Ecclesiastes 8, starting at verse 10. Then I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of holiness, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done. This also is vanity, because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, Therefore, the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times, and his days are prolonged, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before him. But it will not be well with the wicked, nor will he prolong his days, which are as a shadow, because he does not fear before God. There is a vanity which occurs on earth, that there are men, there are just men, to whom it happens according to the work of the wicked. Again, there are wicked men to whom it happens according to the work of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity. So I commended enjoyment, because a man has nothing better under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry. For this will remain with him in his labor all the days of his life, which God gives him under the sun. When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, then I saw all the work of God that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. For though a man labors to discover it, yet he will not find it. Moreover, though a wise man attempts to know it, he will not be able to find it. For I consider all this in my heart so that I could declare it all. that the righteous and the wise and their works are in the hand of God. People know neither love nor hatred by anything they see before them. All things come alike to all. One event happens to the righteous and the wicked, to the good, the clean, and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As is the good, so is the sinner. He who takes an oath is he who fears an oath. This is an evil. in all that is done under the sun, that one thing happens to all. Truly, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil. Madness is in their hearts while they live. And after that, they go to the dead. But for him who is joined to all the living, there's hope. For a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die. But the dead know nothing. and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. Also, their love, their hatred, and their envy have now perished. Nevermore will they have a share in anything done under the sun. Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already accepted your works. Let your garments always be white, and let your head lack no oil. Live joyfully with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life, which she has given you under the sun, all your days of vanity, for that is your portion in life, and in the labor which you perform under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you're going. I returned and saw unto the Son that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill. But time and chance happen to them all. For man also does not know his time, like fish taken in a cruel net, like birds caught in a snare. So the sons of men are snared in an evil time. when it falls suddenly upon them. You may be seated. Now even though Solomon continues with some of the themes here of death past this, what we have here is this interesting connecting back to what we read and talked about this morning. If you look at towards the end of chapter nine, The idea that time and chance happens to all, and man does not know his time. Compare that back with back in chapter eight, when we were looking at this idea that kings and getting their favor might be the way to live the good life, and that got mocked. Well, we saw back in chapter eight I'm looking for the verse here. Here it is, verse 6. Chapter 8, verse 6. It says, Because for every matter there is a time and judgment, though the misery of man increases greatly. For he does not know what will happen, so who can tell him when it will occur? The two verses being compared back and forth, time and chance happening to all, man does not know his time. These things help to create kind of a beginning and end of these connected sections. We're stuck with this difficulty that we don't know our times. We don't know what's happening around us exactly. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know when it's going to happen. As an example of this, I've looked around at real estate prices for a long time. I was raised by a father who did real estate work. I learned about real estate my whole life. I studied that, consider it, I pay attention to the markets, look at things, think about indicators, and I've been saying for like four or five years, they're way too high, the prices are way too high, they gotta fall. And they didn't. They didn't at all. Why? Because I am not God, and I have no idea what the future holds, and the timing of it, I have no idea when it's going to happen. Just like all men who make predictions about the future, you look around and you make predictions, and most of the time, the predictors of the future are fools who set themselves up to show themselves wrong in time. So when you predict things about the future and you're trying to pick timing on things, those are things that help us to remember that we are men and not God and we cannot boast about tomorrow. We don't know if we'll go and make a profit. We have to recognize that if the Lord wills, we'll make a profit. So that's one thing, the fact that you don't know the way of life makes it so that there are difficulties that will happen and you can't predict them all. And when we think about the book of Ecclesiastes and the book of Proverbs, the book of Proverbs is the book of the general rule and the book of Ecclesiastes is the book of exception. The book of the general rule and the book of the exception. The book of Proverbs tells us the general tendency of the way things go. It shows us the blessings of the good life and it connects them to the temporal world. And we're told that generally speaking, you do this and this consequence happens. You obey God and this blessing comes. You disobey God and this curse follows. And we know that in terms of moral absolutes, that the perfectly righteous always receive reward And the perfectly wicked always receive punishment. And we know that all of us, apart from Christ, deserve nothing but punishment. But we have this reality that there are those who are redeemed in Christ, who following general principles, following the law of God, repenting of sins, and the general tendency for those people is going to be blessing in this life. But sometimes there are the Job incidents. where a man seeking God, doing what he commands in many areas of life, having faith, and even facing suffering, well with wisdom and fortitude, still suffers curse in this life. Now with Job, we know it's followed on by double blessing. An increase of more than he lost, but we still see the fact that we don't know what's going to happen when. Job didn't have certainty when he was dealing with the blessings of God being taken away, and he said, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. He didn't know that God was going to give him more children after that. He didn't know that God was going to increase his wealth after that. And so he had to face the uncertainty of life going forward. And so uncertainty. In this life. And the problem of death itself. are being emphasized by Solomon here. We had in chapter seven reputation being dealt with. In the beginning of chapter eight, we had the favor of kings. And we also dealt with this idea of even being a king, you can rule over other people to your hurt. And so power and the favor of the powerful is not sufficient for the good life. And there's this consideration that follows here into verse 10 about failures of power. But all of these difficulties in Ecclesiastes, the book of the exceptions, this is meant to tear down false ideas of what's good and to support the reality that the knowledge of God is the good for us to chase. And he's doing it by showing us problems with other things that we might chase. In verse 10, what we have is the beginning of the consideration of a man who has been a church member his whole life. Verse 10, chapter 8, verse 10. Then I saw the wicked buried who had come and gone from the place of holiness And they were forgotten in the city where they had so done. This also is vanity. What's being explained here are types of lives that destroy meaning. One of the types of lives that destroys meaning is for a man to come and go from the place of holiness, to come and go to the temple or the assembly of the saints, and to be a wicked man. And he sees the wicked buried. That burial reminds us of death. He lived his life. He came and went to the place of holiness. And he was forgotten in the city where he'd done this. You might go, well, if they're wicked, it's a good thing they were forgotten. If they're wicked and they're a member of the church, it's a good thing they were forgotten. I mean, who wants to remember the wicked man who was a part of the church? But when a church does not exercise church discipline and does not differentiate between the profane and the holy, the result is that the meaning, the meaning of being a saint, of being a holy one, is destroyed. There's no distinction between those that are set apart and those that are common. And so if there is no distinguishing between those that live wickedly and come into the holy place, and those that live righteously that come into the holy place, there is a loss of saltiness. There is a loss of distinctiveness. There is a loss of differentiation. And it makes being a saint meaningless. It's vanity. And so what happens is there's a forgetting about it. There's a forgetting about this particular wicked person, and there's a forgetting about any sort of need for this to be dealt with. And so everybody becomes accustomed to hypocrisy and vanity. So that a lack of integrity is the norm, and people don't expect anything from church members. Oh, he's a Christian, so he's just like everybody else. Maybe a little more self-righteous, maybe a little more hypocritical, but otherwise, the same as everybody else. This is vanity. Why? Verse 11, because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily. Therefore, The heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Somebody who goes into the holy place and is wicked, and he's buried. He just dies. He dies a natural death. He dies in old age. Been a church member in good standing. Wasn't excommunicated. Lived and died naturally. As a result, people are hardened to do evil. I could be a churchman. respectable, no consequence. I can be an evildoer, and I can avoid civil punishment, no consequence. Others look on and they go, yeah, I will take all the honors of respectability, I will live in civil society, I will have all the benefits of the city, And I will do what I please. I will be a wild man. I will take what I want. I will do what I want. There will be no consequences. So they are hardened into doing evil. Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Not merely justice, but swift justice is necessary. in order to keep the wicked at bay, in order to prevent the simple from hardening into the wicked. The wicked become scoffers, the simple become wicked. Some of those who are early on the path of seeking to learn the truths of the Christian religion start to go back into, well, who really knows? but the administration of public justice by the two public spheres, the church and the state. The swift use of the keys and the swift use of the sword restrain wicked men. We live in a time where those who have power enacted against them are assumed, assumed to have some plight. And so the vast majority of places that call themselves churches do not use church discipline because of the weaponization of empathy and feeling bad for people and trying to, you know, maybe gently bring them along or maybe we should just not even try to bring them along, we just accept. And because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. In the first several years of my ministry as a pastor, I was way, way, way, way, way, way too slow to use church discipline. And the reason is because of weakness. There's a, our culture does not encourage people to become comfortable with power. And if you're conscientious, you try to be careful about not oppressing the rights of people under your authority, which is good. And the combination of the two can sometimes lead to weakness in rule. It is the duty of those who wield the keys and those who wield the sword to execute justice swiftly. And to do that without tyranny requires two things. One, wisdom to make right determination to avoid punishing the innocent. And second, is a courage that comes from settled conviction. And so wisdom breeds that courage. Careful study is necessary to be able to speedily execute acts of power and to do it without tyranny. Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and his days are prolonged, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before him. What's happening here is in this psychological journey, where Solomon is considering in a memoir kind of way the various lies he believed, he's tracking back his considerations. He thought in his mind, it's possible to have power and to hurt yourself by wielding power. It's possible to have power and to hurt everyone under your authority by a failure to use your power. And the reality that there are differences between the righteous and the evil is by itself an assumption, a presumption, an admission that there is a God in heaven to differentiate good and evil, to define it. And so he says, there are evil people who don't get punished. They die and are buried. Burial doesn't mean as much to us as it would have meant to the original readers here in about 1000 BC. Burial was rare in the race of man. Most men were pagans, heathens, idolaters, polytheists, and they burned their dead. They burned them. And the result is that Solomon looks at all this and he goes, there is evil, there is righteousness, there are holy things. And to blur the holy and the profane, the righteous and the wicked, is something that makes them all meaningless. And the failure to punish the evil quickly is something that hardens the hearts of men. And so I know there must be a solution to this. And the solution will not come in this life. There is not going to be necessarily a reckoning for every evil deed here and now before you die. There is not necessarily going to be perfectly righteous rule in any state that you live in. But there is going to be a judgment. And there is going to be a blessing. Though the righteous suffer in this life, they will receive reward. And so this points to the need, if there is justice, if there is such a thing as justice, then there must be a judgment. And so that need for a judgment. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and his days are prolonged, yet surely I know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before him. He's reminded as he sees injustice, you know, it's so often people see injustice and they say, how can there be a God? There's evil in the world, there's suffering in the world, children starve, all of that. And you go, really? Because if you have a standard by which to judge good or evil, then you are assuming God. And if you're assuming God, then you know that there's an ultimate remedy, there's an ultimate resolution. If there's a standard to judge by, There is something above the world. But it will not be well with the wicked, nor will he prolong his days, which are as a shadow, because he does not fear before God. How does that make sense? Though the wicked's days are prolonged a hundred times, his days won't be prolonged? Solomon loves to do this. The book of Proverbs is full of A, non-A. And here we have it. Even though he A, yet, he will not A. There's a difference between the days. One is having days here, but they are days of curse. And the other is having life. Though he prolongs his life here, waiting for his death, he will not have spiritual life, is the idea. He's not going to be blessed, he is cursed. Though he live, it's cursed. The justice of God is what's on display. His days are a shadow. They're a nose breath. Because he does not fear before God, therefore he doesn't have life. This reminds us of the end of the book. What's man's all to fear God and keep his commandments? What is eternal life? The knowledge of God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It's the beginning of knowledge. Verse 14, there is a vanity which occurs on earth. There are just men to whom it happens according to the work of the wicked. Here's another example of something that destroys the difference. Meaning requires differentiation. Meaninglessness is just a mixed bag. Everything's the same. So what's vanity? This is meaninglessness. This is something that destroys meaning. There is a thing that destroys meaning which occurs on the earth. That's a meaningless existence. There must be a judgment. The philosopher Immanuel Kant rejected the Lutheran pietism of his parents and tried to come up with ways of supporting by philosophy, apart from scripture, different beliefs. And one of the things he tried to deal with was the question of justice. And he felt as though he couldn't really prove anything about there being justice, but he said, well, there has to be justice. And so there must be a Judgment Day. I often think that he stole that without all the background from Solomon, trying to deal with the reality that you can't have a conscience, you can't have trouble of soul about guilt without a sense of justice. And the idea of justice, the distinction between right and wrong, is an unavoidable thought of men. R.C. Sproul famously liked to engage with atheists. And they would reject his arguments about God. And this is pain-inducing. It's gut-wrenching. You see it in a movie and it bothers you. You see it in real life? You're a king of all the space between the river and the river. All the way from the Nile to the Euphrates. Everybody's paying tribute. How many stories of injustice At the center of civilization, this king, with a great court, kings came before him. How many stories of injustice do you think he heard? How many people coming and asking him to relieve their injustice, to save me, to hear my plight, do you think Solomon heard? How many times did he hear about the righteous receiving the reward of the wicked, and the wicked oppressing the righteous, taking all their goods? How much would that vex your soul to hear story after story after story, court case after court case after court case, suit after suit after suit? People not receiving a just reward. And these things are the things that drive men to drink. These are the things that drive men to merriment, to cover over the sadness. And so he hears all of this and he goes, there must be a God. There must be a God in heaven. There must be punishment of the wicked. There must be reward of the righteous. But I can't take it. Wisdom caused his heart to ache because he saw all of the needs. Like he said at the beginning of the book, what is crooked cannot be made straight. What is lacking cannot be numbered. I have the revenues of all the space from Asia Minor down to Sinai, and I can't fix it. And so I commended enjoyment, because a man has nothing better under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry. Under the sun, what's the highest thing? The sun, not the throne of heaven. This world seems so meaningless. Without meaning, without the rule of heaven, what is there to do but to chase pleasure? Eat, drink, and be merry. The Apostle Paul helps to summarize this really well. He says, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. That's the summary of all the false philosophies that Solomon attacks, that Paul gives. Paul's really good at summarizing Old Testament books. That one, that one's impressive. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. For this will remain with him in his labor all the days of his life, what God gives him under the sun. This is the lie he's telling himself. If you're going to live under the sun, if we're going to not have meaning, then, you know, let's just eat, drink, and be merry. You're going to have that all the time you work. Do you remember that he already actually tore this down? Do you remember earlier on, he was like, okay, eat, drink, and be merry. But you know what? I've seen rich guys. They've got it all. They can eat, they can drink, but they just can't be merry. They eat and drink and they can't enjoy it. And they watch other people enjoy their stuff, but they can't enjoy it. And as their wealth increases, it just increases who eats their wealth. And so having stuff, having the ability to throw the parties, having everybody come to you, eating, drinking, and being merry, it's not the solution. Laughter is madness. Do you remember that? He's already torn this down. He keeps going to the same ones. Now, you might go, why would God inspire Solomon to write a book where the same bad answers come up again and again? And you're going to ask a good question. Why do you, in your life, keep being tempted to the same bad answers again and again? I mean, I've only been tempted to overeat once. It was one time, I overcame it philosophically, and I was never tempted again. Is that what it's like with your sin? You're tempted once. Glorious victory, never tempted again. The same thought patterns never reenter your mind. That was easy. Moving to the next one, the next temptation, the next sin, that one we're going to have to deal with that. Or is life filled with the same temptations arising over and over and over and over again? Solomon is revealing to us in his diary of his mind, him overcoming falsehood and then suffering through having to wrestle with these false philosophies and going back to the same thing. Remember Solomon's the one that said, inspired by the Holy Spirit, as a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly. And we all have foolishness and folly in our hearts, and we're all tempted to go back to the same sins. And so Solomon, he's looking around at the world from a position of power, and over and over again, he goes, this is awful. This is painful. I am going to enjoy pleasure, and I will suppress the pain of my heart. And Americans, with video games and food and pornography and antidepressants, can understand that better than any people in the history of the world. We are more like Solomon than any people to live on the face of the earth at any time before. With books as cheap as water delivered to us over air onto our phones, and we chase stupid entertainments, and we are again and again drawn into the same sins. An inheritance unlike any other inheritance. And we tell ourselves lies like, There's nothing to do here but to eat, drink, and be merry. Verse 16. When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, then I saw all the work of God that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. For though a man labors to discover it, Yet, he will not find it. Moreover, though a wise man attempts to know it, he will not be able to find it. These verses, beloved, I want you to exacto-knife them. Enjoy everything and God convicts your soul and causes you to learn. You can't control it. God does. This time, in the ordinary means, ordinarily, when you're studying, when you're thinking, when you're meditating on the truths of God, ordinarily, that's when God teaches you. That's the ordinary means, and that's why we're supposed to chase those, and we pray for the blessing of God on it. So here's what happened. He's going through this, his soul is suffering, and he says, when I applied my heart to know wisdom and see the business that is done on earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, That one, the third person, one, when one, hypothetically, sees no sleep day or night, I have a friend, I'm asking for a friend, what do you do when you can't sleep? What Solomon does is he frantically goes and studies and thinks about theology and philosophy, and he goes and he's thinking about how do I solve this thing, it's bugging me. When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that's done on earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, Then I saw all the work of God. He's pulling his hair out over the fact that he cannot figure out how to deal with the suffering of injustice in the earth. And he's studying and he's thinking and he's trying to deal with this and he's meditating and he's sleepless over it. And God caused him to see. What did God cause him to see? Then I saw the work of God. What's that work? That a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. When you don't understand that under the sun is a catch word that means from the perspective of there's nothing higher than the sun, you're inclined to read this like this. When I applied my heart to know wisdom and see the business that is done on the earth, even though one sees no sleep day or night, then I saw all the work of God that a man cannot find out the work that's done throughout the world. And you go, what? You understand the work of God? But what you understand is that you can't understand the work of God? It turns us into this irrational statement. Ah, true wisdom. I finally understand that I cannot understand. Great. Thank you, Socrates. All I know is that I can't know anything. Fantastic. Let's stop studying. Why read the book? We know the ending. The ending is you can't figure it out. It's meaningless. That is not what Solomon is saying here. Here's what he's saying. When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that's done on earth, even though one sees no sleep, day or night, then I saw all the work of God. And here's the work of God. Here's the part I didn't get before. That a man cannot find out the work that's done from the perspective of false philosophy, of thinking from the perspective of under the sun. If you don't have the faith, If you don't have the doctrine that God rules everything, if you don't believe that God is the definer of good and evil, if you do not believe that God controls everything, if you do not believe that the law of God teaches you the difference between good and evil, what's going to happen is you're going to say, I can't find meaning. Here's the work of God. that men are not capable of finding out the meaning of the work, the work itself, what's going on. They can't understand the world or history or what God is doing apart from starting with the faith. This is a presuppositional proof text. This is a text that teaches us the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. This is a text that teaches us the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And then this explains it. For though a man labors to discover it, yet he will not find it. You can try to search out and seek knowledge from the perspective of unbelief, and you can't. The Apostle Paul says it this way. The philosophers of this world, the rulers of this world, did not know the Lord of Glory. He says it this way, that, I has not seen, nor ear heard, nor entered into the heart of man the things that were prepared for us. It is not possible to know or to have wisdom apart from already having it planted in you by God. When God gives the wisdom, when he gives faith, when he plants it in you, he causes you to see. You were blind. He causes you to have life. You were dead. And dead men are typically bad philosophers. For though a man labors to discover it, yet he will not find it. Moreover, though a wise man attempts to know it, he will not be able to find it. Where's the wise? Where's the scholar? Where's the debater of this age? Why aren't they figuring out? They can't. This little text, verse 16, 17 of chapter 8, Solomon is explaining to us If you don't have the gift of faith, you will look on all the evil of the world and say, there is no God. Which is hilarious, right? Because you go, OK, if you start with the assumption there is no God, if you start with the assumption that the Christian religion is false, you will look at the world and say, the Christian religion is false. Wow. Great, if you start with the position, of course you're in there. But if you start with the position that Christian religion is true, and you look at the world, rather than a grief of heart and all of the injustice, there's an answer to it. You start there, you end there. But that ending there is not the same sort of ending there that the unbelief ends there. The unbelief, you go, there is no God, there is no Christian religion that's true, and the world is full of injustice, which doesn't make any sense without God, because where do you get justice? And so you're stuck in this miserable place. But if you have a belief in the Christian religion, in the God of the Bible, You look at the world and there is an answer to the suffering and the difficulties and to the temporary injustices. But the effect of God being slow to punish is that the wicked are hardened in their wickedness. And that's not a mistake by God. That's not an oversight. It's not a bug. It's a feature. God intends to have the wicked fattened up like cattle to be slaughtered. God stores up coals that are fiery to pour on their heads. The display of justice by God on the day of judgment is a part of the grand display of his glory in history. He does it on purpose. And so when there are wicked who are not punished, when you want them to be punished, And you're right to want them to be punished. Know that what God is doing is preparing for a greater show. He's going to make it better. He's going to do it better than what you wanted. For those of you who are kingly and you yearn for justice, there will be justice. Comments, questions, and objections from the voting members and those with speaking rights. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that you are a God of justice. We thank you that you punish the wicked. Father, we know that we are wicked. And we thank you that in you justice and mercy have kissed. Father, we thank you that we have forgiveness in Christ, that you are just God, and that you have paid for our sins by the death of Christ. We pray, Father, that you would bless us, and that though we see the wicked prosper, that you would bless us to see the truth that is invisible now, that you will bring judgment. And Father, we ask that you would bless us to see that you will either bring judgment by destroying the wicked, or that you have brought judgment in Christ and that you will save those who now oppose you. We ask that you would bless us to rejoice in your mercy toward us and towards others, and that you would cause us to rejoice in your justice And we pray all of this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.