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1 Transcription of 20ID4034 Ecclesiastes 3:12-22 Transcription of 20ID4034 Ecclesiastes 3:12-22 "Solomon's Conflicted Views" June 7, 2020 All right. Let's open our Bibles to Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 verse 12 this morning, as we continue our kind of trip through Solomon's journal. Solomon, David's son, was a godly young boy. In fact, when he was old enough to take over for his dad, his first and only request from the Lord was wisdom to rule as well as his dad had; and at least early on, that was exactly what he did. God was very pleased that he hadn't asked for money or long life or power; that he just asked for wisdom, and so the Lord gave him all that. In fact, he became the wisest man that ever lived, to this day. No one after him, no one before him was wiser, and he used that wisdom to serve the Lord. It went well. The nation did well. It was at its zenith, and for many years he seemed to be just on the path of serving God. And then he began to marry a lot of very strange heathen women, much of them through political alliances. It was a common practice of the day. Shouldn't have been for him. But in his later years, these wives turned his heart away from the God that he knew and had grown up with. And so Solomon spent several years of his life wealthy, powerful, able to chase down life under the world to see if there was a life apart from God to be found in the world. We don't know how many years he spent doing that, but we know what he found. It's written in this book. This is his journal. These are the notes that he took, the conclusions that he made, the decisions that he came to. His resolution is found in the last two verses of Chapter 12, verse 13 and 14, right at the end of the book. So I think God wrote this down so He could save you some time; some travel time down dead-end roads, because what you find here is exactly what the world is looking for, and Solomon describes it in great detail. It was almost 51 years ago, July 20th, I think, 1969, when Apollo 11 took off. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ended up on the moon. Michael Collins was the fellow that you might remember stayed in the command module, the Columbia. And 1 then they put Armstrong and Aldrin in the lunar module, the Eagle; right? And they headed for the moon. I think on that day about 8 o'clock in the evening they landed in the Sea of Tranquility. Six hours later, almost 3:00 in the morning, they stepped out of the hatch and onto the moon. And you remember the famous line that he delivered, "This is one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind." When they, the two of them, came back from the moon, they spoke for hours about the overwhelming spectacular view that the moon offered of the earth, looking back. And you've probably seen those pictures of the earth from moon's perspective. It left quite an impression on them both. But Buzz Aldrin especially, it changed the way that he perceived life. He came back to the earth; he saw all of the difficulty. In fact, the earth didn't look so good from the earth point of view; the corruption, the injustices. The distance view was awesome, the near view is not so good at all. And Aldrin would suffer a nervous breakdown from the disillusionment that he brought back with him. After making the moon his goal for life, and finally arriving there, everything he saw when he came back was unfulfilling to him, and he describes in detail the decades of depression that followed. His view had changed from up there to down here. And two and a half hours of being on the moon, they left I think 21 hours after they landed, left him with a decade of depression. It was almost like he was looking to fill space left by space. He struggled. In that same kind of vein, Solomon is a spiritual astronaut of sorts. He has been looking for life on the horizontal plane. He calls it under Heaven or under the sun is his catchphrase. He makes his determinations and all of his conclusions based solely on what he sees looking this way without looking up, without including God. And so his near view is not very pretty at all. And until he goes up where the Lord is to look down upon life with God's perspective, he also is very depressed, very discouraged. And much of this book reads that way. It's kind of like, oh, my goodness. But at the same time, that's how life is apart from God. Every once in a while, like this morning, Solomon stands up, breathes through his nose, looks around and goes, God's good. He goes back to his early years, to what he knew, to what he had relationship with God for years. So he surfaces, and then unfortunately he slips right back down to where he, you know, kind of stumbles and strives and all. But for a time, it excited him. Now, in our verses this morning from verse 12 through 2 verse 22, Solomon shares both his skeptical view, which is kind of much of the book, but then he also stands up to take a spiritual view at the same picture. It almost sounds like two different men, if you read it kind of quickly and don't stop to consider them. Like he's schizophrenic. He says one thing and then he says another. But he's not at all like that at all. It's not two different people; it's the reality of having to live your life in a spiritual framework while living in a world that's completely gone crazy. You know, walk out of the church -- this is a pretty easy place to hang out; right? We're hanging around with Christians who love the Lord and want to worship God and believe the Bible, but you walk out in the world and it's an entirely different picture, and yet you have to maintain and hang on to what you know about God and what God has said. So to maintain a spiritual outlook in a skeptical world is not very easy anyway for any of us, but when you've given up and run out there like Solomon has, it becomes almost impossible. So when we read these verses, in many ways you kind of can hear the wrestling match in Solomon's mind. He flips back and forth almost in the same breath. In verses 12 and 13, where we'll pick up in a little bit, he continues with what he ended with last week, which was there's a time for everything under Heaven, but it is only useful and purposeful and enjoyable when God is involved. God makes everything beautiful, and He's the one who puts eternity in our hearts. So everything can be factored in with, hey, this isn't the end of the line. So he continues that in verse 13 and 14. He uses the words "I know." I know this to be so. These are things that he had learned and studied and understood, but then he flips back to his theories. He said in verse 16, well, "I saw," and in verse 17 twice he says "I said in my heart." In verse 19 he said "what happens," and in verse 20 "who knows." And in verse 21, "I perceived." I guess this is the way it turns out. It's skepticism that takes hold. And it's almost like you find in the same person two views simultaneously, but that's not so odd. Sometimes that happens to us. We know better, but then something happens in our life and we question everything we know. It undermines our faith. It shakes our foundation for a little while, and we have to go back to what we know. One of the things in counseling over the years that I've used so often with people when they come out and ask why God would allow this or why is this happening, I usually answer with 3 this, "Tell me what you know about God that you are sure of." Because when you're in doubt, fall back on what you know; right? Fall back on what you know. When Asaph wrote, you know, that his feet almost slipped when he considered the prosperity of the wicked, he said almost, but then he considered what he knew about God: That God was good, God was faithful, God's word could be trusted, God would finish what he started. And you can make a list of what you know, so that it can offset sometimes what you don't know. Just have to, by faith, believe. You know, verse 11 of this chapter says, we can't know everything from the beginning to the end, but we can know God and know that He's in charge of that. So Solomon's kind of in that same bounce between the Bible says and I see. The Bible says I know that, and then I see these things, and I don't how to bring them together.
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