Church, please turn with me to the book of Ecclesiastes. We'll continue our series today, and our passage will be two sections of chapter two, the two sections that we did not do last time in chapter two, so verses one through 11, and then also verse 18 through verse 26. And I'll read those two sections now. This is Ecclesiastes 2, beginning at verse 1. I said in my heart, come now, I will test you with pleasure. Enjoy yourself. But behold, this also was temporary. I said of laughter, it is mad, and of pleasure, what use is it? I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine, my heart still guiding me with wisdom, and how to lay hold on folly till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life. I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves and had slaves who were born in my house. I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the delight of the sons of man. So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also, my wisdom remained with me, and whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was temporary and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. " And skipping down to verse 18, I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or a fool, yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is temporary. So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is temporary and a great evil. What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is temporary. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also I saw is from the hand of God. For apart from him, who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For to the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy. But to the sinner, he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is temporary and a striving after wind. Father, I pray that you would fill me with your spirit so that I may proclaim your word in truth and grace and love with boldness and clarity. I pray that you would still my heart, Lord, so that your word would shine forth clearly to your people today. Lord, let it sink into our ears and deep into our hearts so that it informs us and transforms us by your power. In Jesus' name I pray, amen. So, for those of you who have not been with us, you may have noticed that I was reading a little bit different from the text, and that's because we have begun to understand that despite the way most of our English translations say this, The points that the speaker of Ecclesiastes is making is not that all of these things that he seeks out have no purpose. They're not meaningless. They're not vanity. But what they are is temporary. The good things in life are temporary. And even the evil and destructive things in life, they're also temporary. So we're picking up the two sections of chapter 2 that we didn't cover last week. And both of these sections have to do with our speaker's continued pursuit of what is good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life. We see that in verse 3. You might recall from my overview sermon that this topic, what is good for the children of man to do in their lives, this is the overall topic of the whole first main section of the book. The section that begins at chapter one, verse 12, after that introductory poem and ends at chapter six, verse nine. So you might say in these two parts of chapter two, that our speaker Solomon is exploring two ideas. labor, or work, or toil as it's called here, and pleasures, labor and pleasures. So we also are going to explore those two concepts, but really we're going to discover that they amount to one intertwined concept, and you'll see what I mean after a little bit. But first, I'd like to get two items out of the way here, items that might be tripping up some of you, and I don't want your attention to be derailed by either of these two details that I'm about to clarify. So firstly, when it says in verse 7 that as a part of all his building projects, these great works that he built, as it says in verse 4, he bought male and female slaves and had slaves who were born in his house. Well, some of you maybe are concerned about that and about what seems to be a promotion of slavery. But we have to understand that our nation's history of what we would call chattel slavery, and I'll explain that in a bit, that's influenced the way we think about various kinds of slavery which has existed throughout history and throughout the world. Now, I'm not going to expend the whole message giving a whole treatise about what the Bible has to say about slavery, but I think we need to cover at least these few things. Generally speaking, slavery in the history of our nation was that kind of slavery in which human beings were considered nothing but human chattel. That's where the name comes from. That is to say, nothing more than a commodity or an asset to be bought, sold, used, and abused or thrown away, however the master saw fit. This is not the kind of slavery that existed mostly in the ancient Near East, and it's definitely not the kind of slavery that's spoken of in neutral or even positive terms in the Bible. In the Mosaic Law, there were safeguards for slaves, laws for how they were to be treated, and laws for how long they could serve as slaves. Additionally, there were specific laws that governed what should happen if a slave was freed, but then desired to remain serving under their master. There were even laws in the Mosaic Code against kidnapping, which is how many chattel slaves in our nation's history became slaves in the first place. Furthermore, slavery was simply an economic reality in the New Testament times as well. Slavery is not decried outright in the New Testament because slavery was simply how some people survived economically if they weren't able to support themselves any other way. But what the New Testament does is clearly put slaves on equal footing with respect to their fellow man. This is what Paul means when he writes in Galatians 3.28, there's neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free. There is no male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Slaves and their masters could be brothers and sisters in Christ within the church. Indeed, Paul wrote an entire letter, admittedly a short one, about this concept, the letter you may know as the Book of Philemon. It actually might be a good book for us to go through when we're done with Ecclesiastes. So for now, what I think we need to take away is that Solomon acquiring slaves should not be a hindrance to our appreciating what he writes here. The second item I want to clarify is what's said toward the end of verse 8, that he also got many concubines. And the first thing about that that I should clarify is that this wording in the Hebrew is widely considered to be confusing or at best simply uncertain. It's not the normal word that's used for concubines. However, there does seem to be some aspect of human sexuality associated with this wording. And we know from other passages of scripture that Solomon did indeed have many wives and concubines. And it's very possible this translation could very well have been what's intended. So the terminology could have even just referred to his many wives. And that deserves a bit of comment as well. We have to understand that as wise as Solomon was, which we examined in the last few weeks, As the anointed king, the original son of David, as powerful and accomplished and influential in many positive ways as he was, he was still a flawed, fallible man. In many of the aspects we see in this book, even in these passages today, Solomon is presented to us as another Adam, an Adamic figure, a steward exercising dominion over creation. In many of the ways we're about to talk about, building houses and planting vineyards and gardens and parks and forests, possessing herds and flocks. Solomon is seen as another Adam in the same vein that Seth and Noah and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Judah, all those were all viewed in the lineage of the seed of the woman who would one day crush the head of the seed of the serpent. Remember that proto-gospel promise of Genesis 3.15. Solomon was truly viewed in this line and he's presented as an Adamic figure in this account. But Solomon was not the true seed of the woman. That was yet to come. He wasn't the true son of David who would reign on David's throne forever. That title is reserved for the last Adam, Jesus Christ. And we have to understand that Solomon, like all the other Adamic figures that came before him, Solomon failed to live up to God's perfect standard of holiness. And rather than let that reality drive us to dejection and despair and utter confusion, we realize that God's plan all along was that he himself was going to have to come down out of glory to this fallen earth in the person of Jesus, the true son of God, the true son of David, the last Adam, in order to redeem mankind. So let's not allow Solomon's admitted failures to derail us from seeing what's being said here. Let's not discount the value in this book, since we already know that all the human authors of Scripture were flawed, and the great value of Scripture, the prize of Scripture, is its dual authorship, since through the Holy Spirit, these Scriptures don't have only flawed human men as their authors, but God himself as well. He has breathed out these scriptures, and they are profitable for us for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. So now that we've handled those two items, we can get to what I would consider to be the main ideas that come out of these two sections of chapter two. And the content of the first 11 verses of the chapter shows us that just as the speaker had sought out wisdom, to be the great achievement of mankind, to discover whether it was the great achievement of mankind. So now he's also seeking out toil and pleasure, toil and pleasure, to determine if these are the ultimate goals mankind should be spending their days striving after. I first wanna caution you not to rush into believing that Solomon's pursuit of pleasure here was completely hedonistic. He's not like the rich fool in the parable in Luke that we heard, who simply decided that he had everything he needed, he was gonna tear down his barns and build larger barns and eat and drink and be merry. This is not Solomon's pursuit, not at all. In fact, he even states in both verse three and verse nine, as he's describing his pursuit of toil and pleasure, that his wisdom remained with him and his heart was still guiding him with wisdom. This is a controlled experiment in good terms. What value do labor and pleasure bring to the children of men upon the earth? He's trying to discover this. We heard Derek read from Psalm 104, verse 15, that God gives wine to gladden the heart of man. So there is an aspect of the goodness of wine that is a gift of God. There's nothing inherently evil about it. Although there are, of course, plenty of biblical prohibitions against drunkenness and warnings against turning to wine as an escape. Again, his wisdom remained with him and his heart guided him with wisdom in this pursuit. And as we've already spoken about in previous sermons and passages, Solomon was in a unique position to accomplish this experiment, having more power, more resources, and more wisdom with which to seek out these things and experience these things than most others, if not all others who came before or after him would. the temple and the palace that he built, which are described in great detail in 1 Kings 7-8. These were marvels of architecture. In fact, when the Jews returned from exile in Babylon and finally rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed, we see in Ezra 3 that the people shouted and praised the Lord when the foundation was laid. But many of the older priests and Levites who were old enough to have seen that first temple, Solomon's temple, they wept loudly, even as they were shouting for joy, because they remembered the grandeur of Solomon's temple, and they wept that it was no more. Our second section in chapter two that we're covering today, verses 18 through 26, This section shows us two conclusions our speaker arrives at out of his experiment and labor and pleasure. And remember, one of the reasons we see that he's not saying throughout the book that all these things are purposeless or meaningless or vanity, but that they're temporary, is that he actually does bring us these intermediate conclusions, and these conclusions contradict the idea that all of these things are meaningless. So the first conclusion we see right in verses 18 through 19, and also continuing in verse 21, he hated all his labor and toil, even with all his amazing accomplishments, and indeed they were tremendous accomplishments, even with all that, he hated all his labor Well, once more, not because they were meaningless, not because they were futile, but because they were temporary. They wouldn't last. And specifically here, he saw that he must leave all the fruit of his labor to the one who will come after him. Because as we saw last week, earlier in the chapter, every one of us is going to die. Our very life itself is temporary, a vapor, a myth, excuse me, a mist, a breath. Why is it so bad to have to leave the fruit of his labor to whoever comes after him? Well, for two reasons there. Verse 19, the first, who knows whether he, the man who comes after him, will be wise or a fool. And secondly, sometimes the person who labored with all his wisdom, knowledge, and skill must leave the fruit of those to be enjoyed by someone who did not likewise labor for it. So let's take those two reasons in turn. First, who knows whether the one who comes after me will be wise or a fool. Many commentators see in these two reasons, especially this first reason, a mild rebuke from Solomon toward his son, Rehoboam. We see in 1 Kings later on, in 1 Kings 12, that Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, ascended to the throne after Solomon's death. And Rehoboam was indeed a fool. He listened to foolish, even wicked counsel, and laid an exceedingly heavy yoke on the people when he ascended to power. And because of that, The kingdom of Israel was forever divided in two after that, only to eventually be reunited under the eternal kingship that we will see the true King of Jesus. Perhaps Solomon saw glimmers of Rehoboam's folly ahead of time. He may have been concerned specifically about his son and how he would turn out, whether he would be wise or a fool, based on what he already had observed in his life. But perhaps he was just speaking out of the unknown of the future. As his own father David wrote in Psalm 39, verse six, man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather. And interestingly, just a verse prior in that Psalm 39, verse five, David himself describes mankind as hevel. Remember that word, hevel, a mere breath. Before Solomon even existed, David, his father, had discovered that the lives and accomplishments and the evils of mankind were all temporary. Now, while it's true from even the New Testament, as in 2 Corinthians 12, 14, that parents should support their children rather than children having to pay the way for their parents. And Proverbs 13, 22 states, a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. We see that it's an entirely different proposition to pass on large amounts of wealth from one generation to another. Many of you, at my suggestion, have read Randy Alcorn's The Treasure Principle. And in that work, and in other works by Alcorn about money, possessions, and eternity, Alcorn describes what some of the wealthiest men in recent history have said about the inheritance they would pass on. And those words, frankly, they're probably difficult for some of us to believe. We know already from scripture that money alone won't make us happy. Some of the wealthiest men in our nation's history have confirmed this out of personal experience. William Henry Vanderbilt said, the care of $200 million is enough to kill anyone. There is no pleasure in it. John D. Rockefeller said, I have made many millions, but they have brought me no happiness. Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company said, I was happier when doing a mechanic's job. And those are statements from men who themselves labored for the wealth they produced. More quotes could be found by more people in similar positions. But even more telling and more relevant to our passage here is something millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie said. He said, the almighty dollar bequeathed to a child is an almighty curse. No man has the right to handicap his son with such a burden as great wealth. Now, we understand these men were not speaking inspired canonized truth, but their experience, which is far beyond what most or any of us have or will ever experience likely, that should help influence the way we understand some of what's being said in scripture about these topics. Surely they're making a similar point to Solomon's point here in chapter 2, that we don't know whether the person we leave our wealth to will be wise or a fool. And also, and here especially, sometimes the person we must leave our wealth to had no role in laboring for that wealth. That itself is a reality of our fallen creation. Wealth that comes to us too quickly and not as a result of our own labors is particularly fleeting. We see that earlier in Proverbs in that same chapter, chapter 13 in verse 11. Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. speaks to the burden placed on those who inherit great wealth without working for it themselves. It will likely vanish as quickly as it appears, and it's also likely to be a burden that they cannot hold up under. I've said this before about lottery winners. Most of them end up, if you read the news accounts about them, you can look up easily online about the fate of many lottery winners. Most of them end up later just saying, I just wish I had my old life back. Look also at the child stars and children of wealth we've seen over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries in our nation, who simply couldn't handle a life of wealth acquired too quickly or too easily, and instead turned to drugs and crime and other seedy aspects of life because of those things do not satisfy. And they were searching for satisfaction in things that can never satisfy. That was their own spiritual poverty, their own spiritual inadequacy. And even closer to home here in North Dakota, how much damage has been done here by politicians who have come out of wealthy families who have inherited their money through, for example, the oil and banking industries, money that may have come to them simply through inherited land and the chance occurrence that they owned that land where oil was discovered. Many such people are the power brokers in our state today. And I can tell you from first-hand experience with many of them, most of these people are not smarter than you or I. And most of them also, frankly, have a much more deficient moral compass than you or I have. It's just a reality. And such people typically have, they do tremendous damage to our state in the policies they enact because they think that they're inherited, or even acquired by their labor, that their acquired wealth means that God has specifically ordained them to be in such positions of power. It's very similar to the old divine right of kings. No, please hear me. I'm not saying that those industries are inherently bad. Many of you know, I think very highly of the oil industry and what that source of energy does and provides for us, especially here in the kind of winter that we experience. It's a much needed boon to our community in many ways. But I'm using this situation in our state to illustrate how wealth, either acquired or especially inherited, can actually be, as Calvin said, 100 times the trial that poverty is. And most men and women fail miserably when they are tried by great wealth. We see the effects every day here in North Dakota politics. Because of this concept, because of the concept of great wealth being a great trial and having to leave your wealth to someone who will come after you, many of the wealthiest people in our nation's history, including some I mentioned earlier, began setting up charitable and philanthropic foundations with their great wealth. So the hope was that money, that money could be spent with a vision toward doing good in the world. But even in those situations, those foundations often lasted for many, many decades afterward, to the point that the visions for the foundations had entirely drifted from the visions their founders originally had for them. Again, the people who came after them to administer the wealth in their foundations, some of them were fools, and some of them were administering money they didn't work for. And it got to the point that they're too far removed from the founders to feel much affinity for, or even have much knowledge of, the original founders' intentions. In that light, Randy Alcorn even points out that in more recent times, many charitable foundations set up by the wealthiest people have explicit stipulations placed on them that the funds must be completely spent according to the founder's wishes and within just a brief time span, say 20 to 25 years after the founder's death, so that those administering the principal funds would still have intimately known the founder and could more likely administer the funds according to the original wishes. So I think this helps us to see, for example, that when Proverbs 13.22 says a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, this is not necessarily talking about acquiring, amassing a huge inheritance to leave to your children's children. And this might provide a caution to some attitudes that come specifically out of post-millennialism in the church. If you don't understand what I mean, don't worry about that. Proverbs 13 is part of the Proverbs of Solomon. So again, as always, we expect not to see contradictions in God's word, not to see contradictions between his proverbs in the book of Proverbs and his conclusions in the book of Ecclesiastes. So consider this. Many people will know their grandparents and their grandchildren. There can be relationship there. You can sometimes assess whether someone is wise or foolish when you have that kind of relationship, or whether that grandchild is a hard worker or not. And to leave an inheritance for your grandchildren can be done without it being life-altering, soul-damaging amounts too great for them to handle. What's also being said here in Proverbs 13, verse 22, is that it's also better to leave a modest inheritance to your descendants than to saddle them with large amounts of debt. I think that's probably a more helpful caution to much more of us in the culture today, and even to many Christians. And I'm talking about, you know, beyond post-millennialists at that point. Saddling yourselves and your descendants with debt is indeed unwise and a huge burden in itself. Better to be able to leave a modest inheritance than to pass down crushing debt." So that was all to address our speaker's first conclusion in this last section of chapter two. that the person we must leave our wealth to is someone we won't know. Our speaker's second conclusion is the following. We see it in verse 24. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. Now again, this is not like the rich fool we saw in the gospel parable. And we're gonna see how. Solomon's experiment with pleasure and toil has shown that they aren't two separate pursuits. Instead, they're one intertwined pursuit. And yes, we see at the end of verse 26 that this too is temporary, striving after wind. You don't know what will happen afterward and these things aren't lasting. But what one can indeed gain is finding pleasure in your labor. This itself we see in verses 24 through 25. It's a gift of God to find enjoyment in your work. We've spoken already of how the necessity of work for survival, it's part of God's curse on creation because of man's sin in the garden. Because of the curse, everyone has to work to survive. And I'm not just talking about everyone has to be out working a job. We understand that there is work done in the home and it's incredibly valuable work as well. but everyone has to work in order to survive. This is behind the New Testament command given through the Apostle Paul in 2 Thessalonians 3 verse 10. If anyone is unwilling to work, let him not eat. That sounds incredibly harsh, but that is the reality in our fallen creation. Our modern welfare system has, in practical terms, destroyed that relationship between the need for work and our survival. Welfare can and should be temporary, and financial welfare should, frankly, come mostly through the church. If the government is going to get involved, especially, it must remain temporary. The creation of a welfare class of people has truly damaged our society and damaged the lives of the individuals who have bought into it. but even though everyone must work to survive, there's no scriptural guarantee that everyone will enjoy his work or enjoy the fruits of his labor. We see this clearly in verses 24 through 26. There's nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This is a gift from God for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment. Verse 26, for to the one who pleases him God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give to one who pleases God. That middle part of verse 26, that's just like the second half of Proverbs 13.22. Remember, the first half was, a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. The second half goes, but the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous. It's what we saw at the very end of the parable of the rich fool. Whose will all these things be that you have laid up, you thought for yourself? It's what we see here in verse 26 of our passage. And now here's where I have to give a nod back to the post-millennialists and specifically here to something that Doug Wilson has written about this concept in Ecclesiastes. God is the one who gives things. And God is also the one who gives the power to enjoy things. These are distinct gifts. He writes further, just as a can of peaches and a can opener are distinct gifts, only the first is given to everyone. The believer is given both, which is simply another way of saying that he is given the capacity for enjoyment. This second conclusion of our speaker in this last section of chapter two about labor and pleasure is that it is simultaneously a gift of God and an attitude of the believer's heart specifically to find enjoyment in your labor. Not everything you do or that you have to do will make you giddy. When you're awake at 3 a.m. for the fifth night in a row changing another dirty diaper or helping a crying baby go back to sleep, that's not necessarily going to bring you great giddiness or excitement. When you're still working a job you have to drag yourself to every day because it's the only job you can get or you can't get out of it. It's the only job that will support your family. That in itself doesn't tend to bring us joy. But when you can find enjoyment in doing those things and in doing them well, as unto the Lord, that is a gift of God that ultimately only comes to the believer. Because a believer is the only one who can see the glory that awaits us at the end, that says your temporary happiness is only that, temporary. But when you can find joy in laboring well as unto the Lord, even at work that is often tiresome and grueling and boring, That is a gift only given to the children of God, because they know that this world's accomplishments and pleasures and comforts are only going to last so long, and even the world's burdens are only going to last so long as well. Now, if you're in a situation where you always feel the pull toward something else, some other vocation, it may be that God gives you the opportunity to pursue something that is easier for you to find joy in. But even if not, you can take joy in pleasing the master who cares for you in his smiling providence. Even the act of labor itself and the accomplishments that come with it can take our minds off, for a time at least, take our minds off the burdens we bear in our striving after the wind. That's one reason, frankly, that I generally still do most of my own yard work in a pretty large yard and move most of the snow myself in our fairly large driveway. It's not because I love doing either of those things. And it's not really because it's all that great exercise, although it is some exercise. Mostly it's because of the simple benefit of having something to do that takes my mind off other weightier matters in my day-to-day life. and also because of the legitimate sense of accomplishment that comes with staving off just a bit of the curse just one more time, even for a short time. What awaits the unbeliever is an eternity of torment, something, understandably, most unbelievers spend next to no time contemplating. But what awaits the believer is the fully unveiled face of Christ in glory, and the possibility of hearing those words, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with little. I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master. Let's pray. Father, What an amazing blessing it is to know, yes, we know you give gifts to all. You send the rain, as it says, on the just and on the unjust. But one of those amazing gifts that you hold out only to your children is the gift of enjoyment. Because we know that nothing in this world will actually bring us joy apart from you. And so your people have you. We see your face, even if it's veiled for now. We want to see your face in glory because we know that the more we see your face, the more we can understand what a generous God you are. How much you have given to us, Lord. It's so easy for us in our day-to-day life to forget that and to feel like we've been deprived of so much. Yes, other people have things that I don't have that I'll never have, that I might like to have, but you are a generous God. And in this season, especially when we often think of giving gifts and receiving gifts, we know that you are generous because of the amazing gift you gave of yourself in the person of your son, Jesus, who for no other reason than for your glory, chose to redeem us from our sin and to save us from eternal torment and eternal separation from all of your good gifts. So Father, we give you thanks and praise. Help us, remind us every day of the many, many good gifts you have given us and continue to give us and pour out into our lives so that we can take joy in them, take joy in the day-to-day labors that you have for us. Take joy in the little accomplishments, knowing that they won't fill the gaping void in our heart that can only be filled by you. but they're also not purposeless. And so we give you thanks and praise, Lord. I ask that you would pour your spirit out on your people today, the spirit of joy, so that we may be encouraging each other to take joy in the smallest things of our lives. In Jesus' name I pray, amen.