Feast: Ecclesiastes Resumed (Part Thirty-Two): Ecclesiastes 8:1-9

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Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 17-Oct-24; 83 minutes 2024-10-17

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Well, a dozen years ago now—it hardly seems like a dozen years has gone by—but in 2012, I gave the first of my sermons on the book of Psalms. And I do not know how many there have been since then, but I gave that sermon, "Psalms of the Winter Blues" right at the end of the year when people normally get a little down because of the way winter is: gray and rainy and cold, and it can sometimes affect the mood, the spirit.

That sermon was founded on the fact that the five books of the Psalms correlate with other scriptural sets of five, one of which is the five Hebrew seasons of the year, not necessarily the way we do our seasons, because their seasons followed the festivals through the year. So these are festival seasons, not the seasons in nature.

In biblical numerology, the number five is associated with divine grace. Now, here is a simplified explanation for how they come up with that. Four is the number of the earth and God's creative works on the earth. So you have things like the four winds, the four directions, the four corners of the earth, the four natural seasons, and things like that. Those are encompassed within the number four. While five is four plus one, which means that something goes beyond the natural order on the earth and God's creative works on the earth. And this indicates, then, what is beyond God's physical work, which is His spiritual work.

Also, in Hebrew gematria, that is, the numbers associated with the letters within Hebrew, earth, which is ha'aretz in Hebrew, is a multiple of four. If you add up all the numbers that correspond with the letters of that word ha'aretz, you get a number that you can divide by four. But the word heavens, which is ha'shamayim, is a multiple of five. This works in Greek as well. Charis, the New Testament Greek word that is used for the concept of grace, is also a multiple of five.

If you will, please turn with me to Matthew the 25th chapter, verses 1 and 2 and then we will also read verse 10. This is the Parable of the Ten Virgins. Ten is a multiple of five, obviously, five times two.

Matthew 25:1-2 "Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Now five of them were wise, and five were foolish.

Matthew 25:10 "And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came [In the story, they did not have enough oil so they had to go buy some themselves because the five wise ones could not give them any of their oil.] and those who were ready went in with Him to the wedding; and the door was shut."

So the only ones that were able to enter the wedding were the five who were given grace. Those were the ones that were saved and they entered God's Kingdom.

Let us go to Luke 19. We have the Parable of the Minas here starting in verse 11. But I want to notice the rewards here. Let us just go to verse 13.

Luke 19:13-17 "He called ten of his servants, delivered to them ten minas, and said to them, 'Do business till I come.' But his citizens hated him, . . saying, 'We will not have this man to reign over us.' And so it was that when he returned, having received the kingdom, he then commanded these servants, to whom he had given the money, to be called to him, that he might know how much every man had gained by trading. Then came the first, saying, 'Master, your mina has earned ten minas.' [Notice, these are all multiples of five here that we are talking about.] And he said to him, 'Well done, good servant; because you were faithful in a very little, have authority over ten cities.'

So his reward was 10 cities, two times five. And the second came, the same conversation happened, but he had earned five minas. Likewise He said to him verse 19, you will be over five cities. But then there was the one who hid his mina, kept it in a handkerchief, and he ended up not doing quite as well as the other two, to put it mildly. He receives condemnation and death. So here we have these multiples of five being associated with doing well, being a good servant of God, receiving grace and salvation.

Here is another example. When Israel left Egypt by God's grace in Exodus 13:18, they went out, it says there, in orderly ranks. Well, the Hebrew word literally means they went out arrayed by fives. The same wording appears in Joshua 1:14 and Joshua 4:12 in Israel's crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land. So they went out of Egypt in a multiple of five, were arrayed by fives, and they entered into the Promised Land arrayed by fives, showing in the numerology that it was by God's grace that they did both. They came out of Egypt by His grace and they entered the Promised Land by His grace.

This arrangement by fives winds throughout the Old Testament. And since we have five fingers on each hand (well, most of us do, I do), it is very easy to count things off or tick things off on our hand. It is a very handy thing to have. It is a unit of organization that is quite amenable to quick memorization and such. So as mentioned, the year, every year, can be cut into five parts. I will just give them to you right now. There is the Passover time, there is Pentecost time, there is the summer time, there is the fall festival time, and then there is the winter time in which in ancient Israel they had the festival of Purim. By the way, the summer time festival was not a festival at all. It was a fast. It was the ninth of Ab when the Temple was destroyed both times. It is usually in August as it falls on our Gregorian calendar. Yes, I am dating myself all day here.

But anyway, we also have the five books of the Psalms, which I mentioned earlier. And within the five books there are also summary psalms. There is Psalms 146, 147, 148, 149, and 150 and each one of them corresponds to Book One, Book Two, Book Three, Book Four, Book Five. There are also five books of the law, which we call the Torah or the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And Scripture also contains five festival scrolls. They are called the Megilloth. And this last group is our focus today or at least for the time being.

We very rarely hear about the Megilloth. It is a plural word; that "o" at the end means that it is a feminine plural word. The singular is Megillah meaning scrolls or rolls. That is why they are the Festival Scrolls or Festival Rolls because back in the day when they wrote things down in books, they were not in these kind of books like we have. They were in rolls, they rolled them up and rolled them out to read. So they are called the Festival Scrolls or the Festival Rolls.

The Megilloth are part of the Writings. In Hebrew it is ketuvim. It is the third section of the Tanakh. You have the Law, you have the Prophets, and then you have the Writings. The Writings are called ketuvim in Hebrew. And Tanakh, by the way (I do not know if you are aware of this, this is just a little bit of knowledge, I do not know if it is good for anything or not), but the word tanakh is a made up word. It is essentially the initials of torah, navim, and ketuvim, and they put some vowels in between to pronounce it. But the "t" is torah, navim is prophets, and ketuvim is the writings. So that is how they call their Old Testament Tanakh.

Now, the word Megilloth refers to five specific scrolls that are called the Festival Scrolls because they are associated with specific feasts or fasts throughout the year on which they are read. So when they have a service on this particular feast or a fast, they will get out one of the Megilloth and read this megillah to the people on that day. Now, the five Megilloth are in order: for the Passover, Song of Songs; for Pentecost, the book of Ruth; for the ninth of Av in the summertime, Lamentations; for the Feast of Tabernacle's time, Ecclesiastes; and for Purim, Esther.

We are interested in Ecclesiastes, the Megilloth for the Feast of Tabernacles. So I ask, why is this particular book read at the Feast of Tabernacles? What does Ecclesiastes have in it that is associated with this festival? Let us go to Leviticus 23.

Leviticus 23:33 Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the children of Israel, saying, 'The fifteenth day of this seventh month shall be the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days to the Lord.'

Leviticus 23:40 'You shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of beautiful trees, branches of palm trees, the boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days.'

Leviticus 23:42-43 'You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All who are native Israelites shall dwell in booths [the reason], that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.'"

He is saying, as time moves forward, you are going to keep this festival with dwelling in booths so you remind the generations alive at the time that God made His people, when they first came out of Egypt, to dwell in booths as they went to the Promised Land.

Now, earlier, if we go back to Exodus 23 when these feasts are mentioned, this Feast of Tabernacles was called the Feast of Ingathering because of the harvest. But here it is called Tabernacles. And that is the essential name that stuck on the Feast of Tabernacles, or this feast. And of course, tabernacles are tents, they are booths, and the reason why the name stuck is because living in booths or in temporary dwellings of some sort distinguishes this feast from any other feast.

Most of the feasts have something distinguishing about them. The only holy day that (well, maybe that one has one too), but I was going to say that the Day of Atonement is distinguished by the fact of afflicting one's soul. The Feast of Unleavened Bread obviously has unleavened bread that we we eat rather than regular leavened bread. The Feast of Pentecost has the counting that makes it distinctive, and that is its name. Is it not interesting that these festivals are called after this distinguishing thing about these particular times, what they point to? Trumpets is about shouting and rejoicing and declaring our great God. The only one that really does not have one of those really recognizable distinctions is the Eighth Day. The Eighth Day is an enigma unless you have God's Spirit and God has revealed it to you.

The thing we have to take from this series of verses in Leviticus 23 is that God made the Israelites dwell in booths for a reason, as an object lesson. He made them dwell in booths to teach them something, as well as teach all Israelites down through the ages. It is a persistent lesson that needs to be learned by each generation that comes on the scene.

Let us start to figure this out here in II Peter chapter 1, verses 12 through 15. Peter is talking here about his age and his circumstances and he says, "I'm going to die soon."

II Peter 1:12-15 Therefore, I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know them and are established in the present truth. Yes, I think it is right, as long as I am in this tent, to stir you up by way of reminding you, knowing that shortly I must put off my tent, just as our Lord Jesus showed me. Moreover I will be careful to ensure that you always have a reminder of these things after my decease.

Peter was a Jew. He understood these things. He had kept the Feast of Tabernacles all his life. He understood what a tent or a booth was supposed to symbolize. And so he uses it in symbolic form here in speaking to these people he was writing to. A tent, a tabernacle, a booth, a temporary dwelling, symbolizes our lives. You could say our bodies, our existence, to which we can then link also what the Israelites were doing while they were in the wilderness. And that is where the symbol of walking comes in. They were walking through uncharted territory and we too are walking through our own wilderness to our own promised land, a much greater promised land, the Kingdom of God.

So this feast, the Feast of Tabernacles, the feast of tents, the feast of booths, the feast of temporary dwellings, focuses on our temporary dwelling on the earth. Our temporary dwelling in these particular bodies as we have a brief walk to the Kingdom of God. To God, that is over in a minute it seems like. If a day is as 1,000 years, how long is it to God when we do our 70 or 80? It is not very long. So it is quite temporary. We do not look at it that way. I mean, I thought the time between the morning service and the afternoon service was a long time. I think Clyde did too. He just wanted to get it over with.

But that is what we are looking at here. The Feast of Tabernacles is supposed to remind us of the wilderness journey of the Israelites as they lived in these tents. And they had to be able to quickly move, you know, put everything away, put everything on the oxen or whatever, and head out for the next destination that the Cloud was leading them to. And they were always, even though the path was here, there, and everywhere it seemed, they were always headed toward the Kingdom of God. That was their destination and they had to be ready to move at a moment's notice, when God wanted them to move.

Let us go back to the book of Ecclesiastes now and pick up this link that Solomon provided for us. Ecclesiastes 5, this is pretty much right in the middle of the book. It is the last few verses of Ecclesiastes 5, verses 18 through 20. The book has 12 chapters so right before chapter 6 would be pretty much the middle of the book. And here he gives us a very good idea of what the link is between Ecclesiastes and the Feast of Tabernacles.

Ecclesiastes 5:18-20 Here is what I have seen [Solomon says]: It is good and fitting for one to eat and drink and to enjoy the good of all his labor in which he toils under the sun all the days of his life which God gives him; for it is his heritage. As for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, and given him power to eat of it, to receive his heritage and rejoice in his labor—this is the gift of God. For he will not dwell unduly on the days of his life, because God keeps him busy with the joy of his heart.

So here, halfway through the book, Solomon gives advice about what to focus on in this life, this temporary dwelling, this very short time that we have to journey to the Kingdom of God. He highlights here all the simple joys of life: food, drink, fruitful labor, and so forth. And he says, God gives these things. These are all gifts of God. We need to be happy that, by His grace, in His providence, He has given us these wonderful things to enjoy. We should not not enjoy them. Because just like a parent gives something to a child, the parent wants the kid to enjoy what he has given this child. He does not want the child to stomp on it or throw it in the river or you know, take it apart and not know how to put it back together. He wants the things that He gives us to bring us joy.

This, he says, what God has given us in this short time that we have here on earth, is our heritage, our portion, our share. I was going to say we should not pass over the fact that God gives and gives and gives and gives. He never stops giving. He gives us so many things and He gives them abundantly, and He wants us to rejoice in these divine gifts and all of His providence, especially the spiritual things. Solomon here highlights the physical things because remember, he is mostly talking to people who are living under the sun. They are uncalled. And so most of his examples are in the physical realm so they can understand his meaning.

But when a child of God with His Spirit reads these same things, he is supposed to take them up a level, take them up into the spiritual level. Yeah, it is wonderful to eat and drink and enjoy your labor and those sorts of things. But it is so much better to have God's Spirit. It is so much better to have the fellowship of people in the church. It is so much better to have the truth of God. It is so much better to have a goal of the Kingdom of God rather than just an area of land on the earth. Would you not rather have the whole earth and the rule of the whole universe than a little patch the size of New Jersey, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, that everybody is fighting over? I think so.

But when you read this, "Here is what I have seen: It is good and fitting for one to eat and drink and to enjoy the good of all his labor in which he toils under the sun all the days of his life which God gives him; for it is his heritage," it sounds a lot like what God wants us to do at the Feast. You ever noticed that? Let us go to Deuteronomy 14, verses 22 through 27. This is about tithing, but He is talking about the second tithe and using it at the Feast of Tabernacles.

Deuteronomy 14:22-23 "You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field produces year by year. And you shall eat before the Lord your God in the place where He chooses to make His name abide, the tithe of your grain and your new wine and your oil, and of the firstborn of your herds and your flocks, that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always." [and it talks about exchanging it]

Deuteronomy 14:26-27 "And you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen or sheep or for wine or similar drink, for whatever your heart desires; you shall eat there before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice, you in your household. And you shall not forsake the Levite who is within your gates, for he has no part nor inheritance with you."

Here, God is telling us to go to the Feast and enjoy God's blessings that He has given, and rejoice, have a good time. Understand that God has sustained you and given you more than you need. And this is looking forward to all the spiritual things that He has given and He has given us more than we deserve.

So the book of Ecclesiastes is telling us how to rejoice at the Feast, how to live life so that we can make the most of our fleeting time here. And then of course, for the church of God, this gets ratcheted up, like I said, another level or two or five.

We are going to speak about Ecclesiastes 8 today. We will see how far we can get. I think we will actually only get to verse 9. I have been telling a few people here and there that I would like to get this done in like six sermons or so. It ain't gonna happen. There is just too much in Ecclesiastes. I will not go as long as my dad did, but I am not going to just fly through the book of Ecclesiastes either, because Ecclesiastes is a book that needs to be explained. He puts in very few words what really for our minds should take paragraphs to understand. Solomon was a very smart man and some of the things that he says takes a little bit of work to figure out exactly what he meant.

So we are going to get about halfway through this chapter today. The chapter itself covers the benefits of wisdom, the deference to authority, and the inevitability of death for all humans, as well as God's unsearchable judgment and purpose. Like I said, we will only get to the first two of these things—the benefits of wisdom and deference to authority—today.

Let us go to Ecclesiastes 8, verse 1. Now, this verse could either be the end of chapter 7, the conclusion of what he said in chapter 7, or an introduction to what he is going to say in chapter 8, or it could be an exclamation of frustration that bridges the two of them.

Ecclesiastes 8:1 Who is like a wise man? And who knows the interpretation of a thing? A wise man's wisdom makes his face shine, and the sternness of his face is changed.

I will probably be doing this a lot as we go through and giving you my own paraphrase of what he is saying, put it in a little bit more vernacular so that we can understand it a little better.

Solomon says here to open up chapter 8, is anyone wise? Does anyone know how to explain anything? That is the frustration that he is feeling. You remember my dad spent, I do not know, it seemed like about 300 sermons on that paradox in chapter 7 about "do not be overly righteous." And he explained it one way and another way and another way. And he kept saying to himself "that didn't come out right." Or "I don't think I explained myself well enough." And so he would give another sermon about how this this should be understood.

And I think Solomon, at the end of chapter 7, is feeling kind of the same way. You know, I do not think I can explain this the right way. God has given me great understanding and wisdom and I cannot seem to explain anything. Is there anyone wise? Can anyone explain anything so that people will really understand what is going on? He has already said in chapter 7, verses 23 and 24 that even for him, gifted by God in understanding, that wisdom was beyond him. And the solutions to many things, or most things, were undiscovered. You just cannot know. There are many possibilities, but you just cannot know a lot of what is going on.

We are so limited. We see, you know, tunnel vision compared to what is actually happening in the world. And we have a perspective that is very, I do not know, misty, murky. We just cannot understand enough to give a definitive answer on anything.

And so we know that the things that he was having trouble explaining to people who are living under the sun, that is, normal human beings, carnal fleshly, unconverted, uncalled people, that the things he was trying to explain to them were actually things of God that you need the Holy Spirit to understand.

Romans 11:33 [I want to make sure I get this phrasing exactly. He says,] Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!

These were the things that Solomon was trying to explain to unconverted people and they were just too big, too awesome, too spiritual for them to understand. And we find out if we go to I Corinthians 2:6-16, that these matters, these unsearchable matters are only discoverable, learnable, through His Holy Spirit. True wisdom, certainly on the deepest and most perplexing of subjects, is far beyond unconverted humans. They just do not have what it takes to understand them. And I cannot say we are any great shakes either. I am just saying we are unused to using God's Spirit and we have to struggle through a lot of these things because we are still so human. We do not have the spiritual acumen to understand everything perfectly yet. It will come in time and we will have to keep on struggling through a lot of these things. But with God's Spirit, we at least have a chance of understanding them.

So in terms of wisdom for the person who is living under the sun, it is beyond them. They can seek—and many do—but they will not find. They may find some loose nuggets one place or another. You know, something that is more understandable that they can grasp because of their life experience or what have you, but it is just going to be hit or miss. They are not, especially, going to be able to figure out what God is doing overall and not many of the details.

Now, the second half of verse 1, "A man's wisdom makes his face shine and the sternness of his face is changed," is kind of a consolation after the frustrations of the first half of the verse, "Is anybody wise? Can anybody explain anything?" He is saying, basically, that we should not let this fact that wisdom in its whole is undiscovered, to get us down. It should not discourage us from seeking and walking in wisdom. It is still a noble pursuit to look for wisdom and live one's life according to wisdom. So, do not shirk that duty to do what needs to be done, to learn what is right living, what will do the most to make sure that we are living in a way that is honorable, noble, and helpful for those around us. What wisdom we can learn in this life has positive effects and it will be good for us, if we do grow in wisdom, that we put it into practice because it is going to make our lives better—and that is a good thing.

So God makes His face to shine, as it says in Number 6:25, on those who do well, who live well. And wisdom (remember, God is personified as wisdom in Proverbs), can do a certain thing, a similar thing. Like God makes His face to shine on people, wisdom could make their faces shine as well. What does this mean? It means that wisdom can ennoble a person, wisdom can make them honorable, respectable, successful, and even make them cheerful. Those are some of its positive effects. And it all leads to, as much as a human being can, to live an abundant life, to take them above the hoi polloi, the maddening crowds, and make them live a life that is worth something. Wisdom can do that. So even though Solomon is being somewhat negative here, even a bit sarcastic in the way he phrases some of these things, there is an advantage to seeking wisdom despite that frustrating quality of not being able to really grasp a definite answer at times.

Let us go to the next section which is the whole rest of what we will get to today, verses 2 through 9. I will try to read this in a way that it makes it understandable or as understandable as possible. He says here,

Ecclesiastes 8:2-3 I counsel you, "Keep the king's commandment for the sake of your oath to God. Do not be hasty to go from his presence. [That is, the king's presence.] Do not take your stand for an evil thing, for he does whatever pleases him."

Now, it may be a better way to express that last bit is, "Do not take a stand against an evil thing, for he does whatever pleases him."

Ecclesiastes 8:4-9 Where the word of a king is, there is power; and who may say to him, "What are you doing?" He who keeps his command will experience nothing harmful; and a wise man's heart discerns both time and judgment. Because for every matter there is a time and judgment, though the misery of man increases greatly. For he does not know what will happen; so who can tell him when it will occur? No one has power of the spirit to retain the spirit, and no one has power in the day of death. There is no discharge from that war, and wickedness will not deliver those who are given to it. All this I have seen, and applied my heart to every work that is done under the sun: There is a time in which one man rules over another to his own hurt.

This passage, this paragraph, concerns deference. Deference is something that is not applied very much in this day and age. A dictionary definition of deference is "submission to or compliance with the will or wishes of another, often a person in authority. It is courteous regard or respect."

Qoheleth here (I call him Qoheleth)—Solomon—remember that word in Hebrew means preacher or spokesman or pastor; one who gathers people to hear something. Qoheleth is advising us about proper behavior toward an authority figure. How do we act and react in the presence of somebody who has more power or authority than we do, whatever the situation is? He takes it from the standpoint of a human king, but we have to ratchet it up for ourselves, especially in how we behave and react toward God. It works on both levels, so you can apply what he says here to both.

Now, if only more children were taught this idea of deference, this world would not be in the mess that it is in right now. We would have people saying to police officers, Yes, sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. Whatever you say, sir. There would not be the disrespect that you see all over this world in the way people deal with people, with others who are in power, in offices, in positions that have authority in a particular situation. A police officer officer does not have power over you when you are doing good. But when you do evil, when you speed, when you steal, when you assault someone or what have you, then the police officer's authority rises to the occasion, and God is telling us through Solomon here how to react to something like that.

Most of us are probably not going to have to come before a king or serve a king or a prime minister or a president or somebody who has absolute power over a nation. But we do have people who are in lesser offices that these same principles of deference apply to. But instead, today deference is a nearly forgotten attitude and skill because most people have come to believe in the ethos of a "will to power." That they believe that they have the same rights and privileges as anyone else. Their thinking is aggressive, they want to dominate and be assertive. They want to be at the top of the heap and they do not care how they speak to anyone, even if they are over them.

It is rather depressing, especially if you are in a position of some authority. I know my wife is a supervisor at the county and every once in a while she deals with people that, you know, she has authority over in her own sphere but they want to kind of walk around her or whatever. She is not very big, but she does have authority. (Just ask my sons.)

Now, maybe an interesting or a helpful adage here in terms of deference toward authority is the old adage, "You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar." It goes a lot better if you are sweeter to those who are in authority over you than if you are sour toward them. You can go a long way if you just comply and submit and say, "Okay, if that's what you want to do then I'm fine with that." And do what they say.

Verse 2 advises us to keep the king's word, his laws, his commands, and his reason is because of our vows or promises to God. He says there is a higher authority that you are obeying. When you obey the king, you are not doing it because of the king, you are doing it because you have made certain promises to God. In ancient Israel, the people were required to make an oath to God saying that they would obey the king. So it was a formalized thing with them. For us, it is formal too, but it is all included in our baptismal vows, that we have said that we will obey God and God says, obey the king. So we are actually obeying God when we defer to the king's word, to his commands.

So this vow that we have made to obey God, keep His covenant, holds us to keeping our nation's laws as long as they do not oppose God's law. In the New Testament, oftentimes this is told us that we should obey "for the Lord's sake" or we should do these sort of things "as to the Lord." It is the same idea. Because you obey God, you should obey those that He has put in authority over us.

Let us go to Romans the 13th chapter. I want to read the first seven verses here. My Bible, the New King James, here says, Submit to Government. That is what this is about, that we should defer to the government that God has put over us, as long as it is not telling us to do something unlawful before God.

Romans 13:1-7 Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities [and notice his reason]. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God's minister [or servant] to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain [God has given him authority.]; for he is God's minister [servant], an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath but for conscience sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for they are God's ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.

This paragraph then provides the basics of our duties towards secular government. And verse 1 gives us the vital principle regarding why we must do that. And that is simply, God is sovereign. He is sovereign over everything. He is sovereign over the nations of this world and all the authority that He has given them, down all the way to, like, policemen and dog catcher. We have to think of it that way if we want to live in this world in peace. He placed or allowed the government presently over us, so we are to regard the leaders of that government as divinely appointed, and not resist them, but defer to them. Otherwise, he says, we will be subject to their penalties and we will be subject to God's displeasure because we are flouting what He has ordained.

If we defer to our human leaders and do what is godly and right, our leaders should, if all other things being equal, look kindly on us or, as Paul says here, even find us worthy of praise. "Say, look at these people. Why don't you obey like these people do? They're great people. They're model citizens." That is what God wants us to be in whatever nation we happen to live in.

And he distinguishes two reasons why we must be subject to them. The first is pretty evident; Paul says because of wrath. That is, our fear of punishment due to law breaking. We understand this well enough. No one likes the legal process. No one likes fines or having a criminal record or being punished by the state, maybe even go to prison, or the worst thing that could happen, I guess, is they could execute us. I mean, just physically, we fear what authority can do to us. And so he says defer, be subject, submit. If you do that, none of these things will happen to you because they have no authority unless you cross the line. Then they have authority and they can catch you on some law that you have broken. One of the big problems in our day and age here in the United States is they have laws about everything. And we are all probably sitting here breaking some law on the books somewhere.

But this is the principle: we should fear the power that they have and so not break the law and do as they ask us to do.

The second one, the second reason why we have to be subject to them is, to me, the more important of the two, the more spiritual of the two. And that is, he says, "for conscience sake." That is, our knowledge of God's will and purposes. That is supposed to be our conscience. Now, our conscience should not be necessarily our own way of looking at things and what we think are right and wrong. Our conscience should be continually molded and changed so that it reflects exactly what God wants—His own laws, His own purposes.

And so our conscience becomes our knowledge of God's will and His purposes. We defer to secular authority because we understand, at least in part, what God is up to, what His providential power has ordered to bring His will to pass. We know He is working something, we know He has His will that will be done and we want to conform to that will at all times. And His will is, in these matters, that we defer to authority. As long as it does not cross the line of what God's will is, then we have to resist and take our lumps according to whatever God allows us to go through. But until what they want us to do crosses that line, we are to defer and submit to their power.

So we must function in this world under foreign authorities because we fear God and we do not want to interfere in His plans or purposes. This is one of the reasons why we teach that you should not vote in national elections. What if you are voting—we will just use this as a what if. Let us say we think Kamala Harris is the right choice and so we are going to go down to our precinct and we are going to vote for Kamala Harris because we think this is the best thing for America. But what if God does not think so? What if God thinks Donald Trump is the answer to what America needs right now but we voted for Kamala Harris? Whose side are we on? Are we on God's side or are we on Satan's side?

I am not saying you should vote at all, or either way. I am not saying that. I am just giving you the understanding that we do not know what God is up to. Not totally. And if we go into a voting booth and vote contrary to the will and purposes of God, actually that should be a sin against our own conscience because our conscience is the knowledge of God's will and His purposes.

So the church member, the child of God, conforms to God's will by not voting because he does not know the extent of God's will in this particular instance. It does not want to cross that even inadvertently. You want to be totally on God's side. And if you do not know what God is doing, stand back. Let God work.

When we defer to authority, we are conforming to God's will with peaceable interactions and relationships with human authority so that we do not sin or meddle in affairs far above our station—something we do not necessarily grasp or have any authority in them or even perspective about.

Let us go to I Peter 2, verses 13 through 17. Peter says very much the same thing as Paul.

I Peter 2:13-17 [He says] Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors, as to those who are sent by Him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good. For this is the will of God [remember the conscience, it is based on the knowledge of the will of God], that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men—as free, yet not using your liberty as a cloak for vice, but as servants of God. [So he says] Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king.

This is the way we are to submit to those who are over us, certainly in government. One thing that is very interesting here that Peter does agree with Paul, but he adds something to what is said there in Romans 13. And that is Peter gives a third reason we should be submissive. He says we should be submissive or defer to those in authority as a witness, as a witness to outsiders and enemies of Christ-like behavior. We need to do what we can to act like Christ in every situation. And if we go through His life and the way He interacted with authorities, He did not challenge them. He just submitted all the way to His death.

And actually, in this same chapter, Peter gets to that and says that He did not even cry out. He did not say anything. He just took it even though He was King and had far more authority than they did as God and Creator. So we need to make a witness just as He did.

Now, back to Romans 13. Paul breaks matters down and he is very smart to do that, to leave us very little wiggle room about how extensive our deference should be. And he says that this deference not only applies to, let us say, face-to-face audiences with people in authority, but it also applies to paying taxes. That is one way we defer to government. We pay the taxes they demand. We pay customs. Customs are normally import and export duties. If you wanted to move anything from one jurisdiction to another, you probably had to pay an export or an import duty on top of all the other things that they asked for.

He says that you essentially have to behave properly toward soldiers, police, jailers. You have to honor officials all the way up to the king or the emperor or the president or the prime minister. Like I said, he does not leave us a whole lot of wiggle room here. We cannot get out of it because it does not say, "Well, you have to do what the dog catcher says about how you have your animals." You do. He is an elected official in some places, appointed in others. But hey, he is part of the government. He has certain jurisdiction and you have to defer to that. You do it because there is wrath there. He could probably fine you. You should do it for conscience because God wants you to defer to authority and do His will, and you should also defer as a witness.

Those are the three things that Peter and Paul together tell us to do, to defer because of these particular reasons.

Let us get back to Ecclesiastes 8. Never fear, I have only got 93 pages of notes left. I want to read verses 3 through 8 again. It has been a little while.

Ecclesiastes 8:3-7 Do not be hasty to go from his presence. [That is, the king's presence.] Do not take your stand for [or against] an evil thing, for he does whatever pleases him. Where the word of a king is, there is power; and who may say to him, "What are you doing?" He who keeps his command will experience nothing harmful; and a wise man's heart discerns both time and judgment, because for every matter there is a time and judgment, though the misery of man increases greatly. For he does not know what will happen; so who can tell him when it will occur?

Remember, we are talking about in this section, an audience with the king or you as a servant of the king, and you are having this interaction with this man who has pretty much absolute power. How do you act and react with this person who has so much power, where a word could have you skinned alive or thrown off the nearest tower or what have you? What should be your attitude as you are interacting with such a person?

Now, verse 3 in the New King James is a bit stilted in the way that it is put because it follows the Hebrew literally and it makes it seem like it is separate from verse 2, which it is actually very much connected with. It is really one piece and I will paraphrase again here. Solomon writes, because of your loyalty to God as His servant, do what the king commands, not arguing with him and leaving in a huff. Just carry out his will even if it is a bad idea. He will get his way regardless.

If you are his minister and he tells you to do something, and you say, no, I do not think that is a good idea. I have been thinking about this and you should do this and this and this. And he says, guards take this man out and cut his head off or what have you. God says, no, we do not want to do that. There is a way to do this that is just fine and you will save your skin. So he is telling you, ok, if the king tells you to do something that you do not think is a good idea, just shut up. Just do it. We will get to why in a minute here.

Now verses 2 through 5 concern the power of a king. He is an absolute monarch. His word is law. Anyone who argues with him about his commands will normally have one of several things happen to him. If you argue with the king, you will find out that you are either out of favor (and that is the best thing), out of a job, banished, imprisoned, or dead. A servant's job is to carry out the king's will, not to advise him something else and resist and argue. That is not the role of a servant. A role of a servant is to serve. So if you are told to do something by the king, you better serve him and carry out that role.

If one just defers to the king and fulfills his command, usually no harm comes of it, especially to you who just faithfully did as the king said. And he says here, a wise servant will one figure out an opportune time to offer advice if such is in his job description. Well, let us say you are the king's Minister of Health and he tells you to do something that is unhealthy for people. Well, you carry out his will but then you figure out a time where you can go to the king and present evidence that it should be done another way. Do not do it when he tells you to carry out his word. He is going to think that you are a rebel and you are going to end up in jail or your head cut off.

So take it slow. Do not worry. This is where he is talking about time and judgment here. You do not know the timing of things. You do not know particulars of the king's judgment. You have probably not been in all the meetings, you probably have not gotten word from his scouts or whatever that have been gathering things. He knows a lot more, knows the bigger picture of things. And so he tells you to do something. It does not make sense to you, but you better still do it because you have not taken the time to think it through. You do not have the judgment based on the right knowledge and perspective to countermand him and you certainly do not have the power. So the best thing to do is just to follow his orders.

So that first one was that if you are a wise servant, you will figure out an opportune time to offer advice if that is something that you can do.

The second one is contemplate how the king's commands fit into an overall purpose or aim because, as I mentioned, a servant is not privy to all the king knows or intends, or even the timeline or steps necessary to reach his goal. The safest route is deference and compliance. And this applies in spades if God is the king, because God has plans and purposes going on that we have cannot even fathom what is happening and where they lead. But if He tells us to do something like fast on the Day of Atonement, "Oh man, why do I got to fast? I love to eat. I'm going to have little gurgling sounds in my stomach all afternoon. You know, this is just terrible!" but God tells you to fast because He has a purpose for it. And whether you understand the purpose or not, that does not mean you can rebel. It means that if you are wise, you should do what He says and then figure it out later. The same thing applies in lesser ways to a physical king.

Solomon is writing to people under the sun but these principles apply in the way we interact with Christ and God the Father.

Basically, Ecclesiastes 8:2-7 tells us that servants are essentially impotent before their king. It is true; you have no power. God is an absolute monarch, what He says goes, what He decrees happens. And so we have to come to an understanding of how to deal with an individual of such sovereignty and stupendous power and wisdom, who knows things and plans things far beyond our ability to understand. And so the best way to respond to a person of that magnitude, if you will, is to defer. Say, "Yes, Lord, your will be done."

We need to remember, a basic principle in this universe is that government is power. Government is authority and the best way not to be crushed by it is to defer and comply. We have our faith in God to support us that this is not going to be the case forever. He will one day overturn matters. It is part of what this Feast is looking forward to. We, will one day be kings, we will one day have pretty much absolute power. He is teaching us about that from the other side of the coin here. And one day we will have people, their knees knocking and their voice stuttering and stammering before us because of our power, and our word will be law, our commands will be done. We will have power to punish if need be. The same kind of power Jesus Christ has except a little bit lesser than that for where He puts us in the hierarchy of beings.

Of course, at that time, we will not be like a human king that seems arbitrary. Maybe his power is arbitrary and he just does whatever he wants to do. We will be kings with the power to do what is right and good, with godly purposes and goals. But right now though, where we are in the matter of power and authority and government, the wise and prudent course for us now is deference.

Ecclesiastes 8:8 No one has power over the spirit to retain the spirit, and no one has power in the day of death. There is no discharge from that war, and wickedness will not deliver those who are given to it.

Now, Solomon here lists four other areas other than the coming before a king with absolute power. But these are four other areas in which human beings are essentially impotent to change anything. So he says, we cannot 1) confine the human spirit. This is the word ruach, where it says "no one has power over the spirit to retain the spirit." We cannot confine the human spirit. That is the inner life of man, its aspirations, its impulses, and beliefs. We do not have control over those things. Only in ourselves do we have control over them. But other people's spirits, we do not have control over. We are powerless before them. So we just need to back off and let them be.

Of course, we are not talking about your children or things like that. You have power over them while they are in your authority as children. But we just cannot confine the scope of what people will want to do. It is sad in some cases because maybe we are a little wiser than they are and could see that their impulses are going to lead them to destruction. But we really do not have any power over that.

The second thing he says here is that we do not have any power to predict or prevent our death. It is going to come. It is given to man once to die and after this the judgment. And so you are going to die. You do not have much power over when that occurs. This was especially more true in the ancient times. Now, we have a little more power over it because of advanced medical and what can be done because we have learned so much about the human body and health and that sort of thing, but that just delays things. You are going to die. So really, what power do you have?

The third thing he says, we do not have the power to escape the evils of war. That is what is meant here by "there is no discharge in that war." It means you are a soldier and you cannot get a discharge for any reason. The king wants you to fight and so you are going to fight. He is saying you cannot fight the government. You cannot stop all wars. You cannot stop nation going against nation. You are just a little foot soldier in all of this. You are just going to have to take it.

And the fourth thing he says here that you have no power over is that you cannot evade the wages of sin. Another way to put this, a different way of translating this is, you cannot use iniquity to save those who practice it. I will not get into that one. That is just an alternative.

But these things that he mentioned, these four things: You cannot confine the human spirit. You cannot predict or prevent your death. You cannot escape the evils of war. You cannot evade the wages of sin—these stand as a foil to a human king's authority because he is subject to those things too. In most cases, as a man, he ultimately cannot stand against the tide of things greater than himself. He cannot fight against human nature, he cannot fight against death, he cannot fight against war, and he cannot fight against consequences. These are all things that are much greater than any man, even a king with absolute power.

Let us finish with Ecclesiastes 8, verse 9 where Solomon kind of concludes the paragraph.

Ecclesiastes 8:9 All this I have seen, and applied my heart to every work that is done under the sun: There is a time in which one man rules over another to his own hurt.

Verse 9 is a bridge to the next section, but it also stands as a good conclusion for the previous section. And the next section, by the way, runs from chapter 8, verse 10, all the way through to chapter 9, verse 12. It is a pretty bad way of breaking up the chapters here. It is a new line of thought and he is saying, thinking about the king again and his absolute power, he says, sometimes, perhaps often, a king abuses his absolute authority and an individual or a whole nation or even maybe all of mankind is harmed by the things that he does. Power wielded by humans is arbitrary. There are very few humans that wield power by principle. They do what is expedient, they do what they need to do at the time. So what a king does is subject to his individual discretion.

Do you trust a king's discretion? Or his preferences? Or his impulses? Sometimes a king is capricious, he just does whatever, maybe after a few brandies. But he has absolute power, he can do whatever he wants. Truly, most often we cannot know what we will face when dealing with an authority figure unless we have some prior experience with that person. But if you get called in to the police or before the judge or before a government official, you probably do not know what you are getting into.

The best course, Solomon says, because you do not know, because this might be a capricious individual; it might be someone who has no discretion, it might have a preference for dwarves or, you know, have impulses that he cannot control. I am being facetious, of course, but you do not know the kind of person that you are going to deal with. It might be totally off the wall or totally unexpected what happens. And the best course, Solomon tells us to do here, is to submit. Just defer; be obedient. That is the peaceful way. It is not wise to stand for our rights or to argue or to make demands, to go toe-to-toe with this person in authority. It is going to go bad for you because this person whom you do not know much about and could be a very evil person, has authority over you, has power over you, and can make your life very difficult.

So Solomon says, avoid that. Just defer; just be very careful. I mean, who knows? You may be going up and facing a Nero or a Hitler or a Mao or a Stalin or some guy who has tendencies to be a serial killer. I do not know. And you do not know either. So just defer, submit. Because if you do try to go toe-to-toe with such a person, you have just brought the house down on yourself. It is now your fault because you did not follow Solomon's wise advice to defer. Deference—submission—is the wise choice.

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