Ecclesiastes 3, verse 9. What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice and to do good in their lives, and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor. It is the gift of God. I know that whatever God does, it shall be forever. Nothing can be added to it, and nothing taken from it. God does it that men should fear before Him. That which is has already been, and what is to be has already been. And God requires an account of what is past. Moreover, I saw under the sun, in the place of judgment, wickedness was there. And in the place of righteousness, iniquity was there. I said in my heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked. For there is a time there for every purpose and for every work. I said in my heart, concerning the condition of the sons of men, God tests them. that they may see that they themselves are like animals. For what happens to the sons of man also happens to animals. One thing befalls them, as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath. Man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity. All go to one place, all are from the dust, and all return to dust. Who knows the spirit of the sons of men, which goes upward, and the spirit of the animal, which goes down to the earth? So I perceived that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his heritage, for who can bring him to see what will happen after him? Then I turned and considered all the oppression that is done under the sun, and look, the tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter. On the side of their oppressors, there is power, but they have no comforter. Therefore, I praise the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still alive. Yet better than both is he who has never existed, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun. You may be seated. Throughout the book of Ecclesiastes, as different goods are put forward as alternatives to the knowledge of God, be they power, be they pleasure, whatever the alternative is put forward, money, any of these things are all ultimately creatures. And they are things that focus upon the enjoyment of that thing at that time. They are all various forms of encouraging a living in the moment. And many of Solomon's deconstructions of false ethics are essentially him looking into the future to consider if this goes on for a while, what will it lead to? And as he looks into the future, he finds that rather than delayed gratification, these alternate ethics offer sometimes momentary enjoyment followed by horrific consequences. Sometimes they lead to immediate horrific consequences with following on horrific consequences. Never do they lead to immediate enjoyment and following on excellence. And so living in the moment is for us something that we can talk about in two different senses. The Christian ought to live in the moment in the sense that we ought to be focused on what is happening and seeking to take every thought captive, to go through every moment and using it to the glory of God. On the other side, you might say living in the moment could be sort of living for the moment. And in that sense, the Christian ought never to live for the moment, but rather ought to use the moment to glorify God looking to the future with hope, recognizing that there is blessedness that will be in the future with a delayed gratification. So now, as we look in and review verses 9-11 of chapter 3, it says, what profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. So we have here a number of profound things. What's the gain that can be obtained from any particular work? And we have the highest good being put forward, the knowledge of God, the glory of God as the thing to be gained. And we must remember that God is infinite in glory and cannot have his glory added to or subtracted from. And so when we talk about glorifying God, what we're talking about is an increase of the awareness of the glory of God by men and angels. and an increase of the display, form souls by habituation, and fill them with the knowledge of God, that Christ might be all in all, as he fills the fullness, the pleroma that is in the church. And so, the profit to be obtained is the increase of the possession of the knowledge of God, and the increase in the displaying of that knowledge of God into the world. And in verse 10, I have seen the God given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. God gives the work to be done. He commissions us. He gave the dominion mandate. And he also gave the great commission, the dominion mandate to form and fill the great commission to disciple the nations. These are things that we are commanded to do. And we have the law as an instruction set to know how to do it. And that task is given by God, and the means are given by God. Verse 11, He has made everything beautiful in its time. We have the Christian aesthetic, the Christian theory of beauty, that things are beautiful when they are rightly used, when they're rightly placed, when they are used in a proper way. And so we have the aesthetic of holiness, that things are beautiful when they're holy. And so, we do not look merely with the eyes. We do not rely merely upon sensate experience. But rather, we look upon the world as things to be meaningful. They must have lasting consequences. If choices do not have lasting consequences, they are meaningless. And so this is a thing that's put forward over and over again. And in order to avoid nihilism, and remember, what's nihilism? Nihilism, nihilism, nihilo is nothing in Latin. So nihilism, nihilism, is nothingism. The ism of nothing. The idea or ideology of nothingness. Nothing's worth doing, nothing's worth having, there's no goal, there's no right means. Nothingness. And so nihilism is what every false philosophy gets broken down to. that only Christianity can stand up against the assault of critical analysis. Every other philosophy, when examined, breaks down and does not allow for meaning. Christianity does. And so it has an answer, for example, with the issue of eternity being in the heart. That man looks for everlasting consequence. So without everlasting consequence, there's nihilism. And we just talked about what nihilism is. Only Christianity can stand up against nihilism. Everything else falls apart. Now, God has put eternity in the hearts of men so that you can show them the meaninglessness of their lifestyle. And it's a powerful goad to push men to consider the gospel. They still might resist it, and they might play cool, but when they're home at night, it bothers them. However much they pretend like they're not bothered by the meaninglessness, they are. One man who wrote a book called Tactics, it's not a particularly amazing book, but it's a book that deals with the idea of engaging with apologetics, talks about how oftentimes when you are engaging with people and trying to give evangelism or apologetics, your goal is not so much to cover everything, because you don't have time to cover everything. You can't get through a systematic theology with everybody. You can't give them a full apologetic every time. Your goal is to take some truth of God and to make it bother them. There's this little phrase in the book. I think the name is Kugel. He talks about this idea of putting a pebble in their shoe. The goal is to make it so that there's something that bothers them enough that it makes them kind of stop from just going along the way. And instead, they have to think about it a little bit. And as they're dumping the shoe out, before they go back to normal, they might ponder on it a little bit more. So this idea that you present this. So nihilism, the way in which anybody's philosophy leads to meaninglessness is normally a pretty easy pebble to put in their shoe. Asking people what their goals are is a way to get there. There's all sorts of little questions you can do to try to get into people's ethic or into people's goals. And it's one of the powerful ways apologetically of putting things forward. But you also have to give them the answer. You want to present to them the idea that the purpose of life is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever, and that the Bible tells us how to do that. That doesn't give them the whole gospel. There's lots of things they need to know besides that. But your goal is to figure out how can you scatter the seed of the Word of God. Jesus was not particularly concerned to explain everything to everybody, if you notice that in His teaching. A lot of his teaching is designed to bother people. A lot of his teaching is designed to bother people. And so he would tell them truths that would be bothersome and vexatious to their self-righteous souls or to their guilty souls. Or he would tell them things and see if they would bite and want to talk further. And so Ecclesiastes has a number of these sorts of similar things. Jesus uses rhetorical paradox and rhetorical difficulties to draw in attention. And people who are trying to figure it out give it more attention. And so oftentimes you have that here. And so having eternity in the heart, the Bible shows us hooks that we can attach to in the souls of men to grab hold of them as we seek to reel them in. We are fishers of men. And the places that we can latch on to, to reel them in, are revealed to us in God's Word. And one of them is, people have eternity in their hearts. They want meaning. They want something that's lasting. And so that's a place to try to attack. So He's put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. People also don't want the game to end. When you have a really good game, you're always sad when it's over. If there's a great book, the saddest part is the last page. If there's a good movie, you're always unhappy when the credits roll. But God, as a subject of study, always becomes more interesting, and it never ends. And so we have the inexhaustibility of God. We need to recognize when we talk about God being infinite, there is a way that people will talk about God as incomprehensible. That's wrong. It's the idea that God can't be understood. And then there's this idea that God is incomprehensible in the sense that there's so much to learn about God that we can never have a comprehensive knowledge. You see the difference? If somebody says God's incomprehensibility means you can't understand him, they're saying you can't know God. Guess what they just did? They made life meaningless. But if somebody says that there's so much to learn about God, and that God is truth, and you can know Him, you can truly know Him, but you can't know everything about Him. You can't know Him fully because He's infinite, and you're finite. And so you will always and forever be learning. They're just asserting the incomprehensibility of God in the sense that there's an infinite amount to learn, and so it never runs out. God's inexhaustible as a source of beauty, and goodness, and reality, and truth. There's always more. C.S. Lewis is further up and further in, and he talks about this idea of getting to know God is like running up a mountain, but as opposed to the space getting smaller, it gets bigger and wider as you go up. that there is more, that it feels more substantial. And so these senses of that there's a greater reality, more truth, more reality, more goodness, more beauty as you gain more. So these are the things that are present there. So all of this idea, these things are packed into verses nine through 11. There's all these little ideas here. Now, when we get to verse 12, I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice and to do good in their lives and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy good of all his labor. It is the gift of God. So what we have here is this is sort of a different way of saying we should know God. We should do his commandments. And a part of that involves rejoicing and enjoying the good things He gives. That's what's being said here in 12 and 13. There's a place for pleasure, but the place for pleasure is subordinate to the doing of good, subordinate to the knowing of God. So verse 14, I know that whatever God does, it shall be forever. Nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it that men should fear before him. That which is has already been, and that which is to be has already been. And God requires an account of what is past. Now, when we think about the meaning of this text, whatever God does, It shall be forever. His purposes never fail." Isaiah puts it this way. He says, the word that I send never returns void. My thoughts are higher than your thoughts. He explains how his thoughts are different. He says, the purpose for which I send a thing is always accomplished. Let me ask you a question. Do you ever have goals that you fail to accomplish? That's why God's thoughts are higher than your thoughts. Your thoughts are, I want to try this thing. You try it, and you often fail. God thinks I want to try this thing, and it always works exactly the way he wants. That's his decree. He does all he pleases in the heavens and the earth and the sea. Now. God, whatever He does, it lasts forever. It shall be forever. It doesn't run out. It doesn't fail. There's no failure in it. Nothing can be added to it. Nothing taken from it. There's not any sort of wiggle room there. Nothing can be added to it. Nothing can be taken from it. God does it that men should fear before Him. Again, His work is in order to bring about the knowledge of Himself And so he accomplishes it. God gives us the task of dominion to fill the earth and to form it. It will be done. He gives the task of discipling the nations to teach them all the things that Christ has commanded. It will be done. We are on the path. We're on the road. This is the progress of history is toward the fulfillment of dominion and discipleship. The filling of the earth with the church. And the filling of the church with the knowledge of God. So these things. This is the work that God intends. And He's bringing it about. It's filling and forming. So I know that whatever God does, it shall be forever. Nothing can be added to it. Nothing taken from it. He uses the whole of history and creation to display His glory. To display His attributes. God does it that men should fear before Him. He causes the picture to be more and more clear. More and more obvious. That which is has already been. He predestined it. This filling is filling along the track. He has the blueprint and design, and He's causing it to be manifested into space and time. And what is to be has already been. The future is planned. And God requires an account of what is past. So as time is going, things that men are accountable for and that angels are accountable for are occurring. And so it's leading up to judgment. Men have eternity in their hearts. And God is moving things to this grand, everlasting display of meaning with consequences that have no end. The greatness of it is something that we can pretend we have understood fully. We don't. There is more to get about it. To think about that. There are details that as you move in in your thought, and you think about things like, when I am there on this day of judgment, and all of the works of the man standing next to me are revealed, and I'm next, and after me, and it goes to the next man. This whole process, this displaying of all of history and doing it with intimate detail, this show. Great pieces of art we find to be impressive because they interact with themselves in ways that are beautiful and interesting. They have symbols that reappear over and over again. They might have allusions to other pieces of art that are well known. But God made all art to be a part of his art. And every man is his artifice to be something that can be referred to in his telling of the story through every other man. The grandeur of his art, the grandeur of his design, Verse 12, I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice and to do good in their lives. Sorry, not there. Go to page three, forgive me. Go to page three, verse 16. Moreover, I saw under the sun in the place of judgment, wickedness was there and in the place of righteousness, iniquity was there. There are two ways that this sort of gets read. So here, I'm gonna read it and I'm just gonna pretend, I'm just gonna put it in the way I understand it, and I'm gonna show you the other way it gets understood, okay? So verse 16, here's how I understand it. Moreover, I saw under the sun in the place of the civil courts, where justice is supposed to be administered, wickedness was there. And in the place of the church courts, where righteousness is supposed to be, iniquity was there. The way this gets read, for example, Matthew Poole's commentary, he just reads it as a repetition of the civil courts. The reason I don't believe that is because later on, the setting of them side by side is going to occur in more explicit detail, where you have the civil courts and the church courts. And these are the two public institutions. So I believe right here, we're getting the short version. A lot of the stuff that gets said later on in Ecclesiastes is said in shorter form at the beginning of Ecclesiastes, in these first few chapters. And so right here, under the sun, the problem of justice is not resolved. Remember the section we just came out of? This idea that God requires an account of what is past? And you go, okay, maybe that occurs in history. Remember? Like Job's friends, they said, the righteous always get the reward in this life, and the wicked always get punished in this life. So providential judgment. And Solomon said, no, that's not the way it works, because that's not actually what we observe. I mean, there are the righteous getting punished, and there's the wicked getting rewarded. OK, so that's not resolved. Maybe the courts get it fixed, right? Because I mean, that's the point of a court. You go, there's injustice going on. So we'll go to the court, and the court will fix it. We'll go to the civil magistrate. He'll stop the baddies. And he'll make sure the good guys get their comeuppance. Okay. Well, maybe that doesn't work out. Well, how about the church courts? Are the church courts always right? I mean, did John Husk get burned? Martin Luther get a bull of excommunication from the Pope? Totally legitimate office. Should totally be able to do that. Totally made up offices ruling over huge numbers of people calling themselves Christians. So the church court and the state court, do they effectually bring about the justice that men don't have? They do not. The civil courts fail. The church courts fail. In the place of civil justice, there's wickedness. And in the place of ecclesiastical righteousness, there's sin. Under the sun, this doesn't work out. It doesn't resolve it. These things, you end up with the post-modernist and the Marxist view. The Frankfurt School is a group of socialists that, unlike the Marxists, they thought, you know, violent revolution is hard and requires commitment. What if instead we got government bureaucratic jobs? We'd have great pensions and benefits. And what we would do is just gradually move through the institutions, take them over, teach socialism to the next generation. We'll get all the benefits of capitalism. Because, you know, it will take a generation or so. We'll be dead when the consequences happen. But in between now and then, we can sound really self-righteous and explain all the problems of things. We'll deconstruct society. We'll point out how everything is really just a power game. All language is really designed to control people. Reason doesn't help you to determine truth. All there is is words as control mechanisms. That's what postmodernism is. That's what women's studies is about. That's what Queer studies is about, that's what, whatever, put the word studies after it, that's what they're about. They're about explaining how all of social structures, all power, and all reasoning is really about control. By whom? Who did all this? The white man. Okay. So what's happening is everything, including the invention of Protestantism, because as opposed to Protestantism being the doctrine from the mind of God, Protestantism is instead an invention designed to allow people to rule other people, right? That's the idea here. So now you go, the civil courts and the church courts are just tools of control. That's when you look at it from under the sun. And so what do they become? They just become systems of oppression. All the courts, everything, all academia, they all become tools of oppression. So the church courts and the civil courts are just tools of oppression from this perspective under the sun, which makes power the thing. So what we have now is this question of maybe it's not pleasure and property, maybe it's power. Maybe that's the thing worth chasing after. Now, if that's the case, then we start to really have this question of, in the long run, why stick around? Why stay in this life? If it's all just a power game. Because it becomes red in tooth and claw real quick. It becomes a bunch of suffering and oppressing, which is where he goes. That's where Solomon goes. One thing I want to point out to you, one of the reasons it's important for Christians to care about power is because when the institutions are controlled by the wicked, the institutions actually do just become tools of oppression. The civil courts are not about justice, they become about expediency, which is just a euphemism for doing what I want. Think about Pontius Pilate. Jesus is innocent, however, the mob seems to prefer that you be killed, so I'm going to kill you. That is just doing what I want, when I want, because of the effect, because of the consequences. And so that becomes a power game. So the interesting thing is, the people who are post-modernists, who are the Freudian, sorry, not the Freudian, who are the Marxists, the cultural Marxists, I just lost it, the whatever school. Anyways, that school of thought is the school that goes through the institutions, takes them over, and over time, when you have the taking over of these institutions by people who just play power games, they actually create the thing they're criticizing. By saying that Protestant institutions are evil and it's a power game and they want to go replace that by their own power game, they just make the institutions of justice into power game institutions. The Frankfurt School, that's what I was forgetting, the Frankfurt School. So this idea that the institutions are just systems of oppression, when you have that idea and you go and try to take them over, you make what you're criticizing. Now, this leads to nothingnessism, nihilism, and it makes it so that choices are meaningless. It all just becomes about the now. And so, when the place of the magistrate is filled with injustice, the reason Christians should care is because when civil power doesn't administer justice, it makes people no longer believe in justice. It makes them think that God is a joke. It obscures the glory of God, but justice, administered in time and space, makes men fear God. And in church courts, when they deal with discipline swiftly and publicly and justly, it makes men fear God. But when the church courts cover things up, make excuses, have hypocrisy, do things that are designed to be a power game, it makes men say that churches are tools of oppression. So Christians should care about exercising power because men fear God more when power is exercised justly and rightly. And when power is abused, it obscures the glory of God and causes men to mock what they ought to revere. The idea of the civil magistrate being a source of power that is wicked is something that gets talked about in a lot of well-designed art. One of my favorite pieces of art in Western civilization is Shakespeare's Hamlet. And I have a quote for you in the footnote there of Act Three, Scene One, where Hamlet gives the famous to be or not to be. And oppressors cause wrong against those that they rule. and in their pride will not be corrected. These are all slings and arrows of life that Hamlet, written by Shakespeare, says about the reasons why life is difficult to deal with. And he has this issue of why continue on? Because death would bring sleep, where I could be separated from all these things. And then he says, ah, sleeping, dreaming. And the question is, what dreams may come? What judgment happens? And if there is a continuation of the thinking of the mind, and there's a God who is just in heaven, and you murder yourself, what judgment falls? These are the questions that he brings up. So there's this wrestling here. This profound and short statement in Western art. Now, these difficulties of the places where justice is supposed to be are things that cause men to despise life, to despise God, to despise justice, and to think things are meaningless. So now we go to page 4. I said in my heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every purpose and for every work." So here's what happened. Solomon was thinking, ah, there's all this awful stuff that happens. How's that going to be resolved in life? Pleasure can't be the thing that ultimately lasts here because it doesn't just happen that way. This isn't just good guys get good stuff, bad guys get bad stuff. That's not what happens here. Maybe the courts fix it. No, they're evil too. So what has to happen? God, in his righteous judgment, judges the righteous and the wicked. For there is a time there for every purpose and for every work. There's a time where? At the judgment seat of God. There is a time appointed where everything will be examined. Every purpose from the hearts of men and angels and every action. And so all of that gets brought in. So the problem of meaninglessness is resolved by the judgment of God and the everlasting consequences there. Then, verse 18, I said in my heart concerning the condition of the sons of men, God tests them that they may see that they themselves are like animals. What we have next There's this difficulty of what is meant by this idea of the testing of God. Is it the case that men are no different from animals? The Bible plainly teaches there is a difference, but it also deals with men who are wicked, especially false teachers. There's something about them where there's a denial of their humanity in a special way. So what is distinctive about man that makes him above the beast? Man is the image of God. That image is rationality. One of the reasons we know that is because the places where man and beast is contrasted in the scriptures, there is the absence of the human attribute shown to us in terms of what the beasts are like. Let me show you. Look at 2 Peter 2.12. But these, like natural, brute beasts, made to be caught and destroyed, speak evil of the things they do not understand, and will utterly perish in their own corruption. So these are false teachers. When they're said to be like natural, brute beasts, it says they are eloga zoe. Zoe is like an animal. You know the word zoo? A zoo is a place where you keep zoe. It's a place for animals. Zoology is the study of the zoe. Study of animals. So these animals, how are they distinct from non-animal life? They are a loga. They are without logic. They are without reason. They are without thinking. They are without word. Well, maybe that's just a weird one-off and, you know, something about some of the Jots and Tiddles not really mattering, maybe. Okay, well, Jude 10. But these speak evil of whatever they do not know, and whatever they know naturally, like brute beasts. In these things they corrupt themselves, like brute beasts. Alogazoa. These are unreasoning beasts. In Psalms, we have Psalm 49 verse 20, a man who is in honor, yet does not understand, is like the beasts that perish. Without understanding, he's like the beasts that perish. He's not thinking. Psalm 73 verse 22, I was so foolish and ignorant, I was like a beast before you. To not have wisdom and to not have knowledge is to be like a beast. It is the thinking of men that makes them ontologically superior to beasts. And that makes it so that we are men who are accountable. We're inexcusable because we are thinkers. When you behave, and when you think, in such a manner as to deny the difference between man and beast. You have not only denied the difference between good and evil, but even the difference between man and beast, you have, by suppressing the knowledge of the truth, and by suppressing the distinction of good and evil, made yourself beast-like. You have been like an animal. You've destroyed your dignity. There was a Beastie Boys song, They tried to encourage a general debauched distinction between man and beast, because they want to do whatever they want and not be held responsible. This is what the culture would have you believe. This is the spirit of the age, and it must be overcome. It must be viewed as wickedness. This idea that makes it so that you do not see a distinction between man and beast is what results from nihilism, and from denying the consequences of choices. I said in my heart concerning the condition of the sons of men, God tests them that they may see that they themselves are like animals. That word like animals, the word for animal in Hebrew there is behemoth, which you may recognize as being where we get the word behemoth. And so this idea of being like a beast, like a behemoth, Humanity, apart from God, is like a beast. And God tests men and shows us those who are unconverted to be like unreasoning beasts. So how are men like animals? They do not have wisdom and they do not make differentiation where they ought to make differentiation that is necessary for meaning. They have no wisdom, no light, no eyes. God tests them and shows them to have failed. And here's what God does when He shows you that, okay? When He shows you that you're like a beast, He does one of two things. He either hardens you so that you'll lean into it, so that later on He can show His justice by pouring out His wrath on you, or He converts you. The law of God is a mirror that you can see your beastliness in. So showing this way that there's a lack of human dignity in sin and unreasoning. As an apologetics and evangelism help people to see is to say that this false doctrine that there is no difference between man and beast, which is a necessary result of denying meaning. makes it so that the spirits of beasts that are unreasoning are no difference qualitatively between them and men. That men just become beasts, driven around by the id, the hidden desires, and all our rationalizing, all our thinking is really just a self-justification to cover up the bad desires, the animal drive that we have. That's another part of the modern psychology, that reasoning is really just about behavioral management, and it's just about bringing about results in a therapeutic model, as opposed to there is truth, there is purpose, there's law of God, and there's ways to actually solve the problems of sin and misery. Christianity provides answers to those things. Solomon is deconstructing Freudian nonsense, Frankfurt School, power politics. He does all of this in 1000 BC, 3000 years ago, inspired by the Holy Spirit. He is speaking these words and helping us to see the silliness of these false doctrines and what they do. Surely they all have one breath, one spirit. Man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity, all is meaningless. All go to one place, all are from the dust, and all return to dust. This is a denial of the continuation of consciousness. So many people just think when you die, that's it. The lights are out. But there is this haunting in the back of their minds, because eternity is in the hearts of men. So this is the lie. When you think of yourself as just dust, when you're a naturalistic materialist and you think, all I really am is a body, and if you say my brain is where my thoughts come from, and so it's just electrical signals and chemical fizz that make my thoughts, then your thoughts would cease when your body stops working. These lies are what men use to justify doing whatever they want, because they want to eliminate the distinction between good and evil so that they can do what they want. Solomon was not surprised by these philosophies. God was not surprised by them. Under the sun, there's nothing new. Humans can't invent things that the Bible can't tear down. God thought it all through. He gave us the book and said, this is sufficient to tear down all the idols, all the conceptual idols, all the false philosophies, all the wrong ideologies that raise up. This book is sufficient to tear them all down. This idea that everybody goes to one place, the dust, is far from the truth. And it makes everything meaningless. Verse 21, who knows the spirit of the sons of men which go upward and the spirit of the animal which goes down to the earth. Wait a second, I thought we all went to the same place. What he's doing now, he's just deconstructed a false view and shown how that view leads to vanity. All is vanity. That's what he said. That's what his point was. He's showing that view is wrong. He gets to verse 21 and he says, who knows this? When you see that kind of question in the Bible, when it's like, who knows this thing? It's not saying like, who knows? I don't know. Maybe it's not true. Maybe it is true. I don't know. That's not the point. The point is to say, it is rare for men to get this. It is rare to find a man who understands that men go to God for judgment and beasts do not. Go to page 6. So I perceive that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works. For that is his heritage. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him? This is where Solomon goes to, well, you know, this idea of judgment is terrifying. If I've done evil, judgment is a problem, right? And that's the basic reason people want to suppress the idea of judgment. And so they go, you know, I've done some bad stuff. So can we not have judgment? And so Solomon gets back to that and he goes, okay. Who really knows? I mean, who has a great argument for this? Who's really able to demonstrate it that man goes upward to God for judgment and the beast goes downward and there's a distinction of their spirits? And so he perceived. This is his psychological journey. This is where he went in his mind. So I perceive that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his heritage. There was recently a comment that got a lot of traction where somebody said, you know, don't try to leave a heritage for the future, just live your heritage now. What? It's just conflating heritage with don't leave a heritage. People want to destroy meaning, try to take all the things they can, pretending to take the good, and put it into their bogus philosophies that have no meaning. And this is really just live in the moment. YOLO, you only live once. This whole idea of trying to fill your time to live for today rather than future planning. Nietzsche described this as the will to power. Who has the will to power? And interestingly, he had this criticism. He says, you know, the man who has a why can suffer anything. But it is the true lion that without a reason can just will to power. That's the Nietzschean monster, just the will to power. We have a duty as Christians to exercise power for righteousness, but to just exercise power purely for power, just to do what you want, that is a godlessness. That is to make yourself God. I perceive that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his heritage. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him? The idea that because you don't know what's going to happen after you, in two ways, you know, when you die, what's going to happen here? You don't know. Live for now. Also, is there a next life? Is there a spirit that continues? Is my spirit really just the creation of matter? When I die, am I just done? When you hear that, this idea that we should just live for now because you don't know what's going to happen in the future, that's the idea presented here. This is the false philosophy being put forward. Another piece of Western art that deals well with this difficulty of trying to live for now is Macbeth. And I encourage you to read the long quote that I've got at the bottom there for you. But Macbeth, there's this famous thing where he says, talking about life that's focused on now. So what Macbeth did, Macbeth kills a king without any just cause. There's a king who's a just king, who's led his men into battle, and he's feasting with them, and he murders a king. Good King Duncan. And he murders him for the purpose of taking his throne. And it ruins his life. One of the things that happens here as you reach the end, is his wife commits suicide. Because her life is ruined by this too, because she encouraged the stealing of the power. And it ruined their lives. It made everything lose its joy. And so what's happening here is having just heard the death of his wife and about to go into battle, he is saying, life is but a shadow, is but a walking shadow, a poor player. that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. This is nihilism. Life is meaningless. And when you live for power, Shakespeare did a great job of criticizing living for power in Macbeth. When you live for power, the joy of it all disappears. The bothersomeness of conscience and the sort of Damocles always expecting someone to betray you. These two things make it so that just living for power ruins the I'm living in the moment experience. It ruins the YOLO experience. It ruins the I'm not going to worry about the future, I'm going to live for today experience. So this idea that now is your heritage, and I'm just going to do what I want when I want, that power to do what I want to satisfy myself is a good life, foolish and this is put forward in a lot of modern culture one of the most famous songs on the planet is the song imagined by John Lennon and These are the words that advocate for this. I'm going to live for now philosophy says Imagine there's no heaven. Okay. There's no future potential benefit. It's easy if you try no hell below us Okay, no, no consequences that are negative now above us only sky imagine all the people living for today and Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. No religion, no rule of doctrine, no rule of practice. Imagine all the people living life in peace. Beloved, without any rule to govern beliefs or behavior and no civil magistrates to restrain the wicked, there would be no peace. This anarchic vision of the good life, that if people just can do what they want to do, it's all going to work out real well, is naive and stupid. And this is what is peddled to youth, is this living for today philosophy. The targeting of the art is for the young to destroy their youth. and to take their strength and put it to wickedness. The goal is to take people when they are naive and to hit them with art of every variety to sway their hearts. And your job as parents is to guard the hearts of the youth from the propaganda machine of the world, from believing these stupid lies. And so you educate them, and you keep them from stupid art, whether it be song, or whether it be play, or movie, or game, or novel that teaches these stupid doctrines. And when you go through art with them, you point out to them the stupid, false doctrines and show them how to analyze the world. So then it says, imagine no possessions. is getting rid of private property, which, if you are not living so as to build wealth or to preserve your property or to be frugal, is great. Having no possessions equates to, I get to take other people's things. So that's what socialism is about, this idea of being able to take other people's things. Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man. A brotherhood of man is a wicked lie that does not differentiate between the righteous and the wicked. The brotherhood of man as opposed to the brotherhood of the church is an idea designed around eliminating the distinctions between good and evil. The brotherhood of the church separates the city of God from the city of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world. No. The world doesn't have a right to the world. The church does. It's our inheritance. God owns the world. He gave it to his son and his son gave it to us. It's not theirs. It's ours. Eliminating the difference between good and evil and making it so the rewards of the righteous go to the wicked. There's a chorus that goes between each of these verses. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us and the world will be as one. There is no pact between the church and the world. There is no unity between the truth and error. There is an antithesis, an unending opposition between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. The city of God and the city of man are at war, and they are not reconcilable except by the blood of Jesus, as individuals are taken out of the world, made enemies of the world, and brought into the city of God. It is only by conversion, when they go from being like brute beasts to being men, new men, who think rightly, that there can be any reconciliation. Any denial of the consequences of tomorrow is an effort to destroy the meaning of choices. Go to page 7. We'll spend more time in chapter 4, but I want to give you a couple things as this closes out, because it continues with the theme of oppression. Then I return and consider all the oppression that is done under the sun. When you go to living for today, It all becomes a will battle. It's a battle of wills. Who gets to choose? Who gets to choose what we do? Great, you wanna do what you wanna do? I wanna do what I wanna do. And if those contradict, only one of us gets it. And so it becomes a power game. And look, the tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter. Think about that. In a world without God and the rule of heaven, there is oppression, but there's no comforting. We have the Holy Spirit as the comforter. On the side of their oppressors there is power, but they have no comforter. Now the they there could be those who are oppressed, but it could also be the oppressors. The one who commits evil does more harm to himself than to the one he's done evil against. The oppressor, his soul is vexed by his evil, and his joy is robbed. The oppressed without God have no comforter, and the oppressor without God has no comforter. The wrong exercise of power, who will you go to for comfort? Will you go to those you have oppressed and ask them to wipe away your tears? The oppressor has no hope apart from forgiveness in Christ. And the oppressed has no hope for justice in this world apart from the judgment seat of Christ. Therefore, I praise the dead who were already dead more than the living who are still alive. Yet better than both is he who never existed, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun. And so we have this catch word, under the sun, used twice here in a few verses. In just three verses in chapter 4. Under the sun. Under the sun. We're reminded of the fact that unless there is a throne of heaven from which law comes and providence governs the affairs of men and without a judgment seat, there is no comfort for the oppressed. There is no comfort for the oppressor. And as a result, Life itself is not worth living. There is no path of life that's worth continuing apart from God. And so we're stuck with, without God and His rule, nihilism, a true nothing-ism. Or, if we turn to the living God, we can have meaning. Understanding His glory as the purpose of all things. And the good life is the life of pursuing the glory of God defined by the law of God. Comments, questions, objections from the voting members and those with speaking rights. Mr. Nye. I Have no idea, and would concede my passing memory from high school to your knowledge of the music industry. Great, thank you. So perhaps not the Beastie Boys, perhaps the Bloodhound Gangs, I don't know. Thank you. Sir, Mr. McNeer. Oh, inside of Ecclesiastes itself, I think it's 3.19 maybe. Oh, you're talking about the nostrils breath thing, that other one. Sorry, can you read it again? Can you read it again? Sorry, forgive me, I just caught up to where you are, where you're thinking. That's not what I'm thinking of, thank you. It's one that talks about how life is but a, life is but a vapor, it's from a psalm, but there's also that life, but a nostrils breath. There's a text, forgive me, I can't remember where it's written. So thank you, thank you for that. All right, let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you have given to us a deep, rich philosophical text in your scriptures, that you have deconstructed the false philosophies of the world and shown us how they can be dismantled and how the scriptures are sufficient for this. So many want to say that there are things outside of scripture that we need in order to deal with the intellectual challenges of our day. But Father, we praise You that You have given to us answers to the false philosophies of the world in Your Scripture. And we thank You that You have given to us an apologetic tool in this book of Ecclesiastes. And we ask that You would cause our hearts to be enriched by it. That we would store up the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are hidden in Christ. We pray this in Christ's name, Amen. Alright, Psalm 27 Part 2. Please stand.