Ecclesiastes 12:8-14
Father, we come before you with
the need for you to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts
to behold the wonderful things that are in your Word. You say
that your Word is a lamp to our feet, and a light to our path,
and that we do not live by bread alone, but by every Word that
proceeds from your mouth. So your word is life to us, and
we pray that it would be life-giving, that you would stir up repentance
and faith and draw us to our Savior for your sake, and in
your name we pray. Amen. Ecclesiastes chapter 12,
beginning in verse 9. Solomon says this. Besides being wise, the preacher
also taught the people knowledge. weighing and studying and arranging
many proverbs with great care. The preacher sought to find words
of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth. The words of the wise are like
goads, and like nails firmly fixed on the collected sayings. They are given by one shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond
these, of making of many books there is no end, and much study
is a weariness of the flesh. The end of the matter, all has
been heard. Fear God, keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every
deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or
evil. Amen. This is God’s holy, inspired,
and inerrant word to us this morning. May he write his eternal
truth on all our hearts. Well, the British evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a best-selling book back in 2006
called The God Delusion. He is an atheist, someone who
is very much antagonistic towards the things of Christ and the
gospel and the Christian faith, and this is what he says in his
book. He says, there is something infantile in the presumption
that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and
a point. The truly adult view, by contrast,
is that our life is as meaningful, as full, and as wonderful as
we choose to make it. Now, somebody else he’s referring
to is God. And the adult view, in his terms,
is that meaning, purpose, satisfaction, self-validation, rather than to God, to the creator
of the universe, to the one who rules and reigns over all things.
Of course, he thinks that that’s just a fairy tale, and so what
we need to do is look inside ourselves, because man is ultimate,
not God. That’s his position. And really,
what he’s saying here is absolutely nothing new. There’s nothing
new, revolutionary to this. In fact, it goes all the way
back to Genesis chapter 3. It’s been that long since people
have been trying to adult this way. To try to look within, apart
from God, for some sort of self-validation, a legitimacy in life. In fact,
isn’t that what our first parents did? Isn’t that fundamentally
what their sin was, looking away from God, questioning His goodness,
His truth, His love, all that He is for them, and saying, I
actually know better, I’ve got a better way, I can map out a
better course than God can. That’s exactly what our first
parents did, and that’s what’s been happening ever since. What
we’re seeing today in our world, and in our churches, and in our
own personal lives, is nothing new under the sun. We’ve all
sought to gain a little bit more control over our life from this
angle. And we’ve sought to gain a little
bit more power over things from this avenue. We’ve sought to
gain more pleasure, more comfort by pursuing that road. And we’ve
sought approval and acceptance from others and praise from other
people by going in that direction. That’s the inclination of who
you are, and I don’t care if you’re three or if you’re 103,
that’s what’s going on in your life in some form or fashion. That’s the spirit of the age,
and it’s always been the spirit of the age. And as Western culture,
as our world and our culture becomes increasingly post-Christian,
and inclines in this direction even more so with greater acceptability,
greater social approval, we actually have to ask ourselves, are we
better off as a result? Is the secularization of our
ages, and Solomon was really living, saying that he lived
a secular life, is that sort of secularization of our age
leading us to a more just world? A world that’s more equitable
and compassionate and joyful and truly involved in all that
love is, now that secularism is winning the day at the table. And on an individual level, we
do need to look within and ask ourselves, is a life without
any sort of transcendent truth where there’s no authority beyond
ourselves, no true authority, because we ultimately are being
taught by our world to be true to ourselves. That’s what authenticity
really means. Not living under the authority
of God, but living under our own authority. Is that life,
where we see no ultimate judgment, no authority beyond ourselves,
no real categories of good and evil beyond that which disturbs
our good, our nerve endings, is that a really better life? Is that what life is all about?
Is that the chief gift of our life? Solomon has has composed this book under
the inspiration of God, and it has remarkable contemporary applications. I mean, Solomon has pursued escapism,
cynicism, hedonism, opportunism, all of these things, and he’s
found them to be ultimately meaningless. Over and over in Ecclesiastes,
he uses the phrase vanity, vanity, meaninglessness, meaninglessness,
chasing after the wind. Have you, have you been able
to get that image in your head, chasing after the wind? A person
who actually chases the wind? in the literal sense, chases
after Whib, how utterly absurd that would look, as if you could
somehow capture the Whib and bring it in and manage it. That’s
the image! to see how absolutely ludicrous
and absurd such a life is. And that’s what a life devoid
of honoring God, fearing God, living under His gracious, benevolent
authority and trusting in His goodness, that’s what that life
looks like. It is as vain, as chasing after
the wind, and as foolish as well. So what are we to do then? I
mean, how do we live in response? Well, in verse 13 of chapter
12, I mean, he spends all this time, perfect preacher, right?
Goes on and on and on and on, and then the last sentence of
the sermon finally gets to the point, right? Well, that’s what
he does here. The end of the matter, all has
been heard. Fear God, keep his commandments, for this is the
whole duty of man. That’s what he’s saying. In order
to have a life that really actually is authentic. You need to be
a person whose life is anchored by faith in the one who created
us and made us and designed us and reveals to us what is good
and right and true so that we will flourish so that we will
glorify God and love our neighbor. He’s saying that a life before
God is the way to escape this vanity and live the purpose that
God has called us to live. And how does he display that
to us throughout this book, throughout his writings, What he says here
is that He weighed and studied, in verse nine, many Proverbs
with great care. Solomon is the one who wrote
the Proverbs, 31 chapters of it. They are words of delight.
They are words of truth. And he writes these Proverbs
in such a way, sort of like a music lyricist, right? It’s much easier
for you to remember but the lyrics to music than it is to just remember
straight up black and white factual statements. And so he writes
these proverbs in such a way that they will stick. He doesn’t
say things like, you need to be a person in the church who
just lives in community with one another and spends time together
with iron sharpening iron. That’s not what he says, he says, is not easily broken. Can you
see that? Can you visualize that? The importance of that bond together? He doesn’t say things like, don’t
make your life all about making as much as you can, making money,
building this wealth empire that’s a meaningless life, He says things
like, sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much,
but the full stomach of a rich man will not let him sleep. And you can see that. You know,
what is it like to be sleepless? You can have all that you want
in the world, all that you pursue in the world, and still ultimately
it’s not what’s going to satisfy you because that’s not what we
were made for, ultimately. And so he’s trying to stoke our
imagination. And what he does here is he’s
saying he does this and then he brings us to verse 11 and
shows us really where we need to align our lives through faith. And he says here in verse 11
that the words of the wise are like goads and like nails firmly
fixed are the collective sayings. They are given by one shepherd. That shepherd, of course, is
God. Now, what is a goad? It’s like
a prod, right? It’s like something that prods
an animal, a lethargic, just docile creature. I remember playing
golf with my dad one day, and of course he shot one that was
farther off to the right than Rush Limbaugh or something. He hit a deer. And that deer,
bolted across the fairway faster than anything you’ve ever seen,
because that deer was goaded by a golf ball that was coming
at him at Mach 2. So that’s sort of what the Word
of God does. It goads us. prods us out of
our spiritual laziness and lethargic and indifferent life. It pushes us out of our complacency. And what it does is it drives
us to see who we really are before a holy God. And it exposes the
areas of our life that are in darkness and in decay and in
rebellion. And it leads us to our faithful
Savior, Jesus Christ. It draws us in that direction
so that we will repent and find freedom and find grace and find
the power of the Holy Spirit to live a life of humble confidence
under the sun where everything that the world has coming out
to you is designed to pull you away from that. And so when your
life becomes shaped by God’s Word, it prods you towards Christ,
towards Him. and your life begins to be framed
by who he is. But the word of God is not merely
a prod to awake you from your spiritual slumber. He says that
it’s also like nails, right? Like nails firmly fixed, and
you can picture that as well. Something that you nail down,
what you’re doing is you’re trying to anchor it so that it doesn’t
move. That’s the purpose of a nail,
to keep something stuck in place. We sing, prone to wonder, Lord
I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. And we sing that because that
is the orientation of our heart. We don’t drift towards God, we
drift away from Him. That’s not some of us, that’s
all of us. That’s where we go, and so as our lives increasingly
shaped by the word of God, what ends up happening is that we
become anchored so we don’t drift with every wave that comes our
way, with every gust of wind that blows at us. I mean, you
think of Psalm 1, the very first Psalm. Blessed is the man who
does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or the way of
sinners, or sit in the seat of scoffers, but is delighted in
the law of the Lord, the word of God. And he meditates on it
day and night. And what does he like? He’s like
a tree planted by streams of water, whose roots go deep and
are constantly fed by that water so that when hurricanes come
and winds blow and the snow bears down and the heat comes at that
tree, it doesn’t wither up and die and fall and tip over, but
it continues to be sustained over the years despite what’s
coming at it. And that’s what the Word of God
does when it begins to seep into the bone marrow of our life,
into our pores. Because the reality is, is that
all of the world is discipling you. Six days out of the week,
this past week, since we left here, if you were here last Sunday,
since we left here, The world has been trying to disciple you
away from the Lord, trying to get you to be galvanized by anything
and everything other than Him, and not necessarily bad things,
actually mostly good things. All those things that we saw
last week, all that Solomon was writing about, work, pleasure,
wisdom, Good things. None of it’s bad. It’s all good.
God’s given it to us all to enjoy. In fact, he says in Ecclesiastes
that we ought to enjoy these things, but when they become
ultimate, they rot us out from the inside. And we become that
tree that gets knocked out. And so, it kind of takes us to
the task of preaching because the writer of Ecclesiastes here
speaks of himself as the preacher all throughout. And that makes
me tune in because that’s what I do, so I listen to that. And it reminds me that the purpose
of preaching is not to ultimately entertain or amuse or have the
best It’s to bring Jesus before you. It’s to bring the Lord before
you as he reveals in his word and trust that the Holy Spirit
through his word will work in your soul so that you’ll no longer
be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed
by the renewing of your mind. That’s why Lord’s Day after Lord’s
Day, There is this preaching of the Word from this pulpit.
There is the reading, substantial reading of the Word in this church. That this congregation, this
church, for so many years has been celibately anchored in the
Word because we need it. Because as I prayed a moment
ago, Jesus Himself said that we do not live by bread alone,
but by every word that proceeds from His mouth. In other words,
you need His Word every bit as much as you need food to feed
your body. You need His Word to nourish
your soul. every bit as much as you need
food to nourish your body. And so the task of the preacher
is to unleash the Word, not to make it alive. It’s already alive.
It’s just to unleash it. And your task, our task, my task,
is to heed the words, to let ourselves bear the Word, to allow
us to be confronted by God as he speaks to us in his word so
that our life will begin to take the shape of Christ and that
we’ll be able to stand firm and anchored and rooted to resist
the foolishness of the world. And the world thinks this is
foolishness, this is just That’s nothing new, that the
Lord uses that word, uses the preaching to open our hearts
and our minds and stir up our affections for the things of
Christ. And so, the message of Ecclesiastes
is seeking to bring this word to bear upon us. And the purpose
of it is summed up in verse 13, as we saw. Fear God and keep
His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. What a counterintuitive way to
live. I mean, really, it’s counterintuitive,
and it’s against how we are just shaped and inclined to want to
go, and how the world is going. Go home and and Google life on
my own terms. You’re gonna get like billions
of hits for that. It’s gonna take you everywhere,
because that’s what everybody is seeking to do. Liberation
is said to be found in autonomy. My body, my life, my choice.
I am the captain of my faith. I
am the captain of my soul. That is packed with so much more
sweetness and savoriness to our natural palate than what Solomon
writes here, which is, fear God and obey his commands. I mean,
you build your church on that, that’s not a church growth methodology. That’s not what’s in the big
books out there. But that’s what he’s saying is
really our calling and our task to not only honor God and love
our neighbor, but to actually find joy in the authentic life
that we’re called to live. Autonomy. I mean, looking inward
for your own self-validation, psychologizing the truth, politicizing
the truth, that’s just a path to nowhere. It’s thousands of
thousands of years old. People have always done it. It’s
always brought about an unmitigated disaster. It’s a hamster wheel. You just run, and you run, and
you run after the expectations of others, and the pursuit of
success, and the quest for prosperity, and the desire for status, and
acceptance, and for a healthy body, and eating the right things,
and doing the right things, and all of that, and it all makes
these promises to give you life. If anybody would come after these
things, You will have life and add it to the full. That’s the
message of the world. But the thing is, is that it
never forgives you when you fail. It never forgives you. It wags
its finger at you in condemnation. It never quits you and it never
fulfills its promises. It’s never as good as it promises. See, the irony of the Christian
life is that freedom, liberty is found in fearing God, in honoring
God, in submitting to God through faith. And liberation is found
in love for God, the manifestation of which is obedience to his
commands. That means that he is the highest
good in your life. He saturates everything. He’s not number one on the top
10 priorities that you have in your life. You have your priorities
in your life and God is the one who shapes all of that and arranges
your priorities. But he’s never deployed any of
them. Freedom comes in fearing God and keeping His commands. And there are two motivations
that Solomon gives us here as well. The first motivation to
live in such a way is that this is the whole duty of man. This
is the duty of our life. In Hebrew, the word duty actually
isn’t there. It’s sort of implied. Literally
what it says in Hebrew is to fear God and keep His commandments
is the whole of everyone. It’s the shape of our life. It’s the essence of our life.
It’s the most authentic way to live because we’ve been created
by Him in his image. And so he has designed us to
live in such a way that causes us to flourish and brings him
honor. We are more than just the result
of a lightning bolt that hit a chunk of primordial slime billions
of years ago, and ta-da, here we are today. looking and living
like how we are. You’re more than just a substance
of your parts, just your nerve endings, just your basic molecular orientation. You have a soul. You’re creating an image of God. And so your essence is to live true to who God has designed
you to live. And he doesn’t leave us guessing
as to what that looks like. He reveals himself. And he reveals
himself in and through his word, from cover to cover. The whole
counsel of God, Genesis to Revelation, he brings that to us and says, Do you trust me for your sexuality? Do you trust me with your resources? Do you trust me with your future? Do you trust me when I’m saying
go this way and everything else in life is saying go that way? Do you trust me? Because I’m
telling you, this is the way to find your way. This is the
way to get your name. It’s the whole duty of man. Motivation number two, other
than it being the essence of how we’re designed to live, fearing
God and keeping his commandments, motivation number two is that
there’s judgment Verse 14, God will bring every deed into judgment
with every secret thing, whether good or evil. I used to pastor
a church in Greensboro, and a couple of times the police came to my
office. And the reason why is because I set off the alarm. And I remember, I set the alarm
off, and I just, you know, it was so loud that the dead were
rising from the graves. I mean, it was just, it flustered
me, and I couldn’t remember the code, and I had to go look it
up somewhere, and I eventually turned it off, but it was not
long before the cops came to try to find out if someone was
actually breaking into the office, and I had to convince the police
that, no, I’m just a doofus. And so they let me go, but the
point is this, is that if I go into the building on my own terms
and just decide that, you know, the terms I’m going to enter
the building is to not turn off the alarm, is to put in whichever
numbers I actually are most authentic to myself. You know, I want it
to be my birthday, my anniversary, so I’m gonna punch in those numbers,
because that’s what’s most authentic to me, but that’s not the right
number. It’s not gonna turn off. If I don’t put in the right number,
the cops are gonna come. And so if I go into building
on my own terms, I see the civil authorities, and if I go to God
on my own terms, What he says here is that there’s judgment,
that there’s wrath. If you want to stand before God
on your own merits, on what you bring to the table,
on how authentically you feel like you’ve lived your life, God says you don’t have the right
to do that. You don’t have the authority
to do that. In fact, I’m just. Because God
is love, God is also just. And He will not tolerate that
within us. And so are you going to stand
upon your own merits before the Father, or are you going to stand
upon the grace and the merits of Jesus Christ credited to you
in the Gospel before your Father? Because the fact of the matter
is that we’re all falling short of the glory of God. You can
go to God on your record, or you can go to God on Jesus’ record.
Those are the options. He will judge every idle work,
everything done in secret. And this isn’t just some crotchety
Old Testament God where, you know, people have this idea that
the God of the Old Testament is some capricious deity who forgot to take his
meds. And the God of the New Testament
is love and grace and rainbows and butterflies. That’s not true. In fact, Jesus himself says in
Matthew chapter 12, that on the day of judgment, you will have
to give an account for every careless word you utter, but
for your words, justify it, and by your words, you will be condemned. And in Luke 6, he says, out of
the abundance of the heart, the mouth, Who we are inside of us
is revealed in what we say and in what we do. And the question
is this, do you have the fear of God in your soul? In other
words, is Jesus not merely your fire insurance, but also your
Lord? Do you know him? as the one in
whom you’ve been saved. The one who loved you and gave
himself for you, and it’s so beautiful that your life wants
to take on that shape. Your life, as you begin to get
the love of God more deeply, is going to live with increasing
alignment to Him, and to His will, and to His word, however
imperfectly, however much you do this in life. Your life is
going to go in that direction. In Dante’s Inferno, and I’ll
close with this, there are words at the gates of hell, and those
words are, abandon hope, all that enter here. And what the writer of Ecclesiastes
is saying is, abandon hopelessness. Abandon the hopelessness. that you ran the rule over your
own life, that you were the authority over your own life. Abandon that hopelessness and
embrace the hope and the love and the mercy, the power that
comes with running to God, running to who he reveals himself. And
this becomes so much more beautiful when you read what Jesus says
in John chapter 5. He says here that the Father
judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son that all
may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does
not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him. But
truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears My word and believes Him
who sent Me, you know what you get? Eternal life. An inheritance that can never
perish, or spoil, or fade. The promises that He’ll never
leave you or forsake you. The promise that there’s no condemnation
for those who are in Chuck and Christ Jesus. He says that that
person who believes in Him, believes in Jesus, trusts in Him, does
not come into judgment, but is passed from death to life. And so I want to ask you not just how often you appear in
this building, or what you claim for yourself, what is really
true about you, are you taking these words seriously? Because
if you don’t know Him, and His righteousness has not
been credited to you through faith, And you don’t believe
Him to be the One who plunges your sins to the depths of the
sea and casts them off as far as the East is from the West
and remembers them no more. Then what you’re doing is you’re
saying, I’m gonna stand before God and what I bring to the table. And what Solomon is saying here
is what is consistent from cover to cover in Scripture, which
is there’s judgment for that. Because you can’t do it. You
can’t earn it. You can’t deserve it. You receive
judgment for that. But there’s hope. And there’s
grace, and there’s forgiveness, and there’s righteousness. By
turning to the One to do this, points. Solomon had just the most basic
understanding of what was to come. And now we have the greater
advantage than him because we’re on the other side of the cross
and we can look back to what has happened. That Jesus has
come and lived in our place and died for his people and conquered
sin and death and the resurrection and ascended and ever rose to
receive from us. And if you believe him for that
and the one to whom this table points, then you can have good news and
that promise that there is now no condemnation for those who
are in Christ Jesus. So I want to press that into
you. Do you believe Him? Do you believe Him? If you do,
you’ll love Him. you’ll learn your life will begin
to take on issue. Not because you’ll be motivated
by guilt or begrudging obligation, but out of gratitude and thankfulness
to His great mercy to you in the gospel. Amen. Let’s pray
together. Father, we thank you for your
word, and we pray that You would apply it to our soul, for it
does not return away. You draw us to the amazing grace
of our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. We pray this all in the
name of Him who came such a distance for us, our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.