacher’s Spirit-inspired wisdom in such a way that we would live lives more in line with the world as it is for our good and God’s glory.

The big ideas of this passage are that God made the world to function in a certain way and, therefore, as we learn that way and conform to it, things tend to go better for us. Even as when we are ignorant of God’s ways or out of conformity with them, things tend to go worse. And the main takeaway is to order our lives according to God’s design and wisdom for His glory and our good. We’ll get lots of practical ways to do that today.

Have you ever seen someone unknowingly, completely misusing something? My first apartment had the first dishwasher I’d ever used. One of my roommates, who (unlike me) had a dishwasher in his home growing up, bought the soap for it and everything went well…until we ran out. I was alone in the apartment, loaded the dishes, noticed we were out of the normal soap, filled it up with regular dish soap, started the machine, and went to class. Most of you probably already know where this is going. I came back to frustrated roommates and a kitchen full of soap and water. I was well-intentioned, but totally misused the dishwasher and there were messy consequences for it.

The fact of the matter is that all of us go through life doing that kind of thing all the time. God made the world to function in certain ways and, often without knowing it, we miss them to our detriment.

We act as if marriage and intimacy can be used however we want. We act as if we can put hobbies and sports at the center of family life and our kids won’t be spiritually confused. We act as if we can put whatever junk we feel like into our heads and there will be no consequences. We act as if the spiritual disciplines are optional for spiritual growth. We act as if we are only physical or only spiritual and are surprised that our lives are out of balance. We act as if we can make the church about our preferences without that causing conflict within it. We act as if men’s gatherings can happen without smoked meat and still thrive.

The point is that we will either live in the world as it is—as God made it—or we will experience all manner of pathology. The Preacher’s proverbs are, once again, intended to help us do just that. They are meant to describe how the world ordinarily works in order that we might live in it as we ought. That is a great gift to us.

The first proverb is found in v.10. There is life-changing wisdom in it for all who will receive it. The heart of the proverb is that God is sovereign over all things and, therefore, trying to fight against Him is futile.

10 Whatever has come to be has already been named, and it is known what man is, and that he is not able to dispute with one stronger than he.

The idea that “whatever comes to be has already been named” is a big deal. The general idea is the same as Genesis 1-2. God alone has the power to create and name. There is tremendous power in both. The power it takes to create is obvious. But the power to name is no less significant. When God names something, He declares it’s reality. He defines it.

The Preacher’s first proverb, then, is a declaration that the things we experience, the things that come to be, do so because of God’s sovereign decree. Likewise, the things that are, are what they are, because God called them by that name. All that we experience and are, Grace, is because God has known and named it—past, present, and future. Everything belongs to Him. It is all His. God is sovereign over everything.

What’s more, while we like to think of ourselves as wise (wiser than God in our own estimation), we are the foolest of fools compared to God. Apart from God’s grace, we are blinded by pride. Like Job and Jacob, we believe we can contend with God and win. That’s at the heart of our every sin.

And yet, “[Mankind] is not able to dispute with one stronger than he.” In spite of our foolish belief otherwise, we cannot fight with God and win. He is infinitely stronger and wiser. God is God, the Preacher wrote, and we are not. Getting this wrong is like loading regular soap into a dishwasher, only a million times worse.

And while ordinary proverbs are only generally true, this one is true without exception.

Living in light of this wisdom means praying continually. How do you know if you truly believe and trust in God’s sovereignty, if you’re living in light of the wisdom of this proverb, if you’re living in line with reality? The first and main answer is that you pray. If you don’t pray, you don’t really believe this. Prayer at its most foundational level is a humble acknowledgement that God is God and you are not. It is a declaration that God is the only true Namer and Knower. It is the definitive expression of our belief that all things are God’s.

In that regard, one of the most helpful statements I’ve ever heard on prayer comes from a book we’re reading in Masculine Mandate (Disciplines of a Godly Man by Kent Hughes). Of the relationship between our prayers and God’s sovereignty, the author says, “…prayer bends our wills to God’s will.” To explain that concept, he then references an analogy by a different author who said, “If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God” (p. 83).

Living in light of this wisdom means knowing true rest. To know the sovereignty of God, inside the grace of God, and alongside the promises of God, is to be freed from worry and anxiety. When we know that God is perfectly sovereign, wise, and good, when we know that God works all things according to the counsel of His will, when we know that God is continually, actively causing all things to work together for good, we can endure any hardship in peace. No matter our circumstances, we can rest will in the knowledge that they belong to our great God and that He is using them for the greatest good of His name and people.

Living in light of this wisdom means being OK with mystery. A great deal of effort, philosophically and theologically, has been spent in trying to explain how it is possible that God can be sovereign to the extent that “whatever has come to be has already been named” by Him and mankind can make genuine choices. I’m thankful to God for that effort. At the same time, however, God has not chosen to reveal it to us exhaustively. And for that reason, there is mystery surrounding it. We trust that it is possible because God’s Word so clearly teaches both, mysterious as it is.

Living in this world as it is means living in light of the fact that God is sovereign over it.

While our first proverb is absolutely and universally true, the second is a more ordinary proverb—wisdom that is generally, but not always true. There are exceptions to the rule, but only fools don’t know the rule and order their lives accordingly.

In that way, it is not always true that more words are worse. Sometimes it’s best to give longer explanations for things. At the same time, in general, more words, the Preacher wrote, means more vanity, and more vanity means less advantage for those who hear.

11 The more words, the more vanity, and what is the advantage to man?

That is an echo of 5:2-3, “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. 3 …a fool’s voice with many words.”

Combined, these passages help us to see that we are finite creatures. Unlike God, our knowledge is limited and, therefore, our words should be too. We’ve all experienced this at times. The more someone talks, the less they seem to make sense, and the more confused we become.

As a newer believer, I didn’t understand much in the way of biblical doctrine. Therefore, I tried to make up for it by using more words to explain myself and using bigger words to disguise my ignorance.

Two things opened my eyes to the power of fewer and simpler words. The first was R.C. Sproul. There are few people on earth with a deeper well of theological knowledge than he had, but he almost always spoke in clear, simple language that kids could understand. He put out a series on the history of Western philosophy and wrote engaging children’s books. He showed me that intelligence and intelligibility should be best friends.

The second thing that helped me to appreciate the wisdom of the proverb of Ecclesiastes 6:11 was a professor I had in grad school. Whenever she would ask us to explain complicated philosophical principles, she generally listened patiently as we babbled on, and would then politely ask us to tell her a story that made our point. “If you can’t explain it in a simple story, you don’t understand what you are saying,” she would say.

Living in light of this wisdom means listening a lot and talking a little. It means giving the best of our energy to understanding others and to considering how we might communicate our thoughts in the most helpful, concise ways possible.

In the same vein, when teaching, this proverb calls us to be able to communicate in language that is accessible to children. In almost every ordinary situation, if you can’t say whatever you’re trying to say in a way that a 10-year-old can grasp it, and in the length of time a 10-year-old can hang on for, then you don’t really understand it and are disadvantaging your listener. Say it clearly and simply and invite questions for depth.

Living in light of this wisdom also means purposely speaking to advantage your listener. If our words aren’t intended to benefit someone in some specific way, we should keep them to ourselves. Those attempting to live in light of the wisdom of this proverb ought to have Ephesians 4:29 continually ringing in our ears, “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” Say the right words, at the right time, and for the right reason…always and only.

Living in this world as it is means living in light of the fact that more words are worse.

The third proverb flows neatly out of the first. It has two key points. The first continues on with the theme that we are ignorant the second adds the idea that our days are short. Listen for both in v.12.

12 For who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow? For who can tell man what will be after him under the sun?

The first idea of this proverb is, once again, that we are ignorant creatures. Much of what happens and should happen in our lives, therefore, is elusive and mysterious to us.

The Preacher observed all kinds of apparent inconsistencies in the world around him. Often things didn’t end up as they seemed like they should. Good people got sick while bad people were healthy. Honest people were poor while crooks were wealthy. In a world like that, by common sense alone, it is hard to know how a man should live. What is the good path to the good life? It’s often hard to say. “Who knows?” the Preacher wondered.

We barely know what was before us, our own lives are often confusing, and we have no idea what’s next. Again, that seems like vanity of vanities and it’s hard to know what to do in a world like that. We cannot live in this world as we ought to unless we realize that good observation and common sense are never enough.

The second idea embedded in this proverb is that the longest human life is relatively short in the whole scheme of things. We live and die in the blink of an eye. The sun rises each day and sets each night, shadows shrink and then lengthen and then disappear, and so do we.

When all is mystery and the mystery only lasts like a fleeting shadow, how shall we then live? The answer is not often obvious to those whose eyes are under the sun.

Living in light of this wisdom means being humble. This proverb is a call to kill pride.

Living in light of this wisdom also means being people of the Word. What under the sun wisdom can’t do, God’s Word can. What common sense lacks, God’s Word has in abundance. Our reason alone is incapable of making sense of most of ourselves and the world around us, but God’s Word gives us everything we need to live as God designed and commands us to (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

And living in light of this wisdom means carefully considering our own mortality. The next several proverbs set us up well to do just that.

Living in this world as it is means living in light of the facts that we are ignorant and our days are short.

One thing that mankind has been doing since the beginning is creating our own value scales. For instance, throughout history, men have valued the appearance and flattery of a woman over almost everything else (to our consistent demise). But God’s Word tells us that “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised” (Proverbs 31:30). Men, God’s value scale prioritizes a woman’s fear of the LORD way over her charm and beauty.

In the same way, for millennia, mankind has valued staying alive over almost everything else. But God’s Word tells us that Christ is more valuable. Therefore, “to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21).

This next proverb helps us to see two more often misplaced values.

1 A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of birth.

Precious ointment in the ancient world was precious. Baths were uncommon, washing clothes was hard, roads and homes were dirty. Bad smells were easy to come by, but sweet ones weren’t. The sweet smell of ointment requires a lot of time, money, work, and expertise. For that reason, precious ointment was easily and universally understood to be among the most precious things a person could possess.

God’s Word, however, ranks precious ointment below a good name. You can have vats of the most expensive ointment but it means nothing if you are a liar, a swindler, an adulterer, or a lazy glutton. Cultivating character and living in a manner that is commended by God, ought to be prized above almost every earthly thing. It is always better to be around an honest, selfless, God-fearing stinky man than a swindler who smells good.

The first part of the Preacher’s proverb helps us to properly calibrate our value scale. So too does the second part.

Another area of often misplaced value is birth and death. We tend to rejoice at births and cry at deaths. There is, of course, a way in which that is right. But the only way it is right is if those responses flow out of a properly calibrated value scale. And when that’s the case, we’ll see that in many ways, death is more valuable in God’s economy than birth. How can that be?

It is a gift from God every time a child is born. But what happens next will either be a gift or a curse. A godly, obedient, hard-working child is a gift. A dishonoring, godless, disobedient, lazy child is a curse. Birth merely makes the two paths walkable. And it isn’t until death that we can be truly clear on which one a child will take. In that way death is better—it always gives a more accurate diagnosis of a person’s spiritual condition.

Another way death is better is in the fact that while birth fills us with the joy of hope, “Going to a funeral encourages somber contemplation of our own mortality, and this in turn teaches us how to live” (Ryken, PTWC, 153). We’ll come back to this one in the final proverb.

Living in light of the wisdom of the first part of this proverb—a good name is better than precious ointment—means valuing and cultivating godly character in ourselves above all other things. It means gladly letting go of our athletic prowess, earning potential, vacation cabin, and everything else if it hinders the growth of our character.

In a similar way it means valuing godly character in others above all. Guys, girls be thrilled to marry someone who is less externally attractive, but more filled with the character of Christ. Be eager to marry someone who shares less with you in the way of hobbies and more in the way of love for the gospel and a desire to make it known. The same is true for friendships and members in a local church.

Living in light of the wisdom of the second part of this proverb—death is better than birth—means going to funerals. This too we’ll come back to in the next (and last) proverb. Most simply, it means acknowledging that you are going to die, considering what that means, and living in light of it.

And living in light of this wisdom means recognizing that Ecclesiastes only finds its full meaning when it is understood to be a part of the whole. Ecclesiastes was inspired by God to tell a critical part of God’s story, but it only really has meaning inside of the whole of God’s story. In that way, the Preacher had one understanding of how death is better than birth, but the Word of God gives us a fuller one.

“To understand how it is possible for our last day to be our best day, we need to go back to the day Christ was born, and the even better day when he died for our sins. The day Jesus was born was one of the best days ever—the coming of our God and King…but even that blessed day is not the best day. We look beyond Bethlehem to Calvary, where the Savior in the manger died upon the cross. It is not the birth of Jesus that saves us, although of course he had to be born before he could die. Rather it is the death of Jesus that delivers—the shedding of his blood for the atonement of our sins” (Ryken, PTWC, 151-152).

Living in this world as it is means living in light of the fact that God establishes value scales.

The final proverb that we’ll consider this morning is found in 7:2. It expands on and helps explain the previous one.

2 It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.

Most people are invited—at least a couple times a year—to someone’s home who is celebrating something significant (a birthday, an anniversary, a graduation, a wedding, retirement). The invitation is to join in the celebration. There is joy and thankfulness and joy and thankfulness are always best shared.

It’s been great to celebrate with so many of you who have kids graduating and getting married already this summer. I love feasting with you all and sharing your joy. That’s an important aspect of being human and an even more important aspect of functioning well as a part of the body of Christ.

Likewise, most people are occasionally invited to someone’s home who is grieving something significant (an accident, a hard diagnosis, the loss of a loved one). The invitation is to join them in their suffering, to help bear their burdens. There is sadness, grief, and mourning and those things are not meant to be experienced alone.

Rightly oriented, it is good to go into houses of feasting and mourning. It is easier to go into a house of feasting but, the Preacher proverbially asserts, it is better to go to a house of mourning. Again, we are right to wonder how/why that’s the case.

The Preacher tells us the reason for this: “for this [mourning/death] is the end of all mankind.” In other words, as he’s said many times already, death comes to all and so we simply cannot live in this world as it is without that aspect of our personhood properly factored into our living, without properly “[laying] it to heart.”

Grace, the truth is most of us live like we might not die. We either never think about it at all or spend way too much effort in worrying about and attempting to avoid it. The result of denying that aspect of reality is that we continually forsake the blessings and obediences that come from embracing our mortality. The wisdom of this proverb frees us to live life to the fullest. It frees us up to gladly obey even if it puts our lives in danger and therein to find more opportunities to feel our dependence on God.

Living in light of this wisdom means going to the parties (houses of feasting) of those in your life, and especially in your church. Make this a priority. There are still several coming up that you’re all invited to. Go to them. Eat a taco. Drink a pop. Bring a gift. Laugh. Share in the feasting. It’s easy to underestimate the goodness and importance of this. The Preacher’s proverb helps us not to do so.

At the same time, living in light of this wisdom means being even more intentional about being in the lives of those who are suffering (houses of mourning). It means going to them in their time of mourning to sit with them, to listen to them, to pray with them, and, if the opportunity presents itself, to serve them and speak the truth in love to them. It means setting your comfort aside and laying your life down for another.

And with all of that, it means taking the opportunity that affords to consider your own mortality. It means, like Jonathan Edwards, resolving to “think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.” And then turning that into the kind of living that only comes when we settle on the fact that our death is inevitable.

Living in light of this wisdom means not approaching life as if prolonging it is your highest aim. That is not at all to say that we are indifferent to living. But it is to say that knowing that we will all eventually die, frees us up to live boldly, courageously, and fearlessly in obedience to God’s commands. Full obedience leading to premature death is better than cautious, semi-obedience leading to a prolonged life on earth.

Living in this world as it is means living in light of the fact that mourning is better than feasting.

The Preacher gives us significant wisdom in this section. We will do well to live in light of it. And we will usually do worse when we don’t. At the same time, as I mentioned in our look at 7:1, Ecclesiastes only gives us a part of the story. Let me close, then, with the fuller wisdom of God from 1 Corinthians 1:18-24.

18 … the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,
        “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
        and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Look, therefore to Jesus, and know the full measure of the wisdom and power of God, that you may live the fullness of life you were made to live in the world as it really is.

Ecclesiastes 6:1-9 There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: 2 a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous evil. 3 If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life’s good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. 4 For it comes in vanity and goes in darkness, and in darkness its name is covered. 5 Moreover, it has not seen the sun or known anything, yet it finds rest rather than he. 6 Even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good—do not all go to the one place?

7 All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied. 8 For what advantage has the wise man over the fool? And what does the poor man have who knows how to conduct himself before the living? 9 Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite: this also is vanity and a striving after wind.

Our passage for this morning gives us the recipe for the most miserable life. Do you want your time under the sun to be as unbearable as possible? If so, you’ve come to the right place this morning.

In that regard, if I asked you to describe your idea of the most miserable life, what would you say? What do you imagine to be the key ingredients of your worst life now? What kinds of things would be in it and missing from it? Who would and wouldn’t be a part of it? What makes you most miserable?

For the Preacher, there are just two main ingredients for the most miserable life: (1) Unlimited blessings, (2) without God-given joy in them. I imagine the second ingredient (lack of God-given joy) was on some of your radars, but the first (unlimited blessings) seems entirely counterintuitive. I hope to help you see why these two things form a uniquely potent and miserable combination.

Before we get into it, you might (/ought to) be wondering why God would inspire a passage like this. Why would He give us, by way of the author of Ecclesiastes, the recipe for misery? It is, of course, NOT to encourage us to make use of the most miserable life recipe. It is to help us avoid it and escape from it. As we’ve seen several times in Ecclesiastes, the great gift of God in this passage is to warn us of the futility of pursuing satisfaction in places it is never long-found, so that we might not waste our lives chasing a mirage.

God allowed the Preacher the chance to try virtually every other means of satisfaction conceived by man—all the way to the end—in order to reveal to mankind not only where satisfaction is found, but all the places it isn’t as well. Again, this is a great gift. O, that we’d all accept it and never know the most miserable life!

The big idea of this sermon is that the most miserable life is the life that has access to every possible under the sun source of joy, found them all insufficient/empty/hollow, and has not been given the gift of joy in God. The main takeaway, therefore, is to fix our eyes on Jesus, the greatest treasure.

Continuing with his theme of telling of the evils he’s observed (five previous times), in the opening line of our passage the Preacher shares yet another. This one makes his stomach turn more than all the other stomach-turning things he witnessed. He describes it as “lying heavy on mankind”.

1 There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind…

That’s an unusual expression in the OT. It occurs only three other times (and only twice outside of Ecclesiastes).

In Psalm 88, one of the Sons of Korah laments, “My soul is full of troubles and my life draws near to [death]” (88:3). He cried out to God for help, therefore, but as he did, he confessed that “Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves” (88:7).

In Isaiah 24:1, Isaiah promises God’s judgment on the entire earth, “Behold, the Lord will empty the earth and make it desolate, and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants.” In the midst of mankind’s every futile attempt to escape this judgment, God’s wrath continues to fall upon them such that, “The earth staggers like a drunken man; it sways like a hut; its transgression lies heavy upon it, and it falls, and will not rise again” (24:20).

And a bit later in Ecclesiastes (8:6), the Preacher returns to his famous theme from chapter 3 (“for everything there is a season…”). He writes, “For there is a time and a way for everything, although man’s trouble lies heavy on him.”

In each case, the idea (of “lies heavy”) is that of a great, emotional/spiritual burden. Man is faced with a situation that seems to be too much to bear. For various reasons, he feels as if he is being crushed by his circumstances.

That’s the same basic sense in our passage for this morning. The Preacher saw another evil under the sun, one that felt like it might crush all humanity. It is both heavy and universal. What is that great evil? It is, once again, a combination of two, seemingly opposite things.

The first ingredient is a truly surprising one for most of us: “… 2 a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires…

The beginning of this great evil (which, as we’ll see, leads to the most miserable life) always begins with having everything you wish you had. The Preacher summarizes all the desires of man in three broad categories: Wealth, possessions, and honor.

Wealth

The question the Preacher puts in front of his readers over and over is “’How much?’ How much wealth do you think you’d need to be really happy?” We can’t take Ecclesiastes seriously and not acknowledge that all of us have a number in heart, if not in mind. So, what’s your number?

Is it just enough not to have to worry about your basic needs for the rest of your life? Just enough not to have to work anymore? Enough to live comfortably? Enough to live lavishly? Enough to change the world?

Every one of us is at least tempted toward imagining an amount of money that would make us genuinely happy. Again, what’s yours? There’s no number too high. It doesn’t matter what it is, you get it.

But the point of this passage is that the beginning of this heavy evil is having every cent you desire.

Possessions

At the same time, the main point of wealth in Ecclesiastes, as we’ve already seen, is the fact that it is the primary means of getting the under the sun things we want. The value of a society’s currency isn’t the currency itself (the mineral or paper or digital wallet). The actual value is what it represents: the ability to exchange it for whatever we want.

The second, and more important question we need to ask, then, is: What do you really want to make you happy? If you could have anything and everything money can buy, what’s on your list?

Kids, go ahead and make a list right now of every toy, game, gaming system, pet, candy, musical instrument, technology, piece of sporting equipment, and anything else you want. The list can be as long and expensive as you want since you have all the money you need.

Adults, tell the truth, it’s not all that hard to imagine a life of genuine joy if you had the perpetual ability to get whatever you want, whenever you want it, is it?

Non-stop 5-star vacations? Beautiful cabins in all your favorite places around the world and a private jet to get you there quickly? Enough land, wherever you want it (certainly on a trout stream), to build your dream home and enough guest houses for everyone you want to stay as long as they want? A personal doctor to come to you whenever you need and access to the best healthcare on earth? A private chef? The best hunting land imaginable with a personal game warden and forest manager to tend it? Your own private library with a first-rate librarian and all first-edition books? All of those things?

Again, the point of this passage is that the beginning of this heavy evil is having every single thing you desire.

Honor

The third and final category of mankind’s desire mentioned by the Preacher is “honor”. Reputation, importance, glory, and distinction are the words most closely associated with this. To be honored in this since is to have the esteem of others. People will be amazed by you. So what kind of honor would make you truly satisfied?

Do you want to be honored for being the best military general, the world-record holder in whatever events you want, the champ and MVP of whatever sports league you want, the first to walk on Mars, the most prolific author, the most creative artist, the most original musician, the leader who brings about world-peace, Boone and Crockett record holder in all the animals; perhaps the best homemaker, poor-helper, orphan-adopter, preacher or evangelist (good and godly occupations)?

If you could have whatever kind of honor you want and however much of it you want, where would you want to get it from and how much do you think you’d need to make you genuinely and persistently joyful?

One more time, the point of this passage is that the beginning of this heavy evil is having every honor you desire.

Now imagine having all that you want of all three of these things (wealth, possessions, and honor). As I said, for most of us, it’s really hard to imagine not being genuinely happy with any one of them. It seems inevitable with all three, right? Far from a recipe for evil and misery (much less the greatest evil and the most miserable life), this seems like the recipe for the best life, doesn’t it?

While it’s probably not obvious why the first ingredient is part of the recipe for evil and misery (it will be soon), the same can’t be said of the second. On the surface, it makes a lot more sense.

1 There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: 2 a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous evil.

We saw last week, and in chapter 2 before that, that true joy requires two gifts, not one. It requires something (like wealth, possessions, or honor) and the ability to enjoy the thing. And both gifts are from God.

A quick note. When the Preacher says that “God does not give him power to enjoy them,” that is not the same thing as saying that God takes away some innate ability that man has. Sin is such that the ability to delight in good things is not native to any of us since the Fall. Anyone who has it in any measure, has it from God. And if a gift is anything, it is undeserved. No one has the right to complain that they haven’t received a gift.

That said, not having the God-given ability to enjoy whatever we have is certainly a grievous and heavy evil and a part of any miserable life. And, as the Preacher mentioned, that is only compounded if we lose our things to a stranger who, for some reason, can enjoy them.

The familiar point is that there are no things in the world, nothing under the sun, that is able to satisfy on its own. The main point of the last half of v.2, then, is that apart from the second gift of God’s joy, it doesn’t matter what or how much we have (money, possessions, honor, or anything else), we will not be able to find delight in it.

So, the two key ingredients to heavy evil are having whatever you want and lacking the gift of God to enjoy them. The key to this passage and sermon, however, as is the case with any recipe, is not the individual ingredients. The key is the combination of them. The heaviest evil requires all of our earthly desires combined with the lack of God-given power to enjoy them. When mixed together, they are exponentially more powerful to create misery than either by itself.

If you have vinegar and baking soda separately, that’s not much. It’s only when you combine them that you get a significant reaction. It’s the same with the Preacher’s two ingredients.

Before explaining that more fully, there’s another combination the Preacher invites us to consider first. There’s another combination that seems like it might produce a more miserable result than that.

It is the combination of having nothing at all—no food, no money, no friends, no earthly good—and no contentment from God. Both combinations sound bad, but having neither of those things sounds worse than having all of the first and none of the second, doesn’t it?

To highlight the grievous evil of that combination, the Preacher uses the tragic example of a stillborn child in vs.4-5.

4 For [a stillborn child] comes in vanity and goes in darkness, and in darkness its name is covered. 5 Moreover, it has not seen the sun or known anything…

From the Preacher’s perspective, the worst parts of having a stillborn baby are that she never gets to feel her mother’s touch, breathe a breath, see the light, hear her name spoken, express her personality or abilities, or even know anything about the world in any ordinary sense. From the Preacher’s under the sun perspective, a stillborn baby is the epitome of lacking both ingredients.

In a more ordinary sense, we’re meant to imagine the sick, starving, dying man on the street with no one to care for him, to feed him, or to tend to him in his sickness.

Tragically, that isn’t hard for me to do. Years ago, I had a collapsed lung and was taken to the University Hospital. While I was waiting on surgery, they had me in a room with a homeless man who was having a good deal of trouble remaining conscious. His liver was failing and there was nothing anyone could do. He had no earthly possessions and, worse yet, he had no loved one to be with him and care for him. Just hours after being moved into my room he passed away alone. I can’t say for sure where he stood in relation to God, but from every outward appearance he lacked both ingredients.

I asked you at the beginning to consider what kinds of things would constitute the most miserable life. I imagine your answer would include several of those things.

Again, that combo seems worse, doesn’t it? The stillborn child and my hospital roommate’s situations seem worse than someone who is lacking God’s gift of joy, but having an overabundance of money, possessions, and honor, right?

A big part of the point of this passage is that the Preacher’s emphatic answer is “No!” We find that answer in the larger context of the stillborn child example. In it, he compares the stillborn child to a man who had the best the ancient world had to offer—many offspring and long life—but not God’s gift of joy.

Picture a man who “3 …fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life’s good things, and he also has no burial…

The Preacher echoes the same sentiment—with a bit of added detail—a few verses later.

6 Even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good—do not all go to the one place?

The Preacher describes a man who fathered a hundred children over two thousand years (supernatural amounts of the first gift), but had not joy in those things (none of the second gift) (“his soul was not satisfied with life’s good things” and “he also has no burial” and “yet [he] enjoy[s] no good”).

If such a man existed, would he be better off than a stillborn child (or the man in my hospital room)? It might seem like it, but the Preacher’s dispels us of that misunderstanding: “I say that a stillborn child is better off than he.” Having neither gift is better than having all of the first and none of the second.

The question that leaves us with is: How is that so? Why would that be? V.5 sheds light on the Preacher’s perspective.

5 [a stillborn child] has not seen the sun or known anything, yet it finds rest rather than [the man with everything].

“’Better to miscarry at birth,’ says one commentator, ‘than to miscarry throughout life.’ The stillborn child [unlike the man with everything except the ability to enjoy it is better off in that she] never has to endure pain, or see suffering, or struggle with the guilt of conscious sin” (Ryken, PTW, 142).

Again, in a more ordinary sense, we know that when we have nothing, there’s at least the hope of something.

The man in my hospital room might have thought, “If only I could just get a cup of water or a bite of bread or someone to show me the smallest measure of kindness.” A person in that position probably has a long way to go to learn that he needs two gifts, not one. But it is the gap that gives hope (false as it is). When you don’t have anything at all, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to imagine that happiness might come with even the smallest something, and the smallest something doesn’t seem impossible to come by.

In other words, the person with nothing and no God-given joy is better off in the sense that they at least have some measure of hope to cling to—misguided as it is. As tragic as it is, it’s like the person who feels OK, even happy, going into the doctor for a regular checkup only to find out that he has terminal cancer. He wasn’t actually better off before he knew, but he certainly felt better off.

The gravest evil and the most miserable man, then, is the one who lacks God’s gift of joy and for whom there are no further rocks to look under to find it. The most miserable person is the one who has been relieved even of the possibility that something within his grasp might satisfy. He is most miserable precisely because he’s tried every under the sun remedy, found them all to be hollow, and had hope evaporate with each new empty attempt until there was none left.

Since none of us have received our every earthly desire, and never will, the Preacher’s insight is truly a gift, if we will receive it. It is like the loudest fire alarm or city storm siren, warning us of imminent danger. If we have ears to hear, we will flee from this greatest evil and most miserable life.

But that leaves us with another, critical question: Where do we flee to, to avoid this heavy evil and most miserable life? I’ll come back to that at the end. First, let’s briefly look at vs.7-9 where the Preacher drives home his points.

To drive home the point that having our every earthly desire met is only to have more desire, the Preacher wrote,

7 All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied.

We work to get money for food, and the best case scenario is that we get enough money to get the best, most nutritious food. But then we eat it and it’s gone and we need to work more to get more money for food, so we can eat it and on and on and on. It never ends.

Of this, my favorite commentator wrote, “[Under the sun] desire is always stronger than satisfaction” (Ryken, PTW, 139) and “Our longings never go away for long” (140). Wise words.

To drive home his point that absent God’s gift of enjoyment, it matters little what else we have (wealth, possessions, honor, or even wisdom), the Preacher wrote,

8 For what advantage has the wise man over the fool?…

…and…

8 … what does the poor man have who knows how to conduct himself before the living?

The wise man might avoid certain common pitfalls, but his heart is no more glad for it without God’s help. Likewise, the poor man might be wise enough to see the problems rich people have and avoid them, but poverty isn’t the answer to unfulfilled longings either; it’s merely the source of different unfulfilled longings.

And to drive home his point that nothing on earth can satisfy by itself, the Preacher wrote,

9 Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite: this also is vanity and a striving after wind.

Our eyes are always looking for the next thing, hoping that it will satisfy. This is why husbands with beautiful, godly wives look at other women. This is why a kid with three gaming systems can’t imagine happiness without the Switch 2. This is why a woman with a closet full of clothes she had to have, has to have more clothes. This is why guys can never have enough tools, fishing rods, technology, or ATVs. No matter what we have, apart from God’s gift of joy, our appetites eventually wander to something else. It’s crazy and futile, the Preacher saw.

Again, then, getting all of those things and more and more and more, apart from God’s gift of contentment and joy, is the heaviest evil and the most miserable life. It is one without joy or hope for it. Knowing that, Grace, flee! Run away form that empty, deadly pursuit. Stop chasing satisfaction, rest, joy, and contentment where it isn’t found. You’re wasting your life if you don’t. You’re making yourself miserable.

But if we are to flee from the greatest evil and find the most marvelous life, where do we go?

Certainly, with this passage in mind, the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy,

1 Timothy 6:7-11 … we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. 8 But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. 9 But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.

11 But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness.

Flee from the pursuit of sin and the things of earth as ends of themselves and run to righteousness and the things of God. But how do we do that?

Rather than fixing our eyes on under the sun things, let us lift them to the things above; to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith; the King of kings and Savior of the world. Of that, Paul wrote,

Colossians 3:2-4 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life [and salvation and joy] appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

God’s gift of joy, joy that transcends money, possessions, and honor, comes through faith in Jesus and the indwelling of His Spirit. To trust in Jesus is to have your sins forgiven, to be reconciled to God, to be named and made holy, to have the love of God and the full and eternal joy of body and soul in Him.

The Preacher was right in more ways than we can even understand. At the same time, he couldn’t have known either the full measure of the problem or the solution. By God’s grace and through His Word, however, we do. We know that Jesus is the greatest treasure and the One through whom all other treasures find their proper place.

Once again, then, as we just sang, let us turn our eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and as we do, the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. Let us turn our eyes to the heavens, Grace. For our King will return for His own. In full assurance that when He does, every knee will bow and every tongue will shout, ‘All glory to Jesus alone!’—the greatest good and the most marvelous life.

Ecclesiastes 5:13-20 There is a grievous evil that I have seen under the sun: riches were kept by their owner to his hurt, 14 and those riches were lost in a bad venture. And he is father of a son, but he has nothing in his hand. 15 As he came from his mother’s womb he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand. 16 This also is a grievous evil: just as he came, so shall he go, and what gain is there to him who toils for the wind? 17 Moreover, all his days he eats in darkness in much vexation and sickness and anger.

18 Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. 19 Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God. 20 For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.

Good morning and happy Mother’s Day.

Moms, the fact that you are here is a big deal.

The most important aspect of mothering well is not fancy clothes, the number of activities your kid is in or how successful they are in them, what grades they get, how many ribbons they have on their chest, what college they into, or how much money they make at their job, or any of the other things that the world around us tends to value most.

The most important aspect of mothering is helping your kids see that God is greater than they could ever imagine. It is helping them know that God is God and thy are not. It is helping your kids see that they need Jesus and that He offers Himself freely to them. It is helping your kids see that they need the Church.

All of those things come together in the gathering of the saints for worship on the Lord’s Day. Again, the fact that you are here means that you believe those things and want them for your kids as well. Whatever else is going on in your life, that you are here is a sweet expression of God’s kindness, your trust in Him, and your love for your kids.

And now, for you, for your kids, and for all who have ears to hear, let’s turn back to Ecclesiastes and the Preacher’s perspective on the good life and the bad life.

In our passage for this morning, the Preacher continued his Sprit-inspired musings on wealth and work and their inability to innately satisfy. Within that we’ll see a few grievous under the sun evils as well as a couple of above the sun goods and the source of each. Almost all of that is familiar, but the Preacher takes us a bit further as well.

In particular, we’ll see the grievous evils of lost riches, the inability to take anything with us into death, and the fact that life under the sun is hard. But we’ll also see the goods of God in eating, drinking and toiling, as well as in wealth, possessions, and power.

This is a message for everyone who longs to be full of joy. It is a message for everyone who struggles with the love of money or with attempting to find genuine satisfaction in something other than God Himself. It is a message for everyone who has felt the inability of the things of this world to bring lasting happiness. It is a message for moms who want to know where to point their kids. It is a message for us all.

The big ideas of this sermon are that God is the only thing that truly satisfies and God’s grace is the only thing that enables us to be satisfied in Him and the things He gives. The main takeaways are to seek our satisfaction in God alone and contentment in all things through Him.

The larger section this passage falls into begins back in 5:8 and goes all the way to 6:9. As I mentioned in the beginning, the whole thing focuses on the inability of wealth and work to deliver on their promises of lasting happiness. That is, we’ve already seen several evils experienced by those who have not yet learned that lesson. Among them are the facts that the love of money leads to systems of oppression (vs.8-9), it entraps, the one in its trap “will not be satisfied” (v.10), it leads to fake friendships (v.11), and it causes inevitable restlessness (v.12).

Continuing on with and expanding on that theme, our passage opens with the words, “There is a grievous evil that I have seen under the sun.”

The word “grievous” means sick or painful. The word “evil” means wickedness, depravity, misfortune, or disaster.

Combined, these words paint a picture of something truly deplorable and destructive. Literally, something so bad that it made the Preacher sick to his stomach.

I wonder what kinds of things you consider to be grievous evils; to be deplorable and destructive. What kinds of things truly make you sick to your stomach? Your answer to that question tells a good deal about your heart. Usually, the thing you love most is the opposite of what you dislike the most.

Although the Preacher only used the term “grievous evil” twice in his opening paragraph (in v.13 and again in v.16), he actually names three grievous evils. We’ll consider each in turn.

The first grievous evil, the first thing that made him sick to his stomach, was watching a man who loved and lost his riches. Look at v.13.

13 There is a grievous evil that I have seen under the sun: riches were kept by their owner to his hurt, 14 and those riches were lost in a bad venture. And he is father of a son, but he has nothing in his hand.

The Preacher saw a man who had acquired a good deal of wealth. He does not say whether the man acquired it lawfully or unlawfully, for himself or by inheritance, through hard work or good fortune. Indeed, he says nothing at all about the manner in which the man came about his riches.

What the Preacher does say, however, is that he held onto his wealth “to his hurt.” That is, it cost the rich man a good deal to keep his riches. We’ll find out more specifically the nature of the cost in v.17, but for now the main thing we’re told is that the cost was steep and to the man’s detriment.

Do you have anything like that in your life? Something that costs you a good deal just to hang onto? An old car? A toy of some kind? A hobby? A relationship?

My parents had a cabin. For many years it provided us with a great deal of fun and togetherness. Over time, however, as my sister and I moved further away, as their friends and co-owners passed away, and as they got older, my parents seemed to spend more and more of their time and money on the cabin just to keep it. They went there more often than not just to check on it, mow the grass, get it ready for winter, etc. In fact, by the end, my dad probably spent more time worrying about the cabin (failed furnace, frozen pipes, falling trees, etc.) than enjoying it. In a way, it cost them a great deal to hold onto it and they kept it to their hurt.

The Preacher witnessed a truly grievous situation: A man who loved his money so much that he was willing to make himself miserable just to keep it (think Ebeneezer Scrooge). But as grievous as that was all by itself, it got worse. Eventually, in spite of the high cost the man paid to keep his riches, eventually he lost it all to a “bad venture.”

Just as details are omitted as to how the man gained his wealth, so too are they concerning how he lost it. What exactly is a “bad venture”? We don’t know if that means he lost it to speculation, a bad investment, shady partners, a sunken ship, a natural disaster, or something different entirely. All we’re told is that he paid a steep price to keep it only to have it taken away in the blink of an eye, probably due to some mistake he made. An evil indeed.

The Preacher witnessed the man’s situation go from bad to worse. And yet, the man still hadn’t hit bottom. One more time, the Preacher’s observation took a downward turn. Not only did the man pay a high price to keep his money only to lose it, but worse still—a grievous evil indeed—he had a son whom he had intended to leave it to. His lost riches not only wiped him out, but his child as well.

The man the Preacher saw loved his money and so tried to gain and maintain it, only to lose all of it. He’d put his hope in it only to be thoroughly disappointed by it. He wanted it to be a perpetual blessing not only for himself, but for his heirs as well. And it ended up being a curse for everyone instead.

That’s harsh. It’s one of the worst things imaginable for most men. And it is exactly what happens whenever we put our hope in something that wasn’t designed to carry that weight. The heart of every bad life is exactly that: a life built on hope in something unable to bear it.

There is a second grievous evil observed by the Preacher; a second stomach-turning thing he saw. He wrote about it in vs.15-16.

15 As he came from his mother’s womb he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand. 16 This also is a grievous evil: just as he came, so shall he go, and what gain is there to him who toils for the wind?

The grievous, under the sun evil named here is that no matter what we do, we come into the world naked and we leave naked. No one comes into the world with anything. And once in the world, no matter how hard we work, no matter how much wealth we accrue, no matter how much stuff we acquire, no one can take a single thing with them out of the world. Death is the great equalizer and, under the sun, it is a grievous evil to forget that.

Let that sink in a bit, Grace. Everything you’ve worked so hard to collect will, in the relative blink of an eye, no longer be yours—perhaps, as we saw in the last point, in this life, but 100% certainly in the next. We all die with exactly what we were born with and there’s not a single thing we can do about it.

Please consider how much of our lives would we have back if we could learn to be properly sickened by the evil, futile pursuit of happiness through stuff? How much happiness have we actually forsaken by seeking it in things we didn’t come and can’t leave with? What percent of our lives are spent (even if unknowingly) chasing after things that simply will not last? What would Grace Church look like if we all repented of this evil and stopped living as if there was gain for those who toil for the wind?

As I said, two grievous evils observed by the Preacher were explicitly named. A third is found (unnamed) in v.17.

17 Moreover, all his days he eats in darkness in much vexation and sickness and anger.

In vs.13-17, the Preacher has a particular man in mind, a man who acquired a good deal of wealth, who fought hard to hold onto it only to lose it for himself and his son. He had given himself to trying to keep things that can’t be kept—working for wind. And the result of seeking happiness and contentment where it is never long-found was that he was instead filled with loneliness, confusion, poor health, and fury; another grievous evil.

The once-rich man had to work until dark, but didn’t even have enough money for candles. He was, understandably, frustrated because none of what happened to him made sense. His lack of money and need to work continually to barely provide his basic needs wore his body down such that his health constantly failed him. And on top of all of that, certainly as a result of all of that, he became an angry, bitter man.

Life under the sun is really hard most of the time for those who set their affection and hope on money; even for those who actually get it. It is a grievous evil that so many continue to fall into this trap; believing the lie that money can provide what it can’t.

Grace, that is what the love of money does. That’s all it can do; not quite to that degree in every case, but it simply cannot satisfy for long. It always, eventually fails and destroys everyone who hopes in it.

Again, that’s not just true of money. It’s true of everything under the sun. Nothing on earth can bear the weight of our hope. Nothing created can fill anything created with lasting happiness. It is a grievous evil to watch people try again and again and again to disprove that in devastating vain.

The Preacher observed the grievous evils of lost wealth, the universal reality of death and the inability to take anything with us when we die, and the severe hardships of life common to all who live entirely under the sun. At the same time, the Preacher observed the source of all these grievous evils: the love of money.

And yet, Grace Church, even under the sun, that’s not the only option. We need not give into the grievous evils that have swallowed up so many over so many generations. There is goodness and joy to be had for all who will seek it where it is found. The Preacher names two specific, joyful goods, along with their source.

The first good mentioned is found in v.18.

18 Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot.

It is good and fitting, satisfying and enjoyable for mankind to eat, drink, and work.

The Preacher says the same thing in different words at the end of the verse. He wrote that eating, drinking, and working are our lot. Therefore, the key to a life of contentment is coming to find gladness in simply doing what we were made to do. Even as (as in the man of vs.13-17) most discontentment in life comes from ignorance of our lot or trying to bypass or ignore it.

We are made with the need to eat, drink, and work. Those things are essential and inescapable aspects of our personhood. We didn’t make it so and we can’t change it from being so. When we engage in those things, rooted in that revelation, they are is good and fitting, satisfying and enjoyable.

That is, in eating, drinking, not as ends in themselves, but as means of nourishing our bodies for the purpose of living according to our lot in life—working and keeping all that is entrusted to us—there is deep contentment.

OK, but wait a minute. If all we had was v.18, then we’d have a few questions, but no real problems. By itself, v.18 mostly makes sense. But, of course, we don’t have only v.18. We have the passages we just read, as well as everything before it; all of which seems to be in direct contradiction to this.

I’m sure you noticed that the Preacher listed eating, drinking, and working as both grievous evils and as genuine goods. We’re right to wonder how it can be both? We need to wonder how it can be both. What is it that differentiates between those things being evil or good?

We’re given a pretty strong hint of the answer in v.18 and an explicit answer in vs.19-20.

The strong hint in v.18 is the above the sun acknowledgement that our days and our lot are given to us by God. That is, the satisfied and joyful are those who are godward in their eating, drinking, and working. It is those who recognize that all are from God. It is those who eat, drink, and work in the certain knowledge that true meaning and purpose are only found above the sun, in God Himself.

Grace, how easy it is to go to work and eat dinner as a practical atheist; as one who forgets that these things are good gifts from God. How easy it is, moms (and dads), to grow weary in your mothering because you forget that God is with you and the work you’re doing is part of His most fundamental design. There is such great glory in it for all who keep their gaze above the sun.

We aren’t given everything we need in v. 18, but what is subtly implied in it becomes obvious and explicit in the final two verses, which also contains the second good to be had under the sun.

Look again at v.19, first for the final good and second for its true source. Look again at v.19 for the difference between the grievous evils experienced by the man in vs.13-17 and the great good of the man of vs.18-20.

19 Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God. 20 For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.

The first man experienced grievous evils on account of his money and stuff. The second man experienced great joy in his wealth and possessions. The first man experienced the grievous evil of working for wind. The second man experienced the profound gift of rejoicing in his toil. Wealth, possessions, and power crushed the first man, but were good gifts for the second.

Again, what was the difference? It wasn’t what each man did. It wasn’t what each man had. It was in their understanding of where it all came from and what it was for.

The first man believed that he was free to live the life he chose and that the fruit of it came from his own industry. The first man believed that those things were able to satisfy on their own merits. But the second man knew it was all of, for, and from God. His life and lot were of God, his work was for God, and his reward was from God.

The two men lived outwardly similar lives; at some points, probably nearly indistinguishable. Inside, however, the first man knew nothing but the misery of grievous evil, darkness, vexation, sickness, and anger. While the other man knew a life that was good and fitting, enjoyable, purposeful, full of rejoicing. And the difference, once again, was orientation and aim—under the sun and worldward vs. above the sun and godward.

O, the lessons that are ours here, Grace. From an under the sun perspective the difference between a God-honoring life and one of complete emptiness and destruction rests on a razor’s edge. If you only knew the pain the most put-together looking people are experiencing. If you only knew the loss that was right around the corner for those trusting in themselves. If you only knew the peace of those who have little but work honestly, love faithfully, and hope continually in God alone.

There is a great gap between those two kinds of people. Indeed, there’s a vast chasm between the two, and it is bridgeable by the glory and grace of God alone.

The goods mentioned in vs. 18-20 are, once again, eating, drinking, working, money and possessions. Those things are the lot of some such that through them they find genuine joy. The source and difference is God. Wealth is different when it is recognized as given by God. Possessions are different for those who see them as coming from the hand of God. Toil is different for those who work as unto God. Simple sustenance is different for everyone who knows that it is God who sustains and satisfies.

Ultimately, as the Preacher wrote, the difference is that for some, God “has given…the power to enjoy them,” to accept them as their lot, and rejoice in their work. This is God’s gift. It can’t be earned or demanded. It is God’s to distribute as He sees fit. And for all who receive this gift at the hand of God, days go by with a kind of contentment that keeps their heart occupied with joy.

Remember, as we saw earlier in Ecclesiastes, we need two gifts, not one. We need the gift of work and wages, but we need a second gift from God to enjoy and be satisfied by them.

The Preacher came to recognize in a powerful way that contentment in whatever lot God has for you is a gift from God. Joy in the things of earth is a gift from God. The ability to have and enjoy food, drink, work, money, and stuff, while not loving them or hoping in them is a gift from God. Contentment through the loss of the things of earth is a gift from God. Peace in the knowledge that we will all die some day is a gift from God.

The big ideas of this sermon are that God is the only thing that truly satisfies and God’s grace is the only thing that enables us to be satisfied in Him. The main takeaways are to seek our satisfaction in God alone and contentment in all things through Him.

And what the Preacher knew in shadow form, we know in the light. All of these things are ours ultimately through Christ alone. God distributed His gifts to His people in the Preacher’s day, only because He had predetermined to send His one and only Son, in love, to reconcile mankind to Himself—His greatest gift.

I want to close, then, with a few, simple ways to put this into practice. Given all we’ve seen, how to we seek satisfaction in God alone? How do we find contentment, whatever our God-given lot? How do we come to receive these awesome gifts of God?

God has told us, in His Word, that these are His primary means of distributing His ongoing grace. These are His primary means of bringing joy and encouragement, contentment and peace, in Him and in the lot He has for us. These are the primary means by which we are able to recognize and forsake the hollow promises of created things to provide what only the Creator can. It is primarily in continued prayer, repentance, trust, obedience, and fellowship that God is glad to rescue His people from the perpetual temptation toward grievous evils and grant us His gracious goods.

Ecclesiastes 5:8-12 If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed at the matter, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them. 9 But this is gain for a land in every way: a king committed to cultivated fields.

10 He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. 11 When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? 12 Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.

In this next section of Ecclesiastes, which actually runs all the way through 6:9, the Preacher picks back up on two familiar themes: oppression and wealth. He began addressing the grievousness of oppression at the beginning of chapter 4. There he noted the prevalence of the oppressed and lamented their tears and lack of advocates. And of wealth, he spoke of his own vast wealth and its vanity in chapter 2(:8-10).

This morning we’ll see the Preacher move from talking primarily about individuals being oppressed to the systems that oppress them as well as one of the primary reasons for the systemic oppression of the poor (the insatiable appetite for money of those who love money).

The big idea of this passage is that the love of money leads to all kinds of evils, including taking part in systems designed to oppress the poor. The main takeaways are to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and your neighbor as yourself.

As I mentioned back in a sermon from chapter four, talking about oppression in a healthy way seems almost impossible today. Those who talk about it the most and loudest are usually the most confused about it. What’s more, because of that, in an attempt to avoid getting sucked into a vortex of emotion and irrationality, most everyone else tries to avoid the subject altogether. Reasonable voices are often drowned out. And in that way, if the desire to avoid talking about it is strong for the oppression of individuals, it is doubly (or triply) so for systemic oppression—the subject of the first two verses of our passage.

While the desire to avoid the topic in public is understandable in today’s climate, Christians must not do so. We must not because God’s Word’s is so clear on the matter. The Bible’s chief message is that God hates oppression, is continually working against it, and calls His people to join Him in those things. (You can read more on that in my Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 sermon from April 6th). Oppression is everywhere, it is wicked, and ignoring it is not an option for God’s people. We must work against it.

Grace, as we’ve seen over and over already, most of the things the Preacher addressed in Ecclesiastes are every bit as relevant today as they were then. That is certainly true of the systemic oppression of the most vulnerable.

Look with me at v.8.

8 If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed at the matter, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them.

It’s good to pause here to consider a few things: Who the Preacher suggests will be oppressed, how he thinks about oppression, why his readers should not be surprised to find it, and what the alternative is.

Who are the most likely to be oppressed? In the opening clause of this passage we find the answer, “If you see in a province the oppression of the poor…”. The poor are most likely to be oppressed because, virtually by definition, they have the least ability to fight against it and are the least likely to have people in their lives to do so for them. It is a lot easier to hold someone down when they are genuinely forced to choose between principles and starvation.

It is absolutely critical for the Church, the people of God, to stand up against oppression and for the oppressed because doing so is a picture of the gospel. When we fight against oppression and for the oppressed, according to God’s example and command, we become living pictures of God’s saving grace. We were entirely oppressed by sin, unable to get out from under its yolk, and needed someone greater to plead our clause. Jesus did that for all who will receive Him, not because we deserved it, but because He chose to set His love upon us.

What exactly is oppression, though? The definition I offered in my previous sermon was this: “Oppression is sinfully holding someone down economically, morally, legally, or in the way of their innate dignity as a divine image bearer; it is exploitation; it is imposing unbiblical and unbearable burdens on another.”

That is very much in line with what the Preacher wrote here.

8 If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness…

Oppression is a particular kind of violation of justice and righteousness among a particular kind of people.

This too, therefore, is particularly grievous because it is particularly tied to God’s very nature. God does not merely act justly and righteously; He is just and righteous. Oppression is, therefore, at its core a grave evil because it is a rejection of the goodness of God. To oppress someone is to mock God.

We’ve seen most of that already in Ecclesiastes. The primary new contribution this passage adds to what the Preacher has already said on oppression is found at the end of v.8. There he explains why we shouldn’t be surprised to find oppression among the poor.

8 If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed at the matter, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them.

The oppression of individuals is not surprising, the Preacher taught, because there are systems in place to all but guarantee it. There are a number of interpretations of the final clause of v.8. The gist of all of them is basically the same though.

In every society, for various reasons, there is always someone at the top of a pyramid of power. Often, the person at the pinnacle will use his power to extract a bit more than justice dictates from those just below him; that is, to oppress them. In order to recoup their losses and act in kind, those on the next level down do the same to those just below them; they oppress as they’ve been oppressed. Down and down it goes until it reaches the bottom—the poor. And since there is no one below the poor, they are forced to endure oppression without being able to pass it on. Those already struggling are forced to struggle doubly—to be oppressed without opportunity to gain back what they lost through oppression by oppressing others.

That is the definition of systemic oppression. It is a system built on oppression in which those at the top are inherently able and incentivized to keep this system in place as it ensures their advantage. The Preacher observed the universal presence of that kind of system among mankind and for that reason saw how unsurprising it is to find the poor being oppressed.

To be clear, even though systemic oppression is common and unsurprising, it is evil. It is wicked. God hates it and so should we. God is working against it and so should we. The question is how. The world has one answer. We’ll see God’s in a bit.

Like the end of v.8, the specifics of v.9 are hard to interpret. It is one of the least clear clauses in a book filled with unclear clauses. Within this context, however, the big-picture meaning is probably clear: There is an alternative to the systemic oppression of the poor and it often begins at the top of the power structure.

9 But this is gain for a land in every way: a king committed to cultivated fields.

Again, the exact meaning of this idea is not agreed upon, but the big picture is that those at the top have significant influence on what happens below them. When a king oppresses, his subjects will often follow suit. But when a king refuses to oppress those below him, that tends to trickle down too. When a king has the best interest of his subjects in mind, when he refuses to oppress them, then everyone is better off.

To the passage, when a king takes more than is right of his country’s land or its produce, there is inevitably systemic loss. But when a king is committed to justice, there is gain in every way—men are incentivized to work hard to plant, tend, harvest, and to generously share when they don’t have to fear those above them stealing from them. There is dignity in that. There is reward in that. There is gain in every way in that.

Better still is the king who not only refuses to oppress those below him, but by God’s design, punishes severely those who do. And greatest of all is the king who does all of that to honor God and bless the whole society.

We catch a glimpse of this in the story of Joseph’s rule over Egypt.

Again, the best under the sun chance for a society to minimize systemic oppression is when its highest leader avoids and punishes it. At the same time, Grace, it need not start at the top. Anyone, at any level, who refuses to pass down the oppression that comes upon them can serve as a powerful disruptor of systemic oppression.

We catch a glimpse of this in the story of Boaz and Ruth.

Grace, oppression—especially of the poor—has been a part of the way mankind has treated one another since the Fall. It is not surprising when we find it; it is surprising when we don’t. It isn’t surprising because oppression tends to start at the top and whenever it does, everyone below is incentivized to pass down the oppression. This is called systemic oppression (oppression built into the very fabric of how a society functions).

The alternative to this is a society in which there are sacrificial, systemic-oppression disruptors. Before we get to the heart of an oppression-disruptor, let’s take a look at the next few verses to see the heart of a systemic-oppression creator. What is it that drives people to oppress systematically?

In order to answer that question, as we reread the next few verses (10-12), we must see the connection between them and the ones we just considered (8-9).

10 He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. 11 When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? 12 Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.

What’s the connection between the two passages? The love of money and the lengths that some are willing to go to feed it is often at the heart the desire to oppress others.

It is the longing for more and more money that leads to greater and greater willingness to do whatever it takes to get it. When money is your highest love, it’s not hard to justify getting it at the expense of others.

In other words, wherever there is love of money, there will almost certainly be significant amounts of systemic oppression. Since the love of money was everywhere the Preacher looked, so too was systemic oppression, and especially of those without it.

All of that begs the question…What is it that those who love money are really after? What is it that they hope money will provide for them? It must be significant since it makes them willing to take part in the systemic oppression of the most vulnerable among them to get it.

Implied in vs.10-12 are the Preacher’s answers: Satisfaction, friends, and peace. That’s not so bad, right? Those are good, desirable things. Who doesn’t want those things? Clearly, oppression is not a God-ordained or God-honoring means of acquiring those things, but the things themselves aren’t the issue.

And that begs another question…Does the love of money, leading to systemic oppression, deliver on its promise to provide satisfaction, friends, and peace? Does it even work? Let’s look at the last few verses of our passage a bit closer to find out.

Can money deliver on its promise to satisfy (and therein bring any measure of justification to gaining it through the oppression of others)? V.10.

10 He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.

The heart of this line of thinking is simple. Those who love money don’t really love money. Who cares about a hunk of gold or a piece of paper or a bunch of computer code (or whatever form currency takes)? Those who love money actually love something they believe money can provide for them—power, stuff, admiration. But deeper still, they don’t really love those things either. They really love the thing they believe those things can provide for them—genuine satisfaction.

Once again, the simple question is whether or not money can actually provide genuine satisfaction. The Preacher found—both in himself and in everyone he observed—that neither money nor anything it can buy are able to provide it.

Have you ever had poison ivy…I mean really had poison ivy? If so, you know how maddening it can be. The entire time you have it you are faced with the decision of whether or not to scratch it. The itch is always there, you know you shouldn’t scratch it since that will only make it worse, but when you do it really does provide a moment of amazing relief.

The Preacher saw clearly that that is exactly what money and stuff is to the God-given, sin-distorted desire to be satisfied. The desire to be satisfied is ever-present in us all. We must find a way to satisfy it. Money promises to do so, and it often does for a brief moment. In the end, however, loving it only makes things worse no matter how much we have.

And that makes the willingness to create systems that ensure our ability to get more of it by means of oppression both sinful and absurd.

But what about friends? Can money provide genuine friendships and the satisfaction that comes from them? If so, maybe loving it and oppressing others to get it makes some sense?

The second realization the Preacher came to regarding money is that not only can it not satisfy by accumulating large sums of it, but it actually brings with it various forms of dissatisfaction. Not only does it not work, but it also works against the very thing we’re after. He named two specific examples of this, one in v.11 and another in v.12.

11 When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes?

I had a friend in high school whose dad owned a grocery store. My friend worked there and made more money than he should have by doing so (since his dad owned it). Knowing that, I often went to a local restaurant with him for lunch in the hope/expectation that he’d buy me an ice-cream cone if I did. Often he did, often because I made him feel guilty for not. I didn’t think much of it then, but looking back, that was pretty pathetic.

This is that. The Preacher observed that money and stuff will certainly make people want to be around you—the more, the more—but they are there for your stuff, not your friendship. More often than not, they’re only there to play with your toys, eat your food, and gain from your gain. Once those things are gone or you get tired of offering it to them, they’ll move onto the next host.

At best, much money and stuff make it harder to tell who in your life is a true friend and who is a parasite.

And that makes the willingness to create systems that ensure our ability to get more money and more “friends” by means of oppression both sinful and absurd.

Money can’t buy satisfaction or genuine friendships, but what about peace? Can it buy peace? Of course, right? More money means we can buy security systems, guards, safer houses, in safer places, right? Maybe even more importantly, enough money means never having to worry about having food, clothes, a home, and medical attention, doesn’t it? And when we have all that—the absence of which is most often the source of anxiety and worry—peace necessarily follows, yes?

12 Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.

Another of sin’s tactics is to deceive people into believing that anything other than God can protect. The fact that world history is filled with story after story after story of men and women losing everything they have overnight (to fire, famine, war, prosecution, theft, gross mismanagement, etc.), and yet people still trust in money to protect, proves how deceptive sin really is.

The simple fact of the matter is that working hard with a clean conscience has always been the best recipe for good rest. The more the love of money drives someone—whether for satisfaction, friendship, safety, or something else entirely—the less peaceful they tend to be. The Preacher saw this 3000 years ago and we see it all around us still today.

And that makes the willingness to create systems that ensure our ability to get more money by means of oppression in the hope that it will provide more peace is both sinful and absurd.

Grace, the Preacher looked out and saw the poor being systemically oppressed as a means of gaining money as a means of gaining satisfaction, friendship, and peace. Bue he also saw as clear as day that money cannot deliver on what it promises. Which means that the systemic oppression, fabricated and propped up to get those things can’t deliver any of them. It’s all a house of cards. It’s all a gigantic, satanic Ponzi scheme.

Have you given yourself over to gaining money and stuff in the hope that it will provide satisfaction? Have you been willing to use others in order to get it to get it?

Have you tried to use your stuff to attract people to you out of a desire to gain friendships? Have you been willing to use others in order to get them?

Have you tried to get enough money and stuff to provide a sense of protection and peace? Have you been willing to use others in order to get them?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions (which all of us have to some degree), learn from the Preacher. Money can only make hollow promises. It cannot deliver any of the things people seek from it for more than a brief moment. And that makes the willingness to create systems that ensure our ability to get more money by means of oppression both sinful and absurd.

What’s to be done about this? The above the sun answer, as I mentioned earlier, is that God’s people become oppression-disruptors. Wherever we are in the power pyramid of our society, we work to disrupt the system. But how do we do that? Jesus gave the two-part answer in no uncertain terms. The first part is found in Matt 22:34-37.

Matthew 22:34-38 …when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment.

If we want to fight against systemic oppression (and we must), we ignore the world’s suggestions (no matter how emotionally or loudly they offer them) and listen to the wisdom of the One who has all knowledge and authority. What does He say? He says, He commands (for the greatest good), that we do so by loving Him above everything, including money.

If the love of money is at the root of our willingness to participate in the systemic oppression of the poor, then the love of God is the root of rightly hating it and destroying it from the inside out. To love God with everything we have is to find our true satisfaction in Him. It is to love what He loves and hate what He hates. By its very nature, then, loving God is to reject the very thing that often drives people to oppress others. That leads to the second part of Jesus’ answer.

Matthew 22:39 And a second [greatest commandment] is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

To love God with everything is to be freed from the love of money and the willingness to take part in the oppressive systems that feed it. But it is also to love our neighbors, which is to long for them to love God with all they have and it is to be willing to sacrificially disrupt their oppression.

To love our neighbor as Jesus commands is to long for them to find their satisfaction in God and to demonstrate that by serving them and not allowing others to exploit them.

Grace, this is a trustworthy saying: Any time our love is misdirected or mis-apportioned, it always ends in some form of pathology. The Preacher helps us see that the love of money is always misdirected and mis-apportioned love. And for that reason, the love of money always leads to dissatisfaction, broken relationships, and restlessness.

Jesus helps us to see that the love of God and neighbor is always rightly-directed and properly-apportioned love. It alone is oppression-disrupting love. And it alone leads to true satisfaction, genuine friendships, and peace. And as it (love for God and neighbor) spreads, oppression (systemic or otherwise) will be disrupted and die.

In conclusion, I’d like to exhort us all in two ways. First, set your heart in love on God and neighbor (in that order), and then do something out of it. Work with TFG, pursue adoption, start a business in order to provide someone with gainful employment, volunteer to tutor at-risk kids, provide job training for someone, speak out against the injustices in our society. As Christians we cannot be indifferent to the earthly suffering of others.

Second, I exhort you all to refuse to (1) pit addressing the earthly oppression of others against addressing their spiritual oppression, or (2) to wrongly put them on the same plain. God’s people see the need to address both, but also that fighting against spiritual oppression is the greatest need of all.

If you love God and neighbor well enough to end every earthly oppression—individual and systemic—you’ve done a good thing. And yet the good thing by itself is to bring a glass of cold water to someone burning alive. It’s not nothing, but it’s certainly not much help for their greatest need.

As we turn now to the Lord’s Supper, we praise God that Jesus modeled and commanded that we love God and neighbor in such a way that in fighting against under the sun oppression we give glory to God and greater credibility to the gospel’s promise to meet their above the sun needs.

Ecclesiastes 5:1-7 Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. 2 Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. 3 For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.

4 When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. 6 Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? 7 For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear.

Our passage for this morning is one of the many reasons I believe that Ecclesiastes seems to have been written for today. Of course, on one hand, it was—all of God’s Word is for all of God’s people always. But I mean something different than that. What I mean is that everything about the Preacher’s words reads like something every pastor should be addressing from the pulpit right now. It is a rebuke of a belief that is as prominent today as it has ever been—the belief that we can come to God on our own terms. There is currently a swell, inside and outside the Church, of people who are generally religious and believe that to be a form of worship that is acceptable to God.

In these few verses, the Preacher gives us one of the more above the sun passages in all of Ecclesiastes. He helps us understand how we ought to draw near to God by sharing both how to and how not to do so. That is, He tells us the kind of approach to God that is displeasing and pleasing to God.

The big questions this text thrusts upon us are: Does God care how we come to Him? And, if so, what does He want and how do we know? In other words, as you come to church each Sunday, does it matter what we wear, how we carry ourselves, or how we pray, listen, and talk? Does it make any difference how we sing, give an offering, or respond to what happens in the service? Do volume levels matter? What about where we sit? Does our level of eagerness or sincerity matter? What really matters to God in our worship?

The big idea of this passage is that God alone establishes how we must draw near to Him. Only fools believe they can come to God on their own terms. The wise and faithful fear God and come as He calls. The main takeaways, then, are to consider carefully your approach to God, repent of any man-made ways, and look to Jesus who alone provides access to God.

I grew up in a high church setting. Symbolism was everywhere. Liturgy was everything. The building was essential. Virtually no part of the church or services I attended were accessible. Everything seemed to be focused on the transcendent (holy, other, different) aspects of God’s nature.

I came to faith in Jesus in a ministry context that was on the opposite end of the spectrum. There was no symbolism or meaningful liturgy. Creativity and novelty were key. It made no difference where worship happened (often in the same campus classrooms I’d been in earlier that day listening to a godless lecture). Accessibility was a paramount virtue—things needed to be immediately understandable. Everything seemed to be focused on the imminent (near, personal, similar) aspects of God’s nature.

Fast forward a few years. I became a youth pastor at the time in which “seeker-sensitive” worship services and contemporary worship songs sung within churches were just beginning. The big idea was that people were leaving the church and so the church needed to adjust her methods to win them back. The most prominent method-adjustment was to create a worship service that non-Christians would want to go to—high on performance (concert-like music and lighting), high on environment (trendy, coffee shop-like design), high on understandability (topical, felt-need sermons, and PPT), and high on comfortability (little talk of sin or repentance).

The underlying assumption of the church I grew up in seemed to be that God cared about only and every external aspect of the worship service. The underlying assumption of the ministry I came to Christ in seemed to be that God only cared about the sincerity of the internal aspects of the worship service. And the underlying assumption of the “seeker-sensitive” churches seemed to be that God is most concerned with what works in getting people to the services.

These three approaches to worship introduced me to many of the questions I mentioned earlier. By God’s grace, I knew that as a pastor I had to figure this out for myself and for those I was called to lead.

In large measure, the Preacher wrote these seven verses to answer those questions and insodoing (at least indirectly) addressed all three of the assumptions I’d encountered. Most specifically though, Ecclesiastes 5:1-7 is directed at those who feel like they are free to come to God however they wish.

The primary context of this passage, as the opening verse indicates, is coming to God in formal worship (the temple in the Preacher’s day; Sunday morning in ours). And the primary audience is the church-goer who foolishly does so flippantly or casually, as if he and God were on equal plains.

One commentator writes (Ryken, PTW, 120), “[The Preacher’s] exhortations are for people who do go to church but sometimes find it hard to pay attention, whose thoughts wander when they pray, and who are full of good intentions about serving God but have trouble following through”… which, of course, is all of us at times.

The opening and closing clauses of our passage get us right to the heart of the matter. Together, the bookends help us to see that drawing near to God is a serious matter and that God is most certainly not indifferent to how we do so. Along the way, we find seven above the sun principles on how and how not to draw near to God (in a manner pleasing to God).

So, how should we draw near to God when we gather each week? Grace, let us offer silent prayers for the Spirit’s help to consider our ways as we do.

Our passage opens with a stern command that is almost certainly also a somber warning.

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God.

This is the opposite of being casual or flippant. It is the opposite of coming to God however we see fit. To come into the presence of God as He requires means doing so in a careful manner. We must “watch our step” when we approach God. God is not indifferent to the way in which we approach Him.

There are a number of NT parallels, one of which we hear every month when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper together, “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29 For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself” (1 Co 11:28–29).

This too is why we have an exhortation and assurance of pardon as a part of our weekly worship. We mean to warn you against all manner of falsely stepping into God’s house—most notably, against believing you can do so on your own merit and, on the other end of the spectrum, that even in Christ you might not be welcomed.

And this is why it matters how we order our service, what we sing, how we pray, who we put up front, as well as how we dress, what we bring with us, how we conduct ourselves during the service, what we let our kids do (or not do), and what our expectations are. We need to guard all our steps.

Grace, the point for us to see, to joyfully and humbly receive, and to sacrificially live out, is that coming here as a gathered people, on the Lord’s Day, in His presence, must be on God’s terms. We must come as He has called. And we must be on guard against any step in any other direction.

Much of the rest of this passage unpacks what, specifically, we are to be on guard against. But before we get to it, let me admonish us all to heed this command. Guard your steps, Grace Church. God bids you come, but learn this morning more about how He bids you to do so, pray that He’d grant you a tender heart toward it, and fight in the Spirit’s power to come each week with more guarded steps for God’s glory and the good of everyone.

The second worship principle given to us by the Preacher, the first way in which a well-guarded heart comes to God, is that when we come into God’s house, we must draw near to God to “listen”.

To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools…

To “listen” in this sense has a double meaning. First, it means to tune in in order to comprehend. It means really hearing what God has said and thinking carefully on it. It means writing down your questions and finding help to find the answers. It means, as we learned yesterday at Masculine Mandate, disciplining our minds.

We simply cannot honor God apart from a true and legitimate understanding of what He has said. It just does not honor God for us to believe we understand what God has said if it isn’t what He has said. To draw near to listen in the first sense means pressing into God’s Word until you have understanding.

The second aspect of the meaning of “listen” is putting whatever we hear from Him into practice. To listen as the Preacher commends always connects genuine understanding with faithful application. It always means combining right doctrine with right actions.

I’ve said this before, but this is of the most significant aspects of a Jewish understanding of what it means to “know” something—the inseparable connection between concept and practice.

We tend to separate the two. We might say “I know that I should honor my parents” apart from any actual honoring. But for the OT Jew, for the Preacher, you simply can’t talk about knowing something that doesn’t directly impact your life. In that sense, you don’t really know that you should honor your parents until/unless you actually do so.

This is similar to that. The Preacher’s point is that you aren’t really listening to God if you don’t really understand what He has said AND if your life isn’t changed in light of what you hear.

This is why preparing your ears for worship is so important. This is why it is so hard to fill your ears with worldly things (sports, movies, entertainment, social media, etc.) all week and have ears that can hear God on Sundays. This is why it is so hard to come in distracted, having listened to bickering in the car the whole way here, and then hear God. We’re not made to be able to simply flip this kind of “listening” switch. We need to cultivate good ears so we’re ready to hear.

Before moving onto the next principle, let me say one more thing about this one. Listening like this when we come to church week after week after week is challenging. We’ll only be willing to put in the kind of work necessary to really hear/listen week after week after week, when we really believe He is worth listening to—more than anything else in the universe.

Psalm 19:9-10 says, “…the rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether. 10 More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.”

Are those words the genuine cry of your heart? Do you really believe them to be true? The more you do, the more you give yourself to drawing near to listen as the Preacher exhorts.

To hear God’s Word is a gift of inestimable worth. When you hear it read or prayed or sung or preached this morning (and every Sunday), heed the Preacher’s words and listen! Take it in. Mediate on it. Ask for the Spirit’s help to really understand and really be transformed by it. Don’t let a drop of it fall to the ground undrunk. More than water in a desert, every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord is precious.

Don’t mishear (pun intended) me, Grace. Come as you are. God’s grace is sufficient. Come hurting, come late, come confused, come having heard nothing but junk all week, come with worldly appetites, come deaf. God’s grace in Jesus is more than enough for you. And, at the same time, come knowing that God’s grace meets you where you are in order to bring you where you need to be. He is already at work in you to transform your coming.

If this sounds serious, you’re hearing it rightly. Guard your steps, Grace. And the first way we’re told to do so is by making sure we are here to “listen” to God when we draw near to Him.

The third principle is the alternative to the second. If we are not listening to God when we come to church, we are talking to Him. We wouldn’t word it that way because we don’t think of it that way, but the fact of the matter is that if we are not ordering our worship according to what God says, then we are essentially telling God how He will be worshiped. The Preacher calls that the evil sacrifice of fools.

To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil.

Are you tracking, Grace? The point is that when we come to worship God, when we gather here on a Sunday morning, one of two things is happening. Either we come (1) with our ears wide open to consider what God has said so that we might live more fully in light of it or (2) in some other way of our own evil, foolish, detrimental-making. The first way is pleasing to God and the second is the pinnacle of folly. There are no other ways. There is no third alternative.

This draws to mind 2 Samuel 6:5-7. It does not take place in the context of a formal worship service, but it is one of the most startling and blatant displays of the fact that God is anything but indifferent to the manner in which we come to Him.

“And David and all the house of Israel were celebrating before the Lord, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. 6 And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. 7 And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God.”

Uzzah almost certainly thought he was offering a good service to God by keeping the ark from falling to the ground. How terrible would that have been to watch it crash down? Common sense says that what he did was right. But his death tells us in no uncertain terms that our common sense is not God’s standard.

That sounds harsh, but it is simply the Preacher’s admonition played out. His point here is that good intentions are not inherently pleasing to God. Not knowing that you are offering evil sacrifices doesn’t make them not evil. Our ignorance of God’s Word is a second sin, not an excuse for an initial sin. Our worship must be in spirit and truth. What we offer to God must be based on knowledge of God, which, once again, comes from listening to God.

As you know, Grace, none of us have listened well enough. And even if we did, none of us are smart enough to understand it all. Jesus came to bring justification for our sins of ignorance and sincere but misguided “obedience” as much as every other sin. And yet, that is not the same as justification for us to go on in ignorance. The good news of our forgiveness in Christ compels us to listen even more carefully to God’s will, it does not free us from it. This is why we come to Berea, and listen to sermons preached, and have quiet times, and carefully study the Word of God. This is why God has given us parents and husbands and elders to guide us.

In faith we seek to come as God calls, in the power God provides, accepting His forgiveness for our failings.

Several times in the next few verses, the Preacher focuses on the speech of those in the house of God. Since the context is approaching God in worship, the idea here is primarily prayer. While it is always wise to be careful with our words, the Preacher has prayer in worship in mind.

With that, look at vs.2, “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God… Therefore let your words be few.”

In addition, the Preacher comes back to this in v.3 and again in v.7 with some interesting words.

3 For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.

7 For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity

In all of this, something Jesus said comes to mind, “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Matthew 6:7).

When we pray together this morning, we are not informing God of things He doesn’t already know. Likewise, when we pray, we cannot impress God with our ability to string together words, either in quantity or quality. Therefore, do not pray things you don’t mean. Do not pray things God has forbidden. Do not pray mindlessly. Do not pray just for the sake of talking. Do not pray just for the sake of being heard.

All of that is equally true when we “pray” the assurance of pardon together, “pray” creeds together, “pray” songs together. And “pray” Psalms together.

The Preacher’s point is not to keep track of our prayer word count. The Preacher’s point is not that you need to be a Bible scholar before God will hear your prayers. The Preacher’s point is not to make us timid in our prayers.

His point is to remind us to guard our steps whenever we come before God. His point is to remind us to tell the truth when we pray. It is to remind us that our prayers are meant to be an expression of our dependance on God and satisfaction in God, not a chance to check out or to impress God (or others). It is to remind us that God delights to hear from us when we come to Him knowing that He is God and we are not. And that leads us straight to the next point.

The fifth worship principle is to always come before God knowing our place before God.

…for God is in heaven and you are on earth.

We are not God’s equals. We are not first His buddies. Talking and listening to God is not the same as talking and listening to your softball teammates or bandmates or coffee friends or spouse. God is always first God, Creator and Sustainer of all, King of kings, Lord of lords, the Alpha and Omega, sovereign ruler of the universe. And you are never any of those things.

The passage that always comes to mind when I consider this principle is Job 38. In it, God replies to Job’s belief that he understood what God was doing and should have been doing in his suffering. The whole chapter is a scathing rebuke and a fierce charge for Job to know his place. Vs.4-7 are a good summary.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, 7 when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Drawing near to God in a manner pleasing to God means guarding your steps. And guarding your steps necessarily includes seeing yourself in relation to God as He really is and you really are.

It’s hard to overstate this one, Grace. You can never know the freedom that is yours in Christ if it doesn’t begin with and remain in the knowledge that God is in heaven and you are on earth. You will never come before Him, listen to Him, make right offerings, or pray in a manner pleasing to Him if you don’t begin those things by making a distinction in your mind and heart between you and Him.

He has always been and will always be God and you never have been or will be. Knowing this is what makes His offer to approach Him so sweet. It is only once you know why Isaiah believed himself to be ruined in God’s presence (Isaiah 6) that you can come into it in a manner pleasing to Him.

The next worship principle is an interesting one. Unlike the first five, we don’t tend to think as much about this one…at least not in the way the Preacher talks about it. The sixth method of guarding our steps when going into the house of God is to make sure we pay our vows when we do. Look at v.4.

When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. 6 Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands?

We see this idea echoed in passages like Psalm 50:14, “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and perform your vows to the Most High…”.

We see it in practice in Hannah (1 Samuel 1:11) and Jephthah (Judges 11:29-40). (I just read the story of Jephtha’s vow in my quiet time this week. Every time I do, I wonder what he was thinking. What did he think would come out of his house?!)

So, what does it mean to “pay what you vow” or “perform your vows”?

“The Bible assumes that there are times when it is appropriate for us to take spiritual vows, like the vows of covenant matrimony [marriage], for example, or the promises people make when they become members of a church” (Ryken, PTW, 125). Similarly, there are times when, within the context of a worship service, the church is rightly called to vow to give a certain amount of money toward a missionary or the adoption of an orphan.

The Preacher’s point is that rightly coming before God means keeping your word in these righteous vows. It is dishonoring to God to be dishonest. It’s better not to make a vow at all than to make one and not keep it before God. It is so serious, in fact, that failing to do so angers God and brings about His discipline (“destroy the work of your hands”).

One of the keys to grasping all of this is that there is a heightened significance when God’s people gather. When we assemble as a church there is a higher standard and higher blessings. There is more accountability and more grace. That’s an uncommon perspective in the Church today, but it is unmistakable in the Bible. Our private devotions are important. God works regularly in them. But God has always held the gathering in higher esteem and chosen to manifest His presence and give His grace in even more significant ways in it. The Preacher’s language in this passage is a lot harder to understand without this understanding.

Finally, the other bookend of this passage is the seventh worship principle. Once again, it, along with the first, help us see how seriously God takes our entering into His house. To guard our steps toward God means listening to God, avoiding ignorant or flippant offerings, being careful with our prayers, knowing our place, keeping our word, and properly fearing God.

…but God is the one you must fear.

The idea of the fear of the LORD is one of the most important and confusing principles in the Bible.

It is confusing because there are two kinds of fear. One is good and the other is bad. To explain the difference, consider a simple illustration from parenting.

One child fears his dad because he never knows what to expect from him. Sometimes his dad comes home from work and everything is fine. Other times, however, he comes home angry or drunk. And when he is angry or drunk his words are harsh and his expectations are ever-changing. It takes very little for the child to receive his father’s unpredictable and undeserved whip. This causes the child to be anxious every time his father comes home as he waits to find out what awaits him that evening. That kind of fear is rooted in an aversion to his father’s strength being used to sin against him.

Another child fears his father, but only in the sense that he knows his father loves him such that he is jealous for him to walk in the path of righteousness, safety, and joy. As such, the boy lives in complete confidence that as long as he heeds his father’s instruction, he will receive only loving praise, and encouragement. And in equal confidence that should he veer from it, out of the same loving heart, his father will correct him in a manner proportionate to his wandering and always for his highest good. He too fears his father, but his fear leads to an aversion of sin, knowing that his father’s strength will be used to protect and, if necessary, restore him from it.

The Preacher, of course, has the second kind of fear in mind. We catch a glimpse of it in Psalm 89.

Psalm 89:6-7 For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord, 7 a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him?

It is the failure to distinguish between these two kinds of fear that has led some to think the fear of the LORD is only for the unbeliever. Rightly understood, however, the fear of the Lord is one of the greatest gifts God can give us. Until we learn to rightly fear Him, we will never be able to draw near to Him in a pleasing manner; for it is only on the other side of a God-given fear of God, that we will turn to Him for the God-given grace of God in Jesus.

Guarding our steps when entering the house of the Lord comes from a proper fear of God. And once we have that, we have nothing to fear.

Everything we considered so far, everything the Preacher knew and shared, all pointed to something greater. Everything he said was true and good, but anyone who has been granted an honest look at their heart and life knows that we continually fall short of all of it. None of us perfectly rejects God’s prohibitions or embraces His requirements. The gist of the Preacher’s teaching was that only those who come to God in humble faith are acceptable to God. But how does that work? Let’s consider Ephesians 3 for our answer and in closing.

Ephesians 3:8-12 To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, 9 and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, 10 so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. 11 This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, 12 in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.

Today, on the other side of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are able to come before God with boldness and confidence. Indeed, He has torn the veil of the holy of holies in half. And faith in Jesus is the conduit through which God has chosen to carry this grace to us.

The freedom of Christ is not, however, a freedom to come however we see fit. Instead, as the Preacher has helped us to see so clearly, it is a freedom to love to come as God commands and delights in.

Come, therefore, Grace, draw near to God, enter His house, gather with His people. But do so through faith in Jesus, with guarded steps, in order to listen to God, not to instruct Him, with humble, biblical prayers, in full acknowledgement that God is God and we are not, as promise-keepers, and in reverential awe of God. This is what it means to come before Him in a manner pleasing to Him. This is what we are to guard our steps for. This is what our worship service is meant to be. This is our great, gracious gift of God in Christ.

Ecclesiastes 4:4-16 Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.

5 The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh.

6 Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.

7 Again, I saw vanity under the sun: 8 one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, “For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” This also is vanity and an unhappy business.

9 Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. 10 For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! 11 Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? 12 And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

13 Better was a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice. 14 For he went from prison to the throne, though in his own kingdom he had been born poor. 15 I saw all the living who move about under the sun, along with that youth who was to stand in the king’s place. 16 There was no end of all the people, all of whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a striving after wind.

Good morning, Grace Church. Christ is risen.

For years, I missed the fact that we say “Christ is risen” not “Christ has risen.” The difference is a really big deal. He is, right now, risen from the dead.

This news is, of course, not a new or small thing. If it were either of those (new or small), you probably wouldn’t be here. The fact that the resurrection is simultaneously enormous and familiar confronts preachers with the annual question of how to address it in a way that really draws us into appropriate awe and worship and action.

Pastor Colin talked about this challenge recently in preaching through a couple of very familiar and significant passages (Psalm 23 and Luke 19:28-44, the Triumphal Entry of Jesus).

Of course, ultimately, the Holy Spirit will work in us or nothing of spiritual significance will happen. There is no sermon form, word count, particular passage, angle of approach, or amount of preaching animation that will stir us to worship and obedience all by itself. We need God’s help this morning or none of us will respond to the truth that Jesus is risen from the dead in the way we ought.

At the same time, though, we do have to decide what we’re going to preach on and how we’re going to handle it.

Colin, as we’ve experienced a few times already, is particularly gifted at shining light on different facets of familiar passages. He helps the passage feel new because he’s able to point to something a bit different about it. Thanks be to God.

I tend to take another approach. Rather than address a familiar topic (like the resurrection) with a familiar passage (one directly on the resurrection, like Matthew 28:1-10, Mark 16:1-8, Luke 24:1-12, and John 20:1-10), I tend to attempt to overcome the sometimes-numbing effect of the familiar by coming at things from a completely different perspective.

And for that reason, we’re going to spend Easter in Ecclesiastes!

If ever there was an above the sun idea, it’s the resurrection. And if ever we are going to appreciate it, it will be because we see it in appropriate contrast to its under the sun alternatives. The next passage in Ecclesiastes provides just that for us.

The big idea of this sermon is that the only real and lasting solution to the problems we face in this life (physical, relational, emotional, and spiritual) is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The author of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, was inspired by God to help us see that there are no lasting earthly solutions to our earthly or heavenly problems. The main takeaway, then, the primary response to this passage, is to surrender entirely to the risen Jesus.

There are three main sections to our passage for this morning. In each we see an under the sun temptation that is ever-before all of us: Discontentment (4-6), isolation (7-12), and the longing for worldly power (13-16). In each, we’ll also get a small glimpse of the Preacher’s solution (sometimes implied and sometimes explicitly stated).

As we make our way through them, beginning with discontentment, I invite you all to consider the frustration, the difficulty, the confusion, and the pain they often cause. Consider carefully what the Preacher says in the way of a solution. Consider carefully what you’ve tried in the way of a solution. And ask yourself if that’s all there is. Ask yourself if there’s something in you that longs for something more than what the Preacher offers or you’ve tried. Doing so is the key to Easter being more than merely a cultural tradition or an uninspiring reminder.

In vs. 4-6, the Preacher names three areas of discontentment common to mankind in his day (and, as I’m sure you can easily see, in ours as well). The first is found in v.4, the temptation to discontentment through envy.

4 Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.

Throughout the first four chapters in Ecclesiastes, the Preacher addressed man’s work/toil several times. There are, according to him, aspects of it that are good. Mostly, however, he observed that our work tends to be a source of discontentment. He names another aspect of that here.

When we work hard day after day after day, simply because we want to earn enough money to get what our neighbors have, it’s the exact same as spending our lives chasing the wind; perpetually running after something that can never be caught. There’s always going to be a neighbor with more or better stuff than us. Trying to keep up is frustrating and discouraging and leads only to more and more discontentment.

Who among us has not fallen into that pit? Do you know that temptation? Do you drive by a bigger, fancier house and think of how to make it happen? Land? Education? Relationships? Toys? Clothes? Vacations? The Preacher observed that much of our work is done merely on account of our discontent in having less than others.

Every day, but especially on Easter, we’re meant to read this, recognize the vanity of it, see it in ourselves, and feel our heart’s cry: What is to be done about this?! It’s so foolish. God, how can I be freed from it?

The second area of discontentment temptation he mentions is in the way of laziness.

5 The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh.

The picture here is a contrast from v.4. In v.4, the man misguidedly works hard. In v.5, the man misguidedly doesn’t work at all. He is discontent with God’s design for him. Therefore, rather than work as God intends, he folds his hands like someone in a recliner about to take a nap…always! And tragically, his discontentment has built to the point that his body ends up eating itself in the way of starvation.

Most likely, none of us have experienced laziness to that extreme, but the temptation is there under the sun. Again, given the fact that we’re all lazy at times, and we’re all affected by the laziness of others at times, we’re right to wonder what can be done about it. There must be something, right, Grace?

The third and final area of temptation toward under the sun discontentment is found in v.6.

6 Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.

If work or the stuff we can get from it were truly able to satisfy us, more work, leading to more stuff, must lead to more satisfaction, right? That’s the mindset the Preacher was addressing in v.6.

He addressed it, by rejecting it. He states emphatically that neither work, nor anything it can produce, are able to deliver on any lasting promise of satisfaction. And in that way, v.6 perfectly completes vs.4 and 5.

Work driven by envy (v.4) is a perpetually bad and hollow temptation. So too is the temptation to avoid all work (v.5). V.6 adds the idea that working without stopping, to gain without limit, is a continual and hollow temptation as well (v.6). It just can’t deliver on what it promises.

The Preacher concludes, therefore, that it is better to have less stuff with rest than more stuff without it.

Are there any workaholics in here? Do any of you struggle to take a sabbath? Are you driven to work more and more, at the expense of more and more, to gain more and more? Under the sun, it’s inevitable at times. So how do we get out of this cycle? What help is there for real deliverance?

Which of these areas of discontentment have you experienced in yourself or the people around you? All of us have experienced all of them on some level. And as such, we know how frustrating and discouraging they can be. We’re always vulnerable to falling into those pits. The Preacher watched as those around him did so time after time. Why does work need to be so hard and distracting and consuming and discouraging?

Embedded in each of these discontentment observations is a kind of solution: get rid of envy, work hard, and be still—collectively, be content. Good advice for sure, but is it that easy?

That leads to the second section and the second perpetual under the sun temptation named by the Preacher. Because people can be so challenging, there’s a constant pull to pull away, to isolate.

Do you know that temptation? Do you ever feel like it would be better (or at least easier) if you could just get away, do what you want, and only be responsible for yourself? The Preacher’s words are sobering for those who think that the solitary, isolated life is preferable to the trials of community. He warns in vs.7-8 that isolation only ends in unhappiness.

7 Again, I saw vanity under the sun: 8 one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, “For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” This also is vanity and an unhappy business.

The man who has no family or close friends with whom to share and leave the fruits of his labor, is an unhappy man indeed. No matter how rich he gets, he is faced with the constant, nagging question of what benefit he’s really getting from it. Part of what makes any gain meaningful is being able to bless loved ones with it.

It is a universal truth that whenever we let people get close enough to bless them and be blessed by them, we also open ourselves up to being hurt by them as well. Some of you know that all-too-painfully well. When we experience that, the temptation is to pull away, to get out, to be by ourselves.

But the Preacher’s observation is also his help. He points out the truth that the grass is rarely greener and never long-green on the other side of the isolation fence. To work is to deprive yourself of the pleasure of leisure. That is always hard, but it’s often mitigated by the knowledge that others will be blessed by it. Absent that, it’s not worth the sacrifice.

Again, what is to be done? If isolation is bad, but being around others often leads to hurt, what help is there? From where does our deliverance come? How do we really escape the tension and the unhappiness?

The Preacher gives similar challenges and advice in the next four proverbial verses. Look at v.9.

V.9, don’t give into the under the sun temptation to isolate because two people working together produce significantly more than two individuals working the same job by themselves. If you don’t believe that, go watch the Reeds frame up a house together.

V.10, don’t give into the under the sun temptation to isolate because if you’re alone and get hurt, your troubles are far more than if you have someone right there to help. I experienced this in dramatic fashion when I fell into Lake Erie ice fishing, went immediately into shock, and needed my cousin to pull me out. If he hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be here.

V.11, don’t give into the under the sun temptation to isolate because you’ll be colder. How’s that for practical? With furnaces and electric blankets and heated car seats, things are a little different today, but the simple truth remains that there is more emotional, spiritual, and physical warmth in community. Today, right now, as a gathered together people, as a church, we are experiencing that in significant measure. By God’s design, you cannot feel the same measure of resurrection warmth at home, by yourself, as you can here with the gathered people of God.

And, v.12, don’t give into the under the sun temptation to isolate because you’re more vulnerable to being attacked when you’re by yourself. Walking by yourself on ancient roads was often an invitation for bad actors to rob you. It was, therefore, a common practice in the Preacher’s day to travel from city to city in groups.

The Preacher calls for community by warning of the consequences of its lack. If you don’t want to be unproductive, vulnerable, cold, or attacked, don’t do life by yourself. That sounds fineish on the surface, but once again, we’re left knowing that there must be more to the solution than just that. There must be something stronger and more permanent than those things to drive back our desire to isolate and protect ourselves from the pain others can cause.

The third and final under the sun temptation presented by the Preacher deals with the desire for worldly power. To articulate this idea, the Preacher wrote an interestingly structured story about three kings.

13 Better was a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice. 14 For he went from prison to the throne, though in his own kingdom he had been born poor. 15 I saw all the living who move about under the sun, along with that youth who was to stand in the king’s place. 16 There was no end of all the people, all of whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a striving after wind.

In this story, the first king was old and foolish (defined in large measure by his unwillingness to “take advice”). Eventually, he was replaced by a new, young king who had risen from poverty and imprisonment by way of wisdom. This second king was one men gladly followed. He was popular. The third king, which really refers to all kings to come (“those who come later”, 16), are those who have forgotten the good rule of the second king. They do not rejoice in his reign as did those he reigned over. The future kings forgot the past kings—bad and good.

The point of all of this is that there is a constant under the sun temptation to believe that true satisfaction and significance come from gaining and hanging onto worldly power. If only my kids would just obey. If only my spouse would just align himself or herself to my perspective. If only those at my work understood things as well as me. If only my friends were as insightful as me. If only the governor or president would take me as his primary counselor. If only those things, then surely things in general and my life in particular would be better.

But the Preacher, once again, helps us to see that that too is hollow under the sun. No earthly king will be truly satisfied and no earthly kingdom will last. And soon, even the best, most beloved kings will be forgotten. Seeking lasting meaning and significance in worldly power is, once again, like chasing the wind. Therefore, the solution, once again, must be more than a bit more power or obedience, right?

Do you feel this next round of vanity, Grace? Can you feel a longing for something greater than anything that is found under the sun? As you consider your work, the relational trials you’ve endured, and the futility of your longing for power, do you see that there must be more? As you imagine the hardships in your life, do you long for a greater deliverance than anything you’ve experienced; a full and lasting deliverance?

While the Preacher provides some measure of help in each of the areas of perpetual temptation, like all of his solutions, they leave us wanting. None of his suggestions are long-lasting, much less permanent. Anyone who has experienced the pain of coming in and out and in and out of discontentment, isolation, and the pursuit of lasting power (which is everyone) longs for something not found under the sun.

We’re in Ecclesiastes on Easter because, in some ways, more than any other book in the Bible, it helps us recognize the emptiness of life under the sun and therein stirs up in us a longing for a fuller kind of deliverance. Ecclesiastes primes our hearts for the message of Easter.

What Ecclesiastes does not do, however, is get us all the way to the bottom—at least not explicitly. We need deliverance from discontentment, isolation and broken power, for sure. But those things only point to the greater problem and the greater need for deliverance.

Grace, we feel the emptiness and vanity of all the things the Preacher named, along with everything else under the sun, ultimately because all of them have been corrupted by sin, even as we’ve been corrupted by sin.

As we read Ecclesiastes, we’re right to wonder if there is a fuller kind of deliverance, especially when we see that there is a greater need for deliverance. The Preacher seems to have wrestled with that reality every day of his life, but without gaining a whole lot of ground.

Easter in Ecclesiastes is the title of this sermon. We’ve been in Ecclesiastes, but what’s the Easter part? What does Easter have to do with all of this?

Easter is the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, which is the perfect, indisputable, and impeccable promise and proof of the greater deliverance offered by God to all who will receive Him in faith.

The Preacher recognized the perpetual temptation toward discontentment and the lack of any real under the sun deliverance from it. Easter is the good news that Jesus rose from the dead to be our all-satisfying treasure. Are you discontent? Look not first to anything in this world to satisfy, for it will always fail you; look instead to the resurrected Jesus, who alone can fill you with pleasures forevermore.

Matthew 13:44 [Jesus said,] “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

The Preacher recognized the perpetual temptation toward isolation and the lack of any real under the sun deliverance from it. Jesus rose from the dead to be in never-ending, ever-fulfilling communion with us. Have others hurt you? Look not first to anyone or anything in this world to be your companion, for they will always let you down on some level; look instead to the resurrected Jesus who is entirely and uniquely everything you long for.

John 17:3 And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

The Preacher recognized the perpetual temptation toward seeking worldly power and the lack of any real under the sun deliverance from it. Jesus rose from the dead to be the everlasting ruler God promised and we need. He is the risen King of kings. Do you feel the need to control your surroundings? Look not first to exercise dominion, for it will never last; look instead to the resurrected Jesus whose rule and reign are perfect and everlasting.

Hebrews 1:8 But of [Jesus] [God] says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.”

Easter is the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, which is the perfect, indisputable, and impeccable promise and proof of the greater deliverance we need.

Luke 24:1-6 tells of the fact of the resurrection, “But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. 2 And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. 5 And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead? 6 He is not here, but has risen.’”

And in 1 Corinthians 15:19-22 Paul tells us of the meaning of the resurrection, “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. 20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead…21 For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”

Jesus rose so we might rise with Him!

But there’s one more piece to the puzzle that I want to give you in closing. In order for Jesus to rise from the dead, He had to first be dead. He rose because He first died to give His life as payment for our sins.

We were all made to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. And yet every one of us have sinned and fallen short of His glory (Romans 3:23). Without fully understanding it, the Preacher wrote of many of sins’ disordering and frustrating effects. He called it “life under the sun.” But more than merely disordering and frustrating, the full pay-out of sin is death (Romans 6:23). In His holiness, God requires holiness. Our sin is no mere “mess up,” therefore. It is cosmic treason. And like treason everywhere, it requires the death penalty.

Jesus rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, because He paid our death penalty on Good Friday. That is, as we sing, Amazing Grace! And what’s more, we gain access to Jesus saving death and resurrecting resurrection, not by working hard enough or by being good enough or by being spiritual enough or by going to church enough, or by successfully fighting against discontentment, isolation, or the pursuit of power, but by simply realizing that we can’t, confessing that to God, and trusting in Him with all we have—to be our satisfaction, perfect fellowship, and Savior and King.

Easter is the news that Jesus is risen from the dead, but that is only good news for those who first feel the need for deliverance and the fact that nothing under the sun can provide it. Thank God for Ecclesiastes which helps us see those things so clearly.

The big idea of this sermon is that the only real and lasting solution to the problems we face in this life (physical, relational, emotional, and spiritual) is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The author of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, was inspired by God to help us see that there are no lasting earthly solutions to our earthly or heavenly problems. The main takeaway, then, the primary response to this passage, is to surrender entirely to the risen Jesus. Surrender, therefore, Grace Church, to the risen Jesus, that you might find perfect, eternal, complete deliverance from all of sin’s effects and be freed to celebrate it in the highest.

Easter in Ecclesiastes; a first for me. I hope an encouragement to you. Christ is risen!

Luke 19:28:44 And when he had said these things, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. 29 When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, 30 saying, “Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ you shall say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’” 32 So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. 33 And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, “Why are you untying the colt?” 34 And they said, “The Lord has need of it.” 35 And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. 36 And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. 37 As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, 38 saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” 39 And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” 40 He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”

41 And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42 saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side 44 and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

Good morning, Grace Church! We gather this morning at what is known as Holy Week, the “beginning of the end” of Jesus’ work on earth, the week leading up to Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection for the salvation of His people. Blessed be our King!

As we gather each Sunday, our hearts and minds should be about praising God for another day. I will admit that is not always my first thought. Often the distraction of the morning, lack of sleep, pressures for the upcoming day, or stresses from the day before pull my affections away from God. There are days that we simply have expectations of God that can be unmet – we expect He will fix a circumstance, He will answer my prayer exactly how I want, or that He will give me an easy day (whatever that means for you). Yet we must hold any desire open-handed because our Father knows best, even as we pray and ask these things of Him.

May God Himself, this morning, stir our affections to worship God as He has been, is, and will be according to His word. May we worship Him with the open hands of faith, with a right heart and mind this week as we reflect and seek gratefulness at the work He has done to provide a way of salvation, a way of hope through His Son Jesus. This is the Way.

Jesus entered Jerusalem, knowing what coming at the end of the week. In the earlier chapters of Luke, it is said that Jesus set His face toward Jerusalem. He was following the will of God, His Father. How easy to be distracted this day of His entry – crowds of people shouting His name, cheering, laying down their cloaks and palm branches – Jesus was here! Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory to the highest! Even though Jesus knew their hearts, for He is God and knows man’s heart, he does not stop their worship which is skewed.

The Main Point is keeping an eternal perspective, seek to worship Jesus as He is, not how we want Him to be. Through the scriptures and power of the Spirit, you see Him as the Messiah King over your life and Savior of your soul.

Jesus came for a reason – to fulfill the Father’s will (John 4). We see the details of His mission in the gospels, prophesied in the Old Testament, and in Luke with much detail. In the last days of His earthly life, Jesus “turned his face, was resolute in setting out for Jerusalem,” where He knew He would be killed (Luke 9:51). It should be said that the mission of Christ’s time on earth was to fulfill God’s plan of saving the lost. The Apostle Paul encouraged Timothy saying Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Jesus put it this way in Luke 19:10: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” Jesus’ mission was to save people who needed saving. Their reputation for sinfulness was not a reason to avoid them; rather, it was a reason to seek them out. Saved from what? Saved from sin? YES. But also from God. We are saved from “wrath,” that is, from God’s judgment of sin (Romans 5:9). Our sin has separated us from God, and the consequence of sin is death (Romans 6:23). So, we will soberly celebrate Jesus’ willingness to die for God’s enemies, namely you and I, on Good Friday to reconcile us back to our Creator – God the Father. Saved by God the Son in the plan of God the Father from God’s wrath on our sin and rebellion, bringing us back to God in right relationship, so that we can enjoy Him and bring glory to Him. So, one could say: God saves us from God to God and for God. That was Jesus’ purpose and He willingly and joyfully obeyed the Father to accomplish it.

Has anyone ever fallen short of your expectations? Not because they failed, but because what you expected from them was never in the cards in the first place.

Jesus for the first time, became a clearly public figure…allowing people to openly worship Him. Jesus’ purpose in riding into Jerusalem was to make public His claim to be their Messiah and King of Israel in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. Matthew says that the King coming on the foal of a donkey was an exact fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9, “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

The shouts of the crowd, “Hosanna in the highest!” carried deep meaning. The word hosanna comes from a Hebrew word meaning “save now” or “save us, we pray.” By saying “hosanna” as Jesus passed through the gates of Jerusalem and referring to Jesus as King, the Jews were, in a short-sighted sense, acknowledging Jesus as their Messiah. The Jews had been waiting a long time for the fulfillment of God’s Davidic covenant, and their shouts of “hosanna in the highest” were coming from the hope that their Messiah had finally come to set up God’s kingdom then and there. By saying “in the highest,” the crowds were invoking heaven’s blessing on them and the salvation that the Messiah was bringing. The phrase also echoes the song of the angels in Luke 2:14: “Glory to God in the highest.” To paraphrase the shouts of the crowd: “Save us, our Messiah, who comes to fulfill God’s mission! Save us, we beg you, as you take your rightful throne and extend heaven’s salvation to us!”

They welcomed Him out of their desire for a Messianic deliverer, many saw Him as the one who would lead them in a revolt against Rome. They were looking for political salvation, not a spiritual salvation. This is short-sighted view of Jesus, not seeking or understanding our true need. There were many who, though they did not believe in Christ as Savior, nevertheless hoped that perhaps He would be a great deliverer in this life. These are the ones who hailed Him as King with their many hosannas, recognizing Him as the Son of David who came in the name of the Lord. But when He failed in their expectations, when He refused to lead them in a massive revolt against the Roman occupiers, the crowds quickly turned on Him. They went for shouts of joy to shouts of ‘Crucify!”

I think it helpful today, this Palm Sunday, that we are not alone in expectations of God, met and unmet. Our account from Luke shows a crowd worshipping Jesus with these bent expectations…they were missing the point of Jesus. Even a desire to worship God, but with our hearts intent that He will do things for us that He has not promised…or that it will look different than our expectations. Yet, even in that – it is a sign that our hearts were created to worship God. It is in our sin and flesh that we pervert our worship to God with those falsehoods or to turn away from Him when what we want is not given.

Do we not fall into the same trap of looking to Jesus for salvation in this life alone? Do we not seek Him to be the Savior of America? Minnesota? If He could come back and oust the modern-day Romans, we can finally live in peace today in this world. We need saving, but from our sin, friends. In this salvation, we have peace eternal. We have a King who reigns and is preparing a place with the Father for those who believe in Him (John 14).

When Jesus rode into the city, he receives the worship and praise of the people because only He deserves it. There is nothing else on earth that deserves the praise we are to give Jesus, our Savior King. A theologian once described our desire to worship and shortcoming of it like this: “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols….The human mind, stuffed as it is with presumptuous rashness, dares to imagine a god suited to its own capacity; as it labours under dullness, is sunk in the grossest ignorance, it substitutes vanity and an empty phantom in the place of God. To these evils another is added by another action. The god whom man has thus conceived inwardly he attempts to embody outwardly. The mind, in this way, conceives the idol, and the hand gives it birth.” Friends, let me be clear on this point. We worship. The reality for all mankind is to worship something…and we do in our sin and ignorance worship other things when we were made to worship someone, that is God alone. Even redeemed, our hearts will turn toward idols. Even as God has truly circumcised our hearts as He promised to do from the Old Testament, we still live in the flesh and must mortify it.

C.S. Lewis pointed out that man’s desires are not too strong, but too weak. We are far to easily pleased. We must be in awe of God and like a deer pants after water – seek God alone, satisfied in Him alone. When we sense distance from God, a lack of joy in Him, focus on Him, desire for Him…we must seek out prayer and help from our brothers and sisters. We must cry out, “Holy Spirit, renew my mind! Create in me a clean heart and help me to praise Christ alone!”

Jesus made a statement to the Pharisees. They told Jesus to rebuke His disciples to which Jesus replied, “I tell you if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” The Heavens declare, even rocks would have shout praises to God. The expression the stones will cry out seems to be a well-known statement of the time and isn’t to be understood as a literal statement. The meaning is likely that the impossible would happen for the King of kings to enter His capital city in honor, like inanimate objects starting to worship. This is poetry in motion. In Psalm 114:6, the mountains leap. Isaiah 55:12 says, “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.” Throughout Psalm 148, there are numerous examples of created things praising their Creator—the sun, moon, stars, heavens, water, sky, animals, and people. Everyone and everything was created for the pleasure of the sovereign Lord, to worship Him. It is the reason we do missions – that the gospel would be brought to the nations, people saved, thus worship God like they ought. Missions = worship! Since God loved us so that we love Him in return and worship Him….we love our neighbor by speaking of the person to which their hearts will be fulfilled in their desire to worship something. We point them to the best, the treasure, the God-head.

Our God is full of compassion. The God-man Jesus knew He would be rejected, and in His humanity, He feels it more fully. The people had heard and seen Him teach and heal for 3 years…but they missed the point of why He came. He weeps because of their rejection of Him and that this same city would be sieged by the Romans in 40 years. He weeps because love feels when those around us miss the bigger picture. Jesus had an eternal and present viewpoint. Within just a few days, their hosannas would change to cries of “Crucify Him!” Those who hailed Him as a hero would soon reject and abandon Him, even his closest disciples. It is important to note the sadness of Jesus as He knows the people do not understand what is happening. They think Jesus will give them earthly comfort, unconcerned with eternity. Jesus also knows that judgement is coming for them, rightly so in their rejection of the stone, which would become the cornerstone. We must have eternal eyes and a very present viewpoint. We need Jesus. Our neighbors need Jesus. This is an eternal matter – men’s souls on the line. But this is also a very present issue. Jesus brings healing today. Jesus brings peace today. Jesus renews hearts and minds today. Seeds are planned and the Spirit sows today. Salvation is today.

In the kindness of God, He has given us a glimpse into the future. The Triune God is always working toward something better, in the case of our faith – someday it will no longer be needed as it turns to true sight. The hope that we have in Christ has and is accomplishing the redemption of souls for the glory of His name. Someday soon, we will worship with perfect hearts, minds, and song.

Turn to Revelation 7:9-12:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, 10 and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” 11 And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.

This worship is going to be real for all those who believe today. Right worship – to see and know God Father, Son, and Spirit as they are. We will be waving palm branches in the consummation of God’s Kingdom. This is our blessed and assured hope in Christ. So, Grace, today, let’s seek slices of that future worship. Let’s seek moments resting in the glory of God, not for anything other than a recognition of who He is – the only God whom worship is due. We can worship Him for blessings and grace, but let’s worship Him because He is God. Almighty, glorious, and holy.

The saints in the Bible are described as fearing the name of God; they are reverent worshipers; they stand in awe of the Lord’s authority; they are afraid of offending Him; they feel their own nothingness in the sight of the Infinite One. Yet, through Christ, they boldly approach His throne, they sing to Him, serve Him, love others in Him, and extend the invitation to the greatest feast that will ever be when our King comes to bring us Home. Onward!

Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. 2 And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. 3 But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

Good morning, Grace. We’re already a quarter of the way through Ecclesiastes. I hope it’s been anywhere close to as much of a gift to you all as it has been to me. God has used it to rekindle a love in me for those living with an under the sun view of life and an eagerness to keep my head above the sun.

Last week we considered the Preacher’s considerations on justice/injustice. This week we’ll consider his considerations on a particular form of injustice: oppression. Insodoing, we’ll see that the Preacher made four observations about oppression which led him to two conclusions. Before we get to all of that, though, we’ll first settle on a definition of oppression and get a brief overview of oppression in the Bible. That way, we’ll be in a better place to make sense of what the Preacher wrote.

The big idea of this passage is that oppression is everywhere and it is one of the most grievous things known to God and man. The bigger idea and takeaway, however, is that because God saved the world through the oppression of His Son, God’s people are liberated to liberate. We are freed from the oppression of sin to work toward freeing the oppressed, body and soul.

Oppression is talked about a lot today, isn’t it? It’s uncommon to go to any news site or turn on any news station and not be confronted with the topic. Like injustice, whenever we encounter oppression two things are virtually inevitable. First, we feel it deeply. And second, it’s defined loosely.

Of the second inevitability (loosely defined), consider this quote (from a Ligonier publication, Rev. Robert Rothwell, Tabletalk magazine, November 2022.)

Often, at least in the West, people cry “oppression” when[ever] they are told that they cannot do something they want to do. Tell a woman who wants to terminate her pregnancy for any reason whatsoever that she cannot do so, and you might be called an oppressor. Reject the notion that two men can get married, and somebody will accuse you of oppressing people who engage in homosexual acts.

But is it oppression simply to be restricted from doing something that you really want to do? Of course not. Laws are made all the time that restrict us from being able to do what we want to do. Are speed limits oppressive? What about laws against murder?

Oppression cannot be conceived of merely as a restriction on something we might want to do.

When we understand oppression as being told we can’t do something we really want, especially when we really believe what we really want is really tied to our personhood, it’s easy to see why it feels really painful.

But if that’s not an adequate understanding of oppression, what is? Again, I’ll quote from the same article for the beginning and foundation of a definition.

[Oppression is] an offense against justice and the humane treatment of others, but who gets to define justice and humane treatment? Ultimately, it is God, who defines justice and kindness in His moral law, which is revealed in the conscience and given to us in Scripture.

In the most basic terms, building on what we just read, according to God’s Word, oppression is sinfully holding someone down economically, morally, legally, or in the way of their innate dignity as a divine image bearer; it is exploitation; it is imposing unbiblical and unbearable burdens on another.

In the Bible, oppression is a very real, a very important, a very prevalent and a very wicked concept.

Given this definition, it’s even easier to see why it’s so painful to experience. More than simply not getting what we want (or believe we deserve), to be oppressed according to God’s Word is to held back from some good thing God means us to have or some good thing God designed us to need. And of course that hurts a lot wherever it is found.

If that’s what oppression is, how does the Bible present it? How does it show up in the Bible? How does God feel about and respond to it? How does God expect His people to feel about and respond to it? Is there anything that can be done about it?

Consider with me eight broad biblical principles on oppression.

As I mentioned earlier, in the Bible, oppression is a very real, a very important, a very prevalent, and a very wicked concept. As we turn our attention back to our text for this morning, we are right to wonder how much of that the Preacher understood and/or believed. The answer, as we’ll see, is very little. He made four observations and from them, he drew two conclusions.

Oppression Was Everywhere the Preacher Looked

Looking at the beginning of v.1 in our passage we’ll see that the Preacher’s first observation was that there was oppression everywhere.

1 Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun….

There really is nothing new under the sun, is there? What we hear and see so much of today was equally present (probably more so in a lot of ways) three thousand years ago. Everywhere the Preacher looked, he saw people oppressing and being oppressed. He was certainly right about this.

The second observation the Preacher made, which we see in the next clause in v.1, is that the oppressed were crushed to the point of weeping.

1 … And behold, the tears of the oppressed…

When the Preacher looked around, he not only saw oppression everywhere, but the devastation of the oppression everywhere.

Imagining his readers to be on the same path of seeking understanding and meaning as he was, the Preacher invited his readers to “behold” the tears of the oppressed. His implicit point was that whatever conclusions a person comes to regarding life under the sun, it must be able to accommodate the ever-present and soul-crushing reality of oppression.

That’s a good word, Grace. He was right about this too and it remains so today. A worldview worth adopting must be able to account for the sinfulness, the injustice, of the seemingly limitless oppression in the world today. And a truly Christian worldview must be able to do so consistent with a God who is sovereign, wise, and good.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, oppression has always been painful, and especially so for those who are limited to an under the sun perspective. Let us remember, therefore, the promise of God to hear the prayers of the oppressed, promises the Preacher seems to have missed.

His third observation, still from v.1, is that not only were the oppressed crushed, but they were left alone in their crushed state.

1 … they had no one to comfort them!

And again at the end of v.1.

1 … and there was no one to comfort them.

God’s people were, evidently, indifferent to the oppression and the oppressed. Oppressors kept oppressing and the oppressed remained oppressed. No one was doing anything about it.

In repeating this observation, the Preacher seems to have been silently lamenting the fact that neither God nor anyone else had intervened on behalf of the oppressed. Curiously, though, it didn’t seem to have occurred to the Preacher, the King over Israel, to be a comforter himself.

Grace, may this never be the case among us. May we never forget that we are the hands and feet of Jesus. May we never forget that God’s care and comfort often come through His people—through us. And may these never-forgotten truths find expression in our lives such that no one within reach of Grace Church would suffer oppression undefended or the pain of oppression uncomforted. May we not merely (like the Preacher) lament the injustice. May we instead continually work in faith to deliver, correct, and sit with the oppressed.

More importantly, may we never forget God’s promise to defend and bring about justice for the oppressed. May we work hard, in faith, according to God’s commands for the cause of the oppressed, but may we never forget that it is always God working through us when we the oppressor is pushed back and the oppressed are comforted.

Oppression Is Only Possible when Someone Misuses their Power

The fourth and final observation made by the Preacher regarding the ever-present, ever-crushing, never-comforted oppression he saw was that it was perpetrated by the powerful.

1 … On the side of their oppressors there was power…

The great irony in this is that the Preacher is either Solomon or the voice of Solomon, one of the most powerful people to ever walk the face of the earth. If ever there was someone with power sufficient to address this kind of oppression it was him.

And the greater irony is that Solomon’s actions (outlined in 1 Kings 11) contributed greatly to the oppression the Preacher so mournfully witnessed.

Again, Grace, may we learn to lament the oppression as the Preacher did. But may we also learn to from what the Preacher didn’t do; that is, may we learn to use whatever power the LORD grants to do more than merely lament.

Power, in any measure, is given to be used exclusively for the good of others. It is never to be wielded selfishly, much less oppressively.

Older siblings, hear this. Men, hear this. Bosses, hear this. Parents, hear this. Elders, hear this. Civic leaders, hear this. Repent of using your God-given power and authority for your own selfish gain. And woe to those whose selfish gain comes from the exploitation of those whom you’re charged to love and serve.

And, Grace, may this also point us to the fierce kindness of God once again. All the power of God was unleashed on the Son on the cross in order to crush the oppressor and the greatest oppression of all (condemnation and death), and to rescue and restore the oppressed. He is our God and guide.

Given his observations, what were the Preacher’s conclusions? What did it mean that oppression was everywhere at the hands of the powerful, resulting in comfortless despair? How much of what we saw about oppression in the Bible come to bear on his conclusions?

First, consider v.2.

2 And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive.

Oppression is so bad, so wicked, so evil, and so prevalent that it is impossible to not be negatively affected by it. There is truly a way in which understanding the oppression on earth (in quantity and quality) is to have joy continually stolen from you. It can’t not.

The Preacher’s first conclusion is that it is better to be done with it all. He said in the previous passage that he wasn’t sure what happens after we die, but he was sure that it’s better than witnessing the tears of the oppressed.

In life, we carry the burden of the pain of oppression continually. In death, whatever happens, at least our eyes are closed to the misery of the oppression, the Preacher reasoned.

How’s that for a first conclusion. Not “So I determined to comfort the hurting” or “So I determined to put a stop to it.” Not even, “so I cried out to God on behalf of those who cried out in the pain of their oppression.” Simply, the Preacher concluded, death is better than witnessing the oppression on earth.

Maybe his second conclusion would be more faithful, more hopeful, more responsible?

3 But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

What’s better than witnessing all the pain of the oppressed? Death, for when we’re dead we can no longer see the oppression. What’s better than death? Never having been born, for then we never had to see the oppression to begin with.

What a cynical, grievous, under the sun view of life. As we make our way through the rest of Ecclesiastes, we’ll see that the Preacher does have a bit more to say than just this, but that doesn’t change the fact that he did say this. As with many other things, the Preacher just can’t seem to get his head above the sun when trying to make sense of the things he saw in this life. And yet, as always, he’s exactly right if all we can see is all there is.

As I’ve said over and over, many people in your life, perhaps many in this room, are in the same place. They can’t get their head above the sun enough to see anything other than the grievous vanity of things on earth. They can’t imagine any real help, healing, or solution to the oppression so prevalent and destructive.

It is our responsibility and privilege to share the good news with them that there is indeed, in the person of Christ, real help, healing, and salvation, in this life and the next. That’s largely the point of the meal we’re about to turn to.

In conclusion, the title of this sermon is “Death Is Better than Oppression.” You may have noticed that has a double meaning. It was certainly the Preacher’s conclusion as he contemplated the limitless tears of the oppressed. We could learn a great deal form his grief over something that grieves God so deeply.

At the same time, and in a more important way, it also refers to Jesus’ response to the deadly oppression of sin. He preferred His own death to the eternal oppression of His people. Death was better than oppression for Jesus in the sense that He would rather die for the spiritual oppression of the world than allow His people to remain in it.

Again, that’s why we turn to the table now, to celebrate exactly that!

Ecclesiastes 3:16-22 Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness. 17 I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work. 18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. 19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. 20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. 21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth? 22 So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?

Welcome back to Ecclesiastes. We’ve been away for a few weeks now as Pastor Colin preached on Psalm 23 and then I preached out of 2 Corinthians for missions week. Like a healthy vacation, it was good to be away and it is good to be back.

As I’ve mentioned before and as I’ll certainly mention again, the thing I appreciate most about Ecclesiastes, and the thing I most commend to you, is its unflinching honesty about what life is like under the sun. If all there is to reality is what we can see, there is no more accurate description of mankind’s experience than Ecclesiastes.

This is the limited perspective that everyone is born with, it’s all that most of the people in your life have right now, and no one is ever entirely exempt from it in this life. The great gift of Ecclesiastes is that it not only perfectly describes the under-the-sun perspective of so many, but it also perfectly describes its empty end. If what we see is all there is, life is nothing but mystery, enigma, vanity. Things don’t really make sense and there’s nothing we can do about it. And because of that, real understanding, meaning and significance are impossible to find.

In other words, the gifts of Ecclesiastes are that (1) it reveals the inability of anything on earth to provide ultimate understanding, meaning, or satisfaction, (2) it saves us from wasting our time looking for those things in those places, and (3) it invites us to lift our gaze upward, above the sun, where they can be found.

As I said, it was good to be a way from Ecclesiastes for a time, but it’s great to be back as well.

Regarding our passage for this morning, the final verses of chapter 3 contain clear echoes of things the Preacher has already addressed (there is a time for everything, death, vanity, there is nothing better, etc.). At the same time, these few verses really do advance the Preacher’s arguments.

Much of Ecclesiastes is like that. The Preacher makes arguments and then continues to circle back to them even as he slowly builds upon them. It is almost like a stretched out slinky; always moving forward, but in one continuous spiral. While it can feel a bit repetitive, on an important practical level, that structure serves to drive his points deeper into our minds and hearts.

You might not be surprised, therefore, to learn that the heart of this passage is, in many ways, right at the heart of this book as a whole. The big idea here is that as the Preacher looked around, he saw injustice and vanity in that those on opposite ends of the moral spectrum (righteous and wicked) experienced the same outcome in their lives, even as those on opposite ends of the ontological spectrum (man and beast) experienced the same outcome in their deaths.

And from all of this we are given two main takeaways; one from the Preacher and one from the rest of God’s Word. From the Preacher we are charged, once again, to rejoice in our work. And from the rest of God’s Word, we are charged to look above the sun.

To help us all understand and apply this passage, this sermon has three parts. First, we’ll consider the Preacher’s perspective on the vanity and injustice of the same outcome for opposites. Second, we’ll consider why this caused tension for the Preacher. And third, we’ll consider an above the sun response to under the sun injustices.

How would you define justice/injustice and how important is it to you?

Interestingly, God used the work of a non-Christian (Plato’s Republic), studied in a non-Christian context (the University of Minnesota), to help me see the importance of defining justice properly and how essential it is for a well-ordered society. That book in that class drove me to God’s Word since God is the authority on the matter.

Biblically, horizontal justice (justice among people) is giving to others that which God has requires of us.

This kind of justice is rooted in God’s very nature, is revealed in God’s Word, and it requires impartiality, advocating for the weak, and understanding that God will ensure perfect justice.

That is, God is just, God commands His people to be just and advocate for justice, and ultimate justice is only found inside of the godhead and the new heavens and earth. Therefore, there is only frustration for everyone living with a different understanding of justice than that—which seems to be largely what this passage is about.

Because God has put eternity into every person’s heart (3:11), and because eternity includes an innate longing for justice, being the victim of a perceived injustice is one of the worst feelings known to man. Even when we have a misguided understanding of justice or a misunderstanding of the facts, feeling as if we are being treated unjustly cuts deep. We feel this from the earliest days of our lives which is why one of the first laments many children utter is, “That’s not fair!”

No joke, I doubt I’ll ever forget the time my neighbor cheated me out of the Super Mario Bros championship we were in back in 1989ish. The injustice was so clear and egregious that I have been madder only a few times in my life. Of course, there have been far, far greater injustices perpetrated than that (even in my life), but that just proves my point that injustice cuts differently.

The Preacher experienced this continually. Consider the beginning of v.16.

16 Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness.

His point here seems to be that even in places which claim to be built on principles of justice, places designed to ensure justice, wickedness exists.

In courts of law, for instance, the innocent are often convicted and the guilty are often exonerated because of various injustices—bribery, favoritism, laziness, partiality, incompetence, etc.

Likewise, even in places intended to house righteousness, there is wickedness.

In churches, for instance, children are abused, adultery happens, and pastors swindle people out of their money.

The Preacher looked everywhere and saw that under the sun, there was no place to go to escape the unrighteousness of injustice. There was no place in which justice or righteousness were safe. And that was maddening.

Have you ever experienced this; the seemingly inescapable prevalence of injustice and unrighteousness in life? I’m not merely talking about being sinned against. I’m talking about having a direct experience with someone purposely getting in the way of the right handling of sin; of someone purposely working to deny and prevent that which God requires. If so, you know how devastating it can be.

Throughout Ecclesiastes, the Preacher lists many examples of injustices. In this passage, he names two of a particularly vain type—the type where opposites receive the same outcome.

1. Righteous and Wicked (17)

The first concerns the fate of those on the opposite side of the moral spectrum—the righteous and wicked. Look at v.17, “I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work.”

There are two basic problems with the justice of God’s treatment of the righteous and wicked according to the Preacher. First, while there will come a time of judgment from the Lord for the injustices of men, it’s in His timing, the injustices themselves seem to be a part of God’s providential reign, and we can’t change any of that. That was a really hard pill for the Preacher to swallow; as it is for anyone looking at things from an under the sun perspective.

Second, and more importantly, in the meantime (as we await the judgment of God), the righteous and wicked alike will continually experience injustice in this life. We all intuitively feel that people who live morally better lives should fare better at the hand of God and man in a just system. And yet, as the Preacher observed the world around him, that’s just not what he found. Those seeking to honor God and those explicitly rejecting God alike were the victims of endless injustices.

In that way, righteousness and wickedness both lead to the same unjust experiences in this life—the same for opposites. And that was extremely vexing to the Preacher.

2. Man and Beast (18-21)

The second area of injustice observed by the Preacher is that what is true of the righteous and wicked is also true of man and beast—the righteous and wicked share a fate (the injustice of the same injustices); so too do man and animal (the injustice of the same end—death to dust).

Just as we all intuitively believe that justice means the righteous should fare better than the wicked, we also intuitively know that justice means people should generally receive better treatment from God and man than animals. And yet, in v.18 we read…

18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.

In what way does God test mankind to help them to see that they are but beasts? Every day we look around and see that both end in exactly the same way—returning to dust.

19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. 20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.

Every man and every animal die in the end. None live forever. There isn’t a fundamental difference in the breaths we take from that of animals. There isn’t a fundamental difference in the manner in which the air keeps man and animal alive. And there isn’t a fundamental difference in what happens to the bodies of man and animal at death. When our breath stops, man and beast alike die and turn to dust. Man has no advantage over animals in any of those matters. God makes no distinction. And the preacher believed that to be nothing but vanity and injustice.

The Preacher didn’t stop there, though. Without blinking he dove straight into the question of life after death. Maybe there isn’t a difference between man and beast in the manner of death or its effect on our bodies, but what about life after death? The Preacher was certainly aware of the common belief among his people that people are different than animals in their eternal destiny—that the souls of men live on and animals don’t.

But what did he believe?

21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?

Maybe there’s an ultimate difference and maybe there isn’t. If there is, it’s not anything we can observe. There’s no way to know for sure, he reasoned. Nobody knows and, therefore, there’s no comfort in the idea.

Again, one of the most significant gifts of God in Ecclesiastes is how well it articulates the questions that stem from having eternity in our heart and how well it articulates under the sun answers. If all we see is all there is, the Preacher couldn’t be more right.

But what I said at the beginning, I want to repeat here.

As the Preacher looked around, he saw injustice and vanity in that those on opposite ends of the moral spectrum (righteous and wicked) experienced the same outcome in their lives, even as those on opposite ends of the ontological spectrum (man and beast) experienced the same outcome in their deaths.

In that way, he invites us to join him in his vexation, even exasperation. What kind of tragic injustice is it that all breathing beings live lives of vanity and die deaths of dust? The same for opposites. How maddening.

In the final verse from our passage, the Preacher rightly anticipated his readers’ main question: What do we do in light of this? If that’s how things are, what does it mean? How do we live in a world like that? His answer was straightforward and familiar.

22 So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?

Back in 2:24 and again in 3:12-13 he said almost the same thing. He will say it again in 8:15.

Each clause requires a brief word.

1. There is nothing better.

The idea of something being “better” than something else is an important concept for the Preacher. He uses that word nearly 20 times in the twelve chapters of Ecclesiastes. For all you non-math wizzes, that’s almost twice/chapter.

The one who has never been born is better than the living or dead (4:3).

Two are better than one when it comes to work (4:9).

Drawing near to God is better than offering the sacrifice of fools (5:1).

It is better to not make a vow at all than to make a vow and not keep it (5:5).

Being a stillborn child is better than being a man without satisfaction (6:3).

A good name is better than precious ointment (7:1).

Sorrow is better than laughter (7:3)

Quiet words and rebuke from the wise are better than loud words and songs from fools (7:5, 9:17).

Patience is better than pride (7:8).

A living dog is better than a dead lion (9:4).

And wisdom is better than might (9:16) and weapons of war (9:18).

In simplest terms, “better” means “preferable” or “more advantageous” for the Preacher.

After witnessing the injustice of the fact that the same end comes for opposites under the sun, the Preacher concluded that there was one response more preferable or advantageous (better) than all the rest.

2. That a man should rejoice in his work.

The better response is that a man should rejoice in his work. The Preacher has said a good deal about work already.

In 1:3 he wondered, “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (echoed in 3:9) with the implication that there is very little.

In 1:13 he acknowledged that “It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.”

In 2:10, having spent his life engaged in a great deal of toil, he concluded, “my heart found pleasure in all my toil,” but quickly clarified and concluded, “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (2:11) and eventually, “I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me” (2:18) and “I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors” (2:18).

Given all that, it’s hard to imagine how/why there’s nothing better than that. Why not? That thought/question leads straight to the next clause.

3. For that is his lot.

Why is it best for man to simply rejoice in his work in light of the vain injustice that all men and beasts alike end as dead dust? Because, as we’re told in 2:24, it is “from the hand of God”. Because, as we’re told in 3:13, it is “God’s gift to man”. Because, as we’ll see in 8:15, it “will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun.” Because, as we’re told in our passage, it “is his lot.”

In other words, there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work in the midst of injustice and vanity because that is the way God made this world. This is just what life is like under God’s sun.

4. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?

Finally, the Preacher concludes that this is the best life by returning to the uncertainty of anything beyond what we can observe. He wondered earlier, “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?” In similar fashion, he wonders here “Who can bring [man] to see what will be after him”.

In other words, if all we see is all there is, the best we can do is enjoy what God gives us while we have it. And as is the case with everything else the Preacher has written, that’s entirely true from an under the sun perspective.

This is, as I mentioned before I prayed, the first application for all of us. Whatever your work is, work to find enjoyment in it and the fruit you get from it in the knowledge that that is God’s design for you. Your work and its reward are gifts from God. Thank God for them and work hard at them.

Stop being lazy. Stop complaining about your boss or coworkers. Stop wishing your lot were different. Instead, work, work joyfully, work excellently, work productively, work encouragingly, work thankfully and all because that is an important part of living as God has ordered us to live.

So, why does all of this matter? Why did the Preacher, like all of us, feel so much tension on account of these things? I’ve touched on this already, but I want to name three specific things taught by the Preacher that explain the tension felt by the Preacher: God’s nature, eternity in man, and life under the sun.

If there were no God, none of this would be a real problem. It might not be exciting to us, but we’d have no one to complain to or blame. It would simply be a matter of being courageous enough to be honest with ourselves about the reality of the world we live in. That’s the way a lot of New Atheists talk.

But the Preacher was no atheist. He knew enough about God to know that He is sovereign and involved in all the affairs of man. God is, the Preacher knew, in charge of all of the things he listed.

The Preacher almost certainly knew that God is not indifferent to injustice. Whatever percentage of the OT he had available to him, it was enough for him to know of God’s prohibitions against injustice and that some of God’s harshest judgments are promised to those who perpetuate injustice.

Just as importantly, the Preacher believed in God’s goodness. He knew that whatever God’s reason for working in these ways, it was a good reason.

The first reason for the Preacher’s tension, then, is that as hard as he tried, he could not come up with an explanation for why God would make things like this. His experience in the world seemed to be in direct contradiction with what he knew about God’s nature.

The nature of God, coupled with the fact that God has put part of that nature in us is what makes us so frustrated by the perversion of justice. We feel, in many ways, what God feels about those things. We can’t not because it’s built into who we are. The tension we feel is owing to the eternity God place in us.

Finally, and most immediately, the Preacher’s tension at the injustices we all inescapably live in was because he had a really hard time seeing anything other than that which is under the sun. He had a hard time seeing anything other than that which he could observe with his own senses. He possessed an almost exclusively under the sun perspective and that simply wasn’t sufficient to allow him to see anything else.

God’s eternity in our hearts without His omniscience in our minds can be a really difficult combination.

God’s nature (sovereign, wise, and good), the Preacher’s nature (eternity and sin in his heart), and the Preacher’s perspective (under the sun) combined to cause the tension the Preacher experienced as he considered the injustice of the wicked and righteous experiencing similar injustices in life and the injustice of man and beast both experiencing the same dead dust no matter what they did.

And that leads to the final and briefest section of the sermon.

If everything the Preacher wrote is correct under the sun, what is added when we pop up above the clouds? That is, what’s different when we consider these things according to God’s special revelation and not just His general revelation; when we consider what He has revealed in the Bible and not just in creation?

The righteous and the wicked do experience similar injustices in this life, even as man and beast experience some of the same things in death. That’s the nature of living in a broken world among people who are continually under the sinful effects of sin. The Preacher was right about that. But…

The Preacher missed the Word-of-God revealed truth that there are none who are truly righteous (Romans 3:10-12). Who is good but God alone, Jesus forced us to consider (Mark 10:18). The point is that an above the sun perspective is such that we know that anything we experience apart from God’s wrath for our sins is a gift. The worst injustice we face pales in comparison to what we deserve.

Second, the difference between people, therefore, isn’t that some are truly righteous and others are wicked. The difference is that by the grace of God, some recognize their unrighteousness and turn to Jesus in faith for His righteousness. To be a Christian is to have the righteousness of Jesus credited to our account, not to have earned God’s favor through our own righteousness. The Preacher didn’t seem to have much of an understanding of this and it makes all the difference in how we think about the injustices we encounter and what’s best in light of them.

Third, those who have faith in Jesus are given the Holy Spirit to dwell in us, convicting us of sin, reminding us of God’s will, and strengthening us for obedience. The Spirit inspired the Preacher to write what he wrote for the building up of God’s people, but that’s not the same as the indwelling of the Spirit that we have as New Covenant people. An above the sun perspective on the injustices of this world and the proper response to them is only possible with the Spirit in us.

Finally, those who have faith in Jesus are given the above the sun promises of God. There are three that are of particular importance.

First, every injustice we face is being used by God for His glory and our good (especially our sanctification). There is always more to the injustices we experience than the injustices themselves (Romans 8:28-29). As you struggle with this, remember the injustice of the cross.

Second, God will put an end to every injustice (Revelation 21:5). He already did for those whose hope is in Jesus when He paid the price of our sins in Jesus on the cross. He will put an end to the rest when those who remain in their sin reap its due reward in hell.

And third, those whose hope is in Jesus will know the temporary decay of our bodies, but at the very moment the breath leaves us and our bodies begin to return to dust, God sanctifies our souls completely and brings them into His blessed presence forever, even as we await the future resurrection of our bodies to be gloriously reunited with our souls (Romans 8:30-31). In that, we are truly and thoroughly different than unbeliever and beast alike.

When we know these promises, we are truly free to endure every injustice in faith, live with the confidence that it is not death to die, and work in joy—both physically and spiritually—in the knowledge that God is with us in all of it and using it for His eternal glory. Amen and amen.

2 Corinthians 5:16-21 From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Good morning and welcome to missions week. If you’re new to Grace, missions week is a time we set aside every year to highlight God’s charge to His people to tell the whole world of His infinite glory and grace. We spend one week each year reminding us of that which should be our heartbeat all year.

With this sermon, my earnest hope is that God will be glorified by helping us consider missions with greater clarity and engaging in missions with greater earnestness. To those ends, I intend to begin by saying a bit about our basic convictions on missions. Then we’ll take a look at our passage in 2 Corinthians to help us see how we get from believing the gospel ourselves to engaging in world missions. And from there we’ll be in a good place to grasp this year’s missions theme and a handful of practical applications. In all of that comes the challenge to burn bright for Christ wherever we are, and on the mission field in particular.

The big idea of this sermon (along with all missions week) is that God’s Word calls God’s people to glorify God by calling all people everywhere to follow Jesus and we do that best by burning bright for Jesus. The main takeaway, then, is to call all people everywhere to follow Jesus by burning bright for Jesus.

Let’s pray.

For those of you who are newer to Grace Church, this is our eleventh missions week. Our consistent hope each year is that God would be pleased to use it to call some to sacrificially and joyfully go onto the mission field and to burden everyone else to more actively support the called. Ask God right now to open you up to those things.

Because we all tend to forget and because there are so many newer families, it seems good to begin by defining our terms and naming a few of our core convictions surrounding missions and missions week.

First, God’s Word is our ultimate authority in all things. That is, as our doctrinal statement affirms, we believe, “the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. … it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.”

That statement comes from passages like 2 Timothy 3:16-17 which says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

Therefore, the Bible is our authority on missions. We’re eager to hear stories about how God is working around the world. We’re glad to wrestle through the different approaches God’s people have taken toward missions over the centuries. It’s good to take certain cultural things into account as we go to unreached places. And yet, none of those things are our final authority.

The first and main question we ask as a Church is what does God’s Word say about missions. We start there and remain there. Whatever else we ask, think, believe, and do flows continually out of and submits to that. We’re certainly not perfect in this, but it is our core conviction regarding missions and every other aspect of life.

Second, we believe God’s Word teaches that all things (including mission) exist for God’s glory. The chief end of all mankind and everything we do is to see, delight in, and celebrate the unmatched, infinite glory of God.

1 Cor 10:31 So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do [engage missions], do all to the glory of God.

Missions is never first or most about helping Christians use their gifts or find their purpose. Missions is never first or most about mere obedience to God’s commands. Believe it or not, missions is never first or most about the salvation of the world. Grace, missions is never first or most about people at all. Missions, rightly understood and applied, is always first and most about the glory of God.

There are to key ways in which that’s the case. First, mission is about the glory of God in the sense that God reveals His glory by drawing to Himself a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation. Second, it’s about God’s glory in the sense that we rightly engage in missions when we are so amazed by God that we can’t not tell the world about Him. We’ll come back to both of these in a bit.

Grace, God is greater than you could ever imagine and He created all of us for His glory—to be eternally satisfied in Him. We are unwaveringly convicted that missions exists to bring that message to the world. Missions, like everything else, exists for the glory of God.

Our third primary conviction regarding missions is that missions is most honoring to God when it is done out of love for our unknown neighbor. Only when our aim is the glory of God and our motive is love for neighbor, will we joyfully go wherever God leads us, no matter the cost.

Matt 22:36-37 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

It is out of God’s love for us that we love Him (1 John 4:19). It is out of God’s love for us that we love others (1 John 4:20). And if loving others means anything, it means bringing them the good news that they can be rescued from the death of sin and reconciled to the life of God. That’s missions.

Fourth, we believe that biblically speaking, missions is: Glorifying God by crossing a significant cultural barrier to call others to follow Jesus by the power of His Spirit. Within that definition, I’d like to point out a few key implications.

First, many people (understandably) talk about being a missionary wherever you are or a missionary to your neighbors. While we appreciate the sentiment, we think it’s most helpful to maintain a distinction between local ministry and cross-cultural ministry. Reserving the term “missions” for cross-cultural ministry helps us to do that.

Second, likewise, people often talk about humanitarian aid or service projects as missions. Again, while meeting the physical needs of others in Jesus’ name is certainly part of godliness, and while it is understandable why people refer to that as missions, we think it’s most helpful to maintain a distinction between actively seeking to make disciples and actively functioning as disciples. Reserving the term “missions” for making disciples helps us to do that.

Third, our definition is mean to highlight the fact that success in missions is faithfulness to God’s call. We long for people to come to faith in Jesus and to mature in Him (to become His disciples), but those things are ultimately God’s to distribute as He sees fit. We are called to be faithful to God’s Word in proclaiming God’s Word, not to secure the salvation and sanctification of others. Successful missions takes place whenever we faithfully proclaim Christ regardless of how people respond to our proclamation.

And fourth, in all of this, we hope it’s easy to see that missions is simply ministry across a significant cultural boundary. We are not called to do one thing in our neighborhood and another thing among unreached people groups. The nature and aim of both are fundamentally the same. A lot of problems have occurred in missions because of how easy it is to think otherwise about missions.

God’s Word is our ultimate authority in missions, God’s glory is our ultimate goal in missions, love is motivation, missions is simply cross-cultural ministry, and, finally, we believe that the Bible calls every Christian to engage in missions by either going or supporting those who do. In other words, as one Pastor has said, our only missions options are to “go, send, or disobey.”

The primary passage containing the universal missionary call is Matthew 28:18-20, the Great Commission.

18 Jesus … said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

You might be wondering how we get from this being a charge from Jesus to His first followers to a universal call for everyone of us (for all Christians). The logic is pretty simple and straightforward. Jesus’ commission was for His disciples to make disciples of the whole world. Once we receive that call and respond in faith, we become Jesus’ disciples and the commission becomes ours.

One of our most significant convictions as a church regarding missions, and one of the most significant truths driving missions week, is that God’s Word teaches that missions (like baptism and orphan care and active participation in a local church) is not optional for followers of Jesus. Not all of us are called to go, but all of us are called to make sure that those who are called are well-qualified, well-trained, and well-supported.

Those are our basic convictions regarding missions. They shape everything we do in regards to missions at Grace—or at least we mean them to and ought to repent wherever we find that they don’t. And that leads to the next part of this sermon—the gospel and its missions implications.

With all of that in the way of background, let’s zoom in a bit and look to our primary text for this morning. As we do, we’ll see the gospel lens that makes missions make sense, the gospel’s inward effects that makes missions inevitable, and the gospel’s outward effects which is missions.

Have you ever had something happen that completely changed your perspective on something? There have been countless examples of that in my life; some big and some little. On the little side is guacamole. I spent most of my life on the hobbit side of things, “I don’t like green food.” I wouldn’t even try it. At some point that I can’t remember, for some reason I can’t remember, however, I did. And it’s really good. Nothing changed in guacamole. The only thing that changed was my perspective.

The same thing happened with coffee, wood working, reading, old trucks, wood burning stoves, vinyl records (and all things analogue), and a whole bunch of other little things. I’m sure you all have your own similar lists. You began liking something you originally avoided, not because the thing itself changed, but simply because your perspective on it did.

Our text opens with one of the most significant perspective shifts we can possibly make. It is a call to consider every single person in the world through a particular lens.

16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.

If we are to think rightly about any aspect of this world, and about missions in particular, it will begin with us clearly seeing that every single man, woman, and child is an eternal being, made in God’s image, created with both body and soul.

It is all-too-easy to think of ourselves and the people who live in our homes and who we pass on the street and who we’ve never met as merely physical beings. And because of that, it’s all too easy to forget that everyone will live forever somewhere—either in heaven or hell. If we regard people only according to the flesh, we will never see people or missions as we ought.

But as Christians, we know that no one is merely or even mainly skin and bone (flesh). We know that everyone is body and soul, physical and spiritual, temporal and eternal.

And as Christians, we know that we have a responsibility, given to us by God, to care for whole people. That is, according to Jesus’ example and directive, we must care for the physical needs of others. We must feed the hungry, comfort the sad, give shelter to the homeless, plead the cause of the orphan, and seek justice for the oppressed.

But we must also, also according to Jesus’ example and directive, care for them as the spiritual beings they are. We must work to meet their spiritual needs as well as their physical ones. We must pray for their souls, help them to see who God really is and who they really are, and, as we’re about to see, we must share the good news with them that they can be rescued and redeemed—body and soul—for eternity through Jesus Christ.

One of the great challenges of missions is that while everyone readily recognizes their physical needs and is almost always eager to have help in meeting them, that is not necessarily true of the spiritual aspect of their personhood. There are a few people who don’t even know about their spiritual needs, some who do not want them met, and most who do not believe that the gospel of Jesus is able to meet them.

Missions begins for God’s people when we see that Jesus was not merely flesh, but the eternal son of God, the Christ. And it continues on when see that all mankind was made in His image and, therefore, “regard no one according to the flesh.”

With God’s help, we must gain the right perspective on people and from it, we must joyfully give people all of what they need, for all of who they are, no matter the cost.

With God having given us this new perspective, this new lens with which to see mankind, I invite you to consider the gospel (the good news of Jesus) and its primary horizontal implication (world missions!).

If we are to engage in missions as God intends, we will look at the world not through the lens with which we were born, but with the new lens given to us by the Holy Spirit of God and we will use it to see what Jesus has done for us in an all-of-life altering way. If your hope is in Jesus, if you are a Christian…

The fact of the matter is that when we look through the lens of the gospel, it has implications not just for how we see ourselves and others, but for how we relate to others as well. One of the primary ways the gospel shapes our relationship to others is found in verses 18-20.

18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself [that’s what we just considered] and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us…

To be a Christian is to have been given a ministry of reconciliation, it is to have been appointed to the position of ambassador, it is to represent Jesus on earth in all we do. This is why we say that Christians must go, send, or disobey. It is critical that we recognize this.

But it is equally critical that we recognize that we cannot reconcile anyone to God. That’s not our job. Our job is to tell them how they can be reconciled to God by grace, through faith in Jesus. We do the proclaiming, God does the reconciling. We tell people how they can have their sins forgiven, God does the forgiving.

Again, when we see through a gospel lens, and when we understand the good news of what God has graciously, accomplished in us, we cannot help but to feel a holy angst for everyone to know Christ. When we see everyone as the eternal being they are and when we know that we didn’t deserve the grace of God we were given, there is no room for silence, pride, or fear, only ministering reconciliation to the world according to Jesus’ charge.

In that way, truly, to believe the gospel is to share the gospel. We simply cannot believe in the good news promised in Jesus and keep it to ourselves. Grace, one of the ways we know we truly believe it is from the Holy Spirit-given compulsion we have to share it.

That is exactly what Paul’s final words from our passage communicate. The necessary outcome of everything we’ve seen is crying out for the world to hear this good news.

20 … We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

When that is the cry of your heart and those are the words of your mouth, you get missions. When Jesus and His reconciling work are your greatest treasure, such that you can’t help but to share it with others, you get missions. When you have an insatiable longing for people you’ve never met, in every corner of the world, to hear this good news and receive it in faith, you get missions.

That’s what Jesus did, that’s what the world needs, that’s what we are called to, and cultivating all of that within our church and living it out in the world, is why we have missions week.

With all of those things in mind, each year the missions team settles on a theme to help define and narrow our focus. This year, as you’ve heard, the theme is “Burning Bright for Christ.”

We started out by considering missions through the widest lens (our missions convictions), then we zoomed in to consider a biblical basis for missions (in 2 Corinthians). And now, we’re going to zoom the rest of the way in by considering our particular theme for this year: burning bright for Christ.

The idea of burning bring for Christ is rooted in the facts that sin has plunged the world into spiritual darkness, that Jesus is the light of the world, and that God’s people are called to reflect the light of Christ into every corner (among every tribe, tongue, and nation).

Ephesians 5:8-14 sums this up well.

8 … at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light 9 (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), 10 and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. 11 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. 13 But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, 14 for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,

    “Awake, O sleeper,
    and arise from the dead,
    and Christ will shine on you.”

The gist of what we mean by “Burning Bright for Christ” is being so amazed by Jesus that we spend our entire lives reflecting the light of Jesus—His glory, holiness, love, mercy, grace, and reconciling work—to the world. But what does that actually mean?

Practically, we do this in the most God-honoring way: (1) When we are closest to Jesus, (2) When the “mirror” of our lives is cleanest, and (3) When we do so together.

The closer we are to the Light of Christ, the brighter the reflection will be. In other words, burning brightly for Jesus is only possible when we are truly satisfied in Him, when He is our joy and treasure, when our trust is truly in Him. The more we find our satisfaction in Jesus and place our hope in Him, the more everyone around us will recognize the reality of Him in us and the legitimacy of His offer to save them as well.

In this way, the first and best thing you can do to burn brightly for Jesus, the first and best thing you can do for missions, is to have a quiet time each day, to seek God in prayer, to hide the Word of God in your heart, to taste and see that the Lord is uniquely and supremely good. If you want to engage in missions in a God-honoring way, come well-prepared to Church each Sunday, make use of the means of grace God has given us, and nurture your love for Jesus in every way He’s given us to do so.

You can’t burn brightly for Christ (reflect the glory of Christ) if you are not near Christ. And you can’t be near Christ if you don’t go to the places He’s promised to be.

Second, we burn brightly for Jesus when our “mirrors are clean.” The cleaner the mirror, the better it can reflect the light of Christ.

Nothing lies more about the infinitely glorious nature of Jesus than people claiming to be His followers, but preferring the dark. We all sin, of course, but Jesus is honored as we confess it as sin, drag it into the light, and walk in the forgiveness and freedom that are already ours in Jesus. If you want to burn brightly for Jesus and engage more fully in missions, make war on your sin and cultivate an appetite for the things of God.

You can’t burn brightly for Christ if you continually cover yourself in that which He hates.

Finally, we are not called to burn brightly for Jesus all by ourselves. If we must, we must. But God’s design is that we’d all delight in Jesus, with “clean mirrors,” together! There is no limit to Jesus’ brightness and we reflect it most brilliantly when we do so surrounded by others who are committed to as well.

Do you want to burn brightly for Jesus and engage in missions more fully? If so, become a member of a local church, use your gifts to build it up, serve sacrificially alongside the other members, commit to participating in a DG, go through the discipleship tracks with someone else, and above all gather with God’s people every Sunday in worship.

Trying to do Christianity on your own, treating membership in a church like membership in the YMCA, coming to church only when it fits into your extracurricular schedule, doing little but consume when you come, focusing on negatives or personal preferences, and aiming at something other than glorifying God by making disciples, all lie about Christ’s glory and snuff out the brightness we’re intended to reflect to each other and the world.

You can’t burn anywhere nearly as brightly alone as you can with God’s people.

Burning brightly for Jesus means reflecting His glory into the darkness. We do this by getting as close as possible to Jesus, by having clean mirrors, and by doing so together with our church and the Church. All of that is what we’re focusing on this week during missions week.

In conclusion, let me ask you to consider carefully your current posture (your thoughts, feelings, and actions) towards missions. Ask God to sift through your mind and heart and reveal yourself to you. When it comes to missions, are you nervous, indifferent, afraid, frustrated, confused? Your answer, whatever it is, as we saw in 2 Corinthians, is always rooted in your understanding of the nature of God and His work in your life.

Wherever something other than God’s Word is your authority, God’s glory is your goal, and Christ is your treasure, wherever you believe you earned your salvation or otherwise believe you deserve it, wherever you are trying to go it alone or keep your sin in the dark, and wherever you are looking at yourself or the people around you (even hostile strangers on the other side of the world) through some lens other than the gospel of love, you will not burn brightly for Christ and missions will not be the cry of your heart and the aim of your life.

But wherever God’s grace allows you to see His Word as it is (the sufficient revelation of the will of God), Him as He is (infinitely glorious), yourself and all mankind as we are (dead in sin until we place our faith in the gracious work of Jesus), and your charge as it is (to lovingly and corporately engage in a ministry of reconciliation as an ambassador of Jesus), then you will burn brightly for Christ and mission will be the cry of your heart and the aim of your life.

20 … We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

And we implore you on behalf of Christ, to burn bright for Christ and to share this good news with the world that they too might be reconciled to God and become His bright-burning ministers of reconciliation to the world.