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from the book of Ecclesiastes
chapter 4. Ecclesiastes chapter 4 reading
verses 1 to 8. And we should always remember
when we are reading these early chapters of Ecclesiastes that
the writer at this point is writing from the point of view of unbeliever
and he is examining life from the eyes of an unbeliever, an
unconverted person. One of the key phrases in the
book is under the Sun and that phrase means in a world where
there is no God, no supernatural, no heaven or hell or eternity
and he's saying to himself if that is the case What can we
make of human life? So let us read verses 1 to 8,
Ecclesiastes 4. Again I looked and saw all the
oppression that was taking place under the sun. I saw the tears of the oppressed
and they have no comforter. Power was on the side of their
oppressors, and they have no comforter. And I declared that
the dead who had already died are happier than the living who
are still alive. But better than both is he who
has not yet been, who has not yet seen the evil that is done,
unto the sun. And I saw that all labour and
all achievement spring from man's envy of his neighbour. This too
is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. The fool folds his hands and
ruins himself. Better one handful with tranquility
than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind. Again, I saw something meaningless
under the sun. There was a man all alone. He
had neither son nor brother. There was no end to his toil,
yet his eyes were not content with his wealth. For whom am
I toiling, he asked, and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment? This too is meaningless, a miserable
business. May God bless this reading from
his own holy and infallible word. letter to the Colossians. Colossians
chapter 3 verse 18. We read to chapter 4 verse 1. Colossians 3 18. Wives submit to your husbands
as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands love your wives and
do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in
everything for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter
your children or they will become discouraged. Slaves, obey your
earthly masters in everything and do it not only when their
eye is on you and to win their favor but with sincerity of heart
and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with
all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men. Since you know that you will
receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward, it is the Lord
Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be
repaid for his wrong and there is no favoritism. Masters, provide
your slaves with what is right and fair because you know that
you also have a master in heaven. Amen. May God bless his word. Fourth of our 20th century idols
or isms is capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system
which has been dominant in the Western world for a number of
hundred of years, ever since the feudal system of the Middle
Ages broke up. Capitalism is about the relationships
between employers and workers. There are certain people in a
nation who possess capital. Capital is the means of production. It may be money, it might be
land, it might be mines or factories or businesses. All these are
referred to as capital. And there are businessmen, there
are people who own these means of production. And then on the
other side there are workers or labourers who don't own any
means of production. And these two sides make a bargain. The workers sell their labour. That's what they have to sell.
Their bodies, their minds, their skills, themselves. They sell
their labour to those who own the means of production, and
they work for them in return for a wage or a salary. And the
decisions about production are made by the owners, by the businessmen,
and the motive is profit. The workers are compelled by
economic necessity to offer their services. One of the great laws
of capitalism is supply and demand. If workers are in short supply,
they can obtain more money from those who own the means of production. If workers are in very great
supply, then the employers can pay them correspondingly less.
The rule is what the market will bear. It is the relationship
between these two classes, the capitalists who own capital,
the means of production, and operate on the basis of private
profit, and the workers who enter into a contract with the capitalists. We, of course, do not live in
a purely capitalistic society because many of the important
economic decisions in our society are not made by private businessmen,
but they are made by government. And the government has, over
the years, taken into its control and into its possession a number
of the means of production. And part of the capital of the
country is in the hands of the government. And it was quite
interesting in the last few years in what is called Thatcherism
to see how the government was moving back towards a more purely
capitalist position. You remember the word privatisation
and a lot of the different means of production that were in the
hands of the state or the government were being sold or returned to
companies, to businessmen who would now operate on the basis
of profit. So at the minute, for example,
there is quite a row about the selling of water. It is owned
now not by the state but by different boards or companies and they
are making a profit from selling water, the law of supply and
demand. It will be interesting to see
what this present government does, whether it reverses Thatcherism
and moves away from pure capitalism or whether it continues in a
capitalistic direction. This is the economic substructure
of our lives. It will be obvious to some of
you already that I am not an economist, and I don't propose to argue
this evening either for or against capitalism. I have met Reformed
Christians who have argued passionately that capitalism is the economic
system of the Bible and should be in every country. And I've
met equally reformed Christians who have argued the very reverse,
that capitalism is of the devil and should be abolished right
away. So I don't propose to enter into
that argument tonight. I'm not going to speak for capitalism
or against capitalism because I don't know enough about it.
Where I do criticize it is when it is treated as a god. And that's
what we want to look at this evening. When capitalism or any
economic system is treated as a god, when people put their
hopes in the economic system, when human life is controlled
not by God's values but by economics, when the hope is entertained
that the economic system itself will be our saviour and lead
us all to a good life. And my friends, that is what
is happening today. And this system under which we live is
becoming a false and a terrible idol. As I've said to you before,
all of our life is being looked at in economic terms. The political debate in our generation
is no longer about morality. It's about economics. The government
does not talk. Politicians don't talk about
what is morally right. They talk about what is advantageous
for prosperity. The talk is of greater productivity,
increased capital investment, technological training, We can
all talk about the rate of inflation and so on, things that we knew
nothing about twenty years ago. There is a general hope that
somehow our economic system is to be our saviour and to give
us the good life. And that, of course, must fail
and it will fail because God is left out of the picture. and the nations of the West are
living, in the words of Ecclesiastes, under the sun. They're living
as if there were no God. God is left out of account in
the councils of the nations. And this must mean that life
will be reduced to meaninglessness and chaos. And I want us this
evening for a few moments to turn to Ecclesiastes 4, verses
4-6 for a superbly penetrating and
startlingly relevant expose of the mentality of capitalism,
the boardroom and the shop floor in modern industry, and we shall
see how God's word lays bare the sickness and the sin at the
heart of our economy. And then we shall look briefly
at the Christian answer to the problem. So we'll start with
the capitalist, we'll go on to the worker, and then we'll finish
with the Christian. First of all, the capitalist,
verse four, I've called this anxiety in the boardroom. The wise man says, and I saw
that all labor and all achievement spring from man's envy of his
neighbor. This is the great motivating
driving force, he says, behind economics and industry, man's
envy of his neighbor. All labour and all achievement. And the second doesn't come without
the first. You don't get achievement without
labour. To get anywhere, you have to
work. But what's the motive for work? The motive for work in
our Western society is compulsive competition. The survival of
the fittest. the rat race. A century and a
half ago, Charles Darwin taught the theory of the survival of
the fittest. And that's what we have in our
western world today. Economic Darwinism. Man's envy
of his neighbor. The tenth commandment is, you
shall not covet. You shall not covet. And at the
heart of our society is a breaking and a disregarding of that commandment. And our society is saying to
us today, you shall covet. The government tells us, government
ministers have recently told us, that the economy will not
start to turn up, to improve, until people spend more money. and their task is to get us into
the shops buying things. The world of advertising stimulates
people to have not only as much as others, but more than others,
and that is quite candidly and openly expressed. Within companies,
the stress is on striving for promotion and recognition and
advancement. There's a very powerful onward
motivating force. And between companies, it's a
state of war. I was talking to a businessman
recently who described to me how their company deliberately
set about destroying their only rival in one particular field. They sat down, the executives
sat down and planned how to put the smaller and weaker company
out of business. They decided that they were going
to undercut them on various contracts, they were going to do the contracts
at a loss, and they developed a definite strategy to wipe this
other company off the face of the map and to make all its workers
unemployed. These were respectable, I presume,
many of them God-fearing, decent businessmen, and this was good
business practice. This was what they wanted to
do. Tremendous pressure. The capitalistic world is a very
cruel and savage world. There is very little Christian
about modern capitalism. We have the pressures on the
businessman, the endless hours of work, the families neglected,
the ulcers, the heart attacks, the stress, the life wasted,
and always looking over their shoulder, terrified of slipping
back. As Ecclesiastes 4 says, this
is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. Anxiety in the boardroom, Then in verses five and six you
have apathy on the shop floor. We move now from the capitalist
to the worker. The fool folds his hands and
ruins himself. Better one handful, this is what
he says, better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls
with toil and chasing after the wind. Here this man has introduced
a fool, and the Hebrew word means a sluggard, a stupid fellow. He looks at the bosses with all
their problems and he folds his hands. He has no ambition. He has no pride in his work.
He tends to do the absolute minimum He's familiar with long meal
breaks and frequent sickness leave and low productivity. And we know that these cancers
are eating away at all the economies of the Western world. You only
need to read the quality papers and magazines to see them being
discussed. The worker is simply saying, why bother? Who wants
all that stress? His attitude is expressed in
verse six. Better one handful with tranquillity than two handfuls
with toil and chasing after wind. He is enough. He's enough to
live on. His pay is adequate, his life
is comfortable, and the welfare state will fill any gaps. Why
should he exhaust himself with hard work? Who wants responsibility? Who wants overtime? I'm not paid
to work, to worry. The tragedy the scripture says
is that he ruins himself. He ruins himself. The Hebrew
says he eats his own flesh. For you see, apathy and idleness
and irresponsibility destroy people. They destroy people. Man has been made with the opposite
qualities. People's self-respect is corroded
and destroyed. And they become stupid, zombie-like,
irresponsible figures, futile and tragic. Worse even than their
harried employers. It's a pretty grim picture. The
writer pictures a driven man on one side, a driven man, forcing
himself on and on and on. And on the other side, an apathetic
man, idle and careless, shrugging his shoulders. And the basic
problem in both cases is the same. There is an emptiness.
There's a gap. There's no answer to the question,
why? The employer says, what am I
doing this for? He doesn't know. There's no answer. Eventually
he says, it's meaningless. And the employee has said, what
would I kill myself for? There's no answer. It's meaningless. This is industry without God. The economic base of the Western
world is being undermined, eroded and destroyed, and some Christian
economists warn us that we may face a very, very grim future. The spirit of apathy has gripped
sections of the workforce, and the whole social fabric is coming
under an intense strain, and the government and the employers
may urge greater productivity, but they can't give any reason. In the late 60s and early 70s
in America, a whole generation of young people dropped out of
society. Their parents were saying to
them, work hard, go to college, get a good degree, make plenty
of money, get a good job. And the young people looked at
their parents and said, why? So that I could be like you.
So that I can get a new lawn mower
to cut the front grass. So that I can join the golf club
down the road. I look at your life. and it's
empty, and it's meaningless. And a whole generation of young
people folded their arms and dropped out. And that is now
spreading down into society. You talk to young people, talk
to them about a better standard of living, talk about the good
of society, they will laugh. If you bring work under the sun,
if you act as if there is no God, everything is meaningless. There are only three things which
will make people work. You know they are. Only three things which will
make people work. The first is necessity. If you
have to get enough money to live, That'll make people work. If
they're told, you'll starve if you don't work, that'll make
them work. Now our society has taken that
motive away. If you don't work, you'll not
be very comfortable, you'll not be well off, you'll have a pretty
miserable time, but you won't starve. You won't starve. The
second reason why people work is because they enjoy their work
They find it fulfilling, they take pride in it, it brings them
satisfaction. A lot of today's work is very
repetitive, tedious, dehumanizing, and boring. You can't really
take a lot of pride in standing pulling a lever at a machine.
We've taken that second motive away. People say, why? They go into work, and they put
in the hours, they take their paycheck, but they don't care.
Some people do have creative and enjoyable work. They're fortunate. Many people don't. There's one other reason, and
that brings us to the Christian answer. There's a God in heaven. And
he has placed you and me in our jobs. And he calls us to bring
glory to him there. And he is our father. And we
love him dearly. And we want to please him. And
he is our true master. And he sees everything we do. And when you and I go to work
tomorrow morning, We are literally working for our Lord. He is our master. He is our employer. He is the one to whom we are
responsible. He is the one who sees what we
do. Whether you work in a factory,
or on a farm, or in the home, or in school, or in hospital,
or whatever, whatever it is you do, you're working for God. That is your calling. We are
all in full-time Christian service. We're not just working for pay.
We're not just working for necessity. We're not, I hope, working for
envy. We're not just even working for
the love of our work, although we're fortunate if we do love
our work. But we're working for love of
our Lord Jesus. You remember what Paul says to
the Colossians? Whatever you do, whatever you do, work at it with all your heart
as working for the Lord. Working for the Lord, not for
men. It is the Lord Christ you are
serving. Remember that tomorrow. It's the Lord Christ you are
serving. You see friends, it was this
spirit that animated the medieval stonemason. You can go into some of the great
cathedrals in Europe And they can, when they're renovating
the cathedral, they can erect a scaffolding to go right up
to the top of the Gothic arches, right up in the height and the
darkness there, where no one has been for 500 years. And they get up there and they
find a stone carving of a saint or a gargoyle or something. And
that carving is as perfect as the one at the front door. And the man who carved it knew
that nobody would ever see it. Nobody would ever be up there.
There wouldn't be no light up there. But God would see it. And he did it perfectly. He did
it to the very best of his ability. Because he wasn't just working
for people to see. He's working for God to see.
I'm intensely moved when I read about those carvings. And I think
of some humble, forgotten stonemason lying on his back on a plank
with the chips falling in his face and his arms aching, his
lungs filled with dust hundreds of years ago when they were building
that cathedral. And that simple man going to
do his best and he died and nobody ever knew what he'd done except
as God. You can't pay people to do that. I've said before, it was remarked
in Scotland after the Reformation, that one of the differences between
Scottish society and society in Southern Europe was that when
men were working in gangs on the road, making road breaking
stones, There were no overseers. There were no foremen. There
was no one in charge of them. And people asked why that was.
The answer was they didn't need anybody in charge of them. They're
Christian men. Man would out with his hammer
at the side of the road. He didn't need to punch a clock.
He didn't need a supervisor. God was watching. He did a good
day's work. And he didn't stop until he'd
finished good day's work to the best of his ability and he could
look at his master's face and his master would say, well done. Only this knowledge, I believe,
of an ever-present God to whom we are responsible is the ultimate
and sufficient ground to give stimulus and encouragement to
the worker and to take stress from the manager. And in the little that I've read
of capitalism, it seems a very ingenious and effective and efficient
economic system, but at the heart of it, there is no heart. There's an emptiness. There's
a meaninglessness. That's why it's starting to collapse. I suppose each of us should ask
ourselves the question, for whom do I work and why? Do you groan and grumble on Monday
morning? Do you drag yourself out of bed
and say, oh no, not another week again? Do you start focusing
upon your difficult colleagues or the unpleasant people who
are under you or your boss who's insensitive Do you spend your
day struggling in the rap race, or snoozing in apathy, or just
simply putting the hours in? Or do you give yourself to working
honestly, diligently, cheerfully, remembering that thou, God, seest
me? Amen. Let us pray. Our Father, we thank you for
the blessing of work given to man before the fall, that we
might subdue the earth, care for it and steward it, and bring
out the full potential of creation as your under managers. And although,
God, we know that in this sinful fallen world, our work is often
now laborious, repetitive, and frustrating, Father, we thank
you that it is not divorced from our Christianity, but it is part
of our Christian life and service. So, Lord, at this moment, In
our own hearts, we would each thank you for the work which
in your providence you have given us to do. Help us, Lord, to be grateful
for it. We pray for those who are unemployed,
who are seeking work, And help us, Father, to remember always
who it is we are serving, the best of all masters, the one
who sees all, every piece of effort and industry, thoughtfulness
and imagination. And Lord, no matter how humble
our work may be, it makes no difference to you. simply that
we do it well. So, Father, we do indeed thank
you that you're a kind and a considerate and appreciative master, quick
to say, well done. And as we look around us at an
empty society and people who find no meaning in their work
but who live for other things, Help us, O Lord, to show by our
daily attitudes in our place of work that we do have a different
perspective. And Lord, let that be a great
part of our witness. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Capitalism
Series 20th Century Idols
| Sermon ID | 92622203815523 |
| Duration | 35:49 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Language | English |
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