Grief That Makes Us Glad | Ecclesiastes 6:10-7:24 (10-15-2023)

Solomon is teaching about the importance of wisdom and how it can be gained through adversity. He emphasizes the value of having a good reputation and the significance of death over birth. He suggests that going to a funeral can be more beneficial than going to a party. He also highlights the importance of sorrow and grief in developing wisdom and character. Solomon encourages us to embrace adversity and learn from it, rather than seeking a life of ease and comfort. Ultimately, he teaches that adversity humbles us and helps us trust in God, leading to a heart of wisdom. Well, if you do have your Bibles, you grab them and make your way to the book of Ecclesiastes. So we continue this series through this wonderful book, full of wisdom, and for this morning we will be in Ecclesiastes 6 and 7. But to get us going, I'll just read the first 13 verses of Ecclesiastes 7, verses 1 through 13. And these are the words of the true and the living God. A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death better than the day of birth. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of the fools is in the house of mirth. It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools, for as the crapping of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools. This also is vanity. Surely oppression drives the wise into madness, and a bribe corrupts the heart. Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the heart of fools. Say not, why were the former days better than these? For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. Wisdom is good with an inheritance, and an advantage to those who see the sun. For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money, and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it. Consider the work of God. Who can make straight what He has made crooked? When the grass withers and the fire fades, let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, indeed we confess as we just read, who can make straight what You have made crooked, that You, and to You, and through You, and by You are all things that come to pass. And so here we are as Your people. Teach us to humble ourselves before You, to hear the Word of the Lord, to increase in the fear of the Lord that we might get a heart of wisdom. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Amen, you may be seated. Well, I can recall as a child, particularly on longer road trips, we would find creative games to pass away the time. And one such game was a game called, Would You Rather? As the title implies, this game poses to a person the question of, would you rather? And then it finishes it with absurd options. For instance, would you rather go without shampoo for the rest of your life, or toothpaste for the rest of your life? Would you rather have a hook for a hand, or a peg for a leg? Would you rather travel by helicopter, or by horse? Notice when boys are playing, the game gets a little more gruesome. Something like, would you rather be drowned alive, or boiled alive? In a similar way, this is actually what Solomon sets before us this morning, though his version is no game, it's far more serious, because he's going to test your wisdom. For instance, he's going to ask, would you rather go to the house of laughter, or to the house of grieving? Would you rather be rich, or have a good reputation? Would you rather live in the present moment, or go back to those good old days? Would you rather go to a birthday party, or to a funeral? And you can sense these are not trivial questions, as Solomon's goal is to show us the way of wisdom that often travels the road of adversity. Because if you remember from last week, we covered the problem of prosperity. The contrary to popular thought, prosperity is not always a good thing. It's not an unqualified good. It comes with certain liabilities and dangers to the soul. And prosperity might even be a camouflaged curse if we don't have the wisdom to receive it. Well, likewise, the preacher says today that contrary to popular thought, adversity is not necessarily a bad thing. Adversity is not an unqualified evil. Adversity is often the means by which God grows us. I think most of us would agree with that, that it's the hard times that mature us. It's through the furnace of affliction and adversity that we are the most refined. It's not the easy times, but the difficult times that sculpt our spiritual muscles. And yet, even though we know that to be true, if given the choice, we would still prefer a life of ease and comfort and levity. Well, this morning, Solomon is going to show you the advantages to adversity and how we are to get a heart of wisdom in the house of mourning. And so we'll walk through this great text in two very simple parts. We'll just look firstly at wisdom's excellence, and then we'll look at wisdom's excess. And all with the main point that adversity humbles us to trust our God so that we might walk in the fear of the Lord. So the end of chapter 6, verse 10, it sets the tone for us. It says that if man gets into a wisdom wrestling match, he's always going to lose against somebody who is stronger than he, namely God. And typical of Solomon's question, verse 12, he says, well, who knows then what is good for man? And so the first 15 verses of chapter 7 basically give a kind of answer to that question. And so let's look at wisdom's excellence, because Solomon now rattles off a number of proverbs that say this is man's better portion. Choose this portion if you have the option. For instance, verse 1, a good name is better than precious ointment. Precious ointment was a costly, rare luxury in ancient Israel. Ointments that were spiced with myrrh or frankincense, that would take considerable time and skill and labor to produce them. And so it is with producing a good name or a good reputation. A good name can only be built over long periods of time, with consistent integrity and uprightness. And of course, the tragic flip side is that it only takes a matter of moments to tear down what took years and years to be built. Kids, just think of building a house. It takes months and months to construct a house. And yet a tragic event like a fire or a hurricane could tear that house down in just a matter of moments. And kids, so it is with your name, with your reputation. And so it's a sobering thought for us that every word that we speak, every action that we perform is either promoting or demoting our character. And it's all the more sobering because we want to keep a good name not simply for our own personal glory, but because as Christians, we bear, we represent the name Jesus Christ. And one way to keep a good name is to keep in mind the end of the story, and the verse continues to say, that better the day of death than the day of birth. And you see this confidence in the Apostle Paul, who welcomed his own death as a great gain, that he could rejoice and say, I have kept the faith, I have fought the good fight, I have finished my race, and so sweet is the day of my death as I enter into glory. And the way to get there is by being more and more acquainted with sorrow rather than feasting. Verse 2 puts it this way, better to go to the house of mourning than the house of feasting. This is the end of all mankind. In our parlance, we would simply say, better to go to the tombstones than the bar. Better to go to a funeral than the pub. That death has more to teach us about life than does birth. The best school is the school of sorrow, and the classroom of the cemetery. And you just sense how contrary this is to the world's way, that it does everything it can to deny, shun, and ignore the reality of death. Death is taboo. It's not talked about. Open caskets are now quite rare today. A child could go years, maybe even decades, before his first encounter with death. And when it is, it's very sterile. It's a very controlled environment. And Solomon says, better the day of death. Now his point is not fixate on death with a kind of morbid anxiety. No, you see his point there at the end of verse 2. The living will lay it to hearts. They will store it up. Theologians are admittedly an odd bunch. They're odd ducks. But you may know, many of the great theologians would often spend their quiet hours just sitting in a cemetery, just walking amongst the tombstones. Because it was a way to be confronted with the reality of one's death. For the reality of death is what teaches us to number our days. It forces us to ask the right questions. How then shall I live? Have I drifted into living for today, living for the moment? Am I living in light of eternity? And it just says you don't wait until you're dehydrated to start drinking water. It's too late at that point. In the same way, you don't wait until you're deathbed to learn about death. It's while you are living that you prepare for the art of dying well. And that's how it continues in verse 3. Rather than the positive mental attitude we hear so much about, Solomon instead prescribes sorrow. He's saying sorrow is better than laughter. Sadness of face makes the heart glad. The wise are on the house of mourning. There's a kind of sorrow that's good for the heart. Now again, keep in mind, Solomon is not saying that we're to be a morose, downcast, perpetually depressed people. The church has certainly known its people who think the gloomier they are, the godlier they are. Now recall, this is the same man who says, there's a time you should be found laughing and feasting. Rather, his point is there is a kind of grief, though, that makes us glad. When we are grieved, for instance, over our sin with godly sorrow, that is good for the heart. When we are grieved by evil, when we are grieved by the enemy of death, that is good for the heart. In those moments, we realize that we grieve, but not as those without hope. Such grieving is a growing pain. Kids, you should know right now that not all pain is bad. Of course, there's bad pain. You might trip and fall. You might have a bad accident. But know, too, as you grow, you will have growing pains. Your bones, your joints will start to ache as you grow. That's a good sign of growth. And kids, it's the very same for your spiritual growth. The discipline can be painful. Correction can be painful. Sorrow can be painful. But these are good and necessary pains for your spiritual growth. In this case, it is true. No pain, no gain. Even as verse 5 says, as painful as it is, the wise man would rather hear a good rebuke from a good friend than listen to the top 40 songs on his playlist. But such lyrics will not make him wiser, and they probably will make him dumber. But a wiser buke is good for the soul. And just compare that to the fleeting folly of laughter in verse 6. It's described as this crackling thorns under the pot. You can see, as for firewood goes, that thorns would make for a very fleeting fire. And it would have lots of light but very little heat. As quick as it ignites, it flickers out. And so is the fool's laughter. And you see this today. The standard comedian, average talk-show host, run-of-the-mill comedy will make light of anything and everything simply to get a laugh. Nothing is sacred other than getting a cheap laugh. And such laughs work like a salve upon man's conscience. A man doesn't need to worry about things of eternal importance. He doesn't need to worry about his death. But as the Lord Jesus said, Woe to you who laugh now, you shall weep later. And so the better path is to mourn now so that man can laugh later with joy. Verse 8 sets this in perspective. It says, Better is the end of a thing than its beginning. Raising up children is exactly this way. How exciting to bring home a newborn baby. And it is exciting. But there's not much commentary or depth at that point. The baby eats, sleeps, and poops. The entire biography can be summed up in three words. But of course, parents know this, how awesome it is to see their child go from a sapling all the way to an oak of righteousness over time. That's far harder, but also far better to see a thing through to the very end. So this encourages us to patiently play the long game because this is exactly how our God works, isn't it? God's kingdom is the prime example of this. Who would have looked at those 12 obscure, uneducated disciples and thought to ourselves, Oh, yes, surely this good news will fill up the entire globe one day. This good news will span the entire world. This mustard seed will grow to be the largest of trees. So we are to be a people who have the patience to play the long game and not despise the day of small beginnings. Verse 8 and 9 commend to us that patient spirit. It says this, the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Do not be quick to become angry. Anger lodges in the heart of fools. We're reminded, once again, as to the relationship between pride and anger, that unrighteous anger so often is little more than our pride just boiling over, revealing that we think in this moment we deserve better than these present circumstances, that we even know better than God's governance over our lives. And one way to grow this patience is to check our hearts to not nurse nostalgia. Verse 10 puts it this way. Do not say, why were the former days better than these? It is not from wisdom that you ask this. It's so easy, isn't it, to think, ah, the good old days. We saw this in Ezra when they built that second temple. The older generation, instead of rejoicing, they wept, they lamented, oh, this is not as good as the first temple. And you too might say the same thing. Ah, my life was so much better back when I was younger, back when I was healthier, when my children were cute and little. My marriage seemed so much better 10, 15, 20 years ago, but it's lost its luster. So much of us may lament our nation's decline and we say, ah, things were so much better in our nation than they are today. Back when a boy was a boy and a girl was a girl, things were that simple. And Solomon says, this is not of wisdom that you ask this. And now to be clear, Solomon is not saying that the former days weren't better. Indeed, maybe they were better, but you see his point. Do not ruminate, consider, do not meditate, do not linger over these things. If you do, you are setting yourself up for resentment and bitterness. You are challenging God's plans as if you are the judge of history, as if you are the armchair quarterback of all things, implicitly saying, God, don't you realize things are not supposed to be this way? So Solomon says, put that off and don't dwell on the past. Instead, dwell on this great truth of verse 14. In the day of prosperity, be joyful. In the day of adversity, consider God has made one as well as the other so that man cannot find what comes after him. So last week we saw, we are to receive prosperity with an open palm when it falls from heaven, but so too with adversity. It was this that Job said to his wife, shall we receive good from God, but not evil? Reared Kipling, the great poet, once said, if you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same, then you will be a man, my son. And so how is the Christian to have this manly courage? Well, we do know it is faith that works this patience. It is trust in God's fatherly care over our lives. The great Puritan, Thomas Watson, once said that God never takes away any comfort from His people without giving them something better. Do you believe that? God would never take away any comfort from His people without giving them something better. Now it may not be immediately or obviously better, but it will be better in the end if our God is the God who sums up all things in Jesus Christ. And that means wherever you are, whatever season you are in, no matter how high, no matter how low, you are exactly where God would have you be. If you are not convinced, just consider this question of verse 13, consider the work of God. Who can make straight what God has made crooked? Recall the analogy we spoke of weeks ago. I hand you a bent lead pipe and I tell you, bend it back straight. And you try and you try and you try, but you just don't have the strength. Maybe you keep on trying. You try so hard, you might even injure yourself. You pull a muscle, you strain a joint. And Solomon is saying it is not for man to straighten out the adversity under the sun. It is for man to submit to God's perfect, all-wise, loving, fatherly care over our lives, including the day of adversity. For it is in these crooked moments, isn't it, that we find ourselves saying, ah, if I just had the power to change this, to straighten this out, to remove this suffering, to change this hardship, why have the lines fallen for me in this crooked way? Solomon says, consider the work of God. To consider, of course, means much more than just take a glance at. No, it means know by faith that God is in the heavens and He does as He pleases. The secret things belong to the Lord, and to search out the unsearchable is as foolish as it is dangerous. And so what is it that will guard our hearts and still our soul? Verse 12 says, the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money. It preserves one's life. The money offers great protection, doesn't it? Wealth can shield you from an economic disaster. If you're sick, you can afford the best health care that money can buy. If you have legal trouble, you can hire the best lawyer that money can buy. Money answers everything. And Solomon says, wisdom is like that, but only better. It preserves the soul. It teaches us to number our days. It says, consider God's work, and above all, in the furnace of affliction, wisdom can honestly say, it is well with my soul. So there's a word on wisdom's excellence. Let's now look at wisdom's excess. We sometimes say that too much of a good thing can become a bad thing, because if your parents say, eat your broccoli, just say, pastor said, too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing. It almost sounds like Solomon says the same thing here, very confusingly. But on both sides of his mouth, he now says, seemingly, too much wisdom may be toxic. Verse 16, do not be overly righteous. Don't make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Now, at first glance, this is hard to square with Scripture. God's Word gives us every indication that we are to pursue righteousness and full throttle get wisdom without any hesitation. Our struggle is never that we are too righteous or too wise. And so what are we to make of this? Is Solomon just saying, well, settle for average? You know, instead of books like my utmost for his highest, we should write books like my mediocrity for his highest. Well, no, I don't think that's what Solomon has in mind. This is not a true righteousness, but a kind of self-righteousness. You could imagine the tightly wound, sanctimonious, self-serious Christian. Every phrase they utter is a Bible verse. Every comment is a kind of strange Scripture reference. If they miss Bible reading for one day, they consider themselves surely hell bound. And so they go and repent, only to find themselves repenting of their repentance, always imprisoned by their self-inflicted piety, their self-imposed standard, knowing little of anything of God's grace. We, of course, see some of this with the Pharisees, piety, tithing right down to mint and cumin. And yet it was a piety to their own destruction. One of the Puritans compared this self-righteousness to be like a dead fish on a beach under the moonlight, that it simultaneously both shines and stinks. And so Solomon is not condemning true righteousness, but this veneer of righteousness. Is it not true that the more we forget the gospel, the more we diminish the righteousness of Jesus Christ freely given to us, we should really start to believe in our own salvation, our own works, our own righteousness? You see it even in this preceding verse, verse 15, this vain idea. There's a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness. There's a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evil doing. It was exactly this that Job's friends forgot, wasn't it? They looked at Job, then they looked at Job's circumstances and concluded, well, based off these circumstances, surely you are an unrighteous man. Bad things happen to bad people. Good things happen to good people. It's just that simple in God's economy. As much as we know better than that, is it not true we still fall into believing that the right doctrine in our heads, even the right living, puts God in our debt? When something bad happens to us, we might have that thought, wouldn't we? Ah, I bet. If I had just been a little more righteous, God would not have struck me with this affliction. Or still worse, the conceited thought. Doesn't God know how righteous I have been, how much I have served Him, how much I have done for Him? Who does God think that He is? And Solomon says, no, bad things certainly can befall the righteous and the wicked can do just fine in this life. Even in verse 17, you see this counsel, be not overly wicked. Now again, are we to take Him to mean, you can be wicked, just do it in moderation, right? Don't go full pagan on me. No, no, Scripture is clear. The smallest sin, the least sin deserves eternal judgment. Or rather, His point is, self-righteousness hastens death and so too does wickedness hasten death. And so we're right to ask the question, well, what is going to avoid these two ditches, these two pitfalls of hyper-righteousness and hyper-wickedness? Solomon says, it's nothing less than the fear of the Lord. You see verse 18, he says very plainly, very clearly, the one who fears God shall come out from both of them. Notice the fear of the Lord avoids the extremes of overly righteous and overly wicked. Indeed I think it's one of the hardest things in the Christian life, is that we so often bounce back and forth between legalism and then lawlessness. One day we grit our teeth and we say, today I'm going to be the righteous person in the room. Today is the day we're going to get it all right, we say to ourselves. And then of course, we fail. And so the next day, we give ourselves over to a little licentiousness, a little lawlessness and we feel guilty. And so the next day, we double down, we grit our teeth even harder to live up to our righteous standards and we just bounce back and forth between these two false ways of living. And Solomon says, stop wearing yourself out. The straight path that avoids these two poles is the fear of the Lord. The refreshing simplicity that rests not on what does man think? What does my neighbor think? But simply, what does my God think? What does God say? And for the new covenant Christian, what a privileged position that the fear of the Lord comes to its fullest expression in the Lord Jesus Christ. Because Christ is the answer to legalism and Christ is the answer to lawlessness. Because in Christ, the Christian is set free, isn't he? From the curse of the law, from the condemnation of sin, set free by the Spirit to obey and out of a genuine love for Jesus Christ, to walk in a manner pleasing to the Lord. And the more and more you behold Jesus Christ, you see how just ridiculous, how offensive our self-righteousness really is. Perish the idea that we could ever add something, anything to the perfect work of our Savior on the cross. And so too, the more we behold Jesus Christ, the more and more we realize just how much He has set us free to walk in a manner of obedience. Even as verse 20 declares, puts it squarely in perspective, surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins. There is none righteous, none good, not even one. The reason man sins is not because of his upbringing, his lack of education, his chemical imbalances. No, the reason man sins is because it is his nature to do so. And if you're here this morning and not a Christian, know what you already know deep down and that is that no one can claim perfection. No one can come before God boasting that to fail in just one part of God's law is to fail in all of it. And that is why Jesus Christ is the only one qualified to be the Savior of mankind. And what's so wonderful is how Solomon would have this truth refine our relationships. You see it in verse 21. Following that thought, he says, therefore, don't take to heart all the things that people say. When you hear your servant cursing you, your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others. A life under the sun means at some point you are going to hear an insult directed upon your person. And we often have the most visceral of personal reactions when our ears burn, right? How dare they? I can't believe they would say such a thing about me. I would never say such a thing. I would never stoop to such a level of slander. I always take the moral high ground. And Solomon says, no, get off your soapbox and check your self-perception. You well know you have done something similar. At some point you have said things in the moment that you did not mean and that you would never say to that person's face. Don't be so overly righteous. And what that perspective allows us to do is two things. Firstly, to not be so easily offended, to have a little bit more of a thick skin, as they say. And like Proverbs puts it, it's the prudent man's glory to ignore an insult. He can shrug it off. Even the humility to say, yeah, I'm sure I'm guilty of something similar in my time. And secondly, rather than holding a grudge, this wisdom allows us to be gracious, charitable to one another, quick to forgive one another, to keep short accounts with one another. It's like this lubricant of love amidst all the friction of sinners when we relate to one another. Ephesians 5 says it so perfectly, be kind, tenderhearted to one another, forgiving each other as God in Christ has forgiven you. And you can just hear that logic of forgiveness. As God has forgiven me of my many, no wait, all of my offenses against the all-holy God, I can forgive my brother's rather small, rather slight offenses against me. So Solomon concludes this survey of wisdom, that wisdom has this great purpose, this great value, but it's also got its defined limits. You hear it in verse 23. He sums it up saying, all this I have tested by wisdom. And I've said I will be wise, but it was far from me. That which has been is far off and deep, very deep. Who can find it out? Implied answer, no one can find it out. It's just too deep. It's too unfathomable. Much of wisdom we've seen throughout Ecclesiastes is knowing wisdom's limitation and knowing just how little we know. Anyone who's done any kind of serious academic or athletic pursuit knows this feeling. You start out in your field and you think, man, I know a lot. I'm pretty smart. I'm pretty educated. I'm pretty talented. And then as you go along and you start to learn a little more, you start to advance a little more, the more you realize, oh wow, I actually know very little. In fact, give me 10 lifetimes and I will not know all that there is to know. And so it is with wisdom. One of the wisest things we can know is that even wisdom will not ever tell us everything that we need or want to know. And so what is man to do is to enjoy his daily bread as well as eat the bread of adversity, knowing that both come from our Father's hand in His provision for us. So as we close, let us lay up in our hearts one thing Solomon would have us know from our adversity. And that is quite simply to walk in the fear of the Lord, which simply means trusting God that my God, my Father, He creates the day of prosperity as much as He prepares the day of adversity. And friends, nowhere is that clearer. Nowhere is that fuller than in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, that as the nations raged against Him, as the peoples plotted in vain against Him, as false accusations are hurled against Him amidst the cries of Calvary, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That there, that was the most sorrowful thing of all, that was the greatest evil of all, that was the greatest sin of all, all gave way to what is the most joyful thing ever in human history, that the man of sorrows and the man of heaven are one and the same. And what that does for us is that that ought to give the Christian great courage to face adversity, great steadfastness to not shrink back from the day of affliction, to face down the house of mourning and grieving and actually to grow wiser from it, because in Christ the Christian can truly say, to live is gain, to die is Christ, that the Christian grieves and he will know mourning, but he never grieves as one without hope, because Christ is risen, He is risen indeed, let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, we do praise You for we consider who can make straight what You have made crooked, for You are the God who is in the heavens, who does as He pleases. We praise You, though, that You are the very same God who has revealed Your love for us and that while yet sinners, Christ died for us, that You who did not spare Your own Son, how will You not also with Him freely give us all things. And so we do pray, Father, teach us to go to the house of mourning, to the house of grief, that we might get a heart of wisdom. For indeed, we do not know all things, but You have shown us the end of the story, because Jesus Christ has risen as the firstfruits and that all those who are in Him have truly died and have in one sense already risen. And so we pray we would live as such, in Christ's name, amen.