The Beauty, Frustration, and Freedom of Sovereignty

Transcript

It’s very, very good to be with you. It’s always good to be with the saints. It’s always good to be at church. If you have a Bible, please open it to Ecclesiastes chapter 8. And if you don’t have a Bible, there should be one in the seat in front of you. Ecclesiastes chapter 8. Once you’re there, would you stand with me as you’re able for the reading of the word of God? We’ll begin from verse 2.

I say, keep the king’s command because of God’s oath to him. Be not hasty to go from his presence. Do not take your stand in an evil cause, for he does whatever he pleases. For the word of the king is supreme. And who may say to him, what are you doing? Whoever keeps a command will know no evil thing. And the wise heart will know the proper time in the just way.

— Ecclesiastes 8

(ESV)

For there is a time and a way for everything, although man’s trouble lies heavy on him. For he does not know what is to be, for who can tell him how it will be? No man has power to retain the spirit or power over the day of death. There is no discharge from war, nor will wickedness deliver those who are given to it. All this I observed while applying my heart to all that is done under the sun, when man had power over man to his hurt. Then I saw the wicked buried. They used to go in and out of the holy place and were praised in the city where they had done such things. This also is vanity. Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. Though a sinner does evil 100 times and prolongs his life,

yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they fear before him. But it will not be well with the wicked, neither will he prolong his days like a shadow, because he does not fear before God. There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity. And I commend joy, for man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful. For this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun. When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth,

how neither day nor night do one’s eyes see sleep, then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun, however much man may toil in his seeking. He will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out. But all this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God. Whether it is love or hate, man does not know. Both are before him. Saints, this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Father, would you speak to us? Would you incline our hearts to think deeply about eternal and true and beautiful things? And may we, as a result, see Jesus more clearly than perhaps we ever have, because your word is true

Wrestling with Authority

and your spirit can enact it upon our lives and change us into the image of our Savior, in whose name we pray. Amen. All right, go ahead and have a seat, folks. So that’s a lot. It’s a big chunk of text. What we see in our text, as we’ve really been seeing throughout the book of Ecclesiastes, is really this constant back and forth, this inner turmoil, this go this way, but what about this? And go that way, but what about that? And it’s this constant back and forth, this constant wrestling with what the Koheleth knows to be true, what he wants to be true, what he does, how he lives his life, and what he actually wants to do. And it is tumultuous. And just as a quick reminder for all of us, when I say the word Koheleth, that is the word in the Hebrew that is

used to describe the preacher or the teacher that is in Ecclesiastes, the one communicating these truths. And when I say the word hevel, that is the word that’s often translated as vanity. And the notion here is something that’s fleeting, something that is like a vapor, here today, gone tomorrow, so just so that we’re clear on that. But yeah, it’s this constant back and forth. It’s this constant wrestling with the things that he’s really struggling to put into a box that will be satisfactory for him so that he can wrap his mind around it, understand it, apply it. And in a way, what we see here and what we’ve seen in our text just right now is what we see Paul kind of doing in a way in Romans chapter 7. And in Romans chapter 7, verses 15 through 25, Paul writes the following. For I do not understand my own actions.

For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I want, I agree with the law that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh. For I have my desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God and my inner being,

but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself serve the law of God in my mind, but with my own flesh I serve the law of sin. Do you feel the tension? Do you feel just the inner turmoil of what is wrong with me? What is wrong with how I navigate through life and what I do and what I don’t want to do and my thoughts and my actions? Nothing aligns. It’s all chaos. This sounds a lot like Ecclesiastes, just a lot more introspective. Paul’s issue in Romans is his wrestling with his own sinfulness and the fact

that although he’s born again, there is still this old sin and these old tendencies that remain. But Paul sees the solution clearly, the one who will deliver him from this body of death. The Koheles wrestling is a bit broader as he looks at the whole of human nature, as he looks at the people around him and the way the world works. And the solution for him, while still there, is maybe not quite as clear for the long term. And a more permanent and a clearer solution is needed for the preacher. He’s pining for it. He wants it so badly. He wants things to make sense, and he just can’t find it. He can’t lock it down. And that clear solution, for those of you that haven’t yet ventured into the New Testament in your personal Bible reading, which spoiler alert if you haven’t, but that solution is Jesus.

And that’s the title, The Beauty, Frustration, and Freedom, this back and forth, this tug of war, this struggle. It shows that constant going here, but going there, but trying to make sense of this, but not being able to wrap my head around that. And one commentator, when I was studying this text on this whole section of the book of Ecclesiastes, his whole title for this whole section was just frustration. That’s how he kind of summarizes what’s going on in the heart of the Kohelet. And we can certainly sense the frustration in these verses, can’t we? It’s painful. It’s hard. It doesn’t fit. It’s like trying to assemble Ikea furniture without instructions. Although the preacher seems to have come to some big truths in the last chapter. And we talked about this. In Thomas’s sermon at the beginning of the chapter, he came to some really big realizations

about human nature, about his understanding of the broader landscape. And then this wrestling with wisdom and ultimately understanding that wisdom isn’t going to satisfy in the complete and the ultimate sense. But he seems to have kind of reconciled some of these things with the fact that, yes, it won’t satisfy, but there is this beauty in wisdom as it points us to God and as it reveals God to us. And after all of that, after a lot of reconciling, he’s back to despair.

The Frustration of Injustice

And so let’s walk through the Kohelet’s frustration. Let’s walk through it in three parts. First, we’ll look at God’s sovereignty as it applies to earthly authority. Then we’ll look at God’s sovereignty as it applies to life’s many injustices and the paradoxical nature of our lives. So first, let’s look at this question of earthly authority. I just read the text, so I won’t reread it. But we’ll be looking at verses 2 through 9. So keep your Bibles open there and follow along as we walk through this. And as we look at verses 2 through 9, consider chapter 7, verse 29, into chapter 8, verse 1 and how they set the stage for our text here. And what we see is that men are always scheming. There’s always these movements with people. The people that reside in the earth around us, whether they’re in leadership or whether it’s just

your neighbor, people are always trying to make moves. People are always trying to get ahead. They’re trying to implement something, put something into effect. So how can we navigate the challenge of accepting and embracing, even, or even just wrapping our heads around God’s sovereignty, knowing what we know about human nature, knowing that all of these moving parts, all of the people around me, it’s chaotic. And it’s overwhelmingly not good. How can we make sense of the fact that God is sovereign? God is in control. God hasn’t relinquished control to all these schemers. And yet, all of these things are happening around us at any given time. Exercising wisdom in regard to authority will be a benefit to us. The more that we can apply wisdom, the good things of wisdom, not the wisdom that you feel like will answer all of life’s questions for you,

but embracing the things that God has clearly given us in His word and understanding His framework for looking at the world, the more that we can embrace that, the more that wisdom will be a benefit to us. Our text speaks specifically of kings — this authority that God has placed above us. But this can apply more broadly to just really any authority that God places above us. Children, these are your parents. Employees, this is your boss. And you just keep going down that list. But these are the authorities that God, in His infinite wisdom and in His sovereignty, has placed above us. We submit to human authority not because of how much we like that authority, not because of how much we agree with that authority, not because of how much we want that authority to be in place, or maybe even how much we voted for that authority

to be in place. Those things are kind of irrelevant. We submit to authority because of our acknowledgment that the ultimate authority is not this authority, but it’s God who places that authority there. The more that we learn to submit to God, brothers and sisters, the easier it then becomes to submit to these lesser authorities, not easy, easier. It makes more sense when I understand that it’s not ultimately this president or this leader or this whoever that kind of put himself in there and navigated the terrain of human hearts and human minds and all of the machinations of human nature and society and government and all of these things, but the fact that it’s God who controls all things, who holds all things in the palm of His hand, who has brought this to pass. So the Kohelet is calling us then to be obedient to the king,

to not only submit, but to exercise obedience in our submission. The text says, because of God’s oath to him. Now, the grammar with that is a little bit ambiguous, and different translations will actually take this differently. So if you’re not reading the ESV, if you’re reading maybe from another translation, you might see this worded a little bit differently. But the idea here is either because of God’s oath to him, the king, or because of your oath to God, or because of the king’s oath to God. But the point here is that every authority exists because of God and must take Him into account. We don’t think about authority for authority’s sake. And we don’t think about the people above us just because they happen to be above us, but we look at these things through the framework of understanding that it is God who made that happen.

All authority is God-ordained, friends, all authority. And this puts us in a place where, in the appropriate sense, we must respect the authority that God, in His wisdom, has ordained to be in place, not going against that authority, not speaking ill of that authority, not being disrespectful toward that authority in general. This is the thought here. And I know this is hard, especially when we’re looking at the way that these people in authority make a lot of mistakes. And they do things that sometimes, in the nicest way, can be described as a mistake and, in a more cynical way, would just be described as evil or foolish or wrong. And we understand these things. And we look and we compare with what we see in the Word of God and, in many ways, just what we see in terms of common sense applied to how people are exercising their authority.

And we’re just exploding at the seams, like, this is wrong, this is messed up, this isn’t the way that things should be, this is evil, this is dark, this is leading our country, our state, our city, our neighborhood, whatever, to ruin. And yet, the infinitely wise God who created you and me and all things in His infinite wisdom has ordained that very wrong and backwards and whatever else authority is in that very place. And so the moment that we start taking our criticism or our disagreement to the level of speaking ill, of cursing, of whatever, what we’re doing, in effect, is shaking our little fists at God. It’s not the mayor that put himself there, it’s God that put him there. And we need to keep that in our minds, friends. And this thought goes into verse four as well. The way that we submit to earthly authority

is rooted in our submission to God. And Paul fleshes this out in detail in Romans chapter 13. Consider what Paul is saying. He says, let every person be subject to governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval. For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore, one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath,

but also for the sake of your conscience. For because of this, you also pay taxes. As if this wasn’t enough, Paul’s going to touch on taxes and money coming out of our pockets. For the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to him, taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. That is a lot. Surely, there’s a little bit of space for me to kind of slide in and be like, well, I don’t have to submit here.

That’s a lot, that’s a tall order, and it’s not just a lot, but it’s comprehensive in how God views or expects us to submit to the authorities that, again, he places into our lives. Now friends, a lot can be said about this, and that passage alone from Romans, like whole commentaries and whole, yeah, like a lot is written on this, a lot can be said about this, and we’re not here to expand on that, but I do wanna say this isn’t just a blind submission. This isn’t like just following orders and not thinking. This certainly doesn’t go into the realm of sin or disobeying what God has clearly communicated in his word. Again, all authority is under God, and so when God has communicated something, and then that authority that God places above us tells us to go against what God has clearly communicated or to do what God has called sin,

we know that’s the limit. We get that. So we’re not talking about these things, but what we’re seeing here is that God’s plan for placing authorities above people is that he expects those people to submit to those authorities. He didn’t just do that frivolously. He wasn’t just kind of winging it in terms of how he’s gonna create societies and cities and countries and states and leadership structures. God has a certain expectation, and in that, he’s calling us to obedience. He’s calling us to humility, and he’s calling us to depend not on the authority above us, but on him who is above that authority. So how then do we fit all of this in with our understanding of who should or shouldn’t be in a position of authority? Because we get to vote. We get to have a say, especially in this country. We have elections just around the corner.

We just had elections, and we’re gonna have a pretty big one next year. How do we think about these things? How do we kind of understand or wrap our heads around the fact that, well, I’m voting this way. This seems to be good or at least better, and this is clearly wrong, and this keeps happening, so what do I do with that? Who should or shouldn’t be president? Who is fit for office and who isn’t? Who’s smart and qualified and competent, and who’s maybe a total lost cause? Considering our conviction that things really aren’t what they ought to be, and if we look at the world around us, we know that this isn’t how things ought to be. How then do we think about our mayors, our governors? Do we think that God maybe took a break when the politicians in Oregon and Washington were voted in?

Or conversely, do we look at those places that have political leanings other than the political leanings of the best coasts and see them as total and utter chaos, devoid of God’s grace and his leading? Friends, do we understand that Joe Biden is president because God put him there? However we feel about that. However much it just makes your blood boil or however happy it makes you. But the only reason he’s there is because God put him there. And Trump before him, the only reason Donald Trump was president is because God put him there. And Obama before him and going further out, the only reason Putin is in power is because God put him there. The only reason Pol Pot did the things that he did is because God put him there. The only reason Kim Jong-un is in power, and you just keep going down that list

and it gets real uncomfortable real quick. And I’ll tell you, this is a challenge for me. This is, I’m talking about these things and I don’t wanna sound like I’m just kind of like, oh, I figured this out, I’m comfortable. I found that comfortable medium. This is a huge challenge for me. I was born in Eastern Europe. I was born in the Soviet bloc and seeing what’s going on over there and with the leadership there and the corruption, it really does anger me. And it’s good to have a proper, a biblically rooted sense of justice through which we look at the world around us. But if we fail to understand that God is sovereign and God always does what he wants and nothing happens from his perfect, infinite wisdom and his leading, then we start to understand that as uncomfortable as this may make me,

this is the way that God chose to go. And yes, in my finite view of things, this makes no sense. And I don’t know how to fit these things in. But when you zoom way out and you start to look at all of the things happening around that, and you start to look historically how things often pan out and how people are saved and how churches are opened and how people go to the nations as a result of these weird things happening geopolitically, and it just, you start to understand we have a very small view of the world around us. In order to help us think rightly about governments and leaders and rulers who are unjust or at times downright evil, the Qohelet reminds us that an end is coming to every government. And this is what we see in our texts. He’s not just saying like,

this just is gonna be this way. It’s gonna persist. It’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna be bad. But he’s saying, he’s reminding himself, he’s reminding us that an end is coming to every government and justice will be faced by all these earthly rulers. Nobody walks away without having to give an account. And that account will either be given with Jesus standing in front of you or with you standing before God directly, every ruler, every peasant, and everybody in between. Remember, life is a vapor. It’s fleeting. It’s here today, it’s gone tomorrow. And our peace is tied to this reminder, but also to the reminder that whoever is in power, friends, God put him there. It’s not an accident. It’s not a mistake. Earthly authority will do you wrong for sure. It’s not an if, it’s a when. It will disappoint you. It will hurt you.

Like we see at the end of verse nine, earthly authority will be something that’s tough to swallow. It will hurt you. It will hurt your wallet. It will, you know, it’s gonna be uncomfortable. But just like you can’t stop the wind or the coming day of your death, you don’t have power over the authority that God chooses to place above you. And this leads us into the way that God exercises his sovereignty, not only over authority, but also this broader category of life’s injustices. Let’s look at verses 10 through 13. Chapter eight, verses 10 through 13. Then I saw the wicked buried. They used to go in and out of the holy place and were praised in the city where they had done such things. This also is vanity because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily. The heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil.

Though a sinner does evil 100 times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God because they fear before him. But it will not be well with the wicked. Neither will he prolong his days like a shadow because he does not fear before God. Although we all want to live in a just world and a just society, that’s not how things often work out, is it? Yes, death and ultimate justice are coming to all. We know that, and we know that sooner or later, everybody, wicked as they are, however badly they’ve acted, this includes all of us, by the way, too, there is justice coming. But the timing of justice is often unsatisfactory. That refrain of how long, oh Lord, is an ever-present one. Here the Kohelet is saying that even in death, sometimes the wicked seem to be in the clear.

Sometimes they seem to make it all the way to the end, and it’s just like, wait, where’s the justice? When are we gonna talk about all the stuff that this dude has done? And at funerals, we often would even celebrate people that have died in their rebellion against God, saying things like he’s in a better place now, about people who’ve lived lives contrary to God’s word, and as far as we can tell, didn’t die placing their faith in Christ. They died in their rebellion, and often we still hear this kind of thing at people’s funerals, or spoken about people who’ve passed on, died.

Justice is often delayed, says the preacher. Justice is often, earthly justice is often unsatisfactory. Earthly justice often doesn’t quite scratch that itch for us, but although human justice is very flawed, in the end, God will right every single wrong. Nothing will fly under the radar, nothing will escape God’s justice. Nothing has escaped his eye and his ability to see and judge everything that has come to pass. God will exact perfect divine justice, and more than just exacting perfect divine justice, he will do it at the right time. That’s not our timing, because if it was my timing, my enemy would have been smited yesterday, but that’s not how God acts, because God wants for people to come to saving faith in Christ. God is kind, God is patient, and the New Testament fleshes this out for us even more, this timing of justice, and this ultimate justice

that’s coming throughout the book of Revelation, chapters 11, and 15, and 16, and 19, and 20, we see this coming judgment, and in 2 Peter chapter three, in verse 13, Peter writes, according to his promise, we are waiting for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Well, how does this righteousness come to dwell except for if God rights every wrong, and he acts rightly with all people? And what we see promised throughout scripture is that this time is coming, God will not be mocked, God will take care of all things that need to be accounted for. Human justice is incomplete, human justice is imperfect, it’s slow to act, and often it’s misplaced. I mean, often people are punished for things that they didn’t do, and we see this in the American criminal justice system often, we see this all over the world, horror stories

of people serving sometimes lifelong, sometimes death sentences for crimes they didn’t commit. We see corrupt politicians and corrupt businessmen excelling and doing well and getting what they want, and even though their crimes and their sins are exposed, if they just have enough money, you can skate by. And it seems so very unfair, but God’s justice is always right and perfect, even though the timing for us can be frustrating. As we see how lacking justice is in the world around us and how inadequate earthly authorities and systems are in dealing with evil, we also unfortunately regularly see that people who see these kind of cracks in the system and these opportunities to game the system, they capitalize on this, and they find ways to persist in their wickedness, and the Kohelet’s pointing to this too, is this increasing aspect of evil and wickedness and injustice and unrighteousness,

and there is this persistent forward march of wickedness, and that’s because sin, untethered and unrestrained, doesn’t improve on its own. It’s not like somebody gets away with it and then their conscience is just like, oh man, I shouldn’t have done that. People, if they get away with it, they take it a step further next time, and sin just has this cascading effect where it just gets worse and worse and worse. God needs to intervene in order to change the heart of that sinner, in order to break that cycle that we see in verse 11, in order for that to be broken, it has to be something from outside of the sinner. It has to be something, because what ends up happening is even if that person is caught in prisons and in jails, people often kind of stay in that cycle. That’s because the hearts of man

Life’s Paradoxes

are turned onto wickedness and onto deceit. Those who fear God and those who obey God, we’re told, will glean His blessings, and those who rebel against Him will be punished and will taste divine perfect justice, but that just may not happen exactly when we want it to. Friend, if you’re wrestling with this in your life, if you’re struggling a way to make sense of how the world is unfair and things aren’t right, you’re not alone. The Kohelet was wrestling with this, and he’s uncomfortable with that, and Asaph, he’s wrestled with this too, and he kind of picked this apart, and we’ll come back to one of Asaph’s psalms shortly, but this isn’t new, and many Christians throughout church history have wrestled with this, and they’ve contemplated the depths of unfairness and injustice and all of these things that are happening around us. Seeing the wicked prosper is something

that upsets me as well. I’ve seen this happen a lot in my life, and at times, it’s really difficult not to get stuck in a cycle of just repeating the things that I see as being wrong, but if I’m honest, and I have a more accurate assessment of not only the world around me, but of my own heart, I’ve been quite wicked in my life. I’ve done a lot of evil. I’ve done a lot of things that are dishonoring to God, that are offensive to God. I’ve hurt people. I’ve offended people. I’ve wronged people,

and the Lord has spared me, not only from what I rightly deserve in terms of punishment and his justice, but he’s then taken me out of that place, and he’s brought me to a place that’s better than I could have ever imagined, an eternal inheritance and a family and love and acceptance and grace and mercy that just abound in my life, and so it’s so easy to look at the injustices of the world around us and stop there without looking a little bit more inwardly and doing what Paul does in Romans chapter seven and reflecting upon the ways that my heart is wicked, and my actions don’t align with what God has called me to. We’re grateful for mercy when we receive it, friends, and we should be the first ones to pray that God’s mercy extends to people around us. Yes, even those people that are doing the very things

that make our blood boil. When I was in seminary, I was sitting in a class, and I remember this professor had a great sense of humor, Dr. Harris, he’s a very funny guy, and in this class, we’re studying, I think we were actually in Deuteronomy, the curses and the blessings, and we were doing an Old Testament exegesis, and the class has already started, and as students are walking in late, he would stop the class, he’d stop his lecture, and he would look to the students that were already seated, and he’d say, grace or mercy, or I’m sorry, mercy or judgment, and all the good Christian students in the class would say mercy, and then that just kept happening, and eventually, a guy walked in pretty late, like 20, 30 minutes late to the class, and he’s like, mercy or judgment, and one guy in the front said, ‘Judgment!’,

and he’s like, all right, man, but you get it, too, mercy, and this is the way that we are, it’s, you know, that’s wrong, he needs to account for that, he needs to deal with that, somebody needs to call him out, and then when somebody points out your sin, it’s like, well, you don’t understand the circumstances that led up to it, there’s a lot at play, it’s not that I just set out to do that, there was a lot that brought me to that point, and we’re quick to justify our own actions, and we’re quick to look at the ways that I want mercy, I want grace, I want forgiveness, and we should be just as quick to do that for other people, because, yeah, things are ugly, things are broken, things are wrong, but that’s for God to deal with, it’s not my responsibility to make sure

that my neighbor is doing all the right things, my responsibility is to love him, to pray for him, if he’s placed above me by God, to respect that authority that God, in his infinite wisdom, has acted out, and it’s hard, and friends, even with all this in mind, we do know that God will set all things right, God will not be mocked, God will set all things right, and God will put everything exactly where it needs to be, and that brings us to our final point, and that is that God’s sovereignty is over the paradoxes that make up our life, and that’s verses 14 through to 9-1, I’ll reread those verses, there’s a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous,

I said that this also is vanity, and I commend joy, for man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun, when I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth, how neither day nor night do one’s eyes see sleep, then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun, however much man may toil in his seeking, he will not find it out, even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out, but all this I lay to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hand of God,

for whether it is love or hate, man does not know, both are before him, the preacher continues his thought from the previous section, and really from the previous chapter, this is the paradox of injustice, and it bothers him, like it really, obviously it really bothers him, he’s taking up a chunk of the book of Ecclesiastes to speak about this, this doesn’t make sense, and he just won’t let it go, he just keeps coming back to this very question, and why is that? It’s because injustice is frustrating, when we see wrong happening in the world around us, and when we see things that shouldn’t be coming to pass, it frustrates us, it upsets us, and you also have to remember that the author here, this Kohala, he’s functioning under the Mosaic Covenant, and the Israelites functioning under the Mosaic Covenant are taught that if you obey,

you get blessings, and if you disobey, you get punished, and he’s seeing the flip side of this, he’s seeing that this isn’t working that way, why is it that these people who are disobeying are getting what seem to be blessings, and people that seem to be trying to obey, they receive punishment, and this all sort of just seems backwards, and beyond the Mosaic Covenant, this general idea within wisdom literature that you receive blessings if you are wise, and if you do the right thing, and more than injustice just being frustrating, so is not knowing, this ignorance, this human ignorance, and these limitations on human wisdom, this is incredibly frustrating as well, and so he’s bouncing back and forth between these realities of not only are the things that shouldn’t be happening, but then this trying to attain wisdom, this trying to grasp of a way

to kind of fit these things into some kind of box that makes sense to know, it seems to be so elusive, it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t make sense, we don’t know the future, we’re ignorant as to what will come to pass, will my work have been worth it, do I have a long time to live, or on my way home in a car accident, is that it, am I done, is what you’re doing now the most important thing, or is there something better and more important and more pressing that I should be taking care of, and even if today is good, maybe tomorrow will be awful, we just don’t know, and these things, the fact that it’s just all up in the air, seemingly it’s, it can be really scary, it can be really frustrating, and that’s what the Qohelet’s wrestling with, life is a paradox,

life is an enigma, life is confusing, it’s frustrating, it’s heavil, as the Qohelet wrestles with all of this, our minds should go to another portion of scripture, and I just noted this, but the author of that portion of scripture wrestled with this question, and how it is that the wicked prosper, how it is that the righteous struggle and suffer, how is it that evil goes unpunished, how is that fair, turn with me in your Bibles to Psalm 73, let’s take a look at how Asaph wrestled with this very thing that the Qohelet is wrestling with,

I’ll just read these first three verses, truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart, but as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped, for I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked, this isn’t just being mad, about the fact that the wicked are prospering, this is I am jealous, why, how I want that, and so Asaph believes that God is good, verse one right, he believes, he knows God is good, God does the right thing, God does the good thing, and the beautiful thing, and his word is true, and I know it, and I love him, and I know that he loves me, but even with that belief, he’s struggling, and just follow along, you keep reading, so I saw the prosperity of the wicked, for they have no pangs until death,

their bodies are fat and sleek, that’s a good thing, they are not in trouble as others are, they are not stricken like the rest of mankind, therefore pride is their necklace, violence covers them as a garment, their eyes swell out through fatness, their hearts overflow with follies, they scoff and speak with malice, loftily they threaten oppression, it doesn’t get better, it just keeps going like this, he’s like it’s not fair, they have more than they need, that’s the notion there of this fatness, is that their life is just abundance, they just have what they need, for like apparently just doing evil, I’m trying and it’s not going well, I’m slipping, and then all these people around me, who are doing all the wrong thing, it seems to be working out for them, maybe I’m missing something, how is it that everyone around me, can just do whatever they want,

why can my unbelieving friends, seemingly just have as many romantic partners, as they want, and here I am trying to stay pure, trying to do the right thing, and I’m single, it’s not working, why do my dishonest co-workers, keep getting the promotion, why does the dude that’s just super shady, and lies over and over and over, keep getting bumped up, and I’m stuck at the median pay,

why is it that I’m stuck, in this position of life, when I’m trying and working, and doing the right thing, and I’m trying to get ahead, and it just doesn’t go, it’s not fair, Asaph wrestled with the unfairness of it all, he struggled, he was in pain, you just you keep reading, take this song, and just read through it later on your own time, he is just really uncomfortable, with how life is going, and just the unfairness of it all, all but consumed him, and it just beat him up, until he got to verse 17, where he went into the sanctuary of God,

Finding Truth in Community

and as he enters into the presence of God, and as his own thoughts quiet down, and as his own view of the world, becomes not the primary thing, but the reality of God consumes him, it says that I discerned their end, wisdom kicked in, logic, and God’s truth, and God’s promises, and God’s word, all came into effect,

it all seemed vain, it all seemed wrong, it all seemed backwards, that is until Asaph worshipped, truth set Asaph straight, and his community set him straight, because the who was in the sanctuary, it was the people of God, it wasn’t just that he was in there alone, quietly meditating, he was surrounded by the people of God, he was surrounded by the worship of God, and these things set him straight, friend, you need Christians around you, if you live on your own, if you are stuck in your own head, and you’re trying to make sense of the world around you, and you’re trying to make sense of what’s going on, trying to make sense of why the unfair thing keeps happening to me, and you’re trying to fit in why my life doesn’t move, and it doesn’t advance, and it doesn’t go the way that it should,

you need Christians around you, you need to be kept in check, you need to be reminded of the truth, you need to be prayed for, and prayed with, now it seems very simplistic just to say, don’t miss church, just go to church, make it a priority to be at church, that seems overly simplistic, but it’s true, we need each other, we need this,

we can’t survive without truth, and the love of the community, and to be loved, and accepted, and embraced, and to know that everything out there can be chaos, and everything else can be just a dumpster fire, and nothing makes sense, and my job is bad, and I can’t believe that my mortgage is due again, I just paid it, and then you show up here, and a brother prays with you, or a sister hugs you, and somebody shares about how God is walking with them through the challenges and trials of life — and it’s everything, it’s not trivial, it’s not frivolous, it’s not small, it’s everything, this is what God in his wisdom wanted for his church, for us to be together, for us to benefit from one another, from us to benefit other people, from us to love people in the way that we know

that God has loved us, life is tough, it can be discouraging, it can feel unfair, and unjust, and wrong, but time with brothers and sisters, time being ministered to by the word of God, spending time in prayer, being reminded of what Christ did for us when we take the Lord’s Supper, we need these things, and for the Christian, they’re non-negotiables, and sometimes that’s your only lifeline,

when evil seems to prevail, we read in Psalm 2, he who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord holds them in derision, we tend to think like the Kohelet, I’m like man, does it matter, whatever I do, I just can’t seem to catch a break, and yet in Psalm 56, we read, you have kept count of my tossings, you’ve put my tears in your bottle, are they not in your book, he cares,

he’s not blind to the thing that hurts you, and it’s just so easy to get lost, and to get just consumed by that worry, and by that confusion, and by the thing that just doesn’t make sense, but it says he keeps your tears in bottles, every time you toss and turn in your bed, he knows, he knows when you can’t sleep, he knows when things don’t make sense to you, and he’s not indifferent to it, he feels your pain, he feels your hurt, and the more that we isolate, and the more that we live in our heads, and we just look at the world through this perspective, of it’s all bad, it’s all wrong, and you just lose hope, and you don’t have those people around you, to remind you of the fact that he cares,

it just gets bad, so Asaph says, whom have I in heaven but you, verses 25 and 26, whom have I in heaven but you, and there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you, my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever, the answer to the frustration of injustice, and unfairness is the fact that God is good, yeah that doesn’t make sense a lot, when we’re in the thick of it, but God is good, and for us as new covenant believers, how much more do we know this, how much more deeply do we understand this, how much more comprehensively have we experienced this, friends, how good is Jesus, he’s everything, everything makes sense, because he is who he is, and because in him we now are who we are, so Christian take heart, all is not lost,

all is not useless and meaningless, and the Kohelet does ultimately come to this, he’s wrestling with it, and he’s uncomfortable, and he’s still tossing and turning, and he’s going back and forth, but his response is not just give up, his response as we see towards the end of our text, what we see it really in verse 15 is to be joyful, you must learn to enjoy this world, and I know that this sounds like a really weird place to start talking about joy, but you must learn to enjoy the world, you must learn to enjoy God’s goodness, and his grace, and his mercy, a good meal with friends, or a delicious cup of coffee, don’t take these things for granted, not for the sake of those things, not for the sake of those things, but because the one who gives you those things is good,

we do this not as hedonists, but rather we honor God in receiving, and enjoying his good gifts with grateful hearts, knowing that as good as these things are for the Christian, it’s not the main thing, if this is good, how good is he, and this is the mentality that we have to click into, it’s just like man this hurts, man this is rough, but God is so good, I still have food to eat, I still have people around me, I still have a roof over my head, I still have clothes on my back, and I know that when I show up to Trinity Church on Sunday morning, there are people there that love me, God is good,

the way that we live our lives, we can and should live in such a way, that even in our eating, and our drinking, and our enjoying of God’s good gifts, we give glory to him, and in turn we point others to him, instead of going the route of giving up, or nihilism, we should regularly consider God, sovereignty frustrating as it may be, should be this thing that leads us into his kindness, that leads us into his grace, that leads us into his beautiful plan, even the plan that I really don’t get at times, and respond to those things, which seem to scare the world around us with joy,

and this is where you see these saints in the New Testament, and really beyond in the early church, going to like being thrown to lions, or going to being set ablaze singing, that’s weird, but they have joy, they understand what’s happening, and this is where our joy becomes infectious, and this is where what we see in 1st Peter 3, you’re ready to offer a defense for the hope that is in you, it doesn’t make sense to the world around us, and our response to that world that doesn’t make sense, says everything about where our hope is, this is the life that God has given us, that’s the last part of verse 15, and in essence what we see here in verses 15 through 9, 1 it encourages us to gladly receive God’s good gifts, and to not feel like I have to figure everything out,

there’s a lot that we’ll just never wrap our minds around, try as we might, invest into it as much as we possibly can, things are confusing, things are well beyond our finite human minds, but God is good, and he does good, and this is our anchor friends, the preacher is reminding us that life really isn’t as complicated as we often make it out to be, we’re not here for very long,

Joy in God’s Sovereignty

and most things happen in the world around us, or to us directly, they’re kind of out of our control, we were created friends to glorify God and to enjoy him, what is man’s chief end? Come on saints, to glorify God and enjoy him forever, the thing is obedience to authority, gaining wisdom and insight, doing the right thing, that isn’t what will ultimately determine whether or not you’re good with God, or whether your life is in a good place, we talked about this last week, but it’s worth coming back and reiterating that, these things aren’t where we’re supposed to put all of our focus, because having the right amount of wisdom, understanding what’s happening in the world around me, wrapping our heads around authority, that’s not what’s going to put everything in its rightful place, knowing or understanding these things can’t resolve our heart’s longing, because that’s not what we were designed for,

that’s not what we were made for, it’s only in knowing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and being known by him, that we can ever in any complete sense, make sense of what should be right, and as we said during the confession and pardon this morning, we’re to have no hope apart from his death, burial, and resurrection, and friends it’s only in being forgiven, for all the ways that we have wronged others, and acted unjustly, and been foolish, and disobeyed authority, and gone against God’s good perfect law, and rebelled against our creator, that we begin to understand like the Kohelet, that our ultimate quest for identity, and for meaning, and an explanation of life, leads us to the very throne of God,

and for us as Christians, that throne, there’s this beautiful picture in Hebrews 4, that should be our throne of judgment, where we’re being dragged to, as we’re trying to run from the just judgment of God, but that throne we read in Hebrews 4, for the believer becomes the throne of grace, which we boldly approach, this is the beautiful way that a sovereign God, in his infinite wisdom, and in the way that he moves everything for his will, for his glory, has designed to reconcile his people to himself, amen, amen, would you pray with me friends,

our great God, we can never wrap our minds around who you are, your beauty, your infinite worth, the magnitude of your grace and mercy, and Lord we humbly confess, that you are God, and we are not, so Lord for all the ways that we try to grasp, at being in control of our own lives, would you help us see, that it’s so much better, when we recognize that you’re in control, and submit and grow in dependence of you, Father would you help us grow in this, would you help us to celebrate and revel in Jesus, his sacrifice, his love, would you help us live in such a way, that we show to a world around us, that’s confused and scared, and trying to grab onto anything, that even remotely makes sense, that the only thing that makes sense, is that our creator loved us so much,

that he sent his son to die in our place, so that we might be reconciled to him, Father may our whole lives reflect this beautiful reality, may the way that we navigate challenges, and difficulties, and pains, and confusion, and frustration, give glory to you, because we cling to you, not in the understanding of these things, we pray all of this in Jesus wonderful name, and for his glory, amen.