Sermon: Ecclesiastes Resumed (Part Forty): Ecclesiastes 12:1-14
The Difficulty of Growth in Old Age
#1798
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 04-Jan-25; 77 minutes
description: Ecclesiastes 12:1-14 emphasizes the brevity and the progressively harder difficulties of life and urges youth to seek God while young, before the decline of old age and the inevitability of death. Solomon reflects on the fleeting and transitory nature of human achievements as well as life itself, repeating the refrain, "Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!" The meaninglessness or vanity serves as a feature of God's plan to cultivate spiritual growth and readiness in His chosen saints to prepare them for roles in His coming Kingdom. Solomon felt a driving desire to guide his readers with wisdom, emphasizing the value of God-inspired teachings as enduring truths shaping character and righteous behavior. The final two verses, a call to action, stress the importance of fearing God and keeping His commandments, remaining aware of divine judgment, the essence of meaningful life amid the world's futility. As God's called-out saints, we are admonished to align our lives with His purpose, realizing that we live above the "under the sun" limitations which prepare us to serve in His eternal kingdom.
transcript:
Please turn in your Bibles to Psalm 90. Most of you probably know that Psalm 90 is my favorite psalm. (Don't tell anybody, but I often use it in my passwords; well, just one.) This psalm is written by Moses and it starts Book Four of the Psalms. It lays out the themes that the psalms in that section through Psalm 106 contain. And so it is a very important psalm to all of us, especially in our condition, our human condition.
Let us first just read the first six verses.
Psalm 90:1-6 Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. You turn man to destruction, and say, "Return, O children of men." For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night. You carry them away like a flood; they are like a sleep. In the morning they are like grass which grows up: In the morning it flourishes and grows up; in the evening it is cut down and withers.
Now, the overall psalm, which has 17 verses, can be divided into three parts. The first two parts have six verses and the third part has five. So this first stanza that we have read extols God's sovereignty and His eternity, and His forbearance with us. As a timeless deity, He stands above everything. He created all things. He is wonderful and infinite and just so far beyond us, and it is especially hard to see as a human when we put our own condition next to His, and we are just so ephemeral, we are nothing.
For God, millennia are a blink of the eye to Him. I mean, how long is a millennia in infinity? It is just mind boggling. And everything that is physical, even the mountains, the earth, all these things that he mentions here, pass into nothingness in just a short while to Him. And humanity, our short lives are just a blip on the timeline. We are born, we live, and die, and that is it. Across the great expanse of time, we are nothing.
And he compares us to grass of the wilderness, grass of an arid climate that gets a little bit of water, grows and flourishes, maybe puts out some sort of a little flower, and withers seemingly in the space of a day. That is all we are.
Now let us read the second stanza because it is the most crucial to us right now. Starting in verse 7,
Psalm 90:7-12 For we have been consumed by Your anger, and by Your wrath we are terrified. You have set our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your countenance. For all our days have passed away in Your wrath; we finish our years like a sigh. The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength they are eighty years, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knows the power of Your anger? For as the fear of You, so is Your wrath. So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
This stanza begins with God's wrath standing against us because of our many sins. We live in sin. Humanity, all humanity, has this great pile of sins and we carry them about. And only we who have been called by God have been given the opportunity through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to have that pile of sins removed. Yet even if the pile of sins is removed, we still have a nature that yearns to sin, that yearns to go its own way, and we have to wrestle that through the years of our lives which we can think of as long-lasting or, you know, we have decades before us, but they flash by so quickly.
This stanza is Moses' way of describing or impressing upon us how short time actually is, how short the time we have to repent and to please God with a righteous life. It is his way of saying, "Don't say you'll do it tomorrow. Don't procrastinate. You only have a short while to get things right, to do the things that are going to imprint the character of God upon us, the very righteousness of Jesus Christ." Yeah, we do have 70 or 80 years (or maybe even more) to achieve spiritual growth.
But he says, "Don't consider that a guarantee." Especially, even if you live that long, even if you are still breathing when you reach those ages, he says we often finish our years like a sigh. Like, aaaaahhh, when we do not have any energy. When we are thinking about our bodies, our ill health, our aches and our pains, and we just have no energy to do much of anything. Some are in that period of time when they are just bereft of energy and strength and any kind of ambition.
So we must always be aware that the window of our abilities and energy and time is closing swiftly. It may be days or weeks, it could be months or years or even decades, but we are all slowly dying. We are all slowly wearing out and we only have so much time to act. We only have a short time to conform our hearts to God's heart.
We will not read it, but the third stanza is Moses' prayer to God beseeching Him to be merciful and to help us to establish and complete this vital work of sanctification in us. Like Solomon, Moses shows that this problem of limited time affects everybody. Moreover, human life in this age throws multitudes of distractions at us and before we know it, weeks or months or years have just simply flown by. And it forces us to compress our efforts to transform into Christ's image into an even smaller time frame.
Christ's return, Paul says, is nearer than we first believed. It is getting closer, and if not His return, then our deaths are getting closer. We have to work, we have to act now. But now we are older, weaker, less able to perform at our former pace and durability. And in the third stanza here, Moses implies that we cannot do what God requires without His blessing and help. Because we are not making ourselves into His image, He is making us in His image. We are His work. In Ephesians 2:10, he says, "We are His workmanship." We are His project. He is up there on His workbench getting us ready to fulfill a purpose. He is creating us in His spiritual image so we have to cooperate with Him as best we can in the time we have left.
Today, we are going to finish the book of Ecclesiastes and it ends with a call to action, a few final remarks, and a summary conclusion. Now, we have to remember, we have to get this into our minds, I am sure that most of you know this and are aware, but his words are first to those living under the sun. I want to make sure I emphasize that when he is speaking, when he is being a preacher or a pastor to the people of Israel, he is talking to essentially unconverted people. That was his church, if you will, the people of Israel, his subjects in the kingdom of Israel. So he was preaching to them under the Old Covenant. It was a physical compact between God and the physical people of Israel. They did not have the Holy Spirit, at least not many of them, and so they were functioning with a lack of the ability to understand. And so Solomon in his preaching is giving them advice, wisdom that he had collected over many years from his own studies and others so that they would act wisely in this world.
But I do not want you to think that the book of Ecclesiastes is just to a physical people. Because it has another level, at least one other level, and that is for those who are trying in this world that is functioning under the sun to live above the sun. That is, in a heavenly way, in a spiritual way. Because Solomon was also writing to those few whom who God gave the Holy Spirit to. There were not very many in his lifetime, but over the course of time with Ecclesiastes preserved in Scripture, he was able then to also preach to those who are above the sun.
So it has great meaning to us, additional spiritual meaning because, though we have been translated into the Kingdom of the Son of His love (that is Colossians 1:13), we live our lives under the same constraints as the unconverted. We live in an under the sun world. We are trying to live above the sun, but we live in a world that has totally conformed to the wrong way—to human nature rather than allowing human nature to conform to God. And so we are coming out of that under the sun world but it still pulls on us. It still constrains us. We still have to live within the physical limitations of this world apart from God. And so it works on both these levels, both to those under the sun and to those who are trying to live above the sun lives.
Let us go to the book of Ecclesiastes. I want to read the first eight verses. I am not going to go deeply into these eight verses. And after we spend 20 or 25 minutes on it, you will understand. I am being a little facetious there, but we have gone over these scriptures enough elsewhere to understand what what is going on.
Ecclesiastes 12:1:8 Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, before the difficult days come, and the years draw near when you say, "I have no pleasure in them'; while the sun and the light, the moon and the stars, are not darkened, and the clouds do not return after the rain; in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men bow down; when the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows grow dim; when the doors are shut in the streets, and the sound of grinding is low; when one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of music are brought low. Also they are afraid of height, and of terrors in the way; when the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper is a burden; and desire fails. For man goes to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets. Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the well. Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it. "Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher, "all is vanity."
Now this section we just read actually links with the last two verses of chapter 11, verses 9 and 10. In fact, I believe chapter 12 probably should have begun with chapter 11, verse 9, but that is not how it was broken up for us and so we have these first eight verses of Ecclesiastes 12 with the same theme as the last two verses of Ecclesiastes 11. But the common theme in them is building a relationship with God from one's early days; as early as possible, the earlier the better.
Solomon spills much of his ink on the negative side of this. He gives basically two verses to the positive side, "Hey, you're youthful, turn to God then," and then he takes the next eight verses and says, "Don't wait until old age to seek your Creator and grow in righteousness."
Now why does he say this? Why does he say, "Do not wait until you get old"? Well, he answers the question pretty quickly, saying a person's later years are difficult and overall, they are quite unpleasant. In fact, he calls them evil, with that word in verse 1 translated in the New King James as "difficult," actually is ráah, which is evil. Literally evil in Hebrew. So he calls them evil and without enjoyment. Sounds pretty pessimistic, does it not?
One commentator that I read calls verses 2 through 7, "Delicately sketched vignettes of old age." It is almost like he was not trying to offend the old people, and so he delicately wrote these metaphors so he did not have to come right out and say, you know, your back is bent, your knees are creaking, and all those things. But he made these beautiful little metaphors about how unfavorable old age is.
I do not want to spend a lot of time on these because most are easy enough to see in the English translation. Some are a bit stilted or whatever, but I think we can understand what Solomon was getting at. Scholars, if you read the literature, they argue about this or that particular detail and say it could not mean this, it has to mean this, and then somebody else argues the contrary. But I do not think for our understanding right now we need to go into the weeds about them. I think we can just understand what he is talking about, that certain things, negative things, things that we have no pleasure in, happen when we begin to get older.
But what I want to do is actually read these verses, that, is 2 through 5, from the Good News Translation. It is a paraphrase essentially, and what the paraphrasers did there in the Good News Bible is to interpret them for us and I think they get it mostly right.
Ecclesiastes 12:2-5 (GNT) That is when [old age] the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars shall grow dim for you, and the rain clouds will never pass away. Then your arms, that have protected you, will tremble, and your legs, now strong, will grow weak. Your teeth will be too few to chew your food, and your eyes too dim to see clearly. Your ears will be deaf to the noise on the street. You will barely be able to hear the mill as it grinds or music when it plays, but even the song of a bird shall wake you from sleep. You will be afraid of high places, and walking will be dangerous. Your hair will turn right white; you will hardly be able to drag yourself along, and all desire will be gone.
Depressing, is it not? Kids, this is what you have to look forward to. So, remember your Creator.
Now, not every person as he ages has all these symptoms. In fact, in these days not very many have all of these symptoms. We are able to avoid some of them through good diet or exercise or whatever. Some medical advances have helped us to avoid some of these things. Some people will have zest and vitality and energy well into their 80s, and that is wonderful.
But nearly every senior citizen has one or more of these indicators of decline. And they do make life more difficult, it is true. They sap the pleasure out of life. Appetites diminish, aches and pains make life more difficult, make one desire nothing more than to sit around and rest. Ambitions wane with lack of energy. Keeping one's focus becomes hard to do. Remembering new things becomes a chore, and forgetting comes easy. And not to mention, oftentimes as we age, that is when diseases begin to wreak their havoc on our bodies and many live in fear of those things coming upon them.
And so Solomon exhorts us, exhorts young people especially, to seek God before these things happen, before these things take over. Because when we are young, circumstances are more in our favor. We are hale and hearty. We have our life before us; we have mind power, we have endurance, we can concentrate for long periods of time. I think about, Okay, I was 18 to 22 when I went to school and I was able to study and do all those things, listen to lectures and whatnot. My mind was sharp. I could remember. I did not have to laboriously study things—and it drove other people insane who had to do that. They were young like me, but they were just a little bit different in the way they were put together.
But when I left school at 22, I had no desire to go and get any more learning that way because even at 22, I was tired of it. I was at my peak maybe at about 18 or 19 and it has just gone downhill ever since. But thinking of trying to go back and get a degree, like a master's degree in theology or whatever (I do not know where I would get that), but at my age, approaching 60 years of age, I could not stand it. Beth understands, she knows that I would just be totally a waste. I just would not have the ability to do that. I guess if I really pushed myself, I could do that, but I would not want to. That is something for the young.
And the same thing with seeking God. It is easier, if you will, when you are young. But God called some of us when we were old. Not me in particular, but I know people who have been called in their 50s, 60s, 70s, gotten baptized, and had to do a lot of that work that we younger people did when we were young. And now they have to learn His way as elderly people and it is harder. I mean, if you are called when you are old, that does not mean there is no hope that you will not be able to do what God requires of you, that you are already washed up and cannot learn. That is not what I am saying at all. I am just saying it will be more difficult.
Solomon says, he emphasizes, that it is better to seek God when you are younger because youth has energy and strength, a quick mind, along with the ability to serve and do things that an older person just cannot do or may not be able to do or maybe be able to do but it is going to take longer and he or she will be absolutely laid out for a week because he or she has exhausted himself or herself.
So what I am saying here is that God's choice of when to call a person really does not matter. Or maybe it does. Maybe for him, He thought, "Let this person spend his youth in a way that he is going to regret, and I'm going to call him when he's older, when he is actually ready to be called. And then he's going to have to pay for his sins by really applying himself diligently in his old age." But it is more difficult for an older person to come into the truth and learn and grow in all the things that God may require of him because that older person is in a different, weaker stage of life. And so therefore, spiritual growth is going to be a little bit more difficult. Not impossible. It is just going to challenge the older person and make him or her really devote the time and the remaining energy to get it done, really apply themselves.
But on the other hand, older people usually have more humility. They have been over the road, they have been knocked around by life, and maybe they are a little bit more diligent about things than younger people. That is just one advantage that older people have over the younger because by the time you get to be a senior citizen, you should have life pretty much figured out in terms of what is valuable and what is not. What to spend one's time doing and what to avoid.
So it is not terrible that one is called at an older age. Solomon is just saying it is better when it happens in your youth. Not impossible if it is later, but it is better. He has a lot of "this is better than that" statements in the book and we try to be on the positive side of all these better or worse statements. That will help you tremendously.
That is all I want to do in those first five verses. Let us start in the middle of verse 5, and I want to read down through verse 8 again.
Ecclesiastes 12:5-8 For man goes to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets. Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the well. Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it. "Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher, "all is vanity."
The four metaphors that appear in verse 6 all describe death. And death was mentioned in the final two clauses of verse 5.
Let us hop back up to verse 5 here, "For man goes to his eternal home." This is something that Protestants like to grab onto to point out that man goes to his eternal home. It seems like Solomon is validating the immortal soul doctrine and going to heaven. But at least some scholars are honest enough to tell them that that is reading their personal beliefs into the text. Instead, they say this phrase "man goes to his eternal home," simply refers to the grave.
Remember, earlier Solomon had downplayed an afterlife for those who are living under the sun, saying, "Man returns to the earth like a dog does," You know, an animal dies and a man dies and they go to the same place. That is in chapter 3, verse 19. He also mentioned in chapter 9, verses 5 and 10 that the grave is devoid of life and knowledge, and that is where everybody is headed. So he has not changed his tune about death and where those under the sun are going. Because they are under the sun, he does not give them the hope of eternal life, because they are not ready for that yet. As a matter of fact, these people are going to be resurrected, yes, from their graves, but they are not going to be given eternal life. They are going to be given physical life.
Remember the Valley of Dry Bones? The bones have to have the sinew and everything put on them, and skin, and breath is put in them. They are given a physical life again, not an eternal life. And so he is maintaining his consistency here by telling people living under the sun, the unconverted, that this life that they have lived in this world at this time does not give them any chance of eternal life. They have done nothing to merit eternal life. God has done nothing for them to give them eternal life. Remember, He has consigned all of them to futility. He has given them over to a debased mind. He said, Okay, live your lives, be part of the world, but I'm not going to work with you until after the Kingdom of God is established in the second resurrection." So they have lived their lives meaninglessly.
Now this does not apply to those whom God has called in this age. Those who are the elect have a great hope for eternal life. But remember, he is first talking to those under the sun and saying, No, that is not an option right now. Eternal life is not an option. Now what did he say about the grave in just the last chapter? Let us go to chapter 11, verse 8.
Ecclesiastes 11:8 But if a man [under the sun] lives many years and rejoices in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. All that is coming is vanity.
If he is going to be consistent, what he says in 11:8 and what he says in 12:5 cannot mean any kind of afterlife or eternal life. As a matter of fact, the word eternal in chapter 12, verse 5 is a very common Hebrew word, olim, and it can mean everlasting or eternal. But it could also mean a long duration. Or even it can actually go the other direction, meaning the days of old or ancient times. You have to look at the context to see which definition fits the word olim in the particular sentence that it is in. And it looks like here that it means exactly what Solomon meant in chapter 11, verse 8. The days of darkness will be many. Or put it into this other definition, the days of darkness will be of long duration. And that is more what he meant.
So, our eternal home or our home of long duration, to put it more accurately, is the grave. Because as he says, we will be there a lot longer. Most of us will be there a lot longer than we were alive.
The next phrase there in 12:5, "and the mourners go about the streets," is another allusion to death. You know, in Jewish society especially, there was the practice of professional mourners whom they could hire to go along the streets, maybe in a procession with the body being taken to a tomb, and they would be wailing and crying and making a lot of noise and ruckus. And it was a normal death ritual to do that in the society of the time.
And so he is basically saying that the life has ended and the body is being taken to its eternal home or home of long duration, the grave.
Some of these are more interesting. Verse 6, the cut silver cord and the broken golden bowl in the first two of these clauses, illustrate the destruction of something valuable. Silver is valuable; gold is valuable, and both the bowl made of gold and the cord made of silver are destroyed. Now, they have no value. And that is what he is talking about. That when life ends, all the value is gone. All the value in the person has ended. Put simply, when life ends, a person's worth ceases. There is nothing left of value. What value is a heap of old bones? There is no life in them. It was the life that was valuable, life that God gave. Without God-given life, the body, as it is described in verse 7, it is just inanimate dust that recombines with the earth. And the spirit that was in it, that gave it the abilities of a human being, is gone. It is nowhere to be found because the Creator God retrieved it for safekeeping.
So once a person dies, nothing of value remains. Everything that was worthwhile of that person has disappeared. And elsewhere, Solomon says that even the things we leave behind are eventually destroyed, eroded, crumble, or simply forgotten. There is no worth anymore. The life has ended. What has the person left behind that has any value?
Then he goes on with two more metaphors, the pitcher or a jar, and the wheel or the pulley. And both of them have connections with a well or a cistern or, as it says here in verse 6, a fountain, a place where water is. Fountains and wells, cisterns, they all hold water and water is a symbol of life. But if the pitcher is broken and the pulley does not work, we could say the rope, whatever the mechanism is, no longer functions. It cannot reach the water.
And that is what it is saying about the human body. The human body is the jar. The human body is the pulley. Once life is taken away from the mechanism, the body cannot function anymore. There is no way to draw the water up. You can see Revelation 22:1 where God says He gives us the water of life eternally at that point, obviously after the New Jerusalem comes down. But He gives it freely.
But under the sun, in this age, once He cuts off the water supply, as it were, we are done. There is no way to reach that water again, except through the resurrection from the dead, which He also supplies. So he is giving us some pretty good indications here that we better do the work while we are living. Even though that window is closing, and we do not know quite how rapidly it is closing, we need to get on the stick. We cannot wait around and say "I'll do it tomorrow," because procrastination put more people in hell than you might believe (and I use hell in terms of the grave).
How many people have regrets when they get old that they did not get to this, did not get to that, was not able to do this or that? It is not God's fault. It is the individual's fault for putting things off. You need to do it now. You need to do it soon because you really have no guarantees that you are not going to get hit by a bus tomorrow. Or come down with some dread disease or who knows what?
So Solomon is really urging the reader to get on the stick and do what you can while you have the time.
But thinking about all this, the weakness of old age, shortness of life, the finality of death, makes Solomon almost despairing about humanity. And then he finishes by uttering his famous words for the final time. Verse 8, "Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher, "all is vanity." I like how another translation puts it, "Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless." It is frustrating that everything people accomplish under the sun is fleeting, ephemeral—and ultimately pointless. I could just see him: Everything will disintegrate and be forgotten. Nothing lasts, so what is the point? What is the point of life under the sun?
I am going to go where James [Stoertz] went, Romans 8, but I am going to go ahead and read what came before what he read. Romans 8, we will start in verse 18 and go down through verse 23. (I think he started in verse 25.) Because the apostle Paul gives the answer that Solomon did not. Solomon left things with "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." But he does not really answer why this is happening, why God made life to be this frustrating. But Paul picks it up in verse 18 of Romans 8.
Romans 8:18-23 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope. [There is a good godly reason why this world is the way it is. Paul says,]; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. And not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.
Remember I said earlier we have to remember that Solomon wrote to those under the sun, and they are groaning in the futility of life. But we are groaning too. That is the second tier of those Solomon wrote to because we have to live in this world with them.
Romans 8:24 For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen as not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees?
I was only going to go through verse 23 there and I went one more.
What does Paul say the point of all this futility and frustration is? Do you know what the point is? There could probably be several answers, but I will just use the phrase that Paul uses. He says the point of all of this is the "revealing of the sons of God"! That is why God gave this world over to futility and to their own stupidity, their own ignorant thinking. And that has created this world because this world has taken its own way and blundered into sin after sin after sin, and not just blundered but willfully sinned. But God has used this and it is now part of the revealing of the sons of God. That is the goal.
So God purposely subjected the world under the sun to futility, frustration, and meaninglessness because His purpose in reversing the effects of sin and drawing a spiritual people to Himself is progressing toward the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, which will occur of course upon Christ's return and the resurrection of His firstfruits. That is very important: the revealing of the sons of God. That is when it is going to occur.
He says He subjected this world to the way it is, as frustrating as it can get, because He is working on something. His purpose is moving forward and it is focused on you and me. All of this mayhem, all of this pointlessness is because of you and me. Not in a bad way. Do not take it that way. We did not cause it.
But God, as Creator, spiritual Creator, is using the conditions to make you into His children. That is why He left it that way. He had to allow His Son, first of all, and then all His firstfruit brothers and sisters, to overcome the world of sin and vanity and train for their roles in the Kingdom of God. He left this world as it is as a testing ground to prepare sons and daughters, who through belief and love for God have hope in the resurrection, when they will participate in liberating millions from futility. Teaching and guiding them to live above the sun lives.
There is a great correspondence between the Firstborn and all His firstfruits. They both had to run the same course of life. The Master, the Archegos who went before, and we who follow after, all have to run the same obstacle course to gain the knowledge and the experience so that when the revealing of the sons of God occurs at the resurrection from the dead at Christ's return, we can, as they say, hit the ground running and teach Israel, first of all, in the Millennium, God's way, God's above the sun way of life.
But we had to do it like Christ did it to be His bride, to be qualified, if you will, to do the job. To have the same mind as Him in how we do that job.
So what I guess we could say is that the world's futility is a feature, not a bug. It is purposeful. It is not a defect. Sure, God would have rather men had obeyed Him from the beginning. He would rather Eve had said, "No snake! I am not going to eat this fruit. And Adam says that he's not going to eat it either." (She is still talking for him, of course.) But that is not how it happened. God knew that men would sin. If His greatest creation, the archangel Hillel, sinned and took one-third of the sinning angels away from God, as it were, then puny man made of clay with minds that will follow after every little thing, be distracted, would certainly sin.
He knew; He was not surprised. "Oh, I'm just walking in the garden. Where are you guys?" He knew they had sinned. So knowing man's weakness, that we would be sinful creatures, He crafted a plan that incorporated the world's futility and frustration and made it His training program for His saints. And by putting them through this very rigorous training program, where they could easily, if they were not careful, fall away, go the broad way like the rest of the world, give up out of frustration or what have you, it makes their redemption and their sanctification and their ultimate glorification even more glorious and awesome. Because they, like their Savior, worked through the worst of humanity and the frustrations of sinful human life—and won. Were victorious through the help of God.
This is why Moses in the last third of Psalm 90 said, "We can't do it without Your help! Establish the work of our hands. Oh please, establish the work of our hands." It is an appeal. God, what have you done to us? You have thrown us in the thick of the fight. We do not have what it takes to win. Help us, be merciful! Come, get us out of this, but help us to persevere to the end.
Back to Ecclesiastes 12 now. This gives us, then, a good foundation for understanding how he ends the book.
Ecclesiastes 12:9-14 And moreover, because the Preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yes, he pondered and sought out and set in order many proverbs. The Preacher sought to find acceptable words; and what was written was upright—words of truth. The words of the wise are like goads, and the words of scholars are like well-driven nails, given by one Shepherd. And further, my son, be admonished by these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether it is good or whether it is evil.
Now some scholars in their vaunted wisdom posit that the rest of the chapter, 9 through 14, is a later addition. A summary by some priest or whatnot to soften Solomon's depressing ending, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" and provide a moral conclusion. A good way to wrap up the book, right? I think they are simply unable to take anything at face value. The best way to read it, I think, these last 5 or 6 verses, is to read it as Solomon's final thoughts and a summation of his thinking. He wanted to wrap everything up.
I do not think he wanted to end with "Vanity of vanities, is all is vanity." That might have been a main point but he wanted to add a few things to give us more incentive. To take what he said seriously. To put it into practice.
Remember, throughout this book he is called Qoheleth. That is, the preacher, the pastor, if you will. He was the pastor, the shepherd (that is where the word comes from), of his people. As king he was the shepherd of Israel. Not the Great Shepherd like we know Jesus to be, but he felt himself as an under-shepherd and he was put in a place of authority so that he could lead the people, and to him, that included teaching them wisdom so they would know how to live, live in peace and live in righteousness.
So, he thought very deeply, and God gave him the ability through His giving him understanding so that he could think very deeply, come to right conclusions. He says he carefully gathered wisdom through proverbial sayings, probably in Israel and in Egypt and in Assyria and all the various places Babylon. Who knows where he got all the proverbial sayings that that he gives us throughout the wisdom literature here? Thousands of proverbs, and he thought about them. He wanted to include them in his own wisdom, own writings about wisdom, but he made sure that he thought them through.
And it says here, he sought to write acceptable words. That is an interesting concept. It means literally "words of delight" or "words of pleasure." But practically, it means that he wrote in an artistic, attractive, and acceptable style so that his readers or hearers would appreciate them. And in appreciating them, with a nice turn of phrase, if you will, they would remember them. And then because they were memorable, they would become useful.
Solomon is saying he put his all into this work. He did everything he could in his wisdom to craft a book that would be helpful to his people and be memorable and be something that would change their lives. He took his position and his study and ability to transmit the truth seriously so that we can trust his efforts. So we can say, Solomon did his very best to give us something practical but wonderful and artistic and admirable. Making it appealing so that we would use it. What he is telling us, without telling us is, "Hey, I did most of the hard work for you. Because God gave me the ability."
Let us look at verse 11 more closely. He says, "The words of the wise are like goads, and the words of scholars are like well-driven nails, given by one Shepherd." This looks like a hodgepodge of metaphors, and it is really not. We could say here that this is Solomon's version of "thus sayeth the Lord." That God gave him what he needed to put this together so that it would become Scripture. Perhaps we could include all of Solomon's, or even all of Scripture's wisdom literature, under this claim. He is saying it all came from God. It came from the one Shepherd of Israel—Yahweh. This may be an allusion to his father's poem which we find in Psalm 23, The Lord is My Shepherd.
But he says that the teachings of the godly wise, those who have been inspired by God, are goads. You know, that is that stick that you prod cattle with. Get them to go, to move in a certain direction. He said the words of the wise are like those goads that prod readers to change course and to act in wisdom. And he says the collection of them, the sayings of the wise, they are like embedded nails. Fixed and immovable. They are not subject to changing times, changing ideas. When those sayings of the righteous wise are deeply embedded in a person's mind, they become anchors of godly character and righteous behavior.
There is a lot of practicality in learning the wisdom that men like Solomon wrote for our admonition. And this brings up the point, funny pun here, that both goads and nails, both of which are pointy, hurt when applied. Meaning that learning wisdom is almost always painful. Not just in the learning but also in the application, because they make us move out of our normal comfort zones. Trials are traumatic. Nothing teaches more deeply than suffering. Even Christ, it says in Hebrews 2:10 and also in verse 18, was made perfect by the things that He suffered.
So, Solomon's similes here in chapter 12, verse 11 may illustrate a progression of instruction and wisdom. First, the words of the wise act as goads or prods, and they change our direction in the way we would not naturally go. But they do point us in the right direction. We may not be aiming perfectly for where we need to go, but these words of the wise prod us to the point where we are at least headed in the general direction that we need to go. Then when we get all the collective sayings, the whole book, the whole full way of life, and we inculcate them into our behavior, they pierce our inner being. They go deep into the mind. They dig deep and teach us through severe trial and pain and suffering. And we do not like it. But what they do, these words, accumulated words of the wise, is set godly unchanging character in us. Deep down in us to the point where we can carry it through the grave.
Let us look at verse 12. "And further, my son, be admonished by these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh." This is an admonishment, a warning to the young, perhaps his son Rehoboam, who may be the intended recipient of his wisdom here, at least the first one. Anyway, he is saying to his son, most literature available is a waste of time to read. Some books are silly. Some are the author's misguided opinions. Some are deceptive or otherwise sinful. Some are very myopic. Some are egotistical, talking about the glory days, I guess. Nobody cares.
But all books but one are a mixture of good and evil. Only one is truly concerned about the truth and excellence and meaning and godliness. Only the wisdom of God, inspired in His Word, is truly worthwhile. He is not saying do not read other works or other literature or newspapers or any kind of ephemeral writing, but simply realize their limited value. There are tons of books out there and you could spend all your time reading books and get absolutely nothing out of it. So he is saying, be picky about what you read. What you allow into your mind will change you. So be very cautious about what you choose to read.
He also cautions that exhaustive study is indeed exhausting. It is exhausting to the body. It is exhausting to the mind. And especially if we combine this with all the different books out there, when you study something deeply, you get who knows how many contradictory opinions of supposed experts. Sometimes it makes your head spin in sheer confusion and frustration because it just makes no sense. Solomon made several frustrated comments about how nothing makes sense. And that is how it is with exhaustive study. You can get yourself into a really bad mood when you read all the different things people say about something that should be simple.
So he is saying we need to be more discerning and discriminating about what we choose to research deeply. Do not glom on to the first answer that you see. He is not saying that. But think it through, gather evidence, gather experience. I know there is been a lot of conspiracy theorists who jump at the first thing that seems to make sense. And you find out later that it was absolutely stupid. It was somebody else's theory, somebody else's just thinking out loud, and it ended up being something very different. So be very careful about what you study and what you allow yourself to read.
Let us finish these last two verses.
Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether it is good or whether it is evil.
In these last two verses, Solomon gives the main points that he wishes a reader to take from his treatise here. You know, in the book, as we have gone through it, he has up to this point so far mentioned God sparingly. But this conclusion that he gives—this is everything I want you to get out of it, or at least this is a good summary of what he wanted us to get out of it—but he is saying that the reality of God and His instruction that He gives in His Word has been behind everything that he has written in the book of Ecclesiastes.
This was not the writing of a skeptic, even though it seems to come across that way because he is so frustrated about life under the sun. No, this is the writing of a believer. He had had at least one conversation with God. He believed God, that God existed, and that God had given all these instructions. And he is saying, "Look, I've written these things so that you could follow God and make something worthwhile out of your life."
Solomon though was a realist. And he was writing to advise normal, uncalled human beings, his subjects in Israel. But even to them he teaches that the basis for living a good life in this futile world is to fear God and keep His commandments. That is the foundation for abundant life. Whether you are physical and uncalled or whether you are spiritual and living above the sun, you cannot divorce life from fearing God and keeping His commandments.
That is where we must start. It is the duty of all mankind to fear God and keep His commandments. It is what God has created man to do. Yet he did not do it. And he created a world, then, the man created a world apart from God, but those living in that world still should fear God and keep His commandments.
He is telling us that we have to reverse the trend. We, Israel and the Israel of God, have to put God first and keep His laws. That is the foundation.
Then he reminds us in verse 14 that despite confining humanity to the meaninglessness of life under the sun, that God is still the Judge. Just because God has given this world over to its own ways does not mean that He is not going to make them accountable for what they have done. Not in the least. Everyone will end up facing His judgment. And for those under the sun, His judgment is death. "I'll work with you later." Paul says this very clearly in Romans 2, verses 1 through 16 and II Corinthians 5:10. We all must stand at the judgment seat of Christ. He is going to judge the world. So do not think you are going to get away with anything. You can hide nothing from God. We will get away with nothing.
Remember what it says about Jesus in Hebrews 4, that everything is open to His sight. So this should motivate us, knowing that we are under judgment, to fear God, to fear sinning against Him, to fear disappointing Him, fear His wrath.
Now according to Solomon, this advice: 1) fear God; 2) keep His commandments; 3) remember that God is judging, this advice, rightly applied, should keep us on the straight and narrow path and drive us toward success. Toward even joy and some satisfaction in this life.
What a paradox! All along, Solomon has been saying, this life is worthless. This life is futile. It is frustrating. Everything is vanity. But in the last two verses, he poses a paradox. "Yes, I know I've said life is worthless and futile. But if you fear God, keep His commandments, and remember that you are under judgment, you're going to live a worthwhile life. Or at least have the beginnings of it. It will not be meaningless. It will actually be purposeful. And your future is bright because you are seeking and acquiring the above the sun values and character traits God makes available to us even now."
And so what does he basically say? Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.
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