The Life We Have (Ecclesiastes 11)

Ecclesiastes 11:1-10

Sunday, August, 22, 2021

Intro

NCIS and the elusive Leroy Jethro Gibbs; hard to read, hard to know what thinking

His team is not allowed to stand around though waiting to figure Gibbs out, they are called to solve the case, to stay a step ahead.

How much more so with us not being able to know and read all that God is doing? That’s what I want to help us see this morning.

Recap

In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon, the Preacher-King has continually tried to expose the vanity of aiming to live under the sun by seeking purpose in that which is vanity, that fades away and proves unfruitful. At the same time, he has been also trying to show his audience and us how to wisely live in between birth and death.

Last week we saw at the end of chapter 9 and in chapter 10 the comparison of living wisely and foolishly. This morning we shift a bit to look at what it means to live wisely in the midst of the unknown and the one thing that is certain, facing God. Follow along with me as I read Ecclesiastes 11.

Main Point

We do not know what is ahead in the work of God, except that we will stand before him. Therefore, let us rejoice in the life we have and live accordingly.

Points

The unknown work of God

The life to be lived before God

The awaiting judgement of God

The unknown work of God

To live wisely is better than living as a fool, but the question remains, how do we live wisely in the midst of the unknown? This is a tricky thing to think through, especially with so many unknowns out there in life. Thankfully the Bible doesn’t leave us clueless to some of these things. This is the exact same thing that Solomon is hitting on in the first 6 verses of Ecclesiastes 11.

The unknown in disaster

One unknown in life is what disaster may happen on earth. On any given day in life, we are uncertain what the day might bring. This is in part why in Matthew 6:34 Jesus tells us, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” Yet, even with the uncertainties of today, wise living tells us to live. And part of how Solomon is calling us to live is laid out in Ecclesiastes 11:1-2 as he calls us to cast our bread upon the waters. Now, don’t make the mistake here of thinking wisdom is trying to tell us to go feed the ducks more often.

But to cast our bread upon the water can be taken a couple different ways. One is casting our bread regarding financial investments in a variety of different areas. The other is to hold possessions loosely in realizing that they will fade away and be gone. Most commentators seem to take an either or approach. I actually want to challenge us this morning though to consider both approaches.

First, regarding financial investments, putting all your stock in one place would be foolish. For we do not know when the stock market will crash bringing down something even like that of McDonalds or Starbucks. The farmer would be foolish to only invest in one crop, for who knows the disaster that might come on corn this year, but that of tomatoes might survive well. Wise living isn’t a life called to live in fear of these coming disasters. And at the same time, it isn’t a call to live foolishly either. Living wisely examines the reality of life and seeks to be good stewards of what God has given us to the best of our ability. Therefore we need to live wisely in how we scatter our resources instead of them all being poured into one place. As Solomon notes, we would be better to scatter them to seven or even eight different areas as we seek to live wisely.

Then regarding holding possessions loosely, we need to also cast our bread upon the waters in being generous and caring for others. For it is along these lines that the early church lived in Acts 2. For it says there in Acts 2:44-45, And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. If our treasures are vanity and to fade, we are ultimately being called then to share them in the present with others, for we don’t know what the future will bring.

There is the opportunity for us to use wisdom in living to be both wise in financial stewardship with investments and to be generous in loving and serving others. Therefore the wise Christian should both invest wisely and hold treasures of this world loosely, knowing that treasures of this earth will fade away. This is part of us living in the unknown of life.

The unknown in the work of God

Another unknown in life is that of the work of God. Look at verse 3 with me. We look to the clouds to examine the horizon and try discerning the weather to see what is ahead. How many times have some of us looked at the clouds coming and changed our plans in anticipation of bad weather that seems to be coming? I know I have put off things thinking it was going to rain, only to have not even seen a drop. But even worse, think of how often we try to examine the clouds and the wind of life and it keeps us from moving forward with crucial tasks and plans? This is where Solomon points us there in verse 4.

As we try to observe and regard what is coming, it causes us to think we will just wait or we will say now is not a time to try to do something. And yet, as Solomon so blatantly puts it, we will not sow and we will not reap if we merely try and observe the wind and regard the clouds. As much as we try to understand what is coming and ahead, we can’t. For we can’t understand what is to come in the works of God. Note here how Solomon drives this point home there in verse 5.

We cannot know the work of God, the creator over all, any more than we can understand the mystery of life. This is all that Solomon is trying to get us to understand when he says we do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child. There is a mystery to life, and we can’t understand it. In the same way, there is a mystery to the work of God and we cannot fully grasp it. We can’t today, and those in Solomon’s day were even more in the dark of being able to grasp it. Romans 16:25 says, Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages.

God’s mystery was revealed in Christ Jesus. Salvation is made possible through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. And yet, while the mystery has been revealed for what is essential for salvation, there remains many unknowns in understanding the work of God. There are unknowns regarding the disasters to come as we just looked at. There are unknowns about how to properly observe the times. There are unknowns about how exactly all things are working together for our good. There are unknowns in how things fit together in life. This all remains a mystery to us, and is not possible to fully interpret. However, while there are unknowns, God has revealed to us what we need to know. Namely that he is a faithful God who keeps his word. He then is a God who we can trust and find refuge in. He is a God we can faithfully follow as he leads us to Jordan’s Stormy Banks where we can cast our wishful eye and behold a better land flowing with milk and honey. Where are eternal possessions lie. This is the God who we follow into the unknown and who will lead us to green pastures and still waters. This is the God worthy of our trust and worship.

Sow the seed & don’t withhold our hand

So instead of us trying to observe the wind and regard the clouds, we need to trust God and be faithful in the work he has called us too. For indeed, God is sovereign over all things. Him being the Sovereign Lord means that he is in control of all things, including us as man, as his creation. God knows all things and rules over every aspect of human lives. At the same time however, we are responsible to act and obey God’s authority over us. We are to submit to his sovereignty and join in the work he has called us too. As John Frame, a fairly well known theologian says, “The One who controls all things has the right to demand our obedience.”

We need to rise and go about the business that we have been called to in the midst of the unknown work of God. We need to look at the example of Daniel in Daniel 8. The visions of the end were troubling, so much so that in Daniel 8:27 we read: And I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days. Then I rose and went about the king’s business, but I was appalled by the vision and did not understand it. While we know not what disaster may happen on earth. And while the work of God is unknown to us, we are not called to just lay down and do nothing. We are called to be about the things that God has called us to do. The things that God has revealed to us through the pages of the Bible. And this is the very task Solomon is urging those in Israel to do in verse 6, and the same goes for us here today.

From the very beginning back in Genesis 1:28, God called us as man to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And we cannot obey this command if we withhold our seed and hand from the work before us. As followers of Jesus, God has called us to make disciples, going, baptizing, and teaching others to obey all that Christ has commanded found there in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19-20. Jesus has called us to take up our cross and follow him, dying to self. Or to sum it all up, our lives are to glorify God, for this is the whole duty of man and our chief end. For as we read in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

Brothers and sisters, this is our lot, this is the seed we are to be sowing and what our hands are not to be withheld from doing. As long as we are living under the sun, we are to be glorifying God in all that we do. Yet, the temptation in the unknown is for us to shrink back and try to read the clouds instead of faithfully pressing onward. Too often we look to the sky looking for Jesus’s return and missing what the angels told those who were present at his ascension. Acts 1:10-11 says, And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Let’s not just stand here looking, let’s put our hand to the plow, sow the seed and labor faithfully until Christ returns. In the midst of the unknown, let’s not just sit back, but faithfully trust our Sovereign God by walking in the obedience of faith. Let’s press forward in advancing the kingdom so more may join in and worship the King of glory!

The life to be lived before God

The Days of Light

And at the same time that we are to put our hand to the plow in our lot and work hard, our lives are intended to be full of enjoyment too. And that is where we turn here in our second point this morning, the life to be lived before God. In verse 7 Solomon notes, “For the light is sweet”. Then in verse 8 he goes on to tell us to rejoice in all the years we live. God has called us to glorify him, to obey him, to honor him. He has called us to advance his kingdom. But in our life we are to enjoy Him in the midst of it all.

We are called to enjoy God as our hearts cheer and are merry. We enjoy God as we enjoy the things that he has given us in creation. For example, when was the last time we sat in silence just observing God’s beauty of creation? Marveling at the beauty of the sky above and God’s handiwork in creating it? In our various hobbies and passions, do we seek to walk in them, enjoying God through them? If not, what is holding us back? Work? Busyness? Something else?

Sometimes the most important thing we can do to honor God is slow down and live. Busyness does not equal godliness. Living a godly life is the means to godliness, which comes as we both glorify and enjoy God for who he is. And yet, we often try to fool ourselves by all kinds of activities, including that of church activities that we are somehow being more faithful. And yet, in these various activities we fail to actually enjoy the God we claim we want to serve. Brothers and sisters, our God is worthy of being enjoyed as he is the one who created us and has given us the joys and pleasures of this life. Therefore let us rejoice in all our days by actually living and enjoying the good pleasure of the good things God has given us, especially that of himself.

Remember days of darkness will come & be many

And as we live, there of course will be hard and challenging days. There will be many unknowns that pop up into our lives. Even over the last week in our church family’s life and in the world around us there have been a million things going on. We have members who are battling cancer. Other members either have been or are currently battling Covid. Still another church member who has faced the loss of a loved one this week. Then, around the world we have seen chaos develop in Afghanistan as people were abandoned and wickedness began to pursue those left. And that was just the past week or two, with unknowns in the week ahead. The days of darkness will come or are currently here for different ones in our church. And as we learn from Solomon there in verse 8, there will be many of these days of darkness. And so often they come out of nowhere it seems.

Remove vexation and put away pain

But as those days of darkness come, we are called in verse 10 to remove vexation from our heart, and put away pain from our body. In the midst of the dark days though, how are we to put these things away? Do we just ignore the pain and suffering? No, that is not what it is calling us to do. In the days of darkness, that is suffering, pain, and death, we do not ignore them, we turn to the God who is at work and over all things. We go to our Sovereign God in prayer.

Vexation and pain are dealt with as we entrust them to God through prayer. Prayer is a gift of God given to us that we may communicate openly with him and cast our concerns before him. To pray is to lift up our concerns and please to the LORD, asking him to work. Prayers are a means of saying to the Lord, I can’t do this, but you can. Prayer shows our utter dependence upon God. Show me a person devoted to prayer and I’ll show you a Christian who is truly dependent on the Lord. Show me a person who is prayerless or rarely prays and I will show you a person who tries to be dependent upon themselves, not God. In those moments of darkness, in the moments of suffering, in the moments of affliction and sadness, turn to the Lord through prayer. Seek to find refuge and comfort in the Lord, our rock. For in praying, strength and comfort are found.

Prayer is also the means for great kingdom work. Prayer pushes back against the darkness of this world. And yet, prayer is both neglected in our private lives as well as our corporate lives. Prayer is typically one of the first things squeezed out of the daily spiritual disciplines for the individual Christian. Yet, it should not be so. How are we to ask God to open our eyes to behold wondrous things of his word apart from prayer? How are we to seek the gospel to advance to the nations without praying to God for more workers? How are we to labor for the lost without praying to God that he would open their hearts to believe? Yet we remain vexed and struggling why these things don’t happen. They remain and don’t happen because we fail to see our need for the Lord to work in the midst of it all.

This neglect of prayer also takes place in the neglect of the prayer meeting within the church. Part of the reason for this is that we fail to see the value and importance of coming together as a church body and praying specifically for one another and the life of our church, as well as the unreached around us. Churches say that they want to see God work, but the prayer meeting or its neglect is a telling sign. All around our country people shout that prayer should be back in schools, yet the church’s prayer meetings are small if existent at all. Yet it is the prayer meeting within the church that is most meaningful and powerful as God’s people come together to pray for one another in needs, spiritual battles, suffering, and in sharing the gospel that unites the people of God together and empowers them together for Kingdom work. Brothers and sisters, if we are to seek to remove vexation from our hearts and put away pain from our body then we must see prayer as a priority, both individually and together. We need to make prayer a regular spiritual discipline in our private devotions. And make the prayer meeting a crucial date on the week’s schedule. God’s power and work are tied to our prayers, because he wants people who are dependent upon him, not themselves.

Coming to God is a freeing thing, as we see our need to be dependent upon him. For in seeing we need to be dependent upon the Lord, we realize that we can’t do it ourselves. We need to cast this weight off our shoulders and lay them before God. It is too heavy for us, but not too heavy for our Almighty God who is the Sovereign Lord. And as we are freed up from this weight, we can actually begin to live life how we are intended to, namely rejoicing and enjoying the days of light that we have.

Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes

And this is why it goes on and tells us to walk in the ways of our heart and the sight of our eyes there in verse 9. Because we are to live our lives to the fullest. We should pursue the things that our hearts find pleasure in as we turn the hard and difficult things over to the Lord. We are to enjoy the things that our eyes enjoy. For some this might mean that to live, you need to spend more time with dear friends. For others, you live life as you spend it surrounded by loved ones. For others, you might live as you take time to explore creation and the world that God has created. Our desires and passions are going to be different, and we each should pursue the things of this life that we find joy in and can do to enjoy God.

Now, this pursuit is not a hall pass for us to live in mindless self-pleasure and indulgence. It is not a call to walk in sin if that is what our hearts and eyes desire. This call is within the bounds of God’s good and created order and design. For we see there at the end of verse 9, that we should know that for all these things God will bring you into judgement. And that is where we turn in our final point this morning, the awaiting judgement of God.

The awaiting judgement of God

The call for us to walk in the ways of our heart and the sight of our eyes are not a license to go and sin. How we live matters, and it should be done in a manner that is honoring and pleasing to God, since it is before him we will stand in judgement. And because God is a good judge, he will make sure the law is upheld, that all who are guilty of sin will be condemned and all who are righteous will be declared so.

Trial

Of course the reality is that all of us are guilty of sin. For we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We all have been transgressors of the law. Therefore we all should be declared guilty before God in our sin. And as a good judge, he would be just and right in leaving us condemned in our sin. By nature, we as mankind are guilty. Not one of us deserves to be declared innocent from our guilt. Whether we have lied, stolen, committed adultery, which Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that to even have lusted is guilty of adultery. Or how about coveted what a neighbor has, another way of saying that is that we have lusted for their possessions. Any one of these reveals our sinfulness. We missed God’s mark of keeping the entirety of the law.

Plea Deal

But, as we await our trial, before we enter before the judgement seat of Christ, a plea deal has been offered. If we confess our guilty status of sin, and turn and place our faith in Jesus and his death and resurrection, then our sentence is wiped away.

Intercessor

For Jesus came to intercede on our behalf and step in our place. He came and said I know this one is guilty, but I will take the sentence for his crimes against you God, and I will bear them. And so he did on that cross, as he was punished for our transgressions. He who was innocent became sin, that we could be made righteous. He drank the full cup of God’s righteous wrath against sin, that all who would believe in him would be saved from their guilt.

Accept or Deny

But the thing is, this plea deal is only good during this life. If we fail to acknowledge and confess our guilt of sin before God and turn and trust in Christ for our plea deal, we will find ourselves before God remaining in our guilt. Jesus is the only way for our sin to be dealt with. And one way or another, our sin will be judged and held accountable either in us or in what Jesus did on the cross. So friends, if you have been wrestling with whether or not to come to faith in Christ, don’t think you can find another way to deal with your shame and guilt. It is going to be dealt with. Confess your guilt of sin and take the deal! Come to Jesus and find eternal life and the forgiveness of sins in him!

Likewise, Christian, see that by acknowledging our sin before God and trusting in Christ alone for salvation, we have been declared innocent, our guilt has been taken away. And it is this ongoing confession and repentance of sin that needs to be a continual part of our Christian lives.

For just as we have seen in the last few weeks in our Sunday School lessons from 1 John 1:9: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. It is this ongoing confession and repentance that will mark our lives as faithful followers of Christ.

Conclusion

As Leroy Jethro Gibbs has a set of rules that try and explain his actions and methods, the Lord has given us his rules, his commands through the pages of the Bible. This is to be our guide in how we live under the Sun. But we are to actually live in the midst of it. We are not to withhold our hands or fail to sow the seed. In the midst of the unknown we are to remember who is Sovereign over it all and continue to press forward and turn to God in prayer as we remove vexation from us and put away pain.

Let’s pray...