Investing in Eternity

Eternity, Justice, and Human Mortality

The text this morning is in Ecclesiastes chapter 3 verses 11 through 22. He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end.

I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and enjoy the good life. It is also the gift of God whenever anyone eats, drinks, and enjoys all his efforts. I know that everything God does will last forever.

There is no adding to it or taking from it. God works so that people will be in awe of him. Whatever is has already been, and whatever will be already is. However, God seeks justice for the persecuted.

I also observed under the sun there is wickedness at the place of judgment, and there is wickedness at the place of righteousness. I said to myself, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, since there is a time for every activity and every work.

I said to myself, this happens so that God may test the children of Adam, and they may see for themselves that they are like animals. For the fate of the children of Adam and the fate of animals is the same.

As one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath. People have no advantage over animals, since everything is futile. All are going to the same place. All come from dust, and all return to dust.

Who knows if the spirits of the children of Adam go upward and the spirits of animals go downward to the earth? I have seen that there is nothing better than for a person to enjoy his activities, because that is his reward.

For who can enable him to see what will happen after he dies? Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for another Lord's Day where we can come to worship with fellow believers. God, that you have created a community of believers here to worship through singing spiritual songs, through hearing the word preached, Lord, through fellowshipping together.

And God, in each of those things, Lord, I pray that our worship would be pleasing to you. And Lord, as we are encouraged and built up or broken down from the power of your word to pierce hearts, to separate the marrow from the bone, Lord, that we would rejoice in the good gifts that you've given.

Lord, the physical earthly gifts under the sun that you've given, but more, Lord, the gift of eternity in your presence with your people forever, praising your name. And so, Lord, with that idea, and Lord, as you use Josh to preach your word, to work on our hearts and our minds, that we would be conformed in the image of your Son, Jesus.

God, I pray that we would praise you in our hearts and our minds and with our lips.

It's in your name we pray. Amen. I'm sure you guys have all heard the expression, he is so heavenly-minded that he's no earthly good. It's been a response, right? It's been a response to a generation of pietist activity in the modern church.

And the cliché has some truth, right? Somebody is so addicted, so focused on their personal salvation, so focused on their piety, their quiet time. For many of you growing up in Sunday school, I would say that was probably the encapsulation of the Christian life, wasn't it?

Have a quiet time. Pray. Read the Bible. That's what it is. That's what it is to be a Christian. So the cliché has truth. People that are endlessly thinking that the Christian faith is held primarily within your thoughts and between your ears, they get a blowback and a pushback.

And that is that someone is so heavenly-minded that they're no earthly good. But Solomon will teach us that this phrase is largely untrue. Because the reality of the situation is that someone who is heavenly-minded is the only one who can ultimately accomplish good.

And we always have to, in Ecclesiastes, reconcile the Scripture with other Scripture. Because Ecclesiastes is a very dangerous piece of text to take out of context. It's a very dangerous piece of text to take in isolation and not combine it with the totality of Scripture.

This morning's passage is one of those extremely dangerous texts. There are things that could be taken from this text, divorced from the rest of the Bible, that would lead us to some very bad places. So the issue for us this morning is, what does it mean for us to be heavenly-minded in a good way?

Faith as Allegiance to the King

Because the reality of the situation is you will be eternally-minded, whether you want to or not. Because God has bound that up in man. Every man seeks something that is going to last beyond him. And when we don't, we're no better than dogs.

That's what we act like. A long time ago, by God's grace it has been several years now, I would talk about my students at school and I would call them animal humans a lot of times. The reason why is because it seemed that all they wanted to do was to eat, sleep, entertain themselves over and over, rinse and repeat.

And that is acting in a beastly way. But the reality of the situation is that every human being is not a beast. As much as we might act like them at times, there is a difference. Because godliness, as we're going to find out this morning, is not primarily found between your ears.

The Christian faith, my dear brother, the Christian faith is not a set of propositions that you believe. The Christian faith is the regeneration of a creature that is a vessel of wrath into a new type of creature that is a son of light.

And that thing, that creature, is going to be different. The regeneration does not leave you unstained, unchanged, right? You are going to walk in a different way. We see that from scripture. If godliness is just a set of things that you believe, then there's no power in it.

And it's difficult, right? Because we hear, and rightly hear, without faith it's impossible to please God. But what we've done is we have turned even faith itself into mere belief of propositions. When the word for faith, over and over again in the New Testament, is a word that means to bow down before a king.

It is a belief in the authority of your king. And that's how we know faith without works is dead. What good does it do to say that you love the king when you break his law? It does no good. Jesus says, if you love me you'll keep my commandments.

He says that a tree is known by the fruit it bears. He says that love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. We have changes that we have to make in the church. And we really have no silo.

Like the, you know, the Reformed bunch, I beat up on us all the time, that we think that we have reached higher maturity by the things that we believe. But really the traditional Southern Baptist church thinks that their doctrinal purity is their saving grace also.

They're people of the Bible, right? That's what you'll hear over and over again. The reality of the situation is that Christians are defined by what they do, not what they think. You are going to be judged by your works, by your works.

There's going to be a reckoning for what you say, for what you do. And Solomon is going to start to hit to the heart and then he ends at a crescendo, not for him but for us. Because where Solomon is at his most hopeless in his writing this morning, we find hope that Solomon couldn't have known about.

But I get ahead of myself. First we're going to look at the eternal and the temporal divide of man. He's made everything beautiful in its time, God has. He has set eternity in their heart, the sons of men, so that man will not find out the work which God has done from beginning even to the end.

Eternity in the Heart and God's Unchanging Work

Have you thought about that? Do you let that wash over you? I know there is nothing better for them than to be glad and to do good in one's lifetime. This is the contrast in Ecclesiastes, is that on the one hand Solomon is comparing what's on above heaven, and what's going on above heaven is eternal, perfect, unchangeable, never-ending.

All of God's work lasts forever. And then the duality is man can't even understand what God's doing. We have no idea. And when we see glimpses of what God is doing, it does fill us with awe, doesn't it?

And we see miracles all the time. And too many of us, I think, have been accustomed to thinking that God will not follow through on his promises, right? Our job here at this church is not to rearrange a bunch of disaffected people from other churches.

Our job here is to make disciples. Our job here is to preach the gospel, teach them God's commands, and see miracles happen. We get hung up, and we talked about it in 1 Corinthians, we get hung up on the miracles, well I don't believe in the miracles, whatever, okay?

Wherever you land in that duality, in that kind of doctrinal milieu, right? What you do have to believe is that people coming to Christ is a miracle. And we need to see a lot more of it. And friends, we can't do it.

So there is relief in it, in knowing that people's souls are not in our hands, but at the same time that God has promised to win souls. And so to start with today, are you living as though God's overreaching purpose is going to happen, and he's going to use you to do it?

God's work is going to be beautiful in its time every time. He is working all things. In fact, he made us go through a drought for the last weeks so that you don't whine about it when it rains. But I'll tell you, if it rains every day this week, you'll be whining about it by Thursday, won't you?

Oh, we need the rain so much. But not five days straight of it. That's what we are. And God understands that. And Solomon is getting at this idea that there is stuff that's going on in heaven, and there's stuff that's going on under the sun.

And what's going on under the sun is beastly, temporal, and it can seem very pointless. But then what he says is that God's work never ends. God's work is working all the time. History, right now, even as we speak, you are being led along on a path to the recapitulation of Eden.

We know this. The garden is at the end of the book, as well as the beginning of the book, right? God is working all things in history to bring everything that was cursed in Adam, and we heard that this morning in the reading, right?

We are sons of Adam. He is working all that's cursed in Adam into a recapitulation that will, the only difference between this Eden and the first Eden is this one will never change, and it will be unbounded.

Adam was said to take dominion, but through Adam's sin, dominion was going to be a difficult thing to take, right? Because it was going to be by the sweat of his brow. He was going to plow the earth and get thorns.

The job of procreation was going to cause a lot of pain, a lot of torment, a lot of toil on women. It was going to be difficult, but when Eden is re-established at the end of history, it's going to be everywhere.

The whole world will be God's sanctuary, and in the meantime, God is ordaining a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to build and a time to tear down, to love and hate so that he can teach his attributes to a people who is discovering God's eternality and man's own finitude.

We are very finite. We have a very small amount of time, and as you get older, you start to feel that finitude more and more because things hurt that used to not hurt. Things knock you down that didn't used to knock you down.

You can't eat pork without getting indigestion. It's all that stuff. It happens over and over again, and what we start to understand is as we get to the end of it all, we always ask the question, what is the point?

Contentment, Pleasure, and the Temporal Struggle

See, Solomon tells us that there is an eternal struggle of temporal man. There's no struggle with God, right? He's making everything beautiful. Man doesn't understand what he's doing, and God's purposes will always be completely fulfilled.

But with man, it's different, right? Man has a duality that's very difficult, and it's an eternal struggle in that man is created immortal and yet dies, and we do not do well with that, do we? We know in our hearts, we know in the fiber of our being that death is not natural.

We pine for immortality, and we pine to understand our creator, and philosophical works are done en masse to try to understand where do we come from, where are we going, what is it all for, how did it happen, and yet we know from Solomon's writing that as much as we study, and as much as we read, and you can become the greatest student of the scripture that anyone has ever been, you could be the highest level, you could know every single verse in scripture, and you will be not even close to understanding God.

Did you know that? You will never get close to understanding God. Even in eternity, when we behold God, and we see his face, we will still misunderstand and not understand far more than what we do understand.

God is not like us in many ways, and yet in this one way, God has put us on this path to where eternity is bound up in our hearts, we want to know our God, we want to know what we're here for, we want to know about his purposes, we want to know how it's going to last past us, and we strive to discover them, but often the discovery is elusive, and so many people will say, I'm just not going to try anymore.

See, and what Solomon's going to do, you may not see it, you may not see it in the verses, but he starts talking about the righteous and the wicked, and he starts talking about justice being perverted, he starts talking about man as beast, who knows where they're going to go, and what Solomon is doing is he's introducing responses.

There are some people that are going to deal with the eternality that is bound in their soul, and what they're going to do is curse God and die. No greater than a beast, in fact much worse off than a beast.

See, the wicked counsel that makes people look at God, look at the attributes of his creation, look at what he's done, look at what he said, and decide that they do not owe him their allegiance. That is a wicked piece of counsel, that is doing weakness that turns justice on its head, and is going to change the purpose of man from eternity with his creator into an eternity separated from his creator.

Are you urgent about your friends? Do you tell them? How do you love somebody if you don't tell them? The purpose of man is to glorify their God. The purpose of man is to spend an eternity walking in the garden with his creator.

We know it, don't we? And we even knew it before we were brought into faith. We understood that there was something different about us as human beings, that it's an awful thing to take a human life, that it's an awful thing to disparage and to tear apart a human being.

That's a horrible thing to do. And we understand that the purpose of man cries out that we are supposed to be back in the garden, and it causes wreckage here on earth. Because it's not going that way, is it?

It's not peaceful right now. The only way that peace can be brought to the temporal man is what Solomon says in this passage. We have to accept that being grateful to God and doing good to his fellow man is the best.

That is, the blessing from the hand of God is to be able to recognize that God gave it to you in the first place and to praise him. In fact, in this temporal life, that's the only good we ever get, isn't it?

And somehow in our Christian bubble, what we've done is we've actually turned a lot of this on its head, and we've started actually hating God's creation. And we actually think that it's not a good thing to enjoy the things that God has given us.

And instead, what we have to do is we have to get over the ridiculous diatribe that everything we like is idolatry. It's not. It's not. You will know idolatry by the obsession. Idolatry is an obsession.

Idolatry is a single-minded focus on the object of worship. Liking your family, no matter what the gospel coalition says, is not idolatry. Okay? Liking to watch a football game is not idolatry. We have to be careful with this.

There's a struggle that's going on here under the sun, and we should be glad when God gives us good things. That's what Solomon says, right? That's what Corey taught a few weeks ago. Pleasure itself is not a bad thing.

In fact, God created us to feel pleasure, right? The trouble comes in when that becomes the only thing we ever pursue. And it's tempting, isn't it? Because once you get a little pleasure, you want more pleasure.

Once you get a little bit of money, you want more money. See, the peace of man is found only in accepting and thanking God for his gifts. If you want to have peace on earth, be grateful for what God's given you.

All right? What causes wars? Is it not discontent? Is it not covetousness? Do we not want the resources that someone else has somewhere else, and we decide that we can take them? That's war. Peace on earth comes from contentment with God.

We're not going to have peace, though, because there are temporal men who live like beasts. That's what we have here. God is different from us. Did you know? The stuff that you do, that's what Solomon keeps saying, the stuff that you do, it's not going to last.

All right? Jesus tells us in the parable of the dishonest manager that the only thing that's going to last is heavenly treasures, right? That we will have spiritual friends. He says, and he chides his people and says, the sons of this age, the sons of light are not as shrewd as the sons of this earth.

He was trying to tell them, you need to be a little smarter. For too long, Christians have been very dumb, right? We feel like we have to trust everybody. We feel like we have to just accept whatever's coming our way.

The reality of the situation is that we can be wise because God has given us all of the treasures of wisdom. We find wisdom in Christ. We know that everything that God does is going to be forever, and we know that there is nothing to add to it and nothing to take away from it, but our discontentment often comes in thinking that we do add to it and take away from it, right?

Did you know this? It can be a depressing thought, can't it? If you turn this the wrong way, but I'll try to be the right way in scripture and turn it the right way, every work of God will endure forever.

We add nothing and subtract nothing. We only do as God has purposed us to do. I don't care if you're Calvinist or not. When you read scripture and you come across passages like Ephesians 2 .10, and you come across the totality of scripture where God seems to be directing his people, and then you come right here in Ecclesiastes 3, and what God is saying is, you do not add anything, anything to what God is doing.

We think, yeah, we do. Well, if we don't preach, how are they going to hear? Well, the answer is this. The only reason you preach is because he made you, and the only reason you have any words is because he gave them to you.

God's creation, his word and himself will endure forever. There is no escaping that reality. He never, never changes. Did you know that God never reacts to anything? Never. God doesn't think about what's going to happen.

God makes everything happen. He doesn't change, not reactive, doesn't do things because of something else. Everything that God does is completely because of his own purposes, and his own will, and his own sovereign power.

Nothing we ever do is like that, ever. Even when we try to be unpredictable, we have to think about being unpredictable in our mind, right? We can't just be unpredictable. God does everything based on nothing.

Did you know that? God does everything based on nothing. He's not waiting to see what you're going to do. He doesn't care how you feel about it. He is setting everything in motion outside of you, and so that could terrify you, and it really should, right?

It should make you fear God when you think that he is also a consuming fire on one hand. God is a consuming fire who will certainly burn up his enemies, but on the other hand, he is a mothering hen who longs to nest us when we go astray.

That's what Jesus said about the people in Jerusalem who were rebelling against him, who did not recognize the Messiah who had come. He said that he wanted to nest over them, that he wanted to comfort them, and yet that's not what happened because God's decree was against Jerusalem, and they fell.

For God, the past is future, and the future is past. God is outside of time, above time, unbound by time. God gives us time as a mercy because the finite people who are temporal need to have time, or we can't make any sense of the world.

Can you imagine if we had no time? How would you ever even see anybody, right? We can't imagine, and yet time is not a thing to God. He works forwards, backwards, all the time. He is equally understanding of 3 ,000 years ago as he is 3 ,000 years from today right now, even as we speak, and all of those things going on and all of his purposes are happening in the present to God.

Nothing will change that. Nothing can change that. See, big God theology is straight out of the Bible, isn't it? God wants us to see awe, and you know what percentage of God does he show us in order that we would be awed by him?

I bet it's less than one hundred thousandth of a percent. His wisdom is so vast, his power so unimaginable, his intelligence so great that we can't possibly begin to comprehend it. We're afraid of AI right now, right?

Men have to build warehouses to hold these stupid servers, and we think that that's going to take over the world. And Christians, what are you doing? What are you doing? Why would we ever think that? No matter how much Tucker Carlson bleats on about how it's going to end the world with a bunch of nuclear bombs, we forget, we forget God is doing everything all the time, and he has promised, has he not?

The human race is not going to be wiped out. He did it one time with the water, and he hung his rainbow in the sky, and very evil people have co-opted that symbol and turned it into pride, what was a symbol of humility towards human beings who have a creator that God can destroy at any time with no effort at all.

The only reason we survive is because God allows us to survive. The only reason he doesn't destroy everyone for their sin is because of his unbelievable long-suffering and patience. And you can almost see Solomon as he gets to the end of his life and writing this and going, what do I even do with this God who I don't understand, who gave me all this wisdom, and all of this wisdom that Solomon had only makes him more confused, does it not?

Solomon in many ways was the most confused man who ever lived. He was the wisest, and all of his wisdom pushed him towards trying to explain the unexplainable. God is unexplainable to human beings. We cannot possibly understand him.

Really, we can't even get close. So what does Solomon do? He kind of sounds like a hedonist, doesn't he? At the end of it, he's like, I mean just, just like, thank God that he gives you stuff. That's what's good.

At the end of all this, that's what we do. And the reason why he is thinking in this duality, the reason it's so difficult, is because we've made a mess of everything, haven't we? There's a temporal mess.

Justice, Wickedness, and God's Judgment

Look at it. Humanity. Here's what we do. We are created by God to do good. We are created by God to be immortal beings who are searching our way back to him so that we can walk in the cool of the garden with our creator.

And in the midst of that, we fell. Sons of Adam who fell into sin, and what was immortal and good became cursed and mean. And what we do under the sun, verse 16, is that in the place of justice, there is wickedness.

And in the place of righteousness, there is wickedness. I said in my heart, God will judge both the righteous man and the wicked man for a time for every matter and every work is there. There's a seeming contradiction right away here.

He says that God is going to judge the righteous man and the wicked man, and then in just a few more verses, he's going to say, I don't know where they go. Do they go up or do they go down? I don't know.

What we do know is this. What we do know is that Solomon found this. Remember what wisdom means, right? We have to keep going back to this in Ecclesiastes. Wisdom is the ability to rightly administer God's law.

That's what it means. And Solomon, the wisest man on earth, is seeing under the sun that where there should be justice, there is wickedness. And where there should be righteousness, there is evil. And the reason why is because Solomon sees that under the sun, man who has eternity bound up in his heart will constantly inexorably rebel against his God.

He will constantly seek his own law and his own wisdom, and this is a calamity. Do we not see it today all around us? We will seek out our own law. I could lambast the culture right now, couldn't I? We enshrine a woman's right to kill her own child, right?

That is a calamity. But even in the church, we have specific guidelines and rules for how we're supposed to do things, how we're supposed to administer church discipline, how we're supposed to organize the service.

And yet, flagrantly, time and time again, we see the church itself being lawless. We see the church going, eh, that seems like it might get a little uncomfortable, so we're just going to sweep it under the rug and eat it.

Who cares about victim's justice? We'll just let them leave from having no redress. And we look exactly like the world. Over and over, this happens in our families. In our families, we go, oh, well, I mean, the scripture says that wives are supposed to obey their husband calling him Lord, but you know, that kind of makes me feel icky, and I don't really like that very much, so I'm going to just make my own rules.

Unbelievable. But Solomon saw it all. And here is the overarching theme. Do not be deceived. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, that he will reap. And friends, what we should always remember, for ourselves and for the people around us, there is judgment coming.

And that judgment is also set in place because the judgment itself has already happened in God's economy. He is outside of time. He knows who he's going to judge, and he knows how he's going to judge them.

There's two ways to go. Do you do good, love good, and walk humbly with your God? Or do you do selfishness, love your own ways, and proudly resist your God? There's no in between. Do you listen to God's commands and chafe against them?

At the very best, you're a rebellious son or daughter. Or do you love God's law? But guess what? This is what gets Solomon down over and over again. Whichever way you fall, whichever way, whether it's do good, love good, and walk humbly with your God, or whether it's do selfishness, love your own ways, and proudly resist your God, guess what?

Neither of those responses change what God has decreed and purposed. Man is futile. Evil has its day to the glory of God, and good will have its seasons here, and it will ultimately reign forever because this is God's world, and there is a limit to his patience with evil.

The Human Animal and the Hope of Resurrection

We end with, I think, we're going to get into a lot of confusion as we get into Ecclesiastes, but we start it here. I've entitled this section to end with the human animal. The human animal. Are we just animals?

I'm going to read it. I said in my heart concerning the sons of men, God is testing them in order for them to see that they are but beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same fate for each of them.

As one dies, so dies the other, and they all have the same breath. So there is no advantage for the man over the beast, for all is vanity. All go to the same place. All came from dust, and all return to dust.

Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward, and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth? I have seen that nothing is better than that man should be glad in his works, for that is his portion.

For who will bring him to see what will occur after him? Let's begin with the end. Solomon will say this over and over again in Ecclesiastes, that the only good you can do is just be glad in your work, also knowing your work is pointless.

Your work's going to fade away. It's not going to last. It's futile. It's vanity. But it's the only thing you got, so be glad in it. That is the contradiction of Ecclesiastes. That is the difficulty of wisdom.

But we do see here that we share things in common with beasts, especially in the Hebrew mind. In the way of thinking, the Hebrews would define that there's some animals that kind of have like something different about them.

We know this intrinsically, right? If you see a scorpion on the ground, you're probably not having a moral debate over whether you're going to stomp it with your foot or not. But it's pretty hard to kill a dog, right?

That's what we see. And so we understand that not all animals are equal either, right? Even in the animal kingdom, there's a hierarchy. It is a much uglier thing to cut a lion's head off than it is to stomp on an ant, right?

So we share things in common with beasts. Solomon hits on them. We die and we return to the dirt. We travel to and fro on our ordained endeavors. We've seen that in Ecclesiastes, right? With fleeting and vain results.

What do we actually accomplish that the cow is not accomplishing? We're just walking around, right? The cow's standing in the pond, looking around, and we think, do I really accomplish more than that cow?

That is the serious question that Solomon is asking. And when you think about it, do you actually have 200 years from now any more impact on the world than that cow had? Solomon, remember, he's asking this question, and he's saying, I don't know.

I don't know. Everything you do is vanity. No one's going to remember it. We all have life, breath, labor, and death. You live, you work, you get sick, you die, and then you become dust. And nobody will remember you.

I think Tyler was telling me he was dealing with some football players, and they didn't know who Ryan Mallett is. Ryan Mallett, the best Arkansas quarterback that, what was it, 15 years ago? He played 15 years ago.

The kids who play for the Razorbacks now don't know who he is. Isn't that ecclesiastical? Nobody knows, nobody cares. So what do you do with that? Well, here's the thing. There is a dividing line, and this is going to be, we're going to call this old school fire and brimstone here.

Here we go. All right, you ready? If you're going to be a wicked person, it's actually better to be a beast. You're better off, the dogs have it better off than someone who denies their God. Because the dog is acting according to his purpose when he walks around, eats, barks at strangers, and then lays down and dies.

But the wicked, the wicked, they've actually broken their purpose. They're acting at odds with how they were created. They're not accomplishing their purpose. And it should be as unnatural as an animal pretending to be another kind of animal, right?

That's stuff that AI generates. That's stuff that's like comedy shows. And we look at that and we're like, yeah, that'll never really happen. The reason why is because God has ordained beasts to work in a certain telos.

They have a purpose and they work the way that they were designed. But human beings among all the beasts, we're the only ones who do not work according to the design that we were given. And our design is to love and seek our creator.

But when we don't do it, something unnatural happens. And it's broken and it's twisted. See, Solomon tells us that what God is doing is he is testing us in this life to see if we are better than beasts.

Remember, we already got the law all wrong, right? What's good is now wickedness. And what God is doing is he is looking at every human being and his eyes roam to and fro and he is testing our works and he's testing our words and he's testing our thoughts.

He's testing everything about us to see if we're any better than a beast. And if we're not better than a beast, then we're far worse off than a beast. Although the mortal body dies, the hope of the righteous and the terror of the wicked is this.