Some would give anything for fame and fortune. even if it meant abandoning their friends. King Solomon would say those priorities are backwards. Today, on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah continues his series in Ecclesiastes, searching for heaven on earth.
with a look at the relative value of relationships and riches. Listen as David introduces the conclusion of When Your World Doesn't Make Sense. And thank you for joining us. Even the title is intriguing, isn't it? Because if we're all honest, we have moments when life just doesn't make sense.
I've had people tell me that if life is always logical, it probably isn't from God. Because logic is our ability to sort things out. And His ways are not our ways. His ways are above our ways. His thoughts above our thoughts.
God always asks us to do things that humanly don't make sense. But he's always on target. He's always right, and we can trust him. We're sorting out some of the ins and outs of that question as we open our Bibles today to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes and part two of When Your World Doesn't Make Sense. By the way, you can get the study guide for this series and a set of C D's to go along with it that will take you through the series exactly as you hear it every day on the radio.
The CD package is complete with material that isn't on the radio because of time, and the study guide is just very helpful. The great outline takes you through all the major points of each lesson. A lot of scriptures to look up, a lot of places to write in the text itself. A great manual for small groups. Many small groups have used our study guides, and tell me what a blessing they are.
You should try it because it's all the Bible stuff. It's not about emotional thinking, and it's just about what does the Bible say and how do I respond to that. The study guide Guides are great tools for small groups, and there are hundreds of different studies. Take advantage of them by going to davidjeremiah.org. There, you will find a listing of the things you want to study and a way for you to get involved.
Don't forget during this month when you send your gift to Turning Point, we have a special resource we want to send to you. It is related to the series you're listening to. It's the book 31 Days to Happiness, a 323-page soft-back book that's a commentary on this whole book of Ecclesiastes, something you want on your shelf for future reference or for just review of what you've been listening to each day. Be sure to ask for your copy of 31 Days to Happiness when you send your gift to Turning Point during the month of February. Thank you in advance for your investment in what God is doing here.
Now, here is part two of When Your World Doesn't Make Sense. The nail that Solomon drives here into this whole matter of faulty justice is the inevitability of death. He says, judgment is coming. Death is certain. And now the third nail is in verse 22.
He says, life continues.
Now he says, so you see some justice out there that isn't right. Don't mess up your whole life because of that. Don't walk around saying, well, it's not worth living because look at this, this is wrong, that's wrong. No, he says, first, remember, everybody's gonna be judged. Everybody's gonna die.
So what do you do between now and the judgment? Notice verse 22.
So I perceive that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works. For that is his heritage. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him? Once again, we are reminded, friends, that life continues in spite of our questions, in spite of the inequities, and in spite of all the stuff we don't understand. We may not be able to resolve all the conflicts, but while we wait for the resolution, we should rejoice in our own works and leave the future up to God.
Can I get a witness? Amen. A poet put it this way. God holds the key of all unknown, and I am glad. If other hands should hold the key, or if he trusted it to me, I might be sad.
I cannot read his future plans, but this I know. I have the smiling of his face and all the refuge of his grace while here below. Amen. I've got the smiling of his face and all the refuge of his grace. while I'm trying to figure out how to get from the injustice I just saw.
to the ultimate resolution that's going to come someday. The problem of faulty justice.
Now, notice the second goad that Solomon brings up is in chapter 4, verses 1 to 3: the problem of fierce oppression. Then I returned and I considered all the oppression that is done under the sun and look the tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter. On the side of the oppressors there is power, but they have no comforter. Therefore I praise the dead who are already dead, more than the living who are still alive. Yet better than both is he who has never existed, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.
This is a tough goad. Listen to this.
Solomon now records what he saw when he observed the oppression of the world. Here he is talking about the weak and the helpless of the world who are victimized by society. who have no hope of anything ever being different. for them.
Solomon speaks of their tears, and twice he observes that they have no one to comfort them. On the side of the oppressors, there is power, but who do the oppressed ever turn to? Simon Wiesenthal wrote a book about his examination of the Nazi concentration camps And in one part in his book, He explains why he stopped believing in God the way he used to believe in God. He said he was in a camp where a Nazi commander brought two Jews and put them back to back. Shackling their arms in handcuffs so that their heads were back to back.
Then he took his revolver, he put it in the mouth of the one man and he shot it. It killed the man. and it killed the man behind him. And he turned to his corporals and he said, I told you you're wasting too many bullets. You can kill two with one.
And Weisenthal said, when I saw the oppression and the wickedness and the injustice of that. I couldn't comprehend it and I turned from God. And if you don't understand the word of God and the sovereignty of God and the purposes of God, you cannot blame that man. Nor do you.
Solomon's conclusion about the oppressed is that they would have been better off if they had never been born. As he looked at the awfulness of life, The work of evil done under the sun is so great, he said, that one would choose not to be born if it was such a choice that he could have. This was the sentiment that Job had. You remember how Job faced the problems in his life? When he lost all of his family, you remember the oppression of Job?
One day he was sitting on top of. He was the catbird on the mountain, and the next day he had lost everything. All of his wealth, all of his possessions, all of his cattle, all of his family. The only one that was left to him was his wife, and she proved to be quite a liability later on. And Job, in the midst of it all, said, May the day perish that I was born.
and the night in which it was said a male child is conceived, Why did I not die at birth? Why did I not perish when I came from the womb?
So what do you say to someone like that? That's the question Solomon raises. You know what? Preachers never raise questions like that. We try to stay away from them.
Those are the hard things about the gospel, the hard things about Christianity. What do you say to people who are oppressed?
Well, you know what? We've learned sometimes it's all right to say we don't know. We don't understand. Our minds are so Finite, we can't comprehend the corporate purposes of God in His world. But there is an interesting thought that I want to share with you, though Solomon does not share it here.
When David was dealing with the same issue in one of the Psalms, Psalm 73. Talking about why the wicked prosper. He comes to this conclusion. He says, until I went into the sanctuary of God. Then I understood.
If you try to understand the purposes in this world using your own wisdom, your own ways of thinking things through, you're going to see a lot of things that you can't merge. You can't get them to come into sync. And some things you will never be able to resolve. One thing you must remember: that in the things you can't resolve, you must continue to trust God, knowing that someday the resolution will come. even though it is not there now.
Solomon said, I saw the oppressed. And I want you to know what I saw. There's a lot of things in this life that are bad. A lot of things that are hard and evil. We don't do ourselves any favors by turning our back and acting like they're not there.
Pollyanna is not a good prescription for life. You face the issues, and then sometimes you step back and say, Lord God, I don't comprehend this. I don't know why all of this suffering is going on. I don't know why there's so much evil, but I know this. It wasn't here before the Garden of Eden.
And it's come through humanity through our own selfishness and sin. God is not responsible. And that's all we can say. Notice the third goad. The problem of financial rivalry.
Here's one that's very contemporary, and all you guys are sitting out here from the corporate world, you'll comprehend this immediately. Verses 4 through 6, the problem of financial rivalry.
Now, watch this. He said, And I saw that for all toil and every skillful work, a man is envied by his neighbor. This also is vanity and grasping for the wind.
Solomon could have been filing an article for the USA Today or the Wall Street Journal. He summarizes the driving motivation in today's workplace. Men do not work so that they can have things or for comfort, they work so that they can be the envy of their neighbors. They want the car not because it's better, but because everybody will say, whoa, look at that car. They're all excited about Being one step ahead of everybody else that's around them.
They're in this financial rivalry, this competition. Newsweek magazine carried an article about what drives people in Washington, D.C. Listen to this.
Ambition is the raving and insatiable beast that most often demands to be fed in this town. The setting is less likely to be some posh restaurant or glitzy nightclub than a wholly unremarkable glass office building or an inner sanctum somewhere in the Federal complex. The reward in the transaction is frequently not currency at all, but power, perks and ego massage. For this, the whole conglomeration of psychological payoffs, there are people who will sell almost anything, including their self-respect, if they have any. And they will also give up the well-being of thousands.
to get to their goal. Elliott Richardson, the Attorney General. who resigned rather than dismiss Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. at President Nixon's request, wrote this about the late President Richard Nixon. He said, Richard Nixon's great weakness was the approach to life that came out of his battle to achieve station, influence, power, all the things he felt that he had not been accorded as a youth.
He had an insecurity, an insecurity that eventually propelled him to the presidency by his aggression, his suspicion, his vindictiveness, his retaliation, and so forth. He viewed every opponent as an enemy, and he never understood when he had won. An unhealthy craving for power, influence, and all the trimmings leave men in a quiet life of desperation.
So, some people look at that and they say, Well, I'm not going there. I'm not going to do that.
So, notice Solomon says some of them take the other extreme. The fool folds his hands and consumes his own flesh. Here's what Solomon is saying: Some people look at this craving after ambition and they say, Whoa, that's awful. And in the 1960s and the 1970s, a whole generation dropped out. Do you remember?
Some of you were a part of that. You became hippies flower children. You gave everything you had away and you went and lived in a commune.
Solomon says, the fool folds his hands and consumes his own flesh.
Some people saw this runaway ambition for what it was back in the 60s. They decided the answer was to drop out. But Solomon observes that this too is the wrong answer. The answer is not to be driven to get more than anybody else has or to drop out of life. Notice he says If you do this, you consume your own flesh.
He describes what happens when we respond to ambition by dropping out. We end up consuming our own lives, our resources are gone. Our self-respect is gone. Drugs consume our ability to think, and we end up sleeping on the streets and begging for food. We consume our own lives.
No, Solomon says there's a better way to this, and here's the nail. Notice verse 6, better a handful with quietness. Then both hands stole together with toil and grasping for the wind. What's he talking about? Get a little balance in your life.
You don't have to have it all, but you got to have some of it. You don't have to be at the top level on the 25th floor sitting in the CEO's office, but you don't want to be on the street either. Get a little balance. I read a little book sometimes in my devotional. Called Daily Light.
I don't know if you've ever seen that. It's written by Richard Bagster. Billy Graham's daughter. Took that and kind of updated it and put it in a new little book so that there's a reading for the morning and one for the evening. Let me tell you what it is.
It's really a neat little thing because it's like. It's all the scriptures about different themes distilled into one reading, and it's so cool. If you want a real strong shot of the Word of God in the morning, get daily light and just read that thing. What I do is I write it out. I got onto this thing and I used it to write a prayer.
And I took all the scriptures and reversed them around so that I was saying them to God. And we're talking about this whole matter of financial pressure and rivalry and all that.
So I'm going to read to you what I wrote in my journal. This is my prayer from the Daily Light. Lord. I ask that you give me neither poverty nor riches. Please feed me with the food allotted to me.
Lest I be full and deny you and say, Who are you, Lord? or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. Give me this day my daily bread. Lord, help me not to worry about my life, what I will eat, or what I will drink, nor about my body, what I will put on. Is it my life more than food and my body more than clothing?
So Lord Jesus, let my conduct be without covetousness. Help me to be content with such things as I have. For you yourself have said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. Oh wow. That just brought me right out of my chair.
That's it, isn't it? If you get on the tram to get the most before anybody else does, you will ruin your life. If you short-circuit your ambition, you will ruin your life. But if you pray that prayer Your life. will be worth living.
Proverbs 15:16 says, Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure with trouble. Proverbs 16, 8 says, Better is a little with righteousness than vast revenues without justice. 1 Timothy 6:6 says, Godliness with contentment is great gain.
So we've looked at the problem of faulty justice. and fierce oppression and financial rivalry.
Now let me give you the fourth one. The problem of fractured relationships. Mm-hmm. Here Solomon talks about one of the things that happens to a person often when he's on his way up. Watch what he says.
Then I returned and I saw vanity under the sun. There is one alone without companion. He has neither son nor brother. Yet there's no end to all of his labours, nor is his eye satisfied with riches, but he never asks, For whom do I toil and deprive myself of good? This also is vanity and a grave misfortune.
Solomon observes people working their fingers to their bone, putting in hundreds of extra hours. He sees them depriving themselves of good. He sees them toiling without end. He watches as they continue to amass riches, and then he notes they got no friends. They got no relatives.
They got nobody. What do you do with all this money if you've got nobody to share it with? Yeah. I think that's where Charles Dickens got Scrooge. That's how he was.
Right? He went home every night to count his money. Nobody liked him. Everybody hated him. And Solomon observes that this kind of a lifestyle also is vanity, and he adds a new descriptive term.
He says, this is grave misfortune. What a shame. And he adds in verses 9 through 12 something that we often read in Ecclesiastes, one of the more famous passages. But have you ever seen it in the context? He says: don't sacrifice your relationships for riches.
Relationships come first, riches come second. Here's a little paradigm for you to remember. I'll say it about the church. Don't use the church. to get people Don't do that.
The church is here to minister to people. We're to use the church to minister to people. Don't use your friends to get what you want. Use what you have to encourage your friends. But if you don't have any friends, what are you going to do?
And so Solomon gives us four things about friends, about two being better than one. He says, Two are better than one for working. Verse 9: Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor. There's a sense of joy that comes when you share the labors that you have with another, that your wife, your husband, your friends. It's also true that when you share the reward, the reward goes further.
Two is better than one, according to Solomon. Number two, two is better than one for walking. For if they fall, One will lift up his companion, but woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up. Friends provide help in times of trouble. When difficulty comes, it's awful to be alone.
You need somebody to encourage you, to be with you. Two are better than one for working, two are better than one for walking, two are better than one for warmth. Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm, but how can one be warm alone?
Now please don't take that out of context. This is a good word for marriage. This is not for singles here. This is a marriage thing. And it goes back to the culture of when people traveled across the Mideast and they would be traveling overnight in the mountains.
They would get together and they would get as close as they could to share the warmth of one another. He says, Two lie down together, they will keep warm, but how can one be warm alone? And then, number four, two are better for watch care. Verse twelve, though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Solomon is simply saying that there's safety in numbers, and you don't want to be isolated by your drive. You want to build relationships in your life. Do you know any guys who trashed all the relationships because they're trying to get to the top. For whatever purpose you do, and I do, and women do that now too. We're in this corporate culture where women are on the same track.
They trash their relationships to get to the top, and when they get to the top, they look around. And it isn't what they thought it was going to be. It's the classic case of a guy climbing the corporate ladder only to discover when he gets to the top, the ladder's leaning against the wrong wall. And he doesn't like what he sees. Number five, the problem of fickle popularity.
Here, Solomon's looking at all these realities about life: faulty justice, fierce oppression, financial rivalry, fractured relationships.
Now, notice fickle popularity. Better a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who will be admonished no more, for he comes out of prison to be king, although he was born poor in his kingdom. There's a lot of conjecture about what this means and where it came from, but let me tell you what I think. And I wouldn't die for this, but this is what I think. I think Solomon is referring back in history to his own family.
As he talks about this fifth insanity, listen. He says that a poor and wise youth is better than an old and foolish king who refuses to take instruction anymore. Could this be a reference to the first king in Israel who was selected by the people because he was a charismatic personality? Could this be Saul, who started out with everything and ended up with nothing? Instead of consulting with God, he went to consult with the witch of Endor.
Could the poor and wise youth be David, who was chosen to replace him? He was born poor in the kingdom. born as a shepherd boy with no reason to believe that he would ever one day ascend to royalty.
Solomon says that a shepherd boy born in poverty is a better choice for a king than an old and foolish man who refused to take counsel from anyone, including the Lord.
Now the searcher adds one more piece to the puzzle, and I think if you read it in the scripture, you'll get it. Notice verses 15 and 16. He said, I saw all the living who walk under the sun. There were the second youth who stands in his place. There was no end of all the people over whom he was made king, yet those who came afterward will not rejoice in him.
Surely, this also is vanity and grasping for the wind. Who was the second youth?
Now, watch carefully. Who was the second youth who stood in David's place? Of course it was Solomon himself. What does he say about this second youth who becomes king in place of his father? Listen carefully.
He is crowned king amidst the fanfare of the people. There was no end of the people who praised Solomon and his reign, but Solomon reminds us that those who come after him will not celebrate his leadership. nor him. What is he saying? We're talking about fickle popularity.
He's saying, Saul came, he ruled, everybody thought he was the greatest thing, tall and handsome. But when he hit the dust and he was removed, David came and everybody forgot about Saul. Remember the song we used to sing? Saul has slain his thousands and David his ten thousands. That's a great song for David, but it's not real cool if you're Saul.
What they're saying is Long live David, who saw? David came and he was king. Came time for him to give up the throne. And Solomon, his son, was brought to the throne. And if you read the Old Testament story about his coronation, oh my goodness, it's amazing.
I mean, it's the greatest thing in all the Bible.
Solomon comes, and it says here to the fanfare of many, yea, Solomon. David's gone. And he says, One day Solomon will be forgotten. And after him, Rehoboam will be forgotten. Popularity is fickle.
But what he's trying to say to us is, if you put your hope in being popular, and being accorded the praise of men. It is a Fickle thing. It's fleeting. It goes through your hand so quickly. Let me prove it.
Who won the Oscars this year? Who won the Cy Young Award? last year.
Some of you, if you live in that world and you keep track of all of that, you can tell me. We have specials on television that lasts for two hours, and we make all the awards. And within the year, we can't tell you one person who got one. Isn't that true? Your wives are whispering to their husbands who it is.
I know some of you are into this stuff, but don't mess up my illustration here. I want you to understand. What I'm trying to say is... That popularity is not a goal. if you want to be happy.
It's nice to be popular. It's your beats being unpopular. But it's not the ultimate reality. And what Solomon is trying to get us to do is to come back to the reality of God. You center your life on God.
You get through. If you find anything else that takes its place, you're an idol worshiper. God will not bless your life. Amen. Well, I thank you for joining us today as we have opened our Bibles together again to this wonderful book in the Old Testament.
I got to tell you, tomorrow we're going to tackle some things that. Come up on our list of questions. I hope you'll join us tomorrow as we talk about taking your troubles to church.
Now, I know there's no church in the Old Testament, so this is just a title to help you understand what we're going to be talking about from the fifth chapter of Ecclesiastes tomorrow. And it's one of the great chapters in the Bible where God talks about money. It's an incredible passage on money. Most people don't even know it's in the Bible. And you'll want to be sure to be with us tomorrow as we discuss these things together.
Thank you so much for being a part of today's program. We come into your home each day with the Bible in our hands and a prayer in our heart that God will use His Word to encourage you, strengthen you, lift you up, build you up in your faith, and cause you to walk straighter and with your head up high for the Lord. I trust that's happening to you as you enter into this new year with all of the things that God has for you. We'll see you next time. I'm David Jeremiah.
The message you just heard originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and senior pastor Dr. David Jeremiah. Your notes of encouragement mean so much. We invite you to write to us at Turning Point, PO Box 3838, San Diego, California, 92163. Visit our website at davidjeremiah.org slash radio or call 800-947-1993.
Ask for your copy of David's book, 31 Days to Happiness. It's filled with Solomon's wisdom and it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also download the free Turning Point mobile app for your smartphone or tablet, or search in your app store for Turning Point Ministries to access our content. Visit davidjeremiah.org slash radio for details. This is David Michael Jeremiah.
Join us tomorrow as we continue searching for heaven on earth on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.
