Feast: Ecclesiastes Resumed (Part Thirty-Three): Ecclesiastes 8:10-9:1

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Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 20-Oct-24; 79 minutes 2024-10-20

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We mortals do not like to contemplate death very much. We would rather think about something else, do something else. Yet, a good percentage of the population of this world, and especially in the Western world, obsess about death. You may not see it on the surface that they are actually obsessing about death, but when you just go a little bit beneath the surface, you see that that is actually what they are doing.

An unhealthy sector of mankind believes in evolution, in atheism, and nihilism, believing that this life is all there is. And once we die, well, there is nothing, we are done. Our time on this earth has finished and there is nothing further. They believe that the physical and the material is all there is, that any ideas of an afterlife are just myth. Something men many years ago, many centuries or millennia ago, thought up and it has come down to us in those mythological forms. And then they believe, and they will tell you that the truth, that the reality, in their point of view is that beyond death is nothingness.

There are also satanic death cults, believers in necromancy, vampirism, the undead, spiritism, and similar occult ideas and practices, all of which revolve around death, death and its mysteries. And to that we can add things like culture of death politics, that everything that they advocate revolves either around abortion or euthanasia. Two different forms of death.

Then there are the death deniers, and there are a lot of these people, millions and millions, probably billions of people who are death deniers, that is, they believe in the immortal soul. You do not die, you never die. You just change forms in their way of thinking. They say death is merely the shrugging off of the physical. They believe souls depart for some better place or exist in some purgatorial state until they are either promoted to some kind of heaven, nirvana, what have you, some sort of paradise, or sent to live again in another body as another person, and maybe not even as another person, maybe as a bug or a cow or some other organism. I do not know. Do they go lower than bugs like amoebas and bacteria? I do not know.

But yeah, that is the belief in reincarnation. I mean, if you are doing it right, according to the reincarnation people, you go up the ladder in terms of consciousness, but there are bad people and they must fall down the ladder and go into these other lower forms.

And then there are the people whom history has written quite a lot about. Humans who live among us or have lived among us who sought immortality through memory. They wanted to be remembered forever because they figured it was either the Christian idea of going off to heaven or it was the nihilistic idea of nothingness. And so they wanted to make their mark upon history and be remembered forever. They wanted to immortalize themselves by what they did or what they said. And we have, then, records in history of leaders, artists, scientists, adventurers, and others who did something for the first time, something that was thought to be beyond human achievement, or they did whatever it was in a very memorable way so that people would know that this person was the greatest or this person achieved the most in this particular area of study or sports or artistry or education, or what have you.

So we know Leonardo da Vinci. Everybody knows Leonardo. You just say the word Leonardo and the first thing you think of is the Mona Lisa. Or if you think of the great explorers who went to lands that at least Europe did not know about. And so we have Columbus or some of the others that sailed out of Spain and Portugal and England and other places, the Netherlands, and they went where no man had gone before (kind of like early Star Trek, right?). So such people struck out into the unknown, not just the physical unknown of the earth, but into the unknown of science or the unknown of art or the unknown of leadership. I will not say good things necessarily, but they did things that had a magnitude to them that people remember.

And so they are immortalized in memory and I guess for them that was enough. And their exploits and achievements fill our history books and we learn about them in grade school and take their memory throughout our lives.

And then lastly, there is a small number of humans who yearn to outwit death. They are stronger, they are going to prove themselves able to live forever. They are going to find a way to immortality. These are the people who study deeply into metaphysics so they can ascend to a higher spiritual, immortal plane. You see that a lot in science fiction books where somebody just wants to live forever. And so they come up with some new cryogenic formula where they find this alien race that if you just follow their procedure, you are going to ascend to that level and be, you know, Q or something. (I must have Star Trek on the mind.) They have some sort of higher way of being and all they have to do is ascend through it or to it.

But there are others who try to use science and technology to achieve what they think is eternal life. And if you think about it, from our perspective, they do not want eternal life on God's terms, even though He offers it freely. You know, once you are called, He offers eternal life freely and all you have to do is believe and follow His way, have a relationship with Him, and He is willing to give it, He will work with you. But these people that I am talking about, the ones who yearn to outwit death, want to achieve it on their own.

But death is a reality. We have to think about it. We have to consider what we know, what has been revealed, how it works. You know, ask the questions. Is there an afterlife? What does the afterlife look like? What form does it take? You know, all those various questions about death, the big questions that we have to think through.

We do know, for instance, Hebrews 9:27, a verse we probably all pretty much committed to memory way back in Herbert Armstrong's ministry, "And it is appointed for men once to die, and after this, the judgment." So the Bible tells us very clearly that we are all going to die at least once. Poor Lazarus. I think about that every once in a while. He went through it twice.

So we cannot avoid death. We try hard, we do whatever it is that we can do to be healthy and strong; and well, some of us do, you know, something that will lengthen our lives. We look back in our genealogy. Oh, my great grandfather lived to be 68. And then, the next generation they lived to be 72 and then the next generation after that they lived to be like 85. Okay, here we are, my generation, I am going to live to at least 100 if the trend line is right.

But that is not the case. At some point, 70 or 80 years or so (by reason of strength), we are all going to die. That is just the way it is. God has set those limits and He has put those limits on for a good reason.

In Ecclesiastes 8:10 through 9:12, that is the passage or the section where the overall subject is death and its inevitability and its mystery, because death is a great mystery to all of us. And it is only through the revelation of God that we have an even loose grasp of what it all entails. Because everyone dies, no matter who he is or what he has done.

Solomon advises that we live to the full while we are alive, while we are still above the dirt and under the sun, because we cannot know when our time will be up. None of us can predict our own deaths. So we must live well, live abundantly, live so that we can make something of ourselves during that time and enjoy the life that God has given us. And then we will let God do the rest, decide the rest.

But before we get to his primary comments on death, Solomon tackles an ancillary problem in this life and that is, he answers the question, why do people often not get what they deserve? He actually starts with that and then he moves into his primary comments on death. So let us go to Ecclesiastes 8:10. We are going to read the whole length of the passage that we are going to cover today, which is Ecclesiastes 8:10 through chapter 9, verse 1. And that way we will get an overall idea of what he is talking about here.

Ecclesiastes 8:10-17 Then I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of holiness, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done. This also is vanity. Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times, and his days are prolonged, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before Him. But it will not be well with the wicked; nor will he prolong his days, which are as a shadow, because he does not fear before God. There is a vanity which occurs on earth, that there are just men to whom it happens according to the work of the wicked; again, there are wicked men to whom it happens according to the work of the righteous. I said that this is also vanity.

So I commended enjoyment, because a man has nothing better under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry; for this will remain with him in his labor all the days of his life which God gives him under the sun. When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, then I saw all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. For though a man labors to discover it, yet he will not find it; moreover, though a wise man attempts to know it, he will not be able to find it.

Ecclesiastes 9:1 For I considered all this in my heart, so that I could declare it all: that the righteous and the wise and their works are in the hand of God. People know neither love nor hatred by anything that is before them.

Just reading it like that, it seems like Solomon is all over the place and his thoughts are just ranging, this and that and the other thing. But actually, they are all in a line as he gets toward his main concern, which is our approach to death. And all these little pieces that are part of this 8:10 to 9:1 all feed in, eventually; you will see where the connections are ultimately, but it seems like a bit of a hodgepodge. So now we are going to go verse by verse and see how they fit together.

Verse 10 of chapter 8, "Then I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of holiness, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done. This also is vanity."

Commentators say that this verse is a candidate for being the most difficult in the book, not because there is a problem with one word (and we will get to that in a minute), but it seems like what he is talking about here does not make any sense. And here Solomon is trying to teach us sense, wisdom about this particular thing. So you have commentators scratching their heads. What does he mean here?

Now, the general sense of this verse, if I can just give a quick paraphrase is: Wicked people die and their deeds are forgotten where they were active in the holy place. You think that Solomon was thinking specifically about Jerusalem. This sounds like good news to us, that the deeds of the wicked would be forgotten. But Solomon calls it vanity. That is where the head scratching comes in.

Normally, you would think that if the wicked deeds were forgotten that that would be a good thing. But here he says it is a vanity. It is meaningless. This can be solved if we use an alternative reading for the Hebrew word translated as "forgotten." Now, I have explained this before, it has been a few years. But Hebrew roots are made up of three letters and it is the vowels that they throw between them that slightly changes the meaning or where or when they are used. Well, it is the middle of the three letters that looks like another letter and it is easy for those two letters to be transposed or one written for the other.

And so that is what a lot of researchers think that happened. And we actually have two strains of the Old Testament text. One uses one letter and one uses another letter. And like the Septuagint, which came from one strain of the Old Testament text, uses the other word, not "forgotten," not the one translated as forgotten. And so they think that this one is actually probably the truer rendering because it makes sense. It makes the verse make sense.

So this other word that is made from changing that middle letter in the Hebrew word "forgotten," means praised and that works a lot better. Using praised instead of forgotten, the meaning shifts to, again my paraphrase, I believe here, "The wicked die. But afterward, they continue to receive praise in the city where they did their religious posturing." That makes a whole lot more sense.

Now somebody who is looking at this from a righteous viewpoint would say, "Yeah, why is that? That's absolute vanity and futility! Why does that happen? Why is God allowing these people, who made use of His religious system, to prosper and all the rest of their lives were evil? Why does that happen? Why does God allow that?"

Because it is all in this stream of thought that Solomon always seems to go back to. Why do the wicked prosper? Why do the wicked get away with things? And he is using this verse as a way to say, why do religious hypocrites, evil people who use religion for their own gain, get away with it? This is vanity. He says this is part of the life under the sun that is baffling and frustrating.

So now, using this different word, Solomon's frustration makes a whole lot of sense. Wicked people not only go unpunished, but they are praised for their hypocritical works and their religious piety, then, ends up rubbing a righteous person the wrong way. "I can't stand it that he goes to the National Cathedral and makes this speech, almost a sermon, and all those people out there think that he's actually religious and that he really believes in God."

That is what Solomon is talking about. Like a presidential candidate. They do this a lot of times in the South, in black churches, where the candidate comes in, white as can be, and they speak, they try to put on an African American way of speaking. To me, that is hypocrisy, and they get away with it. It is just the way it is. I am sure that if there were Irish churches, they would go in there and try to put on the brogue. They are just trying to get votes and they try to make themselves fit in even though they are not in that group. And it has happened everywhere.

You know, any time that there are people who get together and have a government, there are leaders who use religion to get the people's praise. There are businessmen who do this. There are athletes who do this. There are artists who do this. People try to use whatever means they can to get ahead and they will play the hypocrite if it is going to get them even a little bit, a skosh of more popularity or more power or more wealth or what have you. And Solomon is saying, Why God, why do You allow this? It is not fair that wicked people could do this. And then after they are dead, buried, years and years later, they are remembered for their good deeds and religious piety, which in the original they had none. They were just using it.

Why does this happen? It makes a righteous person's efforts to do what is right seem meaningless. How many people remember us for doing right day after day after day and not posing in the temple or not going to a church to get votes or what have you. We did not do all those hypocritical things. We did righteous things day after day in our neighborhoods, among our families, in sincerity of heart and nobody remembers us. Why does that happen? Where is justice? Where is God in all of this? Why does He not give them their due? Like a lightning bolt?

This really bothered Solomon. He could not wrap his head around the inequity there. But in this verse, he does not give any answers. Let us go to Ecclesiastes 8, verse 11. Here is a partial answer.

Ecclesiastes 8:11 Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.

This is a great memory scripture. It is a good thing to have in mind when you see people getting away with murder. I just use that term. They may be getting away with a lot of different kinds of sins. But this provides an answer that human nature is to blame here and human slowness to execute justice plays into this. So Solomon's (or Qoheleth's) primary concern here is when people get away with evil and prosper, end up living a full successful life, and being remembered for their good deeds and piety, people will think or begin to think that evil pays that. Hey, if that mafia don is able to get away with murder, with evading his taxes, being wealthy based on his bullies getting protection money all over the city, why could I not do that? What is stopping me? Look at him. He had to go through a few lawsuits and the feds tried to get him on this and that, but he won, they could not pin him down. I could do that.

People may not consciously think that, but subconsciously they are looking at all the evildoers around them that seem to be getting away with a whole lot, and the thought rises to the surface next time they get into some sort of trouble or need something. Well, if Joe Schmo was able to steal from this particular thing like the government, why cannot I, why can I not use those means? There does not seem to be any punishment for it. You can get away with it.

But Solomon says that when we get to a point like that, we are seriously thinking about making evil a way of life, then society is going to go down the drain. It may be slow or fast, but when it reaches a tipping point where everybody is thinking that they can get away with evil, they can get away with not paying their taxes, or they can get away with maybe paying only half of their taxes, or what have you, then the society is going to be flowing downhill at a rapid pace. It will not be good. The thought is, from Solomon, if evil is not punished, it will flourish. And if we let it go too long, it will harden into the preferred way of life. This was the case before the Flood and God had to smash that pre-Flood world because every thought and intent of their heart was only evil continually.

That is what we are talking about here. If verse 11 is allowed to go on and reach its full fruit, full maturity, what you have is what happened before the Flood. It is also what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah. And it is increasingly becoming a preferred way of life in our own society. We have thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of people, especially young people, imitating the sinful ways to fame and fortune that they see modeled in music or other other of the arts, in politics, in business, and many other areas.

The thought is, if they can do it and they can get away with it, why can I not? I just need one little break here and I cannot get that break rationally, legally, righteously (just to use that term), well, I will just bend the rules a bit or break the rules if I need to. But I just need to get over this hump. Actually this getting over the hump by bending or breaking the rules begins to become habitual and soon they are what God would call "wicked." And once they get into that position where they achieve their fame and fortune through nefarious means, then they become examples to younger people.

Now this situation is demoralizing. You can read it in the way Solomon is writing this. Should not punishment be a deterrent? he says. Should not justice be executed speedily so that it will deter others from doing wrong for practicing lives of iniquity? But too often, as societies advance, especially it occurs too late, fines, they might take months to come through. Imprisonment, you get a long court case before that begins to take effect and in executions for capital crimes (like we talked about on Atonement), those linger for decades because of all the built-in delays. And so somebody goes on a crime spree, kills 15 people, and he is still alive 15 years later.

That just shows that the justice system is not working. It is not deterring anybody. It tells the populace of the nation that lives of evil are the way to go. Even if you get caught doing something heinous, you get a room and three squares a day at government expense and they will even pay for your lawyer. Is that a deterrent? I do not think so.

Now God set up Israel's justice system to counteract that. And this is why Solomon is saying this is frustrating that the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, because that system that they had should have been quick to punish evil. Unlike our own system, God's system in the Bible was equitable, public, brutal, and maybe the most important, swift. And it was based on relatively simple and unambiguous laws and principles that did not change. It was set up to be as perfect a judicial system as human beings could have, coming from the mind of the great God of all the universe.

But this passage shows that by Solomon's time, the Israelites, as they became more and more sophisticated, had more contact with the nations around them, did not apply them justly. So like today, the rich and the influential were able to get away with evils throughout their lives. So rather than deterring sin and crime, the justice system, a Frankenstein monster of what God had originally given them, aggravated those problems and made the whole society more sinful.

And this is what is frustrating Solomon here. Why cannot I get the court system to work and deter sin and crime? But even as king, he was powerless. These things happened. Although he administered a wide area of the nation of Israel, the same problems kept cropping up. Influential wicked men were getting away with things. And the reason is simply human nature. Wicked men were bribing judges and bribing witnesses, bribing the elders at the gates. And you know, hey, they probably had business arrangements and stuff like that. "Oh, I don't want to put this guy in the stocks or I don't want to have this guy stoned because my business depends on his business." And they work things out and they get away with things, with evil.

So Solomon, we can see the frustration building here. Things do not work like they are supposed to (verses 12 and 13).

Back to Ecclesiastes 8:12, "Though a sinner does evil a hundred times, and his days are prolonged, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before Him. But it will not be well with the wicked; nor will he prolong his days, which are as a shadow, because he does not fear before God."

Now, if we take these verses at face value as what Solomon believed, then we set up a contradiction for what comes later. And so it is very clear that we do not have quite the right translation of these verses. The construction of verses 12 and 13 in Hebrew shows that he is not stating his own opinion here. He is actually stating another's opinion or the opinion of others, perhaps the conclusions of ancient sages on the point, or maybe it is just conventional wisdom, that he is trying to let us know is what is bothering him here.

I will give you another paraphrase so that we can understand how this works here in verses 12 and 13. "Though a sinner commits evils and lives a long life [Solomon says], I am assured by others that God will bless those who fear Him. Ultimately, I am told, the wicked person will get what he deserves. He will not lengthen his life, which is brief because he does not fear God."

Now it begins to make some sense, at least it does in my mind. He is setting up an argument that says conventional wisdom is wrong on this matter. Experience over hundreds of years has shown (I am speaking as Solomon here) that justice is not equal. It is actually not even just in the way that humans do it, humans work. He is saying it is not a law, a guaranteed law that if you are good, you are going to end up with all these blessings and a long life. It is not an absolute law that if you are evil, you are going to be miserable and die an early death.

It does not work that way all the time. That is a good thought. That is the way it should be, that evil men are punished and die early and that righteous men live and prosper and have long, abundant lives. But you look at human experience and it is not that way. From your own experience, you probably know people who lived good lives, at least as far as you understand, and they died young. Or old people who were involved in gangs or the mafia or U.S. politics and they make $15 million when they retire, and when they came in, they were bankrupt, you know, stuff like that, and they lived to be 82. You know these things. It is true, and conventional wisdom is wrong or at least it is not guaranteed.

So we can say retribution for evil is not consistent, nor is blessing and reward for righteousness.

Remember, we are looking at this from an "under the sun" viewpoint. If we were looking at it from God's perspective and He was intervening and imposing His will upon the world, then these things would be guaranteed. But that is not what He has done. He has given humanity over to doing their own thing, to living by their perverse minds. And so things do not go according to the principles all the time, the way we think they should go. We live in a world that does not work according to strict formulas. And God has in many ways let the world just run its course. And what we are seeing in all these inconsistencies in justice and in blessing are the results of human nature run amok.

In many cases, God intentionally lets things play out and run their natural courses because He is giving us examples. He is teaching us lessons. He is helping us to work within this world while we are being righteous, so that we can learn valuable lessons about humanity, things we can take through the grave.

Let us go to Romans 1. I just kind of halfway quoted this a minute ago, but I want you to see what God says here in Romans 1 about how this world works. In the beginning of this long paragraph, he says that the attributes of God can be known by looking at the creation and men are smart enough, they could be wise enough to see God's eternal power and His divine attributes, but they do not, they ignore them. And so he says they are without excuse. That makes them sinners, very iniquitous wicked people.

Romans 1:22-26 Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them up to vile passions, for even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.

Romans 1:28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting.

Romans 1:32 who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

In other words, making a long paragraph short, at this point God lets humanity do what it wants. He rarely intervenes. And when He does, He does it primarily to nudge His purpose along or to help train His people, which I went into a few minutes ago. In such a godless world, we cannot always expect evil to be punished or goodness to be rewarded. It is hit and miss. It is a skewed world. It is unreliable. And yes, there are natural laws and principles baked into the universe and thank God for them, and they can lead to cause-and-effect results, but they are not automatic, not every time. Because of sin, we cannot rely on these natural laws, because in an imperfect, crooked world they are not consistent. They are not guaranteed. In a perfect world, in God's world, they should work as expected, but we do not live in a perfect world. Have you noticed that? It is far from perfect!

And so we have to understand that it is not going to work according to how we think it will work if everything was rational and logical. Man's mind is too perverse to be rational and logical in terms of obedience to God and obedience to these principles.

Solomon is telling us that, in this case, conventional wisdom is wrong. It is not automatic that the righteous will be blessed and it is not automatic that the sinner will be caught and punished. And we just have to take it. We have to live with it because we are in this world, but we are not of this world. And we should be smart enough to know that these things are going to happen in a world whose major influence is Satan the Devil.

Let us go back to Ecclesiastes 8:14. "There is a vanity which occurs on earth, that there are just men to whom it happens according to the work of the wicked; again, there are wicked men to whom it happens according to the work of the righteous. I said that this is also vanity."

So here is Solomon's argument. Remember, in the last two verses he was giving us what others had told him or what conventional wisdom said would happen. But now he gives us what he thinks: some good end up like the wicked and some evil men end up like the righteous. And twice he says, this is vanity, this is the frustration of life. This is the meaningless of life in this world. And notice, he makes sure we understand that this contradiction takes place "on earth." There is a vanity which occurs on earth. He is talking about "under the sun," in this present configuration of the life of humanity.

He is saying, in other words, this is how it is among sinful human beings. They may know better. We saw that in Romans 1. So they are without excuse but they do not care! As long as they end up on the side that is on top, they will use the system to get what they want and who cares how others are affected. So this is an "under the sun" example of meaningless vanity, frustrating, senselessness. It should not work this way, but it does. That is life in a world without God.

Yeah, it would be great if sinners were punished and died young. It would be great if righteous people were blessed and lived long abundant lives. But that does not happen. Not all the time. It is not consistent. Sometimes good men end up like the wicked and sometimes the wicked end up like good men. And who can understand it? Who could predict it?

Verse 15, "So I commended enjoyment, because a man has nothing better under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry; for this will remain with him in his labor all the days of his life which God gives him under the sun."

Solomon says this is why I advocate enjoying the simple pleasures of eating, drinking, and good cheer. He says these are things you will remember fondly as you toil through this life under the sun. Find the good things in life and enjoy them because you cannot make heads or tails out of this world. Things are going to disappoint you a lot. They are not going to work out the way you think. It will make you tear your hair out sometimes.

So when you have a fellowship of people and you are there to eat and drink and have good cheer and fellowship with them, enjoy it to the full. Make it a memorable experience because you are going to have to jump right back into that wicked world where things do not work right. So he says, his tone is kind of resigned here; this is what we have got to do because this world is just so messed up. So he is not actually excited about eating, drinking, and being merry in that sense. He is just saying, yeah, this is what we have got to do if we want to keep our sanity and feel like we have accomplished anything. That we have had some good times and experienced some joy.

So because we cannot depend on anything in this world, it is good to carve out for yourself times of enjoyment where you you can have some pleasure with the things that God provides. Do what you can to squeeze some wholesome good times out of your God-given time in this dreary, evil, inconsistent world.

Now, there is a warning here. Solomon's advice is general. It is very general. That is, it is to people living "under the sun." It applies to God's elect only marginally. The next verses actually back this view as they examine Solomon's thinking about his search for wisdom and what God is doing in this world. But, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, we are not of this world but called out of it. God has revealed His purpose and plan to us, along with the divine wisdom, to conform to it and to attain to eternal life in the Kingdom of God.

This is the warning: enjoying life's pleasures is not a priority for us. Doing so should not be the focus of our lives. I mean, one scripture will show you that I am right, or Solomon is right. And this is Matthew 6, verse 33, a very well known saying of our Savior.

Matthew 6:33 "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things [What did He just talked about? Food, drink, clothing, that sort of thing.] shall be added to you."

So he was telling people in this world who did not have the spiritual understanding of the called, "Go ahead and enjoy those times when you can eat, drink, and be merry because that may get you through all the hard labor under the sun." But for those "over the sun," those who are sitting in heavenly places with Christ, that is not our priority, to eat, drink, and be merry. Our priority is to seek what it says here, the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. And so if we do that, if we have the right priorities, God will give us the good times too: the good times, the good food, the good drink, the good clothing, all those things. Because now God is involved, and He says He will give you the abundant life beyond what this world lives. And that is part of His promise. We just have to have our heads screwed on right, our minds in the right place, our eyes on the goal.

Let us go back to Ecclesiastes 8 and we will read verses 16 and 17. Solomon says, "When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, then I saw all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. For though a man labors to discover it, yet he will not find it; moreover, though a wise man attempts to know it, he will not be able to find it."

Now he had said something similar back in Ecclesiastes 3.

Ecclesiastes 3:10-11 I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also put eternity into their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

He saying here that as much study as you want to put into it under the sun, you are not going to find what is actually going on. So here we see again, some of Qoheleth's—Solomon's—frustration spilling over again. He cannot seem to get out of that mood that life is just so frustrating to him. It has been his entire aim in life to know wisdom and to figure out what this life was all about. But it keeps coming back to extremely disappointing, unsatisfying answers. Every time he thinks about it, he only ends up getting frustrated and saying, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." Nothing works. There is no purpose in anything. And as long as I study this, even if I never lay my head on the pillow, I can still not come up with any answers.

He not only is frustrated but he feels extremely disappointed. He is disappointed in himself most of all because he cannot figure things out. He is unsatisfied because the answers are unsatisfying, because they really do not make sense, at least from his perspective. He is finding all of these contradictions and actually a lot of them are non-answers. Just a bit of anecdotal circumstances that do not add up to anything. It happens this way, it happens this way, it happens this, this, this, this, this other way and he cannot find a common link.

How do you make wisdom out of all of that? You cannot tell anybody do it this way or walk in this manner, because there are too many contradictions. It is kind of just general. Hey, if you do what is right, it will be probably okay for you. You may live a long life, you may enjoy a few things, maybe. Probably, maybe, if you do this and this, but maybe not.

Why does God allow this?

I think Solomon was bald because he had torn all his hair out of his head. You feel his frustration just coming out of his writings here in Ecclesiastes and you wonder, did he ever get a good night's sleep? Because he was turning these things over in his head and he says right here that he did not get any sleep. He thought about these things day and night. And it must have just irked him and bugged him, as smart as he was, with all the understanding God had given him, that he still could not come up with answers. He comes up with zeros, uncertainty, contradictions, inconsistencies, dead ends, and general frustration—and no hair on the top of his head.

He says, here, strenuous effort made no difference. He put his heart into it and he still did not come up with the answers. He says, even the wise who claim they have found the answers do not understand the answers they are giving you. Yeah, more often not, they are asking questions and saying, what do you think?

So these verses, Ecclesiastes 8:16-17, are the equivalent of throwing up his hands and saying, "I'm completely stymied."

Let us go to Luke 10, verse 21. We are going to go through a series of scriptures fairly quickly here.

Luke 10:21 In that hour Jesus rejoiced in the Spirit and said, "I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight."

Let us move on. Matthew 13, verse 11. The disciples had asked Him why He spoke in parables.

Matthew 13:11 He answered and said to them, "Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given."

Let us move forward to I Corinthians 2, that section on the Spirit given to us and what it does for us, how it helps us.

I Corinthians 2:6-10 [Paul writes] However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are coming to nothing. But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew, for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him." But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God [the answers to the questions of life].

One more. Ephesians 3.

Ephesians 3:3-5 [breaking into the middle of a sentence] how that by revelation He made known to me the mystery (as I have briefly written already, by which, when you read, you may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ), which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets [and the general membership by their teaching].

So the answer to Solomon's frustration is, of course, divine revelation through His Spirit, which is the way God wanted it to be. He was going to give the wisdom of the ages, if you will, to a small number of people in order for them to be prepared to help Him in His Kingdom and then it would spread from there.

But we find out in other places that He says that in order to be helpful to Jesus Christ, to be part of the Bride for the Bridegroom, they would have to go through the same experiences as the Son. And the Son, when He came to earth, spent His life living according to God's command, sacrificing and suffering—and He learned through suffering.

And so that is one of the other reasons why we cannot say that our primary purpose in this life is eat, drink, and be merry. Because normally for God's people, because of the process of sanctification that He is putting them through, they are going to be suffering more than partying. But the reward is the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of God, the mystery of the ages.

So we could say that the wisdom that Solomon was striving so hard to find out is the basic teachings of salvation. And the secret things of the Lord, which we heard about just a few days ago in Deuteronomy 29:29. What He has revealed, He has given to His people, and they are the secret things of the Lord which He reveals in His own good time.

Now notice this back in the book of John. You know, we talk about John 6:44 a lot. We talk about the calling, that God the Father draws us to Christ. But how much emphasis have we put on verse 45? Let us read that.

John 6:44 "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day."

We say "hooray!" we are going to be called directly by God the Father and we are going to be drawn to Jesus Christ and time skips at that point all the way to the resurrection. Well, verse 45 fills in the gap.

John 6:45 "It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God.' Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me."

Do you realize what that verse says? It says that Christ—God—has a major responsibility once His people are drawn to Him and that is to teach each one what God has decided to reveal about His plan and His way through the Spirit of God. We are being taught directly by Christ. That is His job. He is teaching you the wisdom that Solomon sought to find out with all of his understanding, but could not find by looking under the sun because the answers were in heaven, beyond the sun, and they are given directly by God, by Jesus Christ. So in this way, we are taught by God Himself, given insight through His Spirit into the deep things of God. We know things.

See, that is what sets us apart. We know things, we know the truth. We have the right perspective. We are working with God's Spirit, and people in this world still living under the sun cannot imagine these things and cannot find out on their own.

This changes everything! Being in the know changes everything. But it also gives us great responsibility. Those who are in the know must transform themselves, must transform their thinking to conform to the will of God if we truly desire as our primary objective to enter the Kingdom of God and put on His righteousness.

Back to Ecclesiastes 9:1. He says, "For I considered all this in my heart, so that I could declare it all: that the righteous and the wise and their works are in the hand of God. People know neither love nor hatred by anything that is before them."

Now, Solomon has assured us that he was diligent in searching for meaning in life. He spent his whole life trying to figure things out. But after a lot of intense observation and study and thought, he determined that disparity of outcomes and injustice are facts of life. They are part of the human condition. We should not be surprised when the wicked prosper and the good are punished. So his conclusion is that the righteous and the wise, which are probably descriptors of the same people—God's people—are under God's sovereign control. This is how he consoled himself about the lack of answers and the perverse, unjust world out there. That God's people, the ones He is keeping an eye on, who should be the righteous, who should be the wise, are under His sovereign control. He is making sure that everything that happens to them is ultimately good.

So we should not worry a whole lot about the circumstances of our lives because God is in control. He is sovereign. He has our best interests at heart, even within this cruel world with its inconsistencies and uncertainties.

But what about this last sentence here? "People know neither love nor hatred by anything that is before them." Now, I think the Lexham English Bible catches the gist of Solomon's thought, and this part of the verse reads, "So no one knows anything that will come to them, whether it will be love or hatred."

Now, we might put it maybe even more simply: People just have to accept the good and the bad. But we must realize that God's purposes are beyond our comprehension. So we cannot point to a good thing or a good event, or even to a bad event, to determine that it happened because God loves us or because God hates us.

That is kind of astounding. Sometimes a seemingly good thing, Hey, a new car, that is wonderful! I am going to enjoy this new car! turns out to be bad. It is a lemon and it cuts out at you at 65 miles an hour on the freeway. That is a good thing. You thought it was a blessing, but it turned out to be a trial, a bad thing. Or maybe the bad thing, the trial, was actually a good thing. But we do not look at it that way. We think it is a bad thing because something ruined my day. And conversely a bad thing, a two hour traffic jam, ah, I'm going to miss my meeting, turns out to be a good thing because the weather rises terribly and a tornado swept right through the area you were going to be at that exact time. It might have flipped your nice new car!

Those are kind of silly examples, but we cannot say that something that happens to us is a definite blessing from God. You know, there is no doubt about it. It may be a blessing from God. I am not saying it is not. But from all the exterior ways that we can look at it or think about it under the sun, we do not know because we do not have God's perspective. We do not know what He is trying to work out. And so a good thing may be actually a bad thing trying to teach us a lesson or to correct our way, but a good thing is actually something that is going to set up some trouble down the line that we have to overcome.

So Solomon says, as I mentioned just a minute ago, people just have to accept the good and the bad. Think it through, we still need to do that. We need to think them through and try to figure out what God is doing. He is not saying just ignore them and plod on stoically through life. He is saying, do not make up your mind right away whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. A lot of these things take time to work out. God works very slowly sometimes and it frustrates us to no end that things are not resolved, but He is working something out.

And so Solomon says here, the righteous and the wise and their works are in the hands of God, so you do not know when things happen to you whether it is out of love or, he uses hatred here, the word is evil really. So, just hold off your judgment and think them through, try to apply wisdom, and God will eventually work it out for good. But that "eventually" may be quite a way down the road. We just do not have enough spiritual insight and foresight to determine that any situation reflects God's feelings or designs one way or the other. If we are God's people, we just have to apply faith to say God's will be done, knowing that ultimately He desires only what is good for us. But He made His own Son perfect through sufferings.

Let us finish in James chapter 5, verses 7 and 8 and then 10 and 11. The apostle counsels us:

James 5:7-8 Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until he receives the early and latter rain. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.

James 5:10-11 My brethren, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord, as an example of suffering and patience. Indeed we count them blessed who endure. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord—that the Lord is very compassionate and merciful.

In this passage or in these two two-verse sections, James uses forms of patience, waiting, endurance, and perseverance, eight times: wait, endure, persevere, be patient, because that is how we, as called sons and daughters of God, have to be in this evil world. It is a significant trait for Christians to develop, as those who endure to the end will be saved. That is right there in Matthew 24:13.

And we can do that, we can persevere all the way to the end and be patient and endure and wait, remembering that whatever happens, good or bad, the end intended by the Lord is compassionate and merciful. Things will turn out for good in the end. Keep that in mind as events swirl around us as we march to the Kingdom of God—our first priority.

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