The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes encouraged his readers to enjoy a vibrant, adventurous, generous life. However, there's something we need to keep in the forefront of our minds in order to celebrate life in the here and now. We'll find out what that is today on Truth for Life as Alistair Begg continues our study in Ecclesiastes.
Well, as we come to Ecclesiastes 12, we're almost at the end of our studies that we've been engaging in in these mornings, and although we won't finish it this morning, at least we can make a good start at it. There is, in the transition from one year to another, an almost inevitable emphasis on the nature of time itself. And I'm sure that many of you will have noticed, as I have done, that there have been in the press a significant number of articles relating to the issue of time. Whether it is simply the question of our calendar and the accuracy of it, or whether it should contain more days or less days, various theories have been propounded. Western culture, more than African or Asian culture, is virtually preoccupied with time, dominated by considerations of time.
So much so that probably the clock is rivaled only by the printing press as the most influential invention in the whole of the last millennium. Think how many times this morning you've inquired about the issue of time. In fact, you can't imagine this morning without thinking about time. Try and think about no time. Try and think of a life without the passage of seconds and moments.
Virtually impossible for us to do. Augustine in his Confessions admits the same. He says, What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not. So although we instinctively know what time is and we can sense that it is passing, we actually have extreme difficulty in defining it. And the Bible addresses this issue from start to finish. Our purpose this morning is not to do some thematical study on the issue of time, but suffice it to say, to make clear—and your own investigation will either confirm or deny this—the Bible declares that time, as we experience it, does not automatically exist. But as with the rest of creation, time was dependent upon God's creative act for its beginning. In other words, God who exists in eternity created time. When he began to create the universe, then, and only then, time was initiated, and the succession of moments and the passing of events commenced.
And indeed, if our wristwatches speak to our creatureliness, then the fact that God exists outside of time speaks to the fact of his creation. And the Bible says that he exists eternally. He exists beyond the bounds of time. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. From eternity to eternity, God is. Therefore, by definition, the familiar speculation about what came before God is actually futile. God is from everlasting to everlasting. Therefore, to ask and seek to delve into the question, What came before God? is a completely futile exercise.
It doesn't stop people from doing it. Now, if that seems a little rarefied for our taste, let's just allow the late Irma Baumbach to give us a little help. Time, says Baumbach, it hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by for the young, and runs out for the aged. And we understand that, don't we? The brevity of life is to be faced. We don't like to face it, but the Scriptures call us to face it.
Not in the posture of morbidity, not in order to manipulate us or to create undue alarm, but in order that we might just be sensible. And there's something within the biological clock of man that addresses this and understands this, although he cannot fully define it and declare it. And it is for this reason that the Scriptures speak always in the now.
Read your Bibles and check. Now is the accepted time. Behold, now is the day of salvation. Now is the time to think this out. Now is the time to be reconciled to God. Now is the time to take care of these things.
Not tomorrow. It calls us not to live with the regrets of yesterday or with the anxieties of tomorrow but to face the fact that the future comes in at the rate of sixty seconds a minute. And so it's no surprise that the writer who has been going up and down the corridors of life to solve the riddle of life itself should end in this way. Remember your Creator in the days of your youth. Now, when he says remember, he's not calling us to some kind of perfunctory mental exercise. The phraseology which is used here to remember in this way is to drop every sense of self-sufficiency and to cast ourselves unreservedly on God as our Creator and Sustainer. It is, if you like, to offer to God the same kind of passionate and intense loyalty that the psalmist felt towards Jerusalem, towards his homeland. In Psalm 137, written during the period of the exile, the psalmist says, By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and we wept, and we hung our harps on the willow trees.
Because, after all, how could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? And then, speaking of the passionate commitment to Jerusalem, he says, May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy. Now, he is explaining the nature of remember by the phrase which follows it. What would it mean to remember you? He says, It is to know you as my highest joy. Okay. Remember your Creator. Know him, love him, serve him as your highest joy. Now, that's the call, that's the exhortation.
The timeframe is explicit, you will notice. When should we do this? Well, we should do it in the days of our youth. We say, I'm no longer a youth.
Well, let me say two things. First of all, the Bible is far more flexible concerning youthfulness than the twenty-first century is. And therefore, many of us who think we're past it are not as past it as we think we are.
We might say, Remember your Creator while you've got the chance, while you have the opportunity. And particularly if you're young, beware of saying, Well, I'll get to the serious stuff, you know, when the serious time comes. Don't be silly. This is the serious time.
And it is now. Beware of allowing the best years of your life to pass while you're waiting for them to begin. I'll get round to that. You have just this moment to tackle this issue. You dare not presume upon the future. You daren't get tangled up in your past. Remember your Creator in the days of your youth. Because let me remind you, he says, that as you proceed, you're going to encounter the fact of life's frailty and death's certainty. How gracious of God!
To exhort us in this way, to issue such an invitation. Remember your Creator while you have the opportunity. Notice, before the days of trouble come and the years approach, when you will say, I find no pleasure in them. In other words, when the springtime of life is swallowed up by winter. There's a kind of chill here in verse 2 that settles over life. When the rain and the clouds have turned daylight into gloom. Sombre picture.
Describing for us the winter scene where you long, at least for the sun, for a moment or two, to penetrate the clouds. Depicting not only the fading of our physical powers but also of our mental faculties. It's the picture, if you like, of the general desolation of old age.
The general desolation of old age. Now, not everybody ages in the same way. Some people are sprightly well on into their chronology. Some are old people before their time. Some possess their hearing to the end. They can hear anyone whispering in the room. Others are deaf before they should be, and so the process goes. But you neither have to be a genius or a particular inquirer to discover that things run down as life goes by. And the lights go out.
The lights are withdrawn. Our senses. Our faculties. Remember your Creator while you have the opportunity. Not in a perfunctory mental way but in a way that gives up my self-dependence and trusts only in God. For the days of trouble come. Better to remember now than to spend eternity with regret. Now, he explains these days of trouble in poetic fashion in verses 3, 4, and 5, doesn't he? A picture of decay, of a house in decay, or of a life in decay.
A foretaste of our future. As I read these verses again this week, it made me think of the drugstore aisles. Particular drugstore aisles. You can gauge the passage of time, actually, by the way in which you approach a drugstore.
This is a small child. You go to the drugstore, you go to the comic section, the candy section, whatever it is. You are no interest in any of us at all. Razor blades hold no appeal. Deodorant holds no appeal. There is nothing really of remote interest to you at all, except, give me the candy or give me the toy section or whatever else it is.
You move into your teenage years, and all of a sudden, acne has become not simply a word but a reality. And so, you're going down corridors you never looked at before. You're finding things that are of no concern to you before. And as life progresses, there's still always two or three aisles out there that are like no man's land, you know. You see people up there, you just see them. Well, I wonder why they go up there. What is up there? You look, but you don't really want to go, because you're going to have to go.
So, you don't want to go before your time. Some of you are already up there. I've seen you.
We were up there together, weren't we? The house of our lives is breaking down. It makes sounds in the night. It thwarts us in the day. The keepers of the house tremble. Our arms shake. Suddenly, carrying Dunkin' Donuts coffee, a briefcase in the newspaper has become an exercise of gargantuan proportions.
Whereas before, you could handle it all. Now, for some reason, the coffee has got jumping beans in it. It's decided to go places. No, you're shaky. Your strongmen are stooping. Your legs are going. Oh, you can pretend, but they're stooping. Every visit to the doctor now, he's knocking off inches. You say, His scales are wrong. His little wooden thing, they drop down on the top of your head. It's bent.
No, it's not. You're stooping. Your grinders cease. You have inadequate occlusion, according to the dentist. The few that you have left on the top aren't meeting the group that are down on the bottom. Suddenly, you're shut in in a way that you weren't before.
The doors to the street are closed. The limitations of mobility. The dimness of sight. You don't have to sleep as much as you used to.
Is that the good news or the bad news? Men rise up at the sound of birds. They're always up in time for the dawn chorus. Trouble is, they're so deaf they can't hear the dawn chorus.
They rise up at the sound of birds, but all their songs grow faint. Did you hear the words? No, I don't think I did. Well, you were up, weren't you? Yes, I was up, but I didn't hear them.
I think I saw them. Why is that? The answer is there.
The almond tree blossoms. Suddenly, your hair is a different color from what it once was. Now, some of you have already taken care of that in a variety of ways.
You've chosen your own particular color, but if you just let things go under this normal process, then eventually it either falls out or turns white. And if you think you look particularly good when you're standing in the mirror, you don't stand there too long, because you look like a grasshopper dragging itself along. Not very nice, is it? Not only that, suddenly the ladder seems a lot taller than it was, suddenly the streets seem far fuller than they were, and desire no longer is stirred. Actually, that translates—that's a dynamic equivalence—it translates, the caperberry fails.
The caperberry was a highly regarded stimulus for appetite and also as an aphrodisiac. And so, as remarkable as it may be to us, eventually everything shuts down. What are you saying? And he makes it even more specific, doesn't he? Before the mourners move around the streets, verse 6, remember him before the silver cord is severed or the golden bowl is broken. In other words, remember him before you die. Now, the poetry here is descriptive of the beauty and of the fragility of life.
A shattered lamp, as a result of just one little piece of the cord fracturing. Our lives are held between time and eternity by very, very tender mechanisms, aren't they? The physicians here this morning can testify to that. It is a remarkable thing that we are all still compass, mentis, and functional. It only takes one very, very small shift in tiny mechanisms for the cord to sever, for the bowl to shatter, for the pitcher to fall into the spring and be rendered useless, for the wheel that has been used to bring the bucket up from the well to find itself propped up against the well. The rope is gone, the bucket has departed, and it stands there as a silent testimony to the fragility of our lives. An eloquent description of the transience of the most basic things that we do, reminding us that there's going to be a last time for every journey, a last time for every routine task. And so, verse 8, no surprise, his refrain remains, doesn't it? Meaningless, meaningless, says the Teacher.
Everything is meaningless. We shouldn't see in verse 7 some testimony of hope, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the Spirit returns to God who gave it. We're not at the conclusion yet. That comes in verse 9. What he is simply saying here is that as sin entered into the world in Genesis 2, God comes and he says, On account of sin, from dust you came, and to dust you will return.
The writer has already mentioned this. He says, God has made everything perfect, and man has made crooked and cannot straighten what he has made a mess of. And therefore, when you view life from the framework of futility, then the conclusion is reasonable. Now, that, my friends, is what makes the exhortation with which the chapter begins so wonderful. Death has not yet reached out to us, so let it rattle its chains and stir us into action. We're not in the final stage of man yet.
Most of us, as described by Shakespeare in As You Like It, the childishness to which we return, the oblivion without teeth, without eyes, without taste, without anything. And so it is a day of opportunity. Some of you have listened for a month of Sundays, and for months of Sundays, about the claims of the Bible and the work of God on our behalf and the sending of Jesus as the Savior, as the one who would bring life into our death and light into our darkness.
But still you do not believe. The psalmist in Psalm 90, with which we began this morning, says, Teach us to number our days aright, so that we might gain a heart of wisdom. Teach us to number our days aright.
Think of all of the abilities mathematically that is part of our existence. Some of you return tomorrow to the world of insurance and to actuarial tables, which are a process involving calculus and discovery that is of vital importance and is used strategically every day. Some of you return to the world of investment, some to engineering, some to laser technology. Some of you go back into the world of research.
They give out the distance between ourselves and the moon, the speed of light, the issues of quantum physics, and so on. And you're able, by means of computer programming, to put together all kinds of calculations. But many of you have never calculated your life.
You spend all your time working out these puzzles, and you haven't dealt with the puzzle of your life. It is a picture to us, isn't it? It's a clear confession of the fact that without divine grace, we are utterly foolish people concerning the plainest things.
Well, there's more, of course. We're going to come to it in verses 9–14. Not only was the teacher wise, he also imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered, he searched these things out, he looked for the right words, he wrote what was upright and true, and he used them as little goads, like sticks with sharp points on the end, to prod in the same way that a farmer would prod his cattle—to protect them from taking a wrong turning and to urge them to go in the right way.
It matters little, really, in the great scheme of things. Whether any of you that are listening to me now remember that I said what I said, or I urged you, as now I seek to do, but it is of immense importance that you realize that God, by his Word, didn't ask you to do something particularly difficult, didn't ask you to start a charity organization, didn't ask you to walk the length of Kilimanjaro, didn't ask you to run round the block forty-seven times and say manifold prayers. The Word of God came to the congregation at Parkside saying, Remember me while you still have the opportunity.
Not the perfunctory recollection of irregular French verbs, but the setting aside of myself and the giving all of my life and all of my future and all of my opportunities to God. Have you ever done that? Will you do that?
Will you do that now? Now, as always now, is the accepted time. Today is salvation's day.
Life is frail and death is certain. Now is the time to trust in God alone for salvation. We're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. Studying the book of Ecclesiastes makes it increasingly clear just how important it is for us to understand and apply God's Word to our lives every day. That's why our mission here at Truth for Life is to teach the Bible with clarity and relevance every single day. We do this trusting that God will use the teaching of his Word to convert unbelievers, to help believers continue to grow in their faith, and to encourage pastors and strengthen local churches. That's why Alistair's teaching is free to download and to share. It's our desire to make clear relevant Bible teaching available to everyone.
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You can request your copy of the book Being the Bad Guys when you give a donation at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. The teacher in Ecclesiastes searched exhaustively for satisfaction, but ultimately declared each pursuit was meaningless. So what does his feudal exploration teach us? Join us tomorrow for the surprising conclusion and some parting words of wisdom. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-03-19 00:38:21 / 2023-03-19 00:46:53 / 9