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Preoccupied Joy | Ecclesiastes 5:8-6:9 (10-8-2023: Mark Evans)
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In this sermon, the speaker discusses the concepts of oppression, justice, and wealth as described in the book of Ecclesiastes. They explain that oppression is a result of a bureaucratic system where officials are constantly being monitored and there is no accountability. The solution to this is a committed leader who prioritizes justice. The speaker then discusses the vanity of wealth and how the love of money can never bring true satisfaction. They emphasize the importance of seeking joy and fulfillment in Jesus Christ rather than material possessions. If you do have your Bibles, do grab them and make your way to Ecclesiastes chapter 5 as we continue in our wonderful series through this book. We find ourselves today in Ecclesiastes 5.8, and we'll go through 6.9 for this morning. And to get us going, I will read Ecclesiastes 5.8 through to verse 12...5.8 through verse 12. And these are the words of the true and the living God. If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed at the matter, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them. But this is a gain for a land in every way, a king committed to cultivated fields. He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income. This also is vanity. When goods increase, they increase who eat them. What advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, for the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep. And the grass withers and the flower fades. Let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, we do praise You for Your Word that is living, that is active, that is sharper than any two-edged sword. And so we do pray, Father, that You would give us soft hearts, that You would give us ears to hear, that You would give us the eyes to see and help us see the fullness of wealth that is found in Christ and in Christ alone, that You would turn us away from serving any kind of vain idols, and You would turn us to serve You, the living and the true God. In Christ's name we pray, amen. Amen. And now you may be seated. Well, let's begin with a riddle. Kids, by all means, join in and see if you can guess this riddle. What does a grave, a field under rainfall, and a fire all have in common? What do these three things have in common? To be sure, this is not an easy riddle, but if you're all familiar with Proverbs, you may already begin to have an answer in mind. What does a grave, a field receiving rain, and a fire all have in common? Well, time is up as Proverbs solves this riddle for us by saying that these are all things that are never satisfied. They never say, that's enough, I'm full. You've surely experienced this. Maybe you've been around a campfire, for instance. As long as you keep throwing logs on the campfire, the fire will keep on burning. The fire never says, okay, that's enough wood for me today. No, the fire has an unending appetite. On a more morbid note, so too does the grave. The grave never stops to say, you know what, I'm full for today. No more dead bodies, please, I just can't hold anymore. No, the grave opens wide its mouth, and it never says enough. Well, this morning, Solomon is going to add one more thing to this riddle, that like the grave, like the fire that never says enough, Solomon would also add, so too is the love of riches, that he who loves money will never be satisfied with money. Like the grave or the fire, such a man would never...once a man opens up his soul, no matter the number of possessions, he would never say, that's enough. And so, as only Solomon can do, he's going to expose for us this morning the utter vanity of this love. Now you might already be saying, well, this certainly does not apply to me, for I am not rich. No one would look at my bank account and envy it, but not so fast. Because listen carefully, Solomon is not actually addressing the wealthy person per se, but rather the love of wealth. Not so much riches, but the desire to be rich. And so indeed, such a person could be wealthy, but of course he could also be quite poor. He could be middle class and still have the love of wealth lodged in his heart. And we're also right to not limit Solomon's wisdom merely to the monetary. Indeed, this truth would apply to the many things that we set our hearts upon, be it our accomplishments, our status, our securities, even good things like relationships and family. Jesus taught us how to rightly order our loves when He said, anyone who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And so as much as Solomon will have us face down our vain idols, the good news is that he does not abandon us there. He will also have us fine-tune our hearts to seek first the kingdom of God and the everlasting joy that is found in Jesus Christ alone. And so we'll look at this text in two simple portions. We'll look at the vanity of poverty and then the vanity of prosperity, all with a very simple point that joy, true joy, is a gift from the hand of the Father. It's to be received and never earned, a joy found in Jesus Christ, ultimately. And before we get to that joy, Solomon, as he loves to do, is going to have us pass through a valley of vanity. And you see it right away. Looking at verse 8, Solomon says, when you see the oppression of the poor, don't be amazed. Don't be dumbfounded. Don't be shocked by such oppression. And now to be clear, Solomon is not saying that oppression and injustice are no big deal. Remember this is the same man who in Proverbs says that whoever oppresses a poor man insults his maker, that to oppress the poor is to slap God in the face, as it were. So Solomon is not excusing oppression, but he is explaining it. Why do they exist? And his explanation is very perceptive. You see as verse 8 continues, he says, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them. Now we don't have this problem in America, but believe it or not, in other countries they can get bogged down in a bureaucratic wasteland. You're laughing good. All right. So Solomon shows us here the correlation, indeed the causation, between oppression and this never-ending bureaucratic ladder, because one official has one higher over him, and there's someone looking over his shoulder, and someone looking over his shoulder, and on and on it goes until you have officials stacked up to the sky. And of course, the higher up on that ladder you are, the easier it is to skim profits off the top, and the lower on the ladder you are, the more you lose out. If you've ever been at a large company before, you've surely experienced this. You might have a great idea, and so you go to your boss, boss, let me tell you this great idea. And his response is, let me check with my boss. And that boss says, great idea, let me check with my boss, and that boss says, let me check with my boss. And of course, before long, your idea has floated off into another world. And so from Washington, D.C. to the workplace, bureaucracies begin to reward looking out for one's self. Now, if that seems counterproductive to you, you would be right. The great Thomas Sowell once said, you'll never understand bureaucracy, because to bureaucrats, nature is everything, and outcomes are nothing. Results, particularly results that are just, simply do not matter, and there is no accountability. And so Solomon here calls out its vanity, its unproductive nature, that oppression begins to be baked into the system. It's often noted that a lot of good could be done right now, at this very moment. Good on things like our economic waste, our national debt, our national defense, the welfare state, even abortion itself could be righted were there not miles and miles of red tape in its way. And so the great irony is that the world's gut reaction so often to solving oppression is that we need actually more bureaus, more departments, more regulation in order to solve these problems. And yet, Solomon says, no, that actually is part of the problem, that the system is facilitating the oppression, and justice begins to fall by the wayside. And so by contrast, Solomon's solution to this oppression, this bloated bureaucracy is in one word, commitment. And you see such commitment embodied in a king in verse 9. Solomon says this, but by contrast, this is a gain for a land in every way, a king committed to cultivated fields. Such a king would be a blessing to his people and to the land. As Proverbs says, the fallow land of the poor would yield much crop, but it is swept away through injustice. So the poor man just may have 40 acres and a plow, and have the ability to start producing crop and have a better life. That potential may be there, and it only takes a little injustice and a broken system to squash the little man. And so Solomon commends here strong leadership with this resolve to do what needs to be done. The great Edmund Burke once said that all it takes for evil to occur is for good men to do nothing. Just sit back and do nothing, and the weeds of oppression will surely bloom. But a great gain, an increase could come from the commitment of a king. Deuteronomy spoke of God's king, that he would have a copy of God's law always on him. He would read it. He would imbibe it so that he would learn how to rule with righteousness and wisdom. And so even as we saw last week, the Christian's ultimate hope is never to be placed in any one particular ruler or reign. It is still good and right for us to long for earthly leaders today who would embody this commitment to lead by God's righteousness. Because of course, for an earthly ruler to do so, it'd be nothing more than to imitate the rule of the heavenly Lord Jesus Christ. Because the rule and reign of Christ is life-giving, and his leadership is like the sun shining on a cloudless morning. It's like rain that falls to the ground that would make the grass grow. He upholds the cause of the poor and of the oppressed. And so says Solomon, long for this commitment. Well, as we've witnessed poverty, it's turned next to a disease that most Westerners are afflicted by, the illness of affluenza, as we look now at the vanity of prosperity. And Solomon shows us that to love money is to forfeit the ability to enjoy money. Rather than money being a tool to glorify God and to enjoy, it becomes a harsh master to be served. You see it very plainly there in verse 10. Solomon says, he who loves money will not be satisfied with money. It's a very simple, critical truth all throughout Scripture that whatever we set our heart upon, whatever we give our heart over to, will never satisfy us in the end. As Solomon has already masterfully showed us, if we make a God of pleasure, we will not have pleasure. If we make a God of self-indulgence, we will never be full. Even if we take good things and we make those good things ultimate, then we will be serving two masters. As the Lord Jesus so clearly said, if wealth is your master, then I am not. But my guess is that while none of us here are aspiring billionaires, our default assumption tends to be that a little more money would mean more freedom, more money, more comfort, more money, more happiness, certainly more money, more security. But Solomon's about to show us here, no, more money, more problems. And the coalesce is going to walk us through no less than five problems that arise out of this love of money and possessions. We see, firstly, how wealth accumulation only leads to wealth consumption. Verse 11, he says, when goods increase, they increase who eat them, as more money brings with it more assets, more managers, more accountants, more lawyers, more moochers, more maintenance, and of course, more spending and more taxes. The more we have, others will try to get it, like moths, just patiently consuming what we have. And so Solomon poses there one of his oh-so-great questions. He asks you, what advantage does their owner have but to see them with his eyes? Say you get a new house, someone comes over and you say, let me give you a tour. Let me show you the new house. There'll be nothing wrong with that. But you walk around, you show them this room, here's the nook, here's the custom walk-in closet, here's the media room. At the end of the tour, that's it, it's over. You might say, do you want to take another tour? And they say, no, once you've seen one house, you've seen them all. And Solomon says, you just used up your one advantage, gazing at your possessions. So increased goods brings increased consumption. It also increases restlessness, restlessness. You see it in verse 12, sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he's little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep. An investing cliche is that you're putting your money to work for you. Even while you sleep, your money can still be at work. Solomon turns that around and he says, no, rather than money working for the man, man is working for the money. So much so, he can't even get a good night of sleep because his mind is always on his money. In the West, we now have an entire industry dedicated to sleep, from books to apps to doctors to drugs, all to help us get our eight hours. It seems that we no longer know how to sleep. And yet, if you went to a poor third world country and you just asked a simple farmer who labored all day by the sweat of his brow, and he goes to bed tired, exhausted, and hungry, and he asked him, what is your sleep remedy? What is your special sleep formula? He would look at you, you know, what is this sleep problem that you speak of? Because he sleeps just fine on his dirt floor. And so you see the clear contrast. This rich man has a full belly and yet empty sleep. has an empty belly and yet he can be full of sleep. The event of sleep is quite interesting when you think about it. If you take eight hours a night, which nobody gets, but if you take eight hours a night and you just do the simple math, you realize that our God has purposed that roughly a third of our life is meant to be unconscious. Our God has so determined that a huge chunk of our life, we are meant to be comatose. And the A-type productive personality may want to challenge God on this very point. We might quietly shake our fist at God. God, don't you know we could be so much more productive? We could get so much more done if only you created us to require less sleep. The sleep is a great example of God being God and you being the creature. As the psalmist says, that he who keeps Israel, he never slumbers, he never sleeps. He who keeps you will not slumber. And so you see, something as simple as laying your head down on a pillow is an act of faith. That where your sleep is, there will your treasure be. The more the Christian embraces the truth that my God does not sleep, the better off he can sleep and put off that anxiety that so often speaks the loudest in the quiet of night. As the psalmist says, God gives his beloved sleep. So consumption, restlessness, a third problem of prosperity, it is short-lived. It is short-lived. It was about a week ago, my daughter and I were discussing the Great Depression for a school project. We got on the topic of that great stock market crash of 1929 that plunged countless Americans into immediate poverty. It was understandably shocking to her that so many people could lose so much in such a short amount of time. And Solomon says, don't be surprised by that. Verse 13, there's this grievous evil that I have seen under the sun. were kept by their owner to his hurt, and those riches were lost in a bad venture. And now we should be clear, wisdom literature often points to the advantages of wealth and investing and saving. Scripture commends, hard work often brings wealth. The blessing of God makes rich. So the Bible knows nothing of a poverty ethic, so to speak. Wisdom literature is equally clear and adamant in pointing out the disadvantages, the dangers and the illusions of wealth. And you see one here, that what took a lifetime to accumulate is lost in a moment. One bad investment, bad venture capital, bad crypto, bad startup, bad IPO, and it is all lost. Something too big to fail, in fact, failed. Solomon says, this is nothing new. In his day, you could lose all of your wealth in a shipwreck at sea, or if your caravan was attacked and ransacked, it could all be gone in a moment. And yet we flatter ourselves in saying, well, sure, they didn't have the FDIC insurance that we have today. They didn't have the security of social security. And Solomon says, friend, that is a vain, delusional hope, until I make matters worse. Verse 14 says, this man who lost it all was a father to a son, and now he has nothing to pass on to the next generation. Again, to be clear, Solomon is not saying forsake financial planning, or don't save your money. Remember, this is the same man who tells parents, save up for your children, leave them a legacy. The point is rather to have the wisdom to recognize the vanity of it all, so that you know exactly where to deposit your money, and exactly where to deposit your heart. Scripture knows this all too well, that as our bank account starts to rise, it is our pride that so often rises with it. As Paul says, I charge the rich for this reason. Do not be haughty, do not be arrogant, but be rich towards God, that the smart money is in laying up treasures in heaven, and a true generosity where it cannot be lost. And Solomon continues on, he says next, even if you don't lose it all in a moment, we most certainly cannot take it with us. Verses 15 and 16 say, and make the point, that just as a man comes into the world, so he exits the world. Remember those famous words of Joe, naked I came into this world, and naked I depart. But Bill Gates, the Elon Musk of this world, will check out of life, as bankrupt and as penniless, as a ditch digger, and on top of it all, the ditch digger would have enjoyed better sleep along the journey. So we've seen the problems of consumption, restlessness, it is short lived. Fourthly, wealth can also be harmful when hoarded, harmful when hoarded. We tend to look at hoarding as kind of an extreme thing. I remember years ago, there was this popular TV show called Hoarders, and it gave the public this inside peek, and the people in their actual homes, who had this obsession of holding on to their stuff. So much so, it'd be from the floor all the way to their ceiling, you could even see inside of their home, because they just couldn't let go of their possessions. But such hoarding is not all that uncommon to fallen man. You might remember when Israel received manna from heaven, God told them, take only enough bread for one day. In other words, trust me for your daily bread, depend on me for your sustenance. And those who gathered little had no lack, and yet those who gathered much had nothing left over. Such holding on, such hoarding was actually toxic to their soul. And we often do likewise, don't we, to our own destruction. You see verse 17, the miser's lot, and what is one of the most pathetic of pictures. Solomon says there, all of his days he eats in darkness. And just listen to this three-course meal of despair. He feasts in vexation, in sickness, and thirdly, in anger, vexation. He eats the bread of anxious toil. He has bread, but he can't enjoy the daily bread, because his soul is always stirred. I wonder what the markets are doing today. Secondly, sickness, it's of course now common knowledge that the more stress, the more anxiety, the less the immune system can function. Now Proverbs, of course, is well ahead of modern medicine when it said that it is envy that makes the bones rot and decay. And thirdly, anger, and this helps us diagnose our anger. You might wonder, what would the rich possibly have to be angry about? They have everything that they need and more. But of course, what angers us is so often a great indicator of what is most important to us. When we think something is very important and it's not as it's supposed to be in our eyes, we are angered. You can recall from the book of Esther, when King Ahasuerus summoned Queen Vashti, saying, Come, show off your beauty, show off my treasure. She refused. King Ahasuerus was angered. To him, his trophy wife did not deliver the trophy, and he was quickly irritated and ignited. And so it is as we relate to our treasures, monetary or otherwise, that as we place them on a pedestal and when they fail to deliver what we hoped they would deliver, we are angered. Lastly, our fifth and final point, which is in many ways the capstone that sums up all the other points on the vanity of prosperity, and that is, it is ultimately unsatisfying. Man may have the whole world, but he can't enjoy it. You can skip to chapter 6, verse 2, it sums it up so plainly for us. God gives wealth, possessions and honor so that man lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him the power to enjoy it. Verse 3 says the same thing. Man may father a hundred children, live many years, but his soul is not satisfied with life's good things, nor is his appetite satisfied. Verse 7, once more, all the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied. All the fullness is there. There is no lack. All the stuff is there. No need is left unmet, and yet there is no satisfaction. And so Solomon makes a bold claim, even for Solomon this is a bold claim, that this dissatisfaction, it's so strong, it's so acute, he says at the end of verse 3, that a stillborn child is better off than the dissatisfied man. Now who among us would dare to agree with Solomon, that better to die at birth than to have lived with wealth and possessions and honor, yet with no joy? That is a bold claim. And if that's true, that overthrows the way that we relate to wealth, possessions and honor. If that's really true, that challenges the American dream. It challenges the desires of the heart and the priority of prosperity. But you see how Solomon backs up that bold claim at the end of verse 5, when he says that at least the stillborn child finds rest, his rest. Give the rich man a thousand years, twice over, and he will never find rest. But at least the stillborn has peace and calm and tranquility. I'm reminded of those words of Augustine, our hearts are restless until we find our rest in God. And that is what Solomon is trying to get us to see. A life full of all the accolades, all the striving, all the rewards, all the awards is no life at all. It's a restless life that has failed in the most basic thing, to glorify God and to enjoy Him. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, you surely know that life goes well until it doesn't. At some point, certainly not every day, not every week, maybe just a few moments in your life, at some point you'll stop and you'll wonder to yourself, what's it all about? What is the meaning of it all? Why is it so unsatisfying? Why does my striving never produce satisfaction? And friend, that is the right question to ask. Solomon is saying you will find no earthly answer to that question. Indeed, this is how God has made the world, because He has made it for Himself, that He alone is all satisfying, a joy and fullness of life that comes to you only by faith in Jesus Christ. Well true to form, Solomon has given us a full dose of vanity this morning. I trust you see clearly what we are to put off, like the rich man in Luke's gospel who believed life consists in the abundance of possessions. We can be tempted to look at our wealth, build bigger barns, build bigger stockpiles, not realizing our soul may be required this very night. And so Paul says, put off this love of money. And we can, of course, broaden that out to include any and all forms of idolatry. What is idolatry? Calvin once said that the human heart is an idol factory, that we can make an idol out of anything and everything, right? And as we just confessed, it's nothing more than placing your trust in place of or alongside of God. We can idolize our accomplishments, our appearance, our possessions, our status, even good things like family or ministry can be idolized. That voice starts to sound in one's head, if only I had this, if only I looked like that, if only I could do this, if only my family was like that, it would be my salvation. And Solomon says, put that off. Why would you spend your days eating the bread of anxious toil in darkness? So he has shown us our sickness, but will he show us our health? Surely there is a better way to live. Well, once again, he surprises us with his conclusion. I would, at this point, expect Solomon to say, given how bad material things are, things like money, just avoid them at all costs. No, instead, he surprises us because he says, find joy, actually find joy in the stuff, in the things of this world. As we've said before, you'll get no hyper-spirituality out of Solomon. Solomon does not say, give away all your things and go into the closet, go into the desert and become a monk. No, instead, he says, receive the gifts and receive them gladly. I'm going to go back to chapter 5, and you can see this truth clearly in verse 18. Solomon concludes, behold, I have seen to be good and fitting to eat, to drink, and to find enjoyment in all the toil under the sun. And notice the joy is not apart from the things, it's in the things themselves. Find joy in your eating, find joy in your daily bread, find joy even in your toil. And a fair objection would be, Solomon, wait a minute, he has just proved how fleeting, how vain these things are. Man does not have the ability to find joy in these things. We will screw it up. And Solomon says, that's exactly right. Man does not have the ability to make his own joy. Joy is not of man's doing, it is the gift of God. And you see it in verse 19, he says exactly that. To whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, to accept his lot, to rejoice in his toil, this, friend, is the gift of God. And you see the double gift of God. God gives not only the wealth, but the ability to enjoy the wealth. God gives not only the possessions, but the ability to enjoy the possessions. God gives the work and the power to enjoy the work. Joy is not of man's work, it is by grace alone. And you can already begin to see how those five problems of riches are all dethroned in Jesus Christ, the true treasure. In Christ we find our true rest, our true contentment. In Christ we find true generosity. In Christ we have ultimate and eternal satisfaction. And it's precisely that that we so easily forget. Just before Israel went into the promised land, Moses warned them. He said, okay, you guys are going to build houses. Your wealth is going to multiply. Your herds and flocks, they're going to multiply. You're going to eat and you're going to be full. And in that moment, be very careful, lest you say in your heart, my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth. But you see, they fell for the lie that every good and perfect gift comes from man's strength and man's mind. They forgot the simple truth. Man cannot receive even one thing unless it is given to him from heaven. Our God so often tests us with afflictions and hardships. It's also rightly said that God tests us with prosperity, a test that Western Christians often face and fail. When you receive the gifts of God to the glory of the gift giver, parents, you know this well. You give your child a gift. Of course, what you're really giving is yourself. The child may seize that gift, run off and not say thank you and you never see them again for a moment. And this is what we do with God. We crumble under our persecution, but we gloat in our prosperity. And Cotton Mather said it well when he said, faithfulness gave birth to prosperity and the daughter ate the mother. And so Moses' final word to Israel was, remember the Lord your God. He is the one who gives you power to get wealth. And so as we close, let's lay up just one word in our heart from this great section and that is the Christian's preoccupied joy, preoccupied joy. To be preoccupied is a very powerful thing, right? We often see preoccupation in its worst forms. We're preoccupied with our devices. We can be so engrossed that we forget to look our children in the face. We may not see a red light when we're driving. We may burn hours in front of a screen because we're so preoccupied. But of course, there's a good kind of preoccupation and it's this that Solomon speaks of in verse 20. He says there, God keeps us occupied with joy in our heart. God keeps us busy with joy so much so we won't remember much the days of our life. That man would be so distracted in joy, he doesn't much remember life under the sun. And to be sure, this could mean finding enjoyment in the simplest of things, playing with the grandkids, enjoying a sunny day, a good laugh with a good friend. Things that we might consider trivial, Solomon says, this is the serious business of joy under heaven because all such little joys have their root meaning in the joy of Jesus Christ. For it's only in Jesus Christ that man can eat and be full. It's only in Christ that man can drink and be satisfied. It is only in Jesus Christ that man could be at rest, knowing that in His presence, in His presence alone, is the fullness of joy. It is this that our God keeps us occupied with all the days under the sun. Let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, we praise You, Lord God, in Your presence and Your presence alone is the fullness of joy. We praise You that You have given us that which we could never do on our own, and that is to find enjoyment in the things of life that is not really in the things of life at all. It is joy from You to glorify You that whether we eat or whether we drink, whatever it is, that we might do all things to the glory of You, our great God. And so, Father, we pray, as we know we cannot do this of our own power, that You would give us this power that we might truly live lives that make much of You, our Father, who art in heaven. In Christ's name we pray, amen. Amen. Well, let's continue on in worship as we give back unto our God what He has firstly given to us with our tithes and our offerings, as well as we stand to sing our hymn of response, Savior, like a shepherd, lead us.
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