In the Hand of God
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But all this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God. Whether it is love or hate, man does not know; both are before him. It is the same for all, since the same event happens to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As the good one is, so is the sinner, and he who swears is as he who shuns an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that the same event happens to all. Also, the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But he who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and forever they have no more share in all that is done under the sun.
Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.
Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.
Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.
Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.
We are starting to move to the endo of our study.
And the preacher is laying out some conclusion he has leared.
He is letting us marrinate in what he has said
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End 7 From Death to Depth
In this chapter the Preacher offers another chance to look at his picture of life in God’s world.
Looking is important and how we see things is importnat.
First time I got glasses
I got them. I was so excited to see. And something was way off
Give yourself time to adjust
it takes a few weeks
but the reality was this. They had given me the wrong perscription. it wasn’t mine.
and if that happens. things become really diffuiclut
not safe to drive
not safe to read
not safe even to walk
but once I got the right lens things got a little better for a season
Here in the passage we are looking at this morning there is an unusual lens
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End (7 From Death to Depth)
Here’s his lens: “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do” (v. 7).
What are we to make of this?
This is almost the entire book in one verse
This is the way the preacher looks at the world and the way he purposes the book.
He wrote the book to smash our idea of God into tiny pieces
If we aspire to have it all
know it all
do it all
achicve it all
have all the answers
and we can hope for that
but we know in a moment everything can change. We could be in a wreck. we could have a new sickness. Everything is really temporary
and a great question to ask is if you knew what would happen tomorrow, How would you live today?
that’s the point of Ecclesiastes. The life we have, the breathe in our lungs. Our being here is a gif from God.
we really just have a short time…a mist or vapor as james calls it
and in this chapter the preacher uses what I would say are three different hammers to shatter this idea we can actually control our own LIVES
V 1-6 he shows us one thing in life is certatin
in verse 11-12 he shows us many things in life are not certain
and right in between he shows us the simple things in life that are wise
let’s try and look at the book ends first
v 1-6
The one thing in life that’s certain
It’s not amazing but here it is. The one thing in life the preacher holds out for us that is certian is : our death.
It a really broken, fallen world it’s a strange reality that the only thing we can really cound on, the only thing we can depend on is this
we are closer to the point of our death right now then when we first started reading ecclesaties
The preacher is wrestling with the fact that death comes to us all.
No matter who we are or what we have done.
Rightous or wicked
good people or bad
nice or nasty
believer or unbliever
the person who never tells a lie or tells them all the time
in the end we all die
Death really makes no sense: It makes no sense. For anyone to experience death is an outrage. It is not the way the world was meant to be
David Gibson, Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017).
when you understand this. That we don’t know and =the little we do know is death is the end
whoever we are and whatever we have done
then the preacher says life is worth living
Look at v 4
another way to say it. to be alive to have the day of oppurtying in our hands in a way tha twe do not have when we are dead
that’s the point of verse 5-6
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End 7 From Death to Depth
The time is coming when all the things you think are the most important in the world, all your strongest emotions—your love, your hate, your jealousy—the time is coming when they will all go cold and vanish and be forgotten.
I want to read you a qoute form a book on Eccelsiates I’ve really enjoyed as we’ve studied
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End 7 From Death to Depth
In the end, death makes no sense. Death will leave your face tearstained in perplexity. And because death is like that, life works like this: God comes to us in Jesus and says, “Trust me. Walk with me. Love me. Put your hand in my hand. Believe my Word. Stop trying to understand everything, to be in control of everything, to tie up all the loose ends, to have perfect peace and wealth and health and happiness. Stop striving for all those things, and stop it now. If you can’t see that life doesn’t always make sense, then something is coming your way that will prove it to you. Death is coming.”
Death is a reminder of our fallen nature. and if eternity is the perspecitve we have then laying up treasure in heaven should be where our heart is
to die well means everything i have in this world I hold with open hands because Jesus is worth more then those things
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Second thing we learn is
The many things in life that are unerctian
It’s almost the oppustie extreme here
Most the time the fastest person wins teh race
the wise person knows how to balance the budget-and there s food on the table
the smarest people get some of the best paid jobs
but not always
v 11- Time and happenings happen to all
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End 7 From Death to Depth
In other words, situations arise, circumstances change, unforeseen events occur.
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End (7 From Death to Depth)
As we grow up, we replace our childhood dreams of being a ballerina or a firefighter with hopes of an apprenticeship, or a degree, and a job, and a husband and children, and a house in a certain part of town with a big dining room where people can come and go and laugh and eat and talk together. You might simply long to grow old happily with your family and grandchildren around you.
Ecclesiastes says maybe you will do all these things, or maybe you will be dead before the year ends.
Maybe you’ll never get that job.
Maybe you’ll get married and have kids but never the house you want. Can you see what the Preacher is saying to us?
He is saying put your faith in something that is not under the son.
Read James 4:13-15
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
So how do we live in between these 2 extreems
On one hand I am going die
but I have no idea when
But what’s inbetween those 2 realites is this.
He focuses on the simple things in life that are wise.
verse 7 Go
seize the day
in other words eat, drink with gladness and joy because as verse 7 tells us God takes pleaseure in what he’s given to you.
in other words God takes pleasure in your pleasure he has given to you
This is what the preacher has been teasing out in this passage
Gift not gain.....Life is not about what you can create or meaing you can find
it’s not about having a lot of money or a wife or kids
you find menaing when you realize that God has given you life in his wordl and any one of those things as a gift to enjoy.
It’s like parents on christmas right
ther is something about given a gift and watching yoru kids enjoy it that brings you joy
what the preacher is saying is God is like that
as he gives us gifts it’s a sign of his pleaure, his delight in us
and the only right way is to enjoy what God has giving.
Even as simple as breathing and saying God thank you for another breath.
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End 7 From Death to Depth
Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head” (v. 8). Sidney Greidanus points out from the Bible that when people were distraught, they wore sackcloth and ashes to show their grief; but white clothes to reflect the heat of the sun, and oil to protect and nourish the skin, were worn to show joy and happiness
Eating, drinking, dressing, and loving isn’t an exhaustive list of God’s gift
it just an idea about doing what Jesus says in John
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End 7 From Death to Depth
These things are a way of saying: when God made the world, he made it good, and no amount of being a Christian, being spiritual, ever changes the fact that God put you in a physical world with hands and food and drink and culture and relationships and beauty.
Sin fractures, it distors but sin does not uncrete the eerything
maybe the preacher is trying to remind us of something we all know
Dying people who know they are dying can be some of the most alive of all people
they know ther aren’t going to live on earth forver, so they live for the day they have
they make thir lives about God and the things he delights in
There is an old saying.....If I knew when I was younger what i know now I’d do things differntly
I’d slow dow
I’d enjoy my family
I feel that at times
Like I look at the last 39 years and it continues to suprise me by how fast things have moved
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End (7 From Death to Depth)
God uses different tools to make us homesick for heaven, and in this chapter he has set to work with some of them.
Death and sickness and uncertainty and disaster and sorrow and grief—all of these are means God uses to dislodge us from seeking security here.
Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End (7 From Death to Depth)
But so too are the gifts God gives. His gifts are also meant to make us homesick for heaven precisely because they’re so good. I find it interesting that verses 7–10 are full of wedding imagery: food, drink, white garments, oil, a husband and a wife.
That is because the Bible’s picture of the best that life can offer us is simply a foretaste of a wedding banquet still to come, the beauty and grandeur and glory of which cannot be put into words.
Read some verse
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,
of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.
He will swallow up death forever;
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,
and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,
“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
it was granted her to clothe herself
with fine linen, bright and pure”—
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.” Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God.” For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.
but Jesus wasn’t just talking about futrue feasting right?
David ford reminds us
Jesus literally ate his way thorugh the gospels
it’s pretty amazing how much that is mentinoed
and its the reason the Preacher says a true wise man knows
He is going die
and a lot of life is uncertain
therefore live this life with gratitude, enjoying the good Gifts from yoru good God, Telling peoiple just how Good your God is in the process
Pray and grouups