The Case Against Self-Sufficiency (Part 1 of 2)

Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

That's an often asked question and it's not unique to our current culture. The preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes was exasperated as he searched far and wide for the answer. Today we'll see his conclusions as Alistair Begg takes us to the Book of Ecclesiastes on Truth for Life. Can I encourage you to take your Bible and turn again to Ecclesiastes chapter 8? And when you've turned there, we'll pause and ask for God to help us as we study the Bible. Father, we acknowledge again that every word we hope to teach and every soul we long to reach is only by your grace. And so we look to the power of your Holy Spirit to enable us to think and to respond in a way that would welcome Christ to his rightful place within our lives. We seek you now in his precious name.

Amen. Well, once again this morning, as last time, we're going to deal not with the details of each of these chapters but rather with the broad sweep of the professor's argument. In coming to these two particular chapters, I was reminded of some words by Winston Churchill many years ago when he was referring to dialogue with the communist regime. And he said this, Trying to maintain a good relationship with the communists is like wooing a crocodile. You do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it over the head.

When it opens its mouth, you cannot tell whether it's trying to smile or preparing to eat you up. And then he said, When negotiating with them, it is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. And it struck me that that phrase is very descriptive of life itself, at least as it is given to us here in the chapters that we've been considering in Ecclesiastes over these Sunday mornings. Our lives are very much like these Russian dolls that some of us have in our homes, that if you look on the outside, you think that you've seen all that there is, and you open it up, and it opens only to discover another layer of life, and then when you've considered that for a moment or two and think you've unscrambled it, you open it again only to discover that it reveals something else of yourself, and then you open it again and find that once more you are confronted by another layer and another dimension, and you open it again, and eventually, it seems, you can just continue opening and opening and opening until you get down to the very core of things. But as we try and make sense of our existence, Churchill's words seem very apropos. Life, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Now, what I'd like to do this morning is give you four statements.

I'll tell you what they are in a moment. But I'd like to begin at the seventh verse of chapter 9. Go eat your food with gladness and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do. Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Now, at first reading, it may appear that the preacher has determined that it would be good for us just to have the brought-out line of things, and so he provides them in the space of a few sentences.

But if you read on, it's clearly not so. He says in verse 9, Enjoy life with your wife whom you love. That's good. And then he adds, All the days of this meaningless life. That God has given you under the sun.

And then he adds again, All your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life, and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. For in the grave where you're going there's neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

So it's as though he gives it with one hand and immediately takes it away with the other. Starts off so nicely. Why don't you have a wonderful meal? Why don't you make sure you put on your best clothes?

A little perfume would be very happy and helpful. And if you're in the company of your wife, make sure that you enjoy yourself. And indeed, if you are involved in the endeavors of the time, do it with all of your might.

Throw yourself wholeheartedly into it all. Because I want you to know that your life is, frankly, meaningless. That your days don't mean much, and that just in case you are tempted to run away with some kind of forlorn notion of the future, remember that you are heading for the grave. You say, Well, this is remarkable, isn't it? What is he saying? Well, what he's saying is essentially what is said again and again and again in different ways at different times. Namely this. Enjoy any pleasures that you may have before you while you can, because you never know what God, if he exists, may do to you tomorrow.

That's what he's saying. From this perspective, he says, you might as well go ahead and enjoy everything that you possibly can, because frankly, you don't know what tomorrow is going to bring, and you don't know if this God exists just exactly what he might do. Now, this launched itself into the consciousness of twentieth-century America in dead poet society.

People understood it from philosophy before. Carpe diem qua minimum credula postero, which is the whole quote from which we get our T-shirt—carpe diem—seize the present day, trust tomorrow as little as possible, said Horace. The British poet put it a little more succinctly when he said, Gather ye rosebuds while you may, old time is still a-flying. If you've got a chance to go out and get some lovely flowers, get them now, because time is passing, though soon wilt, and you may wilt sooner than the flowers. Towards the end of the twentieth century, at its most banal level, the same philosophical posture was presented to us in Wayne's World, a movie which I did not see but saw enough of in various contexts, to realize that it sent out the great and telling observation that given life as it is, the best advice they could give to one another is, Party on, dude!

And that was it. So whether it is Horace, Carpe diem, whether it is the poet whose name I've just forgotten that may be Rankin, Gather ye rosebuds while you may, or whether it is Wayne's World, Party on, that's all that the writer has to say from this perspective. Here's life, he says. We're looking at it. It confronts us. We ask ourselves the question, Why do bad things happen to good people? And we're forced, at the end of the day, when we put all of the pieces up on the table, simply to say that from the perspective under the sun, there's really nothing for us to give a credible answer to.

Indeed, the question itself is ultimately futile. Eventually, our sun will set, our time will come to an end, our day will be over, and nothing will be left. The orchestra will play, the crowd will disperse, some never to return to another performance.

It's all over now, nothing left to say, just our dreams and the orchestra fading. Now, the reason that this is so striking is because although it was written thousands of years ago, it has such a contemporary ring. And some of us this morning, if we're very honest—although we may not want to acknowledge you to anyone around us—have been thinking along these lines. And the thing that we've found most intriguing is this, that given that some of us have already concluded that there is no place for a personal God who made us and before whom we will stand, those of us who have concluded that still find ourselves asking the Why question. And we know that the Why question shouldn't exist. Because if our existence is time plus matter plus chance, then it possesses no inherent meaning in terms of our understanding of it.

Therefore, whether a person is run over by a car or picked up by a car, as Sartre said, it simply authenticates their existence, but it doesn't give meaning in any way to the larger scheme of things. And yet, here we are, realizing life as it ebbs and flows and still asking ourselves the Why question. Now, I can tell you why you ask the Why question, even though you may deny your need of or choose to stand back from a relationship with God.

Paul tells us that God's wrath is revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men—here's the phrase—"who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them." So God, he says, has created man, has stamped man in his image, has given him a sense of moral right and wrong, has given him a sense of oughtness, has placed within him eternity's perspective, man turns his back on all of that, and yet cannot escape the Why question. Why do I feel as I feel? Why is this as daunting as it is?

Why do I not have an explanation? And so on. Now, in addressing this in chapters 8 and 9, the writer essentially says four things. He actually says more than that, but four is all that we can handle in the time that is allowable to us. The first is, life is unmanageable. Or, if you like, life is unfair.

Life is as unfair as it is unmanageable. If your Bible is open at chapter 8, you will still have part of chapter 7 before you, and the fifteenth verse of chapter 7 says, In this meaningless life of mine I've seen both of these—a righteous man perishing in his righteousness and a wicked man living long in his wickedness. He said, Well, we saw that last time.

Yes, we did. I'm reminding you of it, because I want to show it to you again. It reoccurs within a very short space of time, the fourteenth verse of chapter 8.

There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth—righteous men who get what the wicked deserve and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. Now, you imagine a schoolteacher. He gets his eighth-grade class. He takes the eighth-grade class, and there are twenty-four students. He says to them, Now, everyone on the left-hand side of the room gets an automatic A, and everyone on the right-hand side of the room gets an automatic F. They say, Well, wait a minute. We haven't even begun the class yet.

No? Well, that's not fair. Well, says the teacher, why is it not fair? Where does the sense of fairness come from? What does fair mean? Why would you ever think that you deserve anything other than an F? You think you're worthy of an A?

On what basis? And the teacher, by that means, begins to introduce his students to moral philosophy. And the very fact that they have a sense within them of the injustice of the F and the weirdness of getting an A without any effort speaks again to this vast why question and the nature of man as a moral being. And when you look at life from this perspective, you have to say it isn't fair. It isn't fair.

Lovely girls are raped on their way home from school. That's not fair. People cheat like crazy and live in big houses. That's not fair.

People do their taxes and walk with rectitude and apparently keep taking it in the throat. That's not fair. That's what he's saying. Life, he says, is as unfair as it is unmanageable.

Verses 17 and 18, at the end of chapter 8. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man can discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it. Now, you don't have to be a genius.

You just need to think about your life and think about all that you've read in the newspaper this past week. And so the writer says, I gotta tell you, life is as unfair as it is unmanageable. Secondly, people are as unreliable as life is unfair. Which, of course, is a real burden, because our lives are all about people, aren't they? Our need of people, our relationships with people, the importance of people, the importance of friendship. And yet, what do we discover? We discover that people can never unscramble for us the vastness of the human dilemma.

Back in chapter 7 again, we'll just start there. Don't pay attention to every word people say. That's interesting, isn't it? Your mother told you, make sure you listen to everything the teacher says. Yes, of course, but don't pay attention to every word people say.

Why? You may hear your servant cursing you. Don't go around the office asking what everybody's saying on the water cooler, because you may actually find out. And when you find out, it's not gonna make you feel very good. And if you doubt that, just remember in your heart that many times you've cursed others. So when you find that people were talking behind their hands, don't be too quick to say, Excuse me, what was that? I didn't quite catch that. Because when you find out what it was, you'll discover, and you'll wish you hadn't asked.

Because people are unreliable. That's the implications of verses 26 and following of chapter 7, the built-in propensity for infidelity. And here, in that kind of relationship, it proves the emptiness and sadness of it all. But I think one little phrase in chapter 9 gets to the heart of it better than any. In chapter 9, in verse 13, he has this little parable about a small city with only a few people in it, and a big, powerful king came against it and besieged it. And there was in the city a poor man, he says. He was poor, but he was wise. And he saved the city by his wisdom. So you say to yourself, well, I bet he got a big statue, didn't he? Perhaps a big plaque at the entryway to the city.

No, look at what he says. One simple sentence. But nobody remembered that poor man. He saved the city. You remember Mr. Who Saved the City? You remember that? The chap Who Saved…? No, I don't remember him. Well, I remember somebody saved the city.

I don't remember who saved the city. Don't count on anything as fleeting as public gratitude to float your boat. Don't count on anything as fleeting as public gratitude or acclaim to make sense of your life and float you. Don't live with the illusion that everybody thinks you're great, that you will be remembered, and so on.

And somehow or another, on the basis of that, it helps you go to sleep, helps you to wake up. They won't remember us. They just won't remember us. People are as unreliable as life is unfair. Thirdly, the future is unpredictable. You say, Can this get any worse?

Well, actually, it can. And it will. The future is unpredictable. Verse 7 of chapter 8, No man knows the future. Who can tell him what is to come? Chapter 9 and verse 1, I reflected on all this, and I concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God's hands. But no man knows whether love or hate awaits him.

Chapter 11, I've seen something else under the sun. People who run discover that the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned, but time and chance happen to them all. I don't know how the game ended between Notre Dame and USC. I care, but I don't know. Who won?

Good. But there was an interesting little period in the game, wasn't there, where it went interception, interception, interception? It just went one, it went intercepted, back, intercepted, back, intercepted, and then finally a knockdown thing, and then strangers of touchdowns. And they're just sitting there, and they're saying, Can you believe this? Who would have thought this would happen just like this? And once it bounces this way, then it bounces this way, then it bounces this way, and it doesn't matter whether he's a 285-pound gorilla or whatever it was, the poor soul that got to the ball first on the knockdown, he bobbled it all over the place, and the boy that knocked it down, he finally came and got there. Why was that?

Why was that? It just happened. And from this perspective, that's life. Why are you in this office? It just happened. Why are you finishing this college course? I don't know.

I mean, I decided. What are you planning on doing tomorrow? I don't know. Are you sure of anything tomorrow? No.

I mean, the best I can do is go with Annie. You know, the sun will come up tomorrow, apparently. But beyond that, I don't know. Now, what is he saying? He's saying there's neither rhyme nor reason to the events of history. There's neither rhyme nor reason to the events of history from this perspective, viewed from under the sun.

And there's no rhyme nor reason to the events of the individual. Why did this happen? Why have I experienced this? Why did I make such a hash of that? Why didn't I turn right at that point? Why did she leave me then?

Why did this…? Now, of course, this is a perennial question. It's not new. But it's very apropos, isn't it?

Some of you may actually have been asking these questions in a strange way during these particular days. And the unpredictability of the future can press in upon our minds. Indeed, it does press in upon our minds. In the first century BC, a man by the name of Lucretius described life as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But what he's saying was simply this, throw the dice of chance long enough and frequently enough, and the primeval slime will spit out a Milton and give us this wonderful paradise lost and regained, and throw the dice again longer and more frequently, and eventually it may spit out for us a Shakespeare and all this wonderful material that can give to us insight into life, and it spits out Hitler, and we have the Holocaust, and it spits out Timothy McVeigh, and we have Oklahoma City. Well, is that it? Well, my friends, you are sensible people.

Will you think this through with me? Contemporary, sophisticated men and women choose in their sophistication to deny the notion of the existence of a personal creator God who has made them for the express purpose of knowing him and before whom they will one day stand and give account of their lives. So at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the people say, No, no, I have no… No, no, no such notion. Well then, what do they fill the vacuum with?

Just go in the bookstores. As I stood in there, I said, Look at how much multicultural, religious claptrap there is in this place. There is every imaginable notion that is right there. So sophisticated man turns his back on God, and he believes in time, he believes in chance, he believes in mother nature, and we live at a time where God is naturalized and nature is deified. So God is completely dethroned and nature is enthroned. So here are some things we know are true. Life is unfair, people are unreliable, and the future is unpredictable. That is three of the four conclusions from the teacher in Ecclesiastes. Not a very uplifting start, is it?

But hang in there, you'll want to return tomorrow as Alistair Begg concludes this message titled The Case Against Self-Sufficiency. You're listening to Truth for Life. Every day here on Truth for Life we study the Bible together.

However, more and more we can sense that believing in the Bible is increasingly countercultural. So how do we as Christians navigate all of this? Well, we want to recommend to you a book titled Being the Bad Guys, How to Live for Jesus in a World That Says You Shouldn't.

It's a brand new release. It looks at the current state of our world and asks the questions many of us are asking ourselves, how did we get where we are? How did we become viewed as being opposed to individual freedom? This is a book that takes a fascinating look at all of this and gives us a roadmap for how as Christians we should respond. Ask for your copy of Being the Bad Guys when you give a donation to Truth for Life today. You can tap the image you see on your mobile app or visit us online at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. If today's message left you feeling a bit unhinged, be sure to join us tomorrow for a hope-filled conclusion. We'll learn why you don't know how to live until you've learned how to die. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.