Ecclesiastes 8:14-17 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. 15 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.
16 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, 17 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 seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out.
INTRODUCTION
Last Sunday’s sermon was a bit heavy. Carefully considering the necessity and goodness of learning the fear of God is a weighty endeavor. In addition, we heard of the Preacher’s perspective on the fact that the world is often such that it’s not obvious that fearing God is the way to go. It is an easily observable vanity indeed that those who do not fear God regularly fare better than those who do.
In this morning’s passage, the Preacher picked up on that same basic notion by expanding on it (14), suggesting a (familiar) response to it (15), and then expanding on it again (16-17). The big idea of this sermon is that while God works in ways that don’t always make sense to us, they are always good and there is joy in the mystery. The main takeaway for us is to stop trying to find joy through understanding God’s purposes in our circumstances and start finding it through believing God’s promises for our circumstances.
MORE VANITY (14)
Hopefully you all remember that the key word in Ecclesiastes is “Vanity.” Although there is some discussion on the precise meaning of how to bring the Hebrew word (hevel) into English, passages like this one indicate the primary sense of the word is “mysterious” or “confusing” or “unable to make sense of.”
In that regard, the main and recurring idea in Ecclesiastes is that the Preacher (the author of Ecclesiastes) made careful observations concerning the way the world works, but had a really hard time reconciling much of it with what he knew about God. Over and over, he saw apparent inconsistencies happening around him.
For instance, in the previous passage (8:10-13) the Preacher observed that contrary to reason, those who do not fear God often fare better than those who do fear God, that the wicked are often praised for their wickedness, and that the wicked often escape the punishment their wickedness deserves (at least at first).
In v.14 of our passage, the Preacher notes another aspect of life under the sun that just doesn’t seem to make sense. That is, he points out another familiar vanity—a double vanity actually.
14 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.
The short version of this observation is that often the lives of righteous people are determined by the choices of wicked people, while the lives of wicked people are determined by the choices of the righteous. In other words, righteous people often get what the wicked deserve and wicked people often get what the righteous deserve.
To say it in a slightly different way still, people who are characterized by living virtuously (who keep their word, who act justly, who serve others, who pay what they ought, who acknowledge God as God, etc.) often end up suffering for it.
You may have heard the recent story of a Christian monk who was jailed in Michigan for silently praying outside of an abortion facility.
Similarly, a woman in Oregon was denied the opportunity to adopt a child because she would not commit to using “correct” pronouns for a child, taking a child to LGBTQ events, and using cross-sex hormones if the child wished.
An Oregon social worker was required to remove books from his office that acknowledged God’s design in human beings as male or female. He was further threatened with losing his job if he did not comply.
Kansas City passed an ordinance that requires all counselors to provide same-sex material and relationship counseling, forcing Christian counselors to comply or violate their convictions and face sanctions.
A pastor and volunteer chaplain was fired from the Austin (Texas) Fire Department for a private blog post about males not participating in women’s sports.
Another pastor was silenced and arrested by local police for reading his Bible and sharing the gospel at a Seattle protest (against the Supreme Court’s ruling which overturned Roe v. Wade).
In each of these cases (all of which are current or within the past few years), by all reasonable accounts, the individuals were seeking to live righteously—in line with God’s nature, word, and will—but instead of being celebrated (treated as the righteous should be), they were punished in various ways and to varying degrees for it. They were treated like they were acting wickedly.
I’m sure that all of you have experienced some measure of persecution for doing what God commands—even if it’s as simple as awkward holidays around unbelieving family or functioning on the perimeter of the social circles of work or school.
Among us, the P family has sacrificed a great deal to serve a country that is making it harder and harder for them to be there. Content creators are forced to create things that dishonor God or lose out on work. Health care professionals are often put in positions of moral compromise or difficult conversations with bosses or HR. Those enlisted in the military regularly have to make the choice between going to really unhealthy churches or no church at all.
There are many more stories just like this and more still of the exact opposite taking place—of people acting wickedly, but being celebrating as if they were righteous.
Everyone knows it shouldn’t be that way (Romans 1). That’s the definition of injustice. It doesn’t make sense. But it’s the kind of vanity the Preacher observed over and over.
Far from a new phenomenon, it’s been going on since the first human offspring. Cain killed his brother, Able, because Able offered a better offering and Cain was jealous. Joseph, Daniel, the prophets, the Disciples, and (most egregiously) Jesus Himself were all treated as if they were wicked for acting in righteousness.
Again, how does this make sense? Why would God allow the world to work like this? From our perspective, it’s vanity of the highest order. But what are we to do with it? How do wise people respond to such vanity?
A REASONABLE RESPONSE TO VANITY (15)
As we’ve seen more than once, the Preacher’s under the sun observations tend to lend themselves to under the sun applications. His commendation in v.15 is no exception.
Having concluded that the wicked often get treated as the righteous should and the righteous often get treated as the wicked should, the Preacher recognized the need to offer some sort of guidance on how his readers ought to respond. In other words, v.15 is the Preacher’s answer to the question, “In a world in which both the righteous and the wicked are mistreated, what’s the best way to be happy?”
In his own words, “And I commend joy…”. So far, so good. In a mysterious world, get joy. But where is that found or how do we do that in the midst of this kind of vanity? The Preacher continued, …“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.”
Joy through the familiar “carpe diem” charge (2:24-25; 3:12-13; 5:18; 9:7). The Preacher’s observation-driven advice is that reasonable people will acknowledge the legitimacy of his observation—that the world is filled with people being mistreated. And in response, rather than store things up—things that are as likely to be destroyed, lost, or stolen as not—or wait—since you have no idea how many days God has given you—eat, drink, and enjoy the good stuff while you’ve got it and while you have life and health to enjoy them.
Who knows how long you or the things you’ve managed to acquire will be around to enjoy, so invite your friends over and have at it. There’s simply no more reliable way to find joy in this life. And this is how it will be for however long God grants you life on earth.
The Preacher was not thinking eschatologically or cynically. He was thinking realistically.
In that way, as is the case with everything the Preacher wrote, there’s truth in it. From a purely under the sun observational point, it’s hard to argue against his observation or conclusion. This is the way things work. This is how you can be most sure you will get some measure of pleasure. This is how many people live. And those who don’t often lose out on the chance to enjoy the stuff they get.
MORE VANITY STILL (16-17)
In the last two verses of our passage, the Preacher went from empirical to metaphysical.
In other words, he moved from what can be observed through the ordinary use of the senses and the ordinary application of reason to theological reflection.
In vs.16-17, the Preacher answered a second implied question: What is God doing in all of this? He began his answer by restating his methodology.
16 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…
Before giving his answer concerning God’s reasoning behind the vanity he observed, the Preacher reiterated the fact that he gave everything he had, day and night, to observe the world as it truly is and make sense of what he saw. This was the Preacher’s life’s mission.
So what was his conclusion? What did he discover? How/why is God involved in the difficult things of our lives? Answer: More vanity still. More mystery. More confusion. Looks at v.17.
17 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 seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out.
Having observed certain “quirks” in the way things work (in v.14), and having answered the implied question of what can be done in light of them (in v.15), the Preacher gave his thoughts on God’s relationship to those things. His conclusion (my paraphrase): “Everything I’ve just written about would be one kind of vanity in a godless world, but it’s doubly, triply so in a world governed by a personal, good, and omnipotent God. The fact that there is God and things are like this makes far less sense to me than if there were no god.”
The Preacher was a realist and a theist. His theology was often confused and incomplete, which led to applications that were often confused and incomplete, but there’s no question that the Preacher believed that God was at work in all the vanity he observed.
Why things work the way they do cannot be found out, no matter how hard you try. It is impossible to discover through observation and reason alone what God is up to in all of this. No amount of human effort can reconcile any of the injustices, wickednesses, pains, sufferings, difficulties, or inefficiencies we so commonly experience in this life with the God of the Bible. And anyone who claims to have done so is a liar.
In this way, always be skeptical when someone tells you they know what God is doing in their (or your) circumstances. When it comes to discerning God’s specific work and motives in our specific circumstances, even hindsight is nowhere near 20/20.
And, at the same time, we all need to come to greater terms with the significance of the mystery of God’s providence on some level. It is important for all of us to consider what the whole Bible says about why things are as they are (disordered, broken, unjust, hard, painful, unpredictable, etc.) while under the providential reign of an all-good, all-wise, all-powerful, all-personal God.
I recently sat with someone who was struggling mightily in light of a too-close-to-home tragedy he’d experienced. He trusts in God but is also having a hard time reconciling God’s goodness and the death of a young teenage girl.
A number of the philosophy professors I’ve had over the years claimed that their atheism was tied directly to this “problem” of evil. Whatever else there is in the world that might point to the existence of a personal God, the tremendous suffering and misery of so many around the world, they reason, means we need to come up with a different explanation. The world as it is, they believe, is entirely incompatible with the Christian God.
Every thoughtful Christian who has endured any measure of severe suffering has felt the tension between what they believe about God’s kindness and what they are experiencing.
I cannot even begin to estimate the number of pages that have been written to explain God’s relationship to the evil/suffering in this world.
In the end, after a few thousand years of wrestling with this question, the two main positions that thoughtful theists hold are (1) some type of free will defense and (2) some type of higher good defense.
The gist of the free will answer is that for our relationship with God to be genuine, it must be freely chosen, but along with the ability to freely choose God necessarily comes the ability to freely reject Him (and choose evil).
And the gist of the higher good answer is that God uses the evil in the world to bring about a greater good than would be possible without it; such as the ability to reveal the entirety of His glory for the highest good of His people.
My point here is not to argue for either, though. I’m happy to point you to the best arguments for both sides if you want to read more about either of those (or some of the other theodicies that have been developed over the millennia), but that’s not where I intend to go right now.
Instead, I want to briefly share three (of the) familiar biblical stories (that I mentioned above) that are able to cut through quite a bit of the (theodicitical) noise: Joseph, Daniel, and Jesus. These stories won’t answer every question we might have, but they should give us confidence that God is working good in every trial, even if we cannot understand how in most cases. In other words, these stories help us trust in God’s many promises to be working for the good of His people in every hardship by giving us examples of how that can be.
Joseph had eleven brothers, but he was his father’s favorite. Because his father unwisely put his favoritism on display, and because Joseph interacted with his family in unwise ways, and because his brothers were sinfully jealous, they sold Joseph into Egyptian slavery (where he remained for 13 years). There he was mistreated, lied about, wrongly condemned to prison (for at least two years), and lied to while in prison.
While Joseph did act unwisely at times, he was a righteous man. In other words, his story was the exact kind observed by the Preacher where the righteous were treated like the wicked. This was the kind of vanity that the Preacher saw and grieved. And it was the kind of story that the Preacher claimed no one can figure out what God is up to in it. But it is also the kind of story in which God is kind enough to take us above the sun and reveal His purposes, to explain how He was working in the under the sun mystery.
Eventually, God gave Joseph the ability to interpret the king of Egypt’s dreams, God brought him into the Pharaoh’s confidence, and God made him the second most powerful man in Egypt. And all of that in order to save the world from a famine and bring Joseph’s family—God’s covenant people—into Egypt.
In other words, as Joesph himself said to his brothers when they appeared before him, “And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. 6 For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are yet five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. 7 And God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. 8 So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Genesis 45:5-8).
And of all of this, Joseph ultimately concluded to his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20).
There is simply no way to grasp any of that through mere observation and reason—the tools of the Preacher (under God’s inspiration). Apart from divine (above the sun) revelation, during the time of Joseph’s suffering (the righteous for whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked), it just looked like God was indifferent to the injustice. And during the time of his blessing, we could only guess that it was at God’s hand and to what ends. Apart from God’s direct explanation, Joseph’s experiences would have fallen squarely in the Preacher’s category of vanity of vanities.
In the Book of Daniel, we find another example of this in the person of Daniel.
Jerusalem, Daniel’s home town, was besieged and conquered by the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar. In the ensuing years, though Daniel remained faithful to God, he experienced all kinds of mistreatment for his faithfulness. He was tested in ways beyond what most of us can imagine. In addition, things often took unexpected, even miraculous turns for good.
Once again, had the Preacher observed Daniel’s life, he would most certainly have concluded, “Vanity of vanities.” There is no under the sun explanation for any of it. Observation and reason cannot make sense of Babylon’s victory, Daniel’s prosperity through fasting, Daniel’s ability to interpret the King’s dream, Daniel surviving the fiery furnace unharmed, or the mysterious fourth man in the furnace with them.
But God gets us above the sun and explains His relationship to it, including the evil Daniel experienced.
…the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into [King Nebuchadnezzar’s] hand” (Daniel 1:2)…
God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs [allowing him to abstain from the King’s food and thrive on vegetables and water] (Daniel 1:9).
God gave them learning and skill in all literature and wisdom, and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams [which is how he was able to interpret the King’s dreams] (Daniel 1:17).
Then the mystery was revealed [by God] to Daniel in a vision of the night (Daniel 2:19).
There’s a good deal more to Daniel’s story, but in all of it, God revealed that all the victories and defeats, sins and righteousnesses were from His hand, as means of revealing His glory and of preserving His covenant people.
Finally, then, consider the clearest example of all: Jesus, the perfect Son of God, sinless in every way. Because of His perfect righteousness, He was doubted, mocked, betrayed, conspired against, denied, abused, beaten, crucified, and eventually killed. Although He taught only truth, felt only godly emotions, and did only good things, although He loved God with all His heart, mind, soul, and strength and His neighbor as Himself, He was constantly forced to endured every form of sin and mistreatment at the hands of the wicked.
There is no under the sun explanation for God’s relationship to any of that. Never in the history of the world has there been One who was more righteous or One “to whom it happens [more] according to the deeds of the wicked.” It cannot be explained by any measure of the Preacher’s under the sun wisdom how God is related to the evil endured by Jesus.
Had the Preacher been there he could not have made any sense of God’s involvement in a righteous way with that level of wickedness? There’s no way, right? The best earthly observations and reason of all time would inevitably fail to come up with a plausible explanation for the injustice perpetrated upon Jesus.
But above the sun, things look very different. God’s relationship to the evil experienced by Jesus was nothing other than the working out of the greatest good of all time.
Romans 11:33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
Romans 3:23-26 …all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26 It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
There will always be theological and philosophical questions we cannot answer concerning God’s relationship to evil in general and even more concerning His relationship to the specific evils we face each day. Theologians and philosophers will continue debate the finer points and apparent contradictions of the various arguments put forward. People will continue to believe they know more than they really do about what God is up to. But let us all learn from Joseph, Daniel, and Jesus (along with the many other places in the Bible in which God explicitly explains His work and purposes) that even though we are often unable to understand exactly how, God is at work in every single aspect of our lives, working perfectly for His highest glory and our greatest good.
While God works in ways that don’t always make sense to us, they are always good and there is joy in the mystery. Therefore, let us stop trying to find joy through understanding God’s specific purposes in our circumstances (good and bad) and start finding it through believing God’s promises for our circumstances.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, and as we turn now to the Lord’s Table, let me remind you of something of particular importance. What the Preacher grasped by looking at things through an under the sun lens, the whole Bible allows us to see with much greater clarity.
In light of what he referred to as “vanity” (people not getting what they deserve and God’s ways being undecipherable), the Preacher concluded that the best a person could hope for in this life is joy through eating and drinking.
But what he called vanity, we know to be the wonderous mystery of God’s good providence. While the Preacher commended eating and drinking the best food in the pantry and the best wine in the cellar, I commend to you the body and blood of Christ. And while the Preacher offered a resulting joy that was partial and fleeting, I offer you now one that is full and everlasting.
The Preacher’s conclusion, eat, drink and be joyful again, was closer than he realized. It is ours, now, in Jesus and symbolized in the meal in which we are about to partake. So let’s do what the Preacher commended. Let’s come and behold this wonderous mystery. Let us eat, drink, and be joyful in Him.