Ecclesiastes 9:7-10 Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.

⁸ Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.

⁹ Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. ¹⁰ Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever seen Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park? The upshot is that every 90 minutes or so the water in an underground reservoir is heated enough by the lava flowing near it that the pressure builds to the point that it explodes in a stream nearly 200’ in the air.

There’s a certain aspect of Ecclesiastes that is like that. The Preacher’s “pressure” builds and builds as he describes the vanities he witnessed in the world around him, the frustrating nature of them, and his uncertainties as to what to make of them, before “erupting” every chapter or two in a “carpe diem” response.

It’s almost as if, after describing the apparently irrational and therefore unpredictable nature of the world we live in, the Preacher can’t take it anymore, throws up his hands, and yells out, “It’s all madness. I can’t figure it out. No one can. Just grab whatever joy you can in the things God gives you while you can. Seize the day!”

That’s happened five times already (2:24–26; 3:12–14, 22; 5:18–20; 8:15). Our passage contains the sixth and final such “eruption”. In it, we find the Preacher’s ingredients to maximizing joy under the sun before you die.

The big idea of this sermon is that every aspect of God’s creation is meant to give us joy as it points us to God as our greatest treasure. The main takeaway is to joyfully look through the things of earth to the God who gave them.

UNDER THE SUN INGREDIENTS TO JOY IN LIFE (7-10A)

What are the ingredients to joy in this life? In this passage, the Preacher lists eight. Five of the eight are also found in the first five carpe diem passages, three are new to this passage, and four are in the other passages but not in this one. All told, that’s twelve relatively simple ingredients to your best under the sun life now.

As we make our way through the list, I think you’ll find that they are self-attestingly the right ingredients. Every attempt to find joy in this life apart from these things, or in them in ways other than what they’re designed for (and many have tried over the centuries since Ecclesiastes was written) always ends up producing less joy and often in significant frustration. These are, in a very real sense, the basic ingredients, according to God’s design, for living well on earth.

In other words, even if you are an atheist, even if you never see above the sun, you simply can’t get around these things if your aim is maximizing your worldly joy. Again, then, what are the ingredients to under the sun joy?

Eat Bread (7a + 2:24; 3:13; 5:18; 8:15)

The first ingredient is the most familiar and the most basic. The Preacher admonished his readers…

⁷ Go, eat your bread with joy…

There are a couple of key ideas here.

First, you cannot have joy on earth if you don’t have life on earth. And you cannot have life on earth if you don’t have bread. God made our bodies in such a way that we need to eat to survive. In that way, eating bread and drinking water are one and the same. We need both to live. And in that, there really is a simple earthly joy in being able to have enough to eat and drink, even as there is soon no earthly joy when these basic needs are lacking (have you ever seen the TV show Alone or backpacked for a longer period of time or fasted for days?).

As you have food and drink, therefore, Grace Church, thank God, consume it in joy, and share it freely with others, as an act of loving service with those who lack and as an act of genuine friendship with those who have, and all as an expression of God’s goodness and design.

The second key, as we’ll see in each of the Preacher’s ingredients, is that the fullest expression of this under the sun joy, is only found above the sun.

On the most basic level, that means understanding that every bite we have to eat is from the Lord and is designed to point us to Him as our provider. Non-Christians can find joy in the first key to this ingredient, but it will always be a lesser joy than those who add this one—a godward view of it.

In this way, fullness of joy comes in having basic sustenance when we consume it in full assurance that man does not live by bread alone (Matthew 4:4); that Jesus is the true bread of life (John 6:35). Earthly bread is necessary for physical life. Heavenly bread is necessary for eternal life. And eaters of earthly bread find the fullest measure of joy in it when it points us to the heavenly bread of God.

The Preacher (as we see at the end of v.7) had some sense of this, but as is the case with this and all the rest of the ingredients, it was far from complete. His head peaked a bit above the sun a bit, but was mostly stuck below the clouds.

Drink Wine (7b + 2:24; 3:13; 5:18; 8:15)

While the Preacher’s charge to eat bread indicates that there’s genuine joy in having your basic needs met, his next ingredient points to a different kind of joy—a joy of abundance.

⁷ Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart…

There is one kind of joy under the sun when we have what we need on the most basic level. There’s another kind of joy that comes when our life is conducive to excess.

Making wine takes time. It can take years of careful cultivation for grapes to go from planting to maturity, and then months after that to turn mature grapes into wine, and then years after that for the wine to age well. In times of drought or famine or sickness or war, no one is thinking of planting grapes and even if they do, they will almost certainly be neglected or destroyed before they could be processed into wine.

In the world as God has made it, wine is an especially significant symbol of peace and abundance. There’s a kind of joy in this life that is found there. We see it all over in the OT and around the feasts especially.

This is a good kind of joy in celebrating God’s abundant provision, Grace, but unlike eating and drinking ordinary food and drink, wine isn’t meant to be normal. We’re not meant to live in continual excess. Wine isn’t water.

Greater is the joy that comes from the above the sun recognition that wine is from the generous hand of God. Indeed, the Psalmist (104:14-15) sang of the gladness the Lord made wine to bring, “You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth ¹⁵ and wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine (which we’ll come to in a few minutes) and bread to strengthen man’s heart (which we just saw).”

Greater still is the joy that comes from the above the sun charge to drink wine among believers as a part of the Lord’s Supper and as a symbol of the New Covenant (Matthew 26:28; 1 Corinthians 11:25).

And the greatest above the sun wine-joy of all will come when we drink it in the presence of the Lord in the new heavens and earth, not because we need it to survive, but as an expression of God’s excessive kindness. Isaiah and Jesus both spoke of this.

Isaiah 25:6 On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.

Matthew 26:29 I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.

Wear Nice Clothes (8a)

(For a reason I’ll explain then, I’m going to come back to the end of v.7 at the end of this section.)

The third ingredient for under the sun joy is unique to this “carpe diem” and probably the first unexpected one.

⁸ Let your garments be always white…

Ever-white clothes in the ancient world were uncommon. Everything was dirty and there were no washing machines or stain-treating sprays. White garments were worn primarily by wealthier people and primarily for celebrations and special events.

With that in mind, the Preacher’s charge was, in essence: Celebrate when you can. You don’t know if there’s going to be another party to attend or another opportunity to dress up, so put on your best clothes now. Don’t store them for a later day since you cannot be certain that a later day will even come, much less that it’ll provide an opportunity to celebrate.

This reminds me a bit of the grandmas who used to cover their couches with clear plastic so as to protect them from the wear and tear of ordinary use. Ultimately, though, no event ever seemed special enough to warrant the removal of the plastic so the couches were never fully enjoyed.

With an above the sun perspective that comes from God’s Word alone (it cannot be discovered through ordinary senses and reason), there is greater joy still in wearing “white clothes” when they draw our minds to the fact that they are given by God to symbolize Jesus’ perfect, holy nature (Daniel 7:9; Mark 9:3), Jesus’ washing of our sin (Isaiah 1:18; Psalm 51:7), and our eternal heavenly attire (Revelation 7:9, 14).

So, get some nice clothes if you’re able and break them out whenever you get the chance. Don’t wait. Wear them. Enjoy them. And as you do, allow that to lift your eyes upward to the God who covers you with white garments of the holiness of Jesus.

Keep Yourself Refreshed (8b)

The next ingredient named by the Preacher is, once again, unique to this passage.

⁸ … Let not oil be lacking on your head.

The tendency is probably to imagine the Preacher thinking of the last ingredient (white garments) and this one as more to do with holiness or purity or religious devotion than they really are. Almost certainly, he was thinking in far more practical terms—dressing up in the last one and being refreshed in this one.

“The hot, dry climate of [the Preacher’s context] is the reason for…the oil, which protected against dry skin” (Longman, NICOT, 230). Some might have chosen to save the oil they had for really hot days (like white clothes for really festive days), but again, the Preacher commended seizing the day; if oil would be refreshing now, keep your head covered and let tomorrow worry about tomorrow.

God gives shade and cool breezes and swimming holes to bring refreshment on hot days. It is good to make use of those things and find simple joy in them. These aspects of God’s common grace (along with walks in state parks, quiet evenings under the stars, sitting on a beach listening to waves crash, and taking naps) are available to all mankind for our refreshment and joy. We’re not made for continual rest (this isn’t a call to be lazy), but we are made finite (this is a call to accept that).

Above the sun we know that true and full refreshment and the joy of it comes only in the Lord, by grace, through faith in Jesus.

Acts 3:19-20 Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, ²⁰ that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord…

If you want to find joy in this world, make use of the many simple means of refreshment provided by God. If you don’t you will lack joy as is always the case in a disordered life—one that rejects your finitude and need for rest. And if you want to experience the fullest measure of refreshment, turn to Jesus in faith. He is our Sabbath rest. Both are equally from the Lord and for the good of us all.

Love and Enjoy Your Spouse (9a)

The fifth ingredient for joy on earth is the last one that’s unique to this passage.

⁹ Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun…

There is a way in which marriage is a common grace institution—given by God for all mankind—and in it, therefore, the joy of marriage is for all mankind. The very nature of things—basic biology and virtually all of human history—along with the straight-forward language of this passage combine to make it clear that marriage is exclusively between one man and one woman (“the wife”), that it is to be rooted in love (“whom you love”), that it is to be life-long (“all the days of your…life”), and that it is ultimately from God (“he has given you”).

There is a significant measure of joy available to all who honor those basic elements of marriage—joy of companionship, joy of stability, joy of shared and complimentary responsibilities, joy of knowing and being known, joy physical intimacy, joy of procreation, joy of generations and legacy, joy of a rightly-ordered life.

Conversely, as we’re seeing in what seems to be ever-increasing measure, there is no lack of frustration and pain when we forsake God’s design in marriage. Today, even in our churches, it is almost unheard of to find anyone who has a clear and strong grasp on these things.

Marriage is almost exclusively seen (or at least functionally engaged in) as a man-made institution that is entirely optional, self-defined, and self-focused. That is, most people have no idea of what it means that marriage was created, designed, and defined by God and, therefore, most have no idea what the purpose of marriage is or what their God-given roles are within it. And so, as we’ve all seen and experienced, the amount of marriage-disorder (along with the difficulties that go with it) is immeasurable.

Marriage belongs to God and it is the most basic of all human institutions.

Above the sun, marriage is designed by God to provide the world with millions of living pictures of the gospel and of the relationship all believers have with Jesus (Ephesians 5:32). Marriages that are ordered in light of the gospel are filled with a kind of joy not found anywhere else on earth.

• Because of the gospel, you have become new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17). Therefore, in your life and marriage, your past does not define you, it does not confine you, and it does not determine your future.
• Because of the gospel, you are forgiven (Ephesians 1:7). Therefore, you can live free of all guilt and condemnation for every sin. You can trust that God has been and will continue to be gracious to you.
• Because of the gospel, you can forgive one another, just as Christ forgave you (Ephesians 4:32); not because you deserved it, but because He chose to set His love upon you even though you didn’t.
• Because of the gospel, you are accepted by God (Romans 15:7) as His beloved son/daughter. Therefore, you are not dependent on one another for your needs or identity and are free to love and serve.
• Because of the gospel, sin’s ruling power over you is broken (Romans 6:6, 14). Therefore, you can truly obey all that God calls you to do in your marriage, regardless of any circumstances or situation.
• Because of the gospel, you have access to God through Christ (Hebrews 4:14-16). Therefore, you can at any time take any need in your marriage to the One who can do all things. God is always with you.
• Because of the gospel, you have hope (Romans 5:1-4). Therefore, you can endure any marital difficulty, hardship, or suffering with full assurance that God is working all of it to your greatest good (Romans 8:28).
• Because of the gospel, Christ dwells in you by His Holy Spirit (Galatians 3:13-14). Therefore, you can be confident that God always provides what He requires for His people (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24).
• Finally, because of the gospel, you have power to fight and overcome remaining sin (Romans 7:19-21). Your sin has been forgiven and God is working in you to get rid of all it’s lingering effects.

That kind of joy that is available only to those who can see marriage from above the sun.

And greater still is the above the sun joy that comes from the knowledge that one day all earthly marriages will give way to the marriage supper of Jesus and the Church, the Lamb of God and His bride (Revelation 19). One aspect of the eternal life and joy that is ours in Jesus is the reality that the Church will exist forever as the bride of Christ, perfectly loved, protected, and provided for.

Grace, with God’s help, find joy in thinking of and ordering your marriages according to God’s design. And if you’re not sure what that means or how to do it, let us help.

Be OK with How Things Are (9b + 3:14; 5:18; 8:15)

The next ingredient for joy in this life is contentment. We see that in the last half of v.9.

⁹ … because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.

All that the Preacher has said so far (vs.7-9) and even what he’s about to say (v.10) is the portion and lot of mankind. There is, of course, variation within all of that and there are, of course, exceptions to some of that, but it is, for the most part, basic human living.

Although the Preacher struggled to heed his own advice at times, it is good advice. That is how God made the world. It is how the world works. And joy on the most basic level comes from accepting things as they are, not as you wish they would be.

How much angst and fretting and discontentment (how much joy-loss) comes in your life by wishing your circumstances were different rather than finding contentment within them (even as you ask God to change them if they are bad)?

On the most basic level, the Preacher’s point here is this: You might wish that gravity pulled things up instead of down, but it is the very definition of folly and futility to spend your life frustrated by the fact that it doesn’t.

As is the case with all of these, there is greater joy still for those whose hope is in Jesus. There are two key aspects of this higher joy.

First, there is heavenly joy in the knowledge that every minute that I am not in hell, I am getting something infinitely better than I deserve. The way things are, no matter how bad they are, pales in comparison to the terrors of hell. In that way, there is joy even in the worst possible under the sun circumstances.

And second, there is fuller joy in the reality that however things are, they are for a greater good than every other way things might be. We’ve spent some time in this in recent weeks, so I’ll only restate the simple, but joy-filled promise of Romans 8:28, “for those who love God all things work together for good…”.

There is joy in this life, even in the relentless under the sun vanities, for those who learn contentment.

Work Hard (10a + 2:24; 3:13; 3:22; 5:18, 19; 8:15)

Another ingredient to joy on earth is found at the beginning of v.10: Hard work.

¹⁰ Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might…

For many (especially kids, probably), hard work seems like the opposite of joy. It’s more of a necessary evil, to be avoided if at all possible, than anything close to a source of joy. Joy for me didn’t come in math class, but once math was over. God’s Word teaches something entirely different, however.

Back in 2020, in my sermon on Genesis 2:15, I offered a handful of principles on work. It is within those principles that the full measure of work-joy comes. Some of them the Preacher understood. Some he didn’t seem to.

• God is always working (Genesis 2:1-3, summarizing Genesis 1; John 5:17). If we are to rightly understand how to work in joy, we need to begin with an understanding that God only does good things. That God is always working, then, means that work is good, really good.
• God delights in his work (Genesis 1:31; Psalm 149:4; Jeremiah 9:24). Throughout Genesis 1, God continually referred to his work as “good” and then “very good”. This theme is steady throughout the bible; God is always working and God is always delighting in his work.
• God’s work is primarily to create (Genesis 1-2), order (Genesis 1-2), and care for (Psalm 145:14-16); and then it is to rescue (2 Timothy 4:16; Colossians 1:13) and restore (1 Peter 5:10; Revelation 21:1-5). He always joyfully works to make things, order them, and make them flourish.
• God commands us to join Him in His work and His delight (Genesis 1:28, 2:15; Psalm 127:1). This privilege is given from the beginning, in the garden paradise. We were made for hard, joyful work.
• We must work as God works: creating (Genesis 1:28), ordering (Genesis 2:20), caring for (Genesis 2:15), rescuing (Matthew 28:18-20), and redeeming (Matthew 28:18-20). The true nature and purpose of our work are not for us to decide.
• Whenever we work like God our work has value and dignity. All jobs have dignity and worth only because they are a part of God’s work. And if they are not a part of God’s work, then no amount of marketing money or PR can make them dignified or worthy.
• Because God is always working for the good of the world, so should we (Matthew 5:45).
• Because of the fact that in our work we are joining in God’s work, we are also representing God in all we do (2 Corinthians 5:20; Colossians 3:23-24; Ephesians 6:5-6). This means acknowledging that we work ultimately for God and not any earthly master (Colossians 3:23-24).
• In all of these ways our work can and should be as much a part of your worship of God as our time here on Sunday morning (1 Corinthians 10:31; Romans 12:1). Rightly done we work for God’s pleasure and in God’s pleasure.
• We must be ministry-minded in our work (Matthew 28:18-20; 1 Peter 3:15). We must look upward when we work, we must also look outward in our work, seeking to help others look upward as well.
• The Holy Spirit is living in us to empower us for good work (Ephesians 3:16). God’s design for our work is that He gives the charge and he gives the strength.
• We must rest. God gave us this example in Genesis 2:1-3 and then later the command to join Him in rest and promised to be our rest (Matthew 11:28-30). We were made for work, but we were also made for rest.
• Work is harder and less fruitful because of the fall. Our work is always less efficient because sin is in the world, actively bringing about decay and disorder in the world (Genesis 3:17-19).
• All of this together means that success at work means working just as God has called you to: for His glory, according to His example, and in His delight. And Jesus’ death on the cross means that God is pleased with every act of work offered in faith and that he will use it for good.

Working with these things in mind, then, is our God-given path to joy in work.

Find God’s Approval (7c + 2:24-26; 3:13)

For the final ingredient, we need to go back to the end of v.7. There we see that there’s joy in finding God’s approval. In this passage, it’s most directly tied to eating bread and drinking wine, but it really does apply to all of what the Preacher wrote in this passage.

⁷ Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.

Joy comes with God’s approval. Once again, there are a couple of things we really need to settle on here.

First, the Preacher was definitely not saying that God is glad for everything you do, no matter what you do. God has not only given us the things of earth, but He has also given them to us for a purpose. Making use of them for any other reasons or in any other ways is sin and God never approves of sin.

The Preacher’s main point, then, is that everything we’ve covered so far is from the Lord. Bread, wine, clothing, refreshment, marriage, contentment, and hard work are all part of God’s good creation (clothing for warmth rather than modesty). Even pre-Fall, He meant all of those things for our joy. He has approved of them. There really is, therefore, significant joy available in each of them as we make use of them according to God’s design and the approval that comes from it.

We tend to function as if our quite times and Sunday morning worship times are inherently more pleasing to the Lord than our times eating and drinking in Christian fellowship or taking a nap on the Lord’s Day; as if the spiritual is inherently better than the physical.

But again, the Garden in which mankind was made to live before the Fall, as well as the new heavens and earth where we will be in the presence and pleasure of God forever, was and will be every bit as much physical as spiritual. In other words, in God’s Creation and recreation physical things and spiritual things alike are very good and for our joy. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is the full and sufficient proof of this.

The second thing to settle on is that having the sense of God’s approval and actually having God’s approval are not the same. I spent all of my childhood and young adult years with a fairly clear conscience (believing I had God’s approval). I thought of myself as a good person. There was a kind of joy in that.

What I learned later, however, is that my clear conscience and the joy that came with it were entirely misguided. They were nothing more than the product of self-deceit. I was like the person whose body is unknowingly riddled with terminal cancer but still feels fine.

The Apostle Paul worded it this way (1 Corinthians 4:4), “I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.”

A clean, but out of tune conscience, can only bring fake joy.

On the other hand, living in the genuine approval of God brings a joy that’s impossible to match. So, where does that come from? We’ve touched on it already—living a life that is properly ordered to God’s design. But both below and above the sun wisdom tell us that none of us have done that as we should. None of us have lived perfectly ordered lives and, therefore, none of us ought to have a clear conscience.

The good news of greatest joy comes in the knowledge that God’s approval can be ours through Jesus Christ. By grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, Jesus’ righteousness is credited to our account and God’s approval with it. That means, Grace, that if your hope is in Jesus, you must live in the constant joy of knowing that you are accepted by God, fully and eternally. O what joy!

So there you have it…the secrets to under the sun joy; to joy in this life.

AND THEN YOU DIE (10B)

In just about any other book of the Bible we might expect something even more significant to follow, something tied to the greater joy in the life to come. But in this book, as you’ve probably come to expect, that’s not how it goes. The Preacher concludes this section on a much more somber note.

¹⁰ Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

Find joy in your God-given lot…and then you die. For the Preacher, as we’ve seen several times before, death seems to mainly mean something like eternal sleep.

But again, as I’ve pointed out many times, that couldn’t be any further from the truth. There are none who will simply go out of existence or consciousness. All of us will die, but our death will simply be a doorway to a different kind of life—eternal life in one of two places. Either our death will be the door to the eternal condemnation that we deserve for our sin or to the eternal joy purchased by Jesus on the cross.

The key to the first door is to continue on living an exclusively under the sun life. We don’t need to do anything to end up going through the first door when we die. Our sin makes that the default door.

The key to the second door is to place our faith in Jesus as the only way, truth, and life. The first door is to eternal anti-joy. The second to the fullness of joy that we’ve been seeking all our lives, but finding it where it is actually found—in fellowship with God and all of His people, in a world perfectly restored and with the distinction between above and below the sun living forever removed.

In the meantime, in faith, find joy in a clean conscience that comes through faith in Christ alone. And with a Christ-cleaned conscience, find joy, according to God’s design in bread, wine, clothing, refreshment, marriage, contentment, and hard work.

The big idea of this sermon is that every aspect of God’s creation is meant to give us joy as it points us to God as our greatest treasure. The main takeaway is to joyfully look through the things of earth to the God who gave them.