Enjoy Life Series

Let’s read through todays passage - Ecclesiastes 9:1-12. If you were following along in the text, you might have noticed that these passages can be broken down by three areas. The first area deals with the certainty of death. The last section deals with the unpredictability of life. The section that is sandwiched in the middle speaks about the solution to all this. We are to enjoy life. As I go through today’s passage, I would like to address the first section, the third section, and then come back to the second section. We know in today’s passage that Solomon is revisiting this topic that he finds so beneficial; the topic of death. If you were here last week, you know we talked about how Solomon had this view that it is better to spend time in a funeral home, a house of mourning, than a house of feasting and partying. His rationale was that the good would be able to take it to heart because death is the destiny of every person. As I mentioned last week, there are life lessons that can be learned in the house of grief that can’t be learned in a house of pleasure or party. He continues on with this theme of death. This time he is not really talking about the benefits of death. He is talking about the unfairness of death.

He begins in the first passage by reflecting on some of the prior passages that came before in chapter 8. He says “So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no man knows whether love or hate awaits them.” A lot of stuff in here, but the idea is God controls everything. God controls the events. God controls our lives. The sad thing is that Solomon seems to imply that we don’t know whether or not we are dealing with a good God or a bad God. We don’t know if we are dealing with someone who is going to embrace us when we get to heaven or is going to hammer us. Eugene Peterson, who wrote The Message, says it even more clearly. He says “Well, I took all this in and thought it through, inside and out. Here’s what I understood: The good, the wise, and all that they do are in God’s hands – but, day by day, whether it’s love or hate they’re dealing with, they don’t know.” This is Solomon’s view of life under the sun. From that angle of view, it looks kind of weird. We don’t know whether we are dealing with a God of love or a God of hate probably because he doesn’t seem to follow our rules or our pattern of life. We can give a lot of examples even in the book of Ecclesiastes. The one I thought about was the idea that some Christians believe that if all of a sudden they have a windfall of money then that is God showing them favor. Possibly. But what do you do when a drug dealer receives a windfall of money? Is that God’s favor? Some of you might have watched the news and saw how the coastguard intercepted a submarine from Mexico going up to California. In that submarine they found cocaine with a street value of $1.8 million. Now if that went through, I guarantee there would be some people that would profit greatly from the sale. Would we suggest that is God’s favor? Probably not. And also just because you are feeling some sort of pressure in life, you are feeling in a vice, like you are going through some pain or some hard times – like we talked about last week when you develop a timeline the pink stickies represent painful moments – just because you are going through a painful moment doesn’t necessarily mean that you are being punished by God, although sometimes it looks that way from our angle of view. But again all we have to do is revisit the story of Job to know that is not a good way to view life. Job was someone who was a righteous, upright man, and a very blessed man. I think he had ten kids and a bunch of livestock and all sorts of wealth. Satan visited God one day and asked permission to mess with Job. If God would take away all his stuff, he would probably curse God. So God said go for it. The story goes that three of Job’s so-called friends speak to Job several times and suggest that the reason that Job is experiencing such hardship was because God was angry at him. Only to know that at the end of the book, God wasn’t angry. We just don’t know the reason why. Sometimes we just do not know. He didn’t give Job the reason why. Just like he doesn’t always give us the reason why.