Sermon Tone Analysis
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Introduction & Review
<<PRAY>> <<mention last week not being online>> <<Submarine>>
ILLUST: I read an article recently titled, “Five main theories on achieving immortality as scientists say we could live 1000 years.”
But this is nothing new.
The very rich have been dumping fortunes into this kind of thing forever.
They think that we can stop aging, or reverse aging.
The saddest and funniest one is what they call “technological immortality.”
They say that they’ll be able to completely copy your personality and memories into a computer, a simulation.
Like the movie Tron.
If I turn you into ones and zeroes, is it still you?
Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of the electric piano, is in his 70s now.
And I remember an article maybe fifteen years ago where he claimed that if you took the right vitamins, you could outrun death till scientists figured out how to stop it.
He’s down from 250 pills to just 100 pills a day, trying to outrun death.
That’s foolish, and it’s bad enough.
But worse, even if any of these worked, it would be hellish.
To have eternal or near-eternal life in this broken world and without God.
This is hope, but it’s an empty one.
As Solomon said in chapter 6, double the number - if you lived a thousand years twice over, but didn’t have the joy of the LORD, it would just extend the tragedy.
From 1:1-11 “If wisdom is seeing God’s world the way God does, what do you do when it seems like the whole world is broken and it doesn’t make any sense at all.”
A realistic eye - “What am I supposed to do, God, when you tell me this, but the whole world seems to be doing this other thing instead?”
“There’s wisdom, and then there’s wisdom in a broken world.”
Solomon dives like a submarine, resurfaces, catches breath, dives again
As we’ve often seen in our Ecclesiastes series, when we plumb the depths of Solomon’s vision, we’re left wondering if that’s all there is.
Even at his most encouraging, he’s saying things like ecc 9:9-10
And it leaves you wondering, “Is there more to this, or is that it?”
And Solomon would say, “Of course there’s more to it.
But even though I know that God makes everything beautiful in its time, I don’t know how or why, and death is the shadow I can’t shake.”
This time, Solomon’s deep dive into sorrow is followed by the most urgent call to joy that we’ve seen yet in the book.
Q.
Is there hope in the face of death?
ORG: 3 points, then broader context w/ NT
Here’s our first point:
I.
You can’t outrun death (vv1-6)
<<READ vv1-6>>
He tells us that everyone’s deeds are in the hand of God - nobody has jumped a fence or spotted a secret tunnel outside His knowledge, care, wisdom, mercy, and judgment.
And then he says that everyone’s under the curse of sin & death, even the so-called “good” and “righteous.”
In chapter 2, he told us that wisdom can’t save you.
Here in v2, we see that religious rituals can’t save you.
Solomon doesn’t mince words when it comes to death.
He calls it evil in v3.
It’s an enemy.
But he's realistic about people, too.
Just as we saw in chapter 7 - there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins - and last week in chapter 8 - the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil.
Verse 3 - “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.”
Cheery?
Maybe you struggle with these words.
You want to say, “That’s not fair.
People are basically good.”
But that’s part of the madness in our hearts.
Our standard for comparison is the guy three houses down who only very rarely lies to his wife, and on very rare occasions even says the words, “I’m sorry” out loud to his kids.
But Solomon’s indictment isn’t based on a sliding scale, it’s based on God’s infinitely good character.
And when he looks with an eye of wisdom, he sees that even the righteous and the good among us are neither righteous nor good in an absolute sense.
And all the protests we raise against God’s standard dissolve into nothing like a mist when we stop to consider that they don’t change anything.
And after the fog clears, the image of God within each human heart recognizes the truth: It’s the same event for all, because all are under the same curse,
And
Under the sun, every reward and gain is wiped out, left behind, and the dead are forgotten.
But look at verse 4.
There is hope.
For the living.
But we will come back to that.
First, we’re going to skip ahead to verses 11-18, which you might call Preacher Solomon’s application section.
This is our second point:
You can’t outrun death
II.
Because death cheats (vv11-18)
Here’s verses 11-12.
<<READ vv11-12>>
Because: Time and chance happen to them all.
Without God, these “chance” events seem to be random.
But for Solomon, they are absolutely not random; they are in the hand of God.
But they aren’t in our hands.
ILLUST: I know a man who took his high school football team to state in his senior year, went into college with NFL prospects, and had a career-ending injury before his first college game.
He was the strong and the swift.
And like that <snap> it was gone.
Good luck always ends badly
Verse 1 told us, “Whether it is love or hate, man does not know, both are before him.”
And look at verse 12 <<READ v12>>
And this is true both in matters of life and death, and in matters of blowing your knee out, or losing a client, or a job.
Here are verses 13-16: <<READ 13-16>>
Against all expectation, the strong and swift king loses the battle.
And against all expectation, the wise man’s wisdom is hated.
Man does not know whether it will be love or hate; both are before him.
This doesn’t make God’s gifts meaningless.
<<READ vv16-18>>
But it does remind us that these gifts cannot give us hope in the face of our mortality.
They can’t solve the problems of vanity, toil, and death.
And that brings us back to verses 7-10, and our 3rd point:
You can’t outrun death, because death cheats
III.
So chase joy in God’s gifts now (vv7-10)
<<READ vv7-10>>
From the deepest dive he’s taken yet, he surfaces with a new urgency that comes out in terse imperatives.
Go.
Eat.
Drink.
Enjoy.
This is the kind of enjoyment he said in chapters 2 and 5 could only come as a gift from God to those who fear Him.
God has already approved the enjoyment of His good gifts by His people, so stop waiting to enjoy what God has given you.
Remember what we saw in
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