“Vanity in Life and in Death” – Ecclesiastes 3:16–4:16

Harvest Community Church | Omaha, NE

“Vanity in Life and in Death” – Ecclesiastes 3:16–4:16

Listen to the Sermon:

Hear now the word of the Lord from Ecclesiastes starting in 3:16.

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. 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?

1 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. 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. 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.
Ecclesiastes 3:16-4:16, ESV

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. I’m not all that old but I am old enough to remember the wonder that it was when email first hit the scene in a very popular public way. I had my first email address in 1997 and I remember how amazing it was that I could sit down on my computer and send a message to someone anywhere else around the world. In fact very early on I corresponded with someone in Australia that I had never met before, but we sent some email messages back and forth. It was an amazing thing to be able to do that. It was a huge step forward beyond just the ability to call someone on the phone or the postal service or even the fax machines which were the predominant technology up until then.

As I think about my life, about 25 years later, it’s fair to say that some of the sheen has worn off of email. I don’t look forward to checking my email in the way that I did. You may remember that movie, “You’ve Got Mail”, back in 1998, well I don’t feel at all that way when I open my email. It’s a source of dread and anxiety. Sometimes you may feel the same about email.

Well there was actually an interesting book that came out about this this year by an author that I read a lot, a man named Cal Newport. His book was called, “A World Without Email.” What was really interesting is he wanted to acknowledge that email is a big step forward technologically in the way that we communicate. Email is so much better so much faster and efficient, especially if you compare it to the fax machine that came before it. Nevertheless he says that email has destroyed our productivity. He actually wrote an article in a major academic magazine saying that email is making professors stupid.

Email is something that causes us dread and anxiety, so there’s a problem. So what does he suggest? Well he tries to give perspective about email, that’s his main goal. To give perspective he wants to show the goodness of this technology for what it is and the places where it really is helpful, but then he shows all of the ways where email can be corrupted. The fact that we all send way too many email messages back and forth and we receive many email messages that aren’t good for us. So he tries to give perspective to sort of work through how do you take this good technology and how do you have perspective to use it in a way that’s beneficial. Even though with email most of us would not ascribe any beneficial role in our lives these days.

Well in my view the preacher in Ecclesiastes is taking a very similar path through the passage that we’re going to be looking at today. He’s not talking about the goodness of some particular technology, he’s talking about much greater goodnesses, namely the goodness of creation.

When God created the world he’s going to talk first about the justice with which God created the world. God created us to be people who long for righteousness and justice. Then he’s going to talk about work. Work was not a product of the curse after the fall into sin, work was something that God established at creation, it is a good thing. Then he’s going to talk about companionship. Right from the very beginning of the Bible God says it is not good for man to be alone. God created us for relationships and companionship and yet with all of these good gifts, and if something like technology has a little bit of goodness, these goodnesses that God established at creation are much bigger.

Nevertheless he’s going to say these goodnesses have been corrupted by sin. Justice is not what it ought to be. Work is not what it ought to be. Our companionships and relationships are not what they ought to be. So what the preacher is trying to do here is not to just sort of say let’s get rid of these things altogether. He’s rather saying we have to approach these good gifts that God has given in creation with biblical perspective to both recognize their goodness and to have perspective to see the corruption that sin has done to them in this life. Then to figure out a way to live with all of those realities at the same time.

So our big idea today as we look through our passages this that sin corrupts God’s good gifts.

So we’re going to see three areas where we need biblical perspective.

1. Perspective for Justice
2. Perspective for Work
3. Perspective for Companionship

Perspective for Justice

Now this part of perspective for justice starts in Ecclesiastes 3:16 and I’ll actually go a little bit farther than we read into Ecclesiastes 4:3. In verse 16 the preacher starts off with this note,

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. Ecclesiastes 3:16, ESV

Now again God created the world in righteousness and he created it in justice and yet even these places for justice and righteousness, he’s talking about the public courts here, even these are places that are corrupted. They are places where justice is not done and where righteousness isn’t established, but these are places that are pushing along wickedness in the world. Now remember Solomon is the king, these courts are under his jurisdiction. But he’s grieving from this that even as king he can’t fix the corruption that’s built into these places of justice.

Now does this mean that there will never be any justice ever? That we are built with this longing for justice and yet we can’t ever see it come about? Well no that’s not quite the case. In verse 17 he writes,

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. Ecclesiastes 3:17, ESV

Now this is great. There is a time when God will judge the righteous and the wicked. Justice will be established, righteousness will flourish in the earth. The question we have to ask is why not now? Why not now as we look around the world and see all kinds of injustices and we see unrighteousness running rampant? Why doesn’t God establish this now? The answer’s not what we would expect.

In verse 18, and frankly it’s a little off-putting, he says

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. Ecclesiastes 3:18, ESV

Now this is a little harsh, a little abrasive. We might want to say what on earth are you talking about that we are but beasts. Well he has a very particular sense in which he wants us to see this truth.

In verse 19 he says,

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. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. Ecclesiastes 3:19-20, ESV

What the preacher’s saying is that God is testing. Part of the reason that there is not flourishing justice and righteousness in the world is that God wants to test us in the sense of teaching us this very important lesson, namely that just as the beasts die so we will die. There’s no distinction in this, both of us die. Animals die and human beings die, all are from the dust and the dust shall all return.

Now this is again a reflection back on the biblical account of creation. We talked about the breath, they have the same breath, and talked about from the dust that’s echoing the language of Genesis one and two. What’s so interesting about that passage is the language that’s used there. When God forms man out of the dust and breathes the breath of life into him, the text of Genesis 2 says that man became a living being. Well that word does not actually differentiate human beings from animals. To say that the man is a living being, that phrase living being is also a phrase that’s used of the animals in that sense. In the sense that both of us have breath for a while and then both of us will return to the dust from which we are created. All of that is saying that animals and beasts are on the same footing.

However, that doesn’t mean that animals and human beings are the same in every regard. This is what the preacher gets at in verse 21 he says,

Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth? Ecclesiastes 3:21, ESV

Now this is a notoriously difficult verse to translate. You may have a version that puts this a little bit more matter-of-factly, “who knows the spirit of man that goes upward and the spirit of the beast that goes down into the earth.” I think the ESV has it right here. It’s more of a question who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and whether the spirit of man will go down into the earth, it’s a question. This doesn’t mean that in the scope of the rest of the Bible the answer to this question is unknown, because the rest of the Bible again shows us what the author of Ecclesiastes is simply hinting at here. Remember the preacher is very often not giving us the solution tied up in a neat little bow, he’s clearing away error.

What he wants us to see when he asks this question is that as we’re evaluating everything from the perspective of those who live under the sun, you can’t see a difference. You see an animal die, you see a human being die, and from this perspective under the sun it looks exactly the same.

As Benjamin Shaw writes, “the answer to this question about whether the spirits of man will ascend upward and will have an ongoing enduring life and are different from the spirits of animals which will descend back into the ground and they will be destroyed and will not have an ongoing enduring life,” Benjamin Shaw writes, “this answer is a matter of revelation not observation. We can’t see with our eyes the difference. The preacher’s reflecting on this in the world. Because our spirits will continue in this way, in a way that the animals will not, we find justice not right now in this world under the sun, but he reminds us that justice is coming. Death is not an escape from a life given over to wickedness and a life suffering under oppression is not going to be entirely ignored by God. Justice will come one day, for there is a time for every matter and for every work, just not right now under the sun before we die.”

That should give us perspective and that perspective takes a couple of different forms. The first form is in verse 22. The preacher said,

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? Ecclesiastes 3:22, ESV

In other words in this issue of justice, you can strive all you want to try to bring about justice and yet you will, in all your labors and all your toil, never bring it about under the sun. It can’t be done in this world. We have to live in that complex reality that the good justice with which God created the world has been corrupted.

From this issue of injustice, another aspect of our perspective moves on into chapter 4:1-3, where the preacher moves to the related topic of oppression. He writes in chapter four starting in verse one,

1 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. Ecclesiastes 4:1-3, ESV

The preacher says if you look at this world, if you live in this world with justice and or with a desire for justice and you see all of these oppressions that are in the world, this evil is so great in it and we should not shrink for recognizing the greatness and the depths of these evils. Then the preacher goes on to say it would be better to die than to suffer under oppression or it would have been better not to have been born than to suffer through the kinds of oppressions that exist in this world.

Now part of what the preacher is doing is again giving us this proper perspective. This proper perspective forces us to grapple with a dark and difficult truth that in this world injustice and oppression cannot be fixed, they cannot be straightened, they cannot be sorted out. In fact they can only be to some degree stabilized.

Let me illustrate to you what I mean by that. It was in the year 1173 when construction began on a bell tower for the cathedral of a prominent city in Italy. As the construction workers continued on, about five years into the work they began to start working on just the third story of this large bell tower. Only to realize by that point that the foundations had shifted and in the soggy soft ground the foundations of the structure had tilted a little bit. Well they were five years in, they were two stories, three stories now, deep and they decided not to destroy it all and start over but to keep building on it. You may have guessed this is the history of what has come to be known as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

What’s interesting is this leaning tower is built in such a way where the goal has never been to fix it entirely, but rather to stabilize it in its crooked shape. So as they built they made one side shorter than the other side longer to try to correct it. So it’s sort of moving upward more straightened out as it goes along. So what this means is that today, if you were to just try to come along and fix the Leaning Tower of Pisa and make it straight, you couldn’t actually do it without destroying most of it and starting over again.All the efforts of keeping the Leaning Tower of Pisa from entirely falling over have been focused on just stabilizing it to make sure that it doesn’t completely fall down, rather than trying to correct it and to fix it and to make it straight.

That’s something like what it’s like to live in a world with injustice and oppression. In the world we can’t just fix it and all those who believe they can and go through the efforts of trying to just fix oppression and injustice do far more harm than good. Now sometimes people try anyway. The Marxist Communists reasoned that they were justified in using violence to establish their idea of justice by explaining that to make an omelet you have to break some eggs.

The preacher says it just doesn’t work. Injustice and oppression in this world is a fixed reality and as Christians our goal is not to fix it, not to straighten it, but rather to try to live in a world where we’re simply trying to stabilize it and to live with proper perspective. Justice is God’s good gift. God loves justice far more than we do.

Yet we must recognize that justice was corrupted by sin in this world. Now God will bring justice, as 3:17 says there is a time for every matter and for every work, and that includes the judgment of the righteous end of the wicked. That time will not take place in this lifetime and so in the meantime part of our perspective requires us to curb our enthusiasm about efforts to fix this world in totality. It doesn’t mean that we approve of injustice and oppression, but that we’re not surprised by them. It doesn’t mean that we ignore injustice and oppression, but that we approach them from this biblical perspective that injustice and oppression is a fixed part of God’s reality, or a reality in God’s good world that has been corrupted by sin. Now that’s how the preacher talks about justice. That’s a hard truth, especially as we think about some of the very heinous injustices and oppressions in this world.

Perspective for Work

Yet the same truth and the same kind of perspective is what the preacher tries to bring out about work itself. This brings us to our second section in chapter four verses four through six. Here the preacher is dealing with two errors on either side and then trying to give us the right perspective. Now the first error has to do with working for the wrong reasons, which lead us to maybe work too hard and toil in the wrong direction. In verse 4 he says,

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.Ecclesiastes 4:4, ESV

The first area is to be led along in our work by these motivations of envy for our neighbor, trying to outdo and outstrip our neighbor. As Dave Derrick Kidnapper writes, “all too much of our hard work and high endeavor is mixed with the craving to outshine or to not be outshone. Even in friendly rivalry this may play a larger part than we think, for we can bear to be outclassed or outdone for some of the time and by some people, but not too regularly and not too profoundly.”

Remember God gave work as a very good gift, but the preacher is saying that even in our hearts, even in our motivations, we corrupt the gift of work to be a way to one-up ourselves over our neighbor. That’s the first error of work, working too hard in the wrong directions for the wrong reasons.

Well the second error is in verse 5 and this is a reaction swinging all the way to the other direction.

5 The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh. Ecclesiastes 4:5, ESV

This is describing the one who looks out at the world and sees everything guided by envy and everything done for the wrong reasons and people in workaholism working far too hard. This is the one who folds his hands and sits back and decides I’m not even gonna bother with that. The preacher says that’s not an okay solution either; laziness, sloth, idleness, that is not what you were created for. If you fold your hands and sit back and give yourself over to this kind of idleness, you’re not just staying out of the fray, you are destroying yourself. You are eating or consuming your own flesh from your body. It’s a horrifying picture. Don’t be the idler, one who consumes his own flesh.

Well how then should we live? Well the answer, the balance, is given in verse six.

6 Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind. Ecclesiastes 4:6, ESV

So, in other words don’t try to work for no handfuls, that’s the one who doesn’t work at all and doesn’t try to gain anything out of life and out of his work. Yet also, don’t try to be the one who’s striving for two hands full, where you’re given just toil and striving after the wind. Instead it’s far better to work for one handful in quietness. To work with peace and harmony and to do your own business and mind your own work and to end up with less than maybe the workaholic, but living in a way that is quiet and honoring to the Lord.

This echoes what Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:10-12. Paul writes

10 for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, 11 and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, 12 so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.1 Thessalonians 4:10-12

Work is good, laziness is bad, and working too hard is bad. Now we all know this, we’ve all seen people fall off on both sides of the spectrum. We’ve seen people who don’t work enough and we see people who work far too much, it’s easy to illustrate.

I remember when I was working for a company before I entered into full-time pastoral ministry, I did a lot of job interviews. We were a company that hired a lot of people right out of college. It was interesting as we did all these interviews and watched people work for a certain amount of time. One of the biggest predictors of success was whether or not these young people had had high school part-time jobs. It had nothing to do with the extent of the or the impressiveness of the degree that they got in college, so much as it really had to do with whether they developed a good work ethic early on. Working hard is a good thing that God gives to us. So if you want to leg up, at least when I was interviewing people, which is in the past admittedly, you should maybe get a part-time job in high school if you can still affect that.

On the other hand there are studies that say that some high school students work far too much. For those who work 20 or more hours a week, you’re not just building up a good work static ethic, you are running yourself into the ground. More often than not too much work in high school is linked to lower grades and even to risky rebellious behavior. It’s not good to do too little, it’s not good to do too much.

God made us for work, but not for the kind of toil where we are constantly striving after the wind. Work is God’s good gift. God loves work, he created it. He is the first worker in the work that he did in creating the world. He made humanity to work and keep the garden in the person of Adam. That work was corrupted after sin entered into the world so that our work is plagued by thorns and thistles, and even by evil motivations of envy. Like with justice we must approach our work with biblical perspective.

Perspective for Companionship

Finally this biblical perspective gives us insight into how to navigate God’s good gifts of relationships and companionship. So the third section is that we need perspective for companionship, in verses 7 through 16. Now what’s interesting about this final section of chapter 4 is that the whole section is connected again and again by the word “two”, or the word “second”, like first and second. That’s obscured somewhat in the translation that we have, it’s hard because the translations are very good and give the sense in each context, but it’s very difficult to see the connecting thread throughout all of this.

So the first thing that happens in verse seven and eight is we see the necessity of having a second, the necessity of a companion.

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. Ecclesiastes 4:7-8, ESV

This section is connecting the previous section about work into this next section about relationships. He’s saying if you don’t have companionship, there’s going to be a hole in your life that no matter how much you work you cannot fill it with toil and with the riches that you gain from your toil. Some of the most miserable people are those who have forsaken companions in order to give themselves to their work. No matter how high they rise, no matter how much money they make, that can never fill that hole and that gap because God created us to have a second, to have a companion to be in relationship with other people.

9 Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. Ecclesiastes 4:9, ESV

Well there’s that word “two”. Remember the word “better” is the word “good”, we don’t say “gooder” though, we say better. Remember this is echoing it is not good for man to be alone. It’s clearer in Hebrew than in English.

We need a companion, we need someone else to be with us.

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! Ecclesiastes 4:10, ESV

If you fall, you can’t get up again without a second, without a companion.

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. Ecclesiastes 4:11-12, ESV

If two is good, three is even better. Look, companionship is God’s good gift and the preacher wants us to see that and to appreciate that, but we have to have perspective and that perspective comes in verses 13 through 16. In this awkward kind of parable, it’s difficult to translate this and there are actually a couple of ideas of what this is actually doing, but the overall meaning is very clear. Look at what it says in verse 13.

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.
Ecclesiastes 4:13-16, ESV

Now this sounds like what the preacher had been saying, if you can’t take advice any longer you are a fool. You need a companion, you need someone else who can speak truth into your life. So, it’s better to be a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who can’t do that any longer. Then verse 14 there’s wisdom if you can take advice. There’s wisdom so much so that it can even lift you out of poverty and set you on the throne to replace that old and foolish king who could no longer take advice. Again, this sounds like what the preacher has been saying.

Then the twist comes in verse 15, here’s where we see that word “second” come up again, but it’s not translated that way in the ESV, “I saw all the living who move about under the sun along with the second youth.” Now some people think there’s just two people in this parable, the old and foolish king and the poor and wise youth, but the way this is written it actually introduces a third person. It introduces a second youth who apparently stands in the place of the youth, the poor and wise youth, who had become king. As good as it is to have wisdom, to listen to others, and as much as that can exalt you from poverty to the throne, even you will be replaced one day is the point of this parable.

What about this third person, the last person in the line of succession? Well in verse 16, even for the final person, where he’s popular for a time, he falls out of favor with the people. As important as companionship is, the biblical perspective is that popularity and approval are fickle things and to try to reach out for them is a vanity and a striving after the wind. We have to approach God’s good gift of companionship with the proper perspective.

Now again I’ve been trying to argue that this passage is about recognizing why God’s good gifts are not always good in our experience. It doesn’t have anything to do with failure on God’s part, God created them perfectly good. The shortfall comes in the fact that they have been corrupted by sin. The solution to this dilemma, the proper perspective on the goodness of these good gifts, is that at the end of the day we have to approach these by seeing both their goodness as well as their pitfalls, as well as the corruptions and to navigate them accordingly.

Application

So, at the end of the day how do we apply all of this?

1. Well the first application says that we must cultivate proper perspective in relation to God’s good gifts. Now this is a very complex stance for Christians. It’s not a simplistic approach to the world, but what this means is that Christians must be people who oppose injustice and oppression while we also recognize these are fixed realities under the sun. Moreover we also recognize that much of what our culture calls injustice or oppression is in fact a rejection of what God calls justice and what God calls righteousness. What our culture is calling for is often part of the wickedness that is bound up in the modern day. Places of justice and places of righteousness, there’s wickedness there.

Christians then in terms of work, we oppose laziness and we value hard work. However we also recognize that straining and striving an endless toil out of envy of neighbor, for the two handfuls that we might have this, is vanity and it’s striving after the wind. One handful from quiet work is enough. The Bible says also, in terms of companionship, Christians oppose rogue rugged individualism and we insist on right relationships with our families and our church and with our neighbors. We are critical and we are suspicious of celebrity and popularity and the appeal of the crowd, so again this is complex, it’s not a simplistic view of the world.

How can we maintain this thoroughly biblical perspective? Well again it comes from seeing that, number one these gifts are good gifts from God and not to be rejected or despised, but at the same time it’s a healthy appreciation of the way in which these good gifts have been corrupted by sin. That’s our big idea, that sin corrupts God’s good gifts. So on the one hand we should celebrate and prize and seek after justice and hard work and right relationships.

Don’t become so cynical about justice that you become like the priest or the Levite in the parable of the good samaritan who passes by a bleeding man on the road. You can’t solve all oppression and all injustice everywhere, but you can love and serve your neighbor. Don’t become so cynical about work that you fold your hand in laziness, departing from the fray because to do so is to devour your own flesh. Don’t become so cynical about relationships that you stiff arm people and keep them at arm’s length.

On the other hand we should have eyes that are wide open to the fact that justice work and relationships cannot provide the enduring satisfaction that we are seeking. These are good gifts but it’s the impulse of sin that wants to treat them as ultimate gifts. That’s what ultimately corrupts them, so that we are willing to do anything and harm anyone to try to achieve them and justifying ourselves by saying it takes broken eggs to get the omelet.

2. So what then is the ultimate gift? Well the ultimate gift brings us to our second application point, we must cultivate proper perspective in relationship to God himself. He himself is not only the giver of all good gifts, the Father of lights from whom all good gifts come down from heaven. He himself is the ultimate good gift.

So when God strips away, through a thousand disappointments, our false hopes of finding eternally lasting justice and fruitful work and perfect companionship in this world, we must remember that he is testing us, chapter 3 verse 18. Specifically he’s testing us to show us that we share the same fate as the beasts, we are going to die. Yet as the preacher reminds us, we are not like the beasts in a very important respect. Our spirits were created to endure forever, while the spirits of animals perish when they die.

So as the puritan John Flavel put it, “You do not cease to be when you cease to breathe.” That’s what God is testing you with, to try to get into your mind and teach you so have you considered how short your life is in this world under the sun, compared to the never ending stretch of eternity that you will experience in your life in the world to come. Have you considered that when you die you will stand before the judgment seat of almighty God who will call you to give an account for how you have spent your life? God will judge the righteous and the wicked for there is a time for every matter and for every work chapter 3 verse 17.

Have you considered that your sin and faithlessness and rebellion against God Almighty have incurred his wrath and displeasure? That was one of the vows for the communicate member earlier. Have you considered that no efforts toward justice and no productivity at work and no level of popularity will satisfy God’s righteous anger at your sin against his infinite holiness? Have you considered that God is not only capable of harming your body in this life, but that he is the one who can cast you body and soul into hell for all eternity? We must cultivate a proper perspective on these things.

Again, the preacher of Ecclesiastes is trying to clear away these errors so that we might see what the rest of the Bible bears witness to, what may ultimately save us, and ultimately give us satisfaction. The preacher wants us to see that justice and work and relationships cannot save us. He clears away these errors so that we might see what the rest of the Bible says. Namely that this same God, the God who will judge the righteous and the wicked, is the same God who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

The God who loves is the one who condemned his own son to death, even though Christ did nothing worthy of dying. The God who loves you was the God who sent his son to be condemned for sin that his son did not commit, but that was put on him in your place for your evil doing. The God who loves you sent his son to bear all the wrath of God Almighty, the wrath that God the Son did not himself incur but he did all this so that guilty unrighteous sinners like you and me can be forgiven. That’s the hope, that’s the gospel message, that’s what you’re called to believe upon and to be saved. It’s that gospel that puts everything in this life and the next into proper perspective. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that you give us perspective, biblical perspective, to love your good gifts as the Father of Lights who is unchangeable, from whom all good gifts come down from heaven. To also recognize the way in which our sin corrupts every one of those gifts, so that we experience them in a very difficult and complex fashion. Give us faith that cuts through the complexity to see Jesus Christ resurrected from the dead, a victor over sin death and the devil, and the one who will not only raise us from the dead but who will recreate heavens and the earth so that we will live with him in perfection. Perfect justice, doing perfect work, in perfect relationship with him for all eternity to come. Oh Father let everyone in this room look to Christ and be saved. We pray this by the power of your Spirit. It’s in Christ’s name we pray. Amen.

The post “Vanity in Life and in Death” – Ecclesiastes 3:16–4:16 appeared first on Harvest Community Church | Omaha, NE.