Chuck Larsen

People with money often tell us it won’t make you happy. But I always think, “I’d like to find that out for myself.” In Ecclesiastes 2:16-18, Solomon says he hated life, work, and wealth. Then, he proceeds to explain why he hated it all. He gave three reasons. First, he hated it because you can’t keep it! A Jewish proverb says, “There are no pockets in shrouds.” Of course, the American saying equivalent to that is, you’ve never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul! I know that you can’t eat money. But in our society, it will buy what you need to eat. It won’t keep you warm but will pay the utility bills. One writer called money something that “may be used as a universal passport to everywhere except heaven and as a universal provider of everything except happiness.” Solomon lost his happiness when he sought to find meaning and purpose in wealth! It’s the case for us all.

The second reason Solomon hated it all was that you can’t protect it. Since there are no pockets in shrouds and no U-Hauls with hearses, we have to leave everything behind. We have no idea what’s going to happen to it when we’re gone. Solomon spent years building a united kingdom. He brought all twelve tribes together to rule the world under a unified nation that became the greatest country, the wealthiest country, and the most powerful country in the world. Yet, when he died, he left it to his children. Solomon didn’t know what would happen to the kingdom when he died, but he knew it would be out of his hands. Rehoboam, his son, destroyed it all! He also killed all of Solomon’s other sons! (See 1 Kings 11:41f). I would argue that it doesn’t make a lot of difference how specific you get in your will you can’t protect any of it when you’re gone. Solomon resigned himself to this truth. We all must learn to cooperate with the inevitable.

The third reason that Solomon hated all this and felt such great despair is that he realized that we can never fully enjoy it all as we should. The more we have the greater the responsibility. The more we have the more we need to worry about. It takes hard work, dedication, and a lifetime spent in grief, travail and often many anxious and sleepless nights. For what? Ecclesiastes 2:22 says, “What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun?” Then he finally lifts the veil of depression and despair in verse 24 when he says that God is the great giver of it all and one of the greatest gifts he gives us when we enter into a faith relationship with Him, is the gift of joy and contentment with our lot in life. Warren Wiersbe says, “Apart from God, there can be no true enjoyment of blessings or enrichment of life. It is good to have the things that money can buy, provided you don’t lose the things that money can’t buy.” Money can’t buy me love, but God offers it freely on the cross of Calvary: God so loved the world, that’s us! We need but to receive it. John tells us that all who receives Him, Jesus; they are blessed with the gift of becoming children of God.

Francis Schaffer said that the popular music of our generation will reveal the climate and nature and wisdom of each generation. As I’ve been studying through Ecclesiastes, I’ve been relating the truths written by Solomon over 3000 years ago to songs I remember in my own generation. It seems there are plenty of songs that attempt to do what Solomon did, find meaning and purpose in life, but come up with the same answer: vanity of vanities. It’s useless, and under the sun, there is no true meaning and purpose from the purely human perspective. Every evaluation in every generation of man’s purpose in life always leads to the same conclusion:

“The Answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…” Peter, Paul & Mary.
“You may as well try to catch the wind…” Donovan
“It’s dust in the wind; everything is dust in the wind…” Kansas

In Ecclesiastes 2:17, Solomon wrote: “Everything is meaningless, like chasing the wind.” (New Living) “I had been chasing the wind.” (Good News) “…Everything here on earth is useless, like chasing the wind.” (New Century) “When I looked, I saw nothing but smoke, smoke and spitting into the wind. There was nothing to any of it, nothing” (The Message). From man’s perspective, that’s absolutely true. But God has a plan and a purpose for all life! The conclusion of it all is one must trust God. In a trusting relationship with Him, it will all come together. Man will never understand the puzzle of life outside of a personal relationship with God. Further, man will never really find fulfillment in life outside of a relationship with God. So, in Ecclesiastes 2:24-26, Solomon concludes with several observations. “So I decided there is nothing better than to enjoy food and drink and to find satisfaction in work. Then I realized that this pleasure is from the hand of God. For who can eat or enjoy anything apart from him?” Even in the middle of much despair, confusion, and disillusionment we can find joy.

There was an old cartoon in which a publisher tried to convince Charles Dickens to change the opening sentence in one of his most famous novels, “A tale of two cities.” “Mr. Dickens, either it was the best of times or it was the worst of times. It can’t be both.” Phil Ryken says, “But of course it can be both, and often is. We live in a world that is cursed by sin (see Genesis 3:17–19), but it is also a world that God created essentially good (see Genesis 1–2) and that he has visited in the flesh and is working to redeem through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son. Thus we experience joy as well as sorrow, especially if we know God in a personal and saving way.”

Pete Seger is credited with writing the song “Turn, Turn, Turn.”  It was written in the 1950s but was not set to music until 1962. Seger did a rendition of it, as did the Limelighters in the early sixties, but neither took off. It was in 1965 that the Byrds put it to a contemporary rock sound that it made it all the way up the charts to #1 on the American Billboards. I graduated in 1965, and our yearbook committee chose it as our theme song for the class. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 was the theme passage for our class. Pete Seger, who got all the royalties, wrote only one word of the song. That word was “turn.” He repeated it three times (Turn, Turn, Turn) as the chorus after the verses that were penned 3000 years ago by Solomon. The passage uses the word “time” twenty-eight times.

According to Phil Ryken, Plautus wrote about the tyranny of time, “Bemoaning the stress caused by the latest device for keeping time, the Roman playwright said, ‘the gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish hours! Confound him who has cut and hacked my days so wretchedly into small pieces. Confound him who in this place set up a sundial.’” How much worse is it for us today? We all wear watches to keep close track of what time it is so we can meet our next appointment or accomplish our next mini-mission. I remember the story of the missionary who moved to the jungle to reach a very primitive tribe. The tribe’s people referred to him by a particular word that he could not understand. When he got a translator, he told him that the natives had given him a name that he didn’t understand. He then asked what the name meant. The translator laughed and said it means, “The one who wears his god on his wrist.” Like most Americans, the missionary always checks his watch before doing anything. We are indeed slaves to time.

Ecclesiastes 3 begins with, “There is a time for every purpose under heaven.” It is followed by the repetition of the word “time” 28 times in 14 pairs of perfect opposites. Looking at these opposites, we might notice that they cover the entire gamut of the human experience. However, we might also notice that there is a “purpose” expressed. Each event has a sovereign design and order, beginning with “a time to be born and a time to die.” God is sovereign over birth and death. Once a year, we celebrate what is known as the “Sanctity of Life Sunday.” Ronald Reagan established that back in the 1980s. Its focus is to draw our attention to the fact that God, and only God, has the power to start or end life. Reagan believed that life began at conception. Each conception is a miracle. Think of all the circumstances that must take place for any particular person to be conceived. It’s not just sex! Abraham and Sarah had sex thousands of times (I’d expect), as did many other couples in the bible who never conceived a child. Each conception is a miracle planned and purposed under a sovereign God’s mighty hand who establishes a “time to be born” and “a time to die.” Life from conception to death in God’s time is sacred.

I’ve been thinking about pastors who died on Sunday, and I remember the Pastor of Ft. Calhoun Presbyterian Church 20+ years ago, who was found dead on Sunday morning. I remember my good friend and a local pastor, who also died on Sunday.  I looked it up and found at least three stories a year in the past three years where pastors died on Sunday—some before they preached, some between sermons, and some after the services. Pastors experience extra stress on Sundays. We should give our pastors more time off. I don’t think anyone can relate to the stress a pastor feels on Sunday. I preached two different sermons every Sunday at three weekly services for almost 20 years. Looking back at that now, after several years of retirement, I can’t imagine doing that.  A news article I read one Monday morning made me think of this.  Here is what it said, “Smyrna (MI) Bible Church Senior Pastor Mike Jones died suddenly yesterday from a stroke. He was up early to get ready for church, and sometime later, his wife found him on the floor. They took him to the hospital, but he was declared brain dead by early Sunday afternoon. Mike was 45 years old, had no warning, no medical history, and was taking no medications. He just had a stroke and died. He leaves behind a wife and young family with six kids.” You never know!

I’ve been studying Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and the passage that struck me again was “there is a time to be born and a time to die.” Everyone should come to terms with that reality. We should live our lives knowing that a time is coming for each of us. Hebrews 9:27 makes it clear that “…it is appointed for man once to die.” Phil Ryken asks, “…Will you be ready when the time comes? Many people aren’t. When the Vicomte de Turenne was mortally wounded at the Battle of Salzbach in 1675, he wistfully said, ‘I did not mean to be killed today.’ By contrast, one sixty-five-year-old widow from Amsterdam was prepared. After the death of her husband in 2005, she carefully planned her own funeral, including the music. One day the next year, when she went to pay her respects to where her husband was buried, she lay down and died right next to the family grave, perhaps of a heart attack. The woman’s name was already inscribed on the headstone, and her will was found inside her handbag.”

I want to be careful how I talk about this subject because only a truly morbid person obsesses over the inevitability of his own death. Reminding people of the inevitability of death is not always the best thing to do. Alexander MacLaren tells of the overzealous Christian barber who wanted to share his faith with his customers. When he met his first customer one morning, he sharpened his straight razor on the leather strap. His initial approach to his customer was, “Are you ready to die?” One can imagine what went through the customer’s mind as he viewed the finely honed razor. On the other hand, only a foolish person refuses to ponder his mortality. One of the most profound truths come from the mouth of William Wallace of Brave heart fame. He said, “no man can really live until he is ready to die.”