Shade of His Hand - Chambers, Oswald

Shade of His Hand

Talks on the Book of Ecclesiastes
Oswald Chambers

Copyright, Oswald Chambers Publications Association 1924, 1936
Scripture versions quoted: kjv, rv

Introduction

Source

This material is taken from talks on Ecclesiastes given by Oswald Chambers to British Common wealth soldiers at Zeitoun, Egypt, 1 September 24 through October 17, 1917.

Publication History

.As a book: Shade of His Hand was published in 1924, and a second edition in 1936.

Zeitoun, six miles northeast of Cairo, was the site of the YMCA compound where Chambers spent most of his two years in Egypt. Nearby was a large military camp. For the most part, the soldiers had evenings and weekends free, and many of them regularly fre quented the YMCA huts at Zeitoun for rest and recreation. Chambers taught regular classes on spiritual matters for all who were interested.

This book contains the last messages given by Oswald Chambers before his death. For a month during the autumn of 1917, he explored the meaning of life as revealed in Ecclesiastes.

Chambers completed chapters 1 through 11, but he became ill before covering the final chapter of Ecclesiastes. The first edition of Shade of His Hand noted that chapter 12 was never taken. In the 1936 edition, David Lambert2 added his own thoughts on Ecclesiastes 12 to complete the book.

Some of Oswald Chambers impressions of Ecclesiastes 12 can be found in the last chapter of his book The Place of Help. Chambers last Sunday sermon at Zeitoun was given on October 14, 1917, titled, Disabling Shadows on the Soul, based on Ecclesiastes 12:5.

On October 17, Chambers became ill after his evening class for soldiers at Esbekieh Gardens in Cairo. He managed to conduct the evening class at Zeitoun on Thursday, October 18, but was in such pain he had to leave all meetings to others for the next ten days.

On October 29, he underwent an emergency appendectomy at Gizeh Red Cross Hospital in Cairo. After recovering well for a week, he began to hemor rhage from the lungs. His condition fluctuated for a week before he died on the morning of November 15.

Shade of His Hand was the second book published by Mrs. Chambers after her 1919 return to England from Egypt. She compiled the book while support ing herself and her daughter, Kathleen,3 by keeping a boarding house for four university students in Oxford.

Foreword to the First edition

These talks on Ecclesiastes were not given with any idea of subsequent publication, and they are com piled from my own verbatim notes. It seemed fitting that the talks, the last message that God would speak through his servant, should be reproduced, outlines and all, as nearly as possible as they were delivered, and this has been done. May the Spirit of God bring to all who read the book a vision of Our Lord Jesus Christ in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom.

B. C.4 200 Woodstock Road, Oxford October, 1924

Preface (1936 edition)

These talks on Ecclesiastes were given by my friend Oswald Chambers at the Y. M. C. A. Hut, Zeitoun, Egypt, to the Troops in October, 1917. They are a verbatim report of what really were the last lectures he ever delivered, for he was called from the midst of his happy, arduous, fruitful toil among the soldiers into the immediate Presence of his Lord on November 15, 1917. This came before Eccles. 12 had been reached, so notes on the final chapter have been added to make the book complete.5 These last expository talks ought to be taken in the light of his former teaching. Those who knew his other books, Biblical Psychology, The Sermon on the Mount, The Discipline Books, The Psychology of Redemption, etc. , will profit most by this one. In the earlier books he shows the process of salvation as it works out in the inner life of a man. Here we see it in its relation to the everyday world outside us. Does Ecclesiastes teach that life is not worth living? That gloomy tale would not be worth telling. Oswald Chambers interprets its message as being Life is not worth living apart from Redemption. This is a Book of Wisdom for to day. It shows how it is possible for a redeemed man to glorify God amid all the inter play of lifes forces, in work and play, in study, in recreation, in home life or social inter course. Life apart from Redeeming Love is full of sin and sorrow, guile and cruelty, callous selfishness and numbing despair. This book takes full account of all that. It anticipates many of the problems facing the young life of today, and brings to their solution the one and only key, the realisation of the Lord Jesus Christ in every relationship of life.

David Lambert.

Contents

Rationalism Hard Pressed Ecclesiastes 1……………………………………1194
In the Thick of It Ecclesiastes 2 ……………………………………………….1197
In the Whirl Ecclesiastes 3:1–15 ………………………………………………1200
In the Discipline of Discouragement Ecclesiastes 3:16–22 …………..1205
On Winking the Other Eye Ecclesiastes 4 …………………………………1207
“A Man’s Reach Should Exceed His Grasp” Ecclesiastes 5:1–7…….1210
The Triune—Dust, Drudgery, Deity Ecclesiastes 5:8–20 …………….1212
The Edge of Things Ecclesiastes 6:1–12 …………………………………..1216
What Price This? Ecclesiastes 7:1–7 …………………………………………1219
Something Doing Ecclesiastes 7:8–12……………………………………….1222
“Over the Top” Ecclesiastes 7:13–22 …………………………………………1225
In the Sty Ecclesiastes 7:23–29…………………………………………………1228
Some Perspective Ecclesiastes 8 ……………………………………………….1231
Time, Death and Trifles Ecclesiastes 9 ……………………………………..1234
Differentiations Ecclesiastes 10 ………………………………………………..1238
Timidities of Rationalism Ecclesiastes 11 ………………………………….1241
The Dissolving Tabernacle Ecclesiastes 12 ………………………………..1243

shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
The Hound of Heaven 6

Rationalism hard Pressed

Ecclesiastes 1

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about, but evermore
Came out by the same Door wherein I went.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it
grow,
And this was all the Harvest that I reaped,
I came like Water and like Wind I go.
Omar Khayyám7

(N.b.—Solomon and his School
of wwisdom , 1 kings 4:29–32)
The Wisdom of the Hebrews (Proverbs 8:22–36)
The Wisdom of the Greeks   (1 Corinthians 1:19–25)

1. Practical Experiment
(a) Constant Obliteration of Conscious  Effort (Ecclesiastes 1:2–4)
(b) Continual Oblivion of Cosmic Effects (verses 5–6)
(c) Common Origin of Changing  Experiences (verses 7–9)
(d) Counterfeit Originality of Casual  Expressions (verses 10–11)

2. Personal Experience
(a) Actual Condition of Thought  (Ecclesiastes 1:12–13)
(b) Absolute Conundrum of Thinking (verses 14–15)
(c) Applied Cultures of Time (verse 16)
(d) Ascertained Cruelty of Truth (verses  17–18

It is important to notice the difference between the Wis dom of the Hebrews and the Wisdom of the Greeks. The Wisdom of the Hebrews is based on an accepted belief in God; that is, it does not try to find out whether or not God exists, all its beliefs are based on God, and in the actual whirl of things as they are, all its mental energy is bent on practical living. The Wisdom of the Greeks, which is the wisdom of our day, is speculative; that is, it is concerned with the origin of things, with the riddle of the universe, etc. , consequently the best of our wits is not given to prac tical living. 1 Kings 4:2932. The Book of Job was produced by Solomon and his School of Wisdom, and in it we see worked out, according to Hebrew wisdom, how a man may suffer in the actual condition of things. The sufferings of Job were not in order to perfect him (see Job 1:8). The explanation of Jobs sufferings was that God and Satan had made a battleground of his soul, and the honour of God was at stake. The sneer of Satan was that no man loved God for His own sake, but only for what God gave him. Satan was allowed to destroy all his blessings and yet Job did not curse God; he clung to it that the great desire of his heart was God Himself and not His blessings. Job lost everything he possessed, including his creed; the one thing he did not lose was his hold on God, Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him. The value of the Book of Job is not in what it teaches, but that it expresses suffering, and the inscrutability of suffering. In the Book of Psalms, Wisdom is applied to things as they are and to prayer. The Book of Prov erbs applies Wisdom to the practical relationships of life, and Ecclesiastes applies Wisdom to the enjoy ment of things as they actually are; there is no phase of life missed out, and it is shown that enjoyment is only possible by being related to God. The record of the whirl of things as they are is marvellously stated in these Books of Wisdom: Job how to suffer; Psalmshow to pray; Proverbshow to act; Ecclesiasteshow to enjoy; Song of Solo monhow to love.

The Wisdom of the Hebrews (Proverbs 8:2236)

The Wisdom of the Hebrews does not set out to dis cover whether God is, nor does it enter into speculat ing enquiries as to the origin of sin, etc. Belief in God is never questioned, and on that basis Hebrew Wisdom sets out to deal with practical things as they are. The basis of things is not rational, but tragic. Rea son is our guide among facts as they are, but reason cannot account for things being as they are. This does not mean that a man is not to use his reason; reason is the biggest gift he has. The rationalist says that everything in between birth and death is discernible by human reason; but the actual experience of life is that things do not run in a reasonable way, there are irrational elements to be reckoned with

The Old Testament is coming to its own just now; we have been too patronising. We always get out of touch with the Bible attitude to things when we come to it with our own conclusions. For instance, the Bible does not prove the existence of God, nor does it prove that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. The Bible was written to confirm the faith of those who already believe in God. We are apt to come to the conclusion that the Bible is tepid. Why, some of the most heroic and drastic thinking is within the covers of the Bible! St. John and St. Paul reconstructed religious thought, quoting from no one; there are no thinkers like them, yet it has been fashionable to belittle them.

The Wisdom of the Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:1925)

Our modern wisdom, which is the wisdom of the Greeks, is three removes from actual facts. It is men tal; we are busy trying to find out the origin of things. It is a type of wisdom that does not find its home in the Bible. The intellectual order of life does not take things as it finds them, it makes us shut our eyes to actual facts and try to live only in the ideal world. The Wisdom of the Greeks tells us how things should bethere ought to be no sin, no war, no devil, no sickness, no injustice; but these things are! It is no use to turn ourselves into ostriches mentally and ignore them. Solomon is fearless in facing facts as they are. No room is allowed either in the Old or New Testament for mysticism pure and simple, because that will mean sooner or later an aloofness from actual life, a kind of contempt expressed or implied by a superior attitude, by occult relationships and finer sensibilities. That attitude is never countenanced in the Bible. The Mount of Transfiguration may serve for a symbol of mysticismand Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master it is good for us to be here, and let us make three tabernacles. . . . But there quickly followed the transition to the demon possessed valley. The test of mountain top experiences, of mysticism, of visions of God and of solitariness is when you are in the soup of actual circumstances. It is not a question of living a blind life in the brain away from actuality, not of living in dawns or on mountain tops; but of bringing what you see there straight down to the valley where things are sordid, and living out the vision there. 1. Practical Experiment (Ecclesiastes 1:111) In the Book of Ecclesiastes we deal with the actual condition of the things we are in, which is the arena for manifesting the hold we have on God in the unseen.

(a) Constant Obliteration of Conscious Effort (verses 24)

Vanity of Vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

Vanity, i. e. , ephemeral, not conceit, but fleeting, here and gone as a day. Everything man has ever done is constantly being obliterated; everything a man fights for and lives for passes; he has so many years to live and then it is finished. This is neither fiction nor dumps. In true thinking of things as they are, there is always a bedrock of unmitigated sadness. Optimism is either religious or temperamental. No man who thinks and faces life as it actually is, can be other than pessimistic. There is no way out unless he finds it by his religious faith or is blinded by his temperament. The summing up of all practical life is that the basis of things is tragic. Sum up your life as it actually is, and, unless you look at actual things from a religious or a temperamental or an intellectual standpoint, every thing is to be said for this philosophy: Eat, drink and be merry, for to morrow we die. If Rationalism is the basis of things, that is undoubtedly the most reason able thing to do. But if the basis of things is tragic, then the Bible standpoint comes nearer the solution, and Nietzsche is nearer the truth than any rationalist. Nietzsche declares that the basis of things is tragic, and that the way out is by the merciless Superman; the Bible reveals that the basis of things is tragic, and that the way out is by Redemption. We say that man is in process of evolutiona magnificent promise of what he is going to be! The Wisdom of the Hebrews looks at mans history and attainments and says What a magnificent ruin of what he was created to be! Very few of us think unblinded by a religious or a temperamental point of view, we are not capable of it. We are blinded either by religion, or temperament, or by thick headedness. To look at things as they are, with the superb wisdom and understanding and disillusioned eye of Solomon, takes a Solomon to do it. Another man did it with the knowledge and understanding of Solomon, and he was Ibsen. He saw facts as they are clearly, without losing his head, and without any faith in God he summed it all up no forgiveness, no escape from penalty or retribution, it is absolutely and inexorably certain that the end of things is disaster. In Shakespeares writings there is an under current of faith which makes him the pecu liarly valuable writer he is, and makes him more at home to those who understand the Bible point of view than to those who do not.

(b) Continual Oblivion of Cosmic Effects (verses 56)

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

Everything that happens in Nature is continually being obliterated and beginning again. What Solomon says is not merely a poetical statement. A sunset or a sunrise may thrill you for half a minute, so may beautiful music or a song, but the sudden aftermath is a terrific, and almost eternal sadness. Lovers always think of what one would do if the other died; it is more than drivel. Immediately you strike the elemental in war or in Nature or in love, you come to the basis of ineffable sadness and tragedy. You feel that things ought to be full of joy and brightness, but they are not. You will never find the abiding order of joy in the haphazard, and yet the meaning of Christianity is that Gods order comes to a man in the haphazard. There is a difference between Gods will and Gods order. Take the case of two boys born in the slums, one determines to get out of it, and carves out for himself an honourable career, he gets at Gods order in the middle of His permissive will. The other sinks down in despair and remains where he is. Gods order is no sin, no sickness, no devil, no war: His Permissive will is things as they are.

(c) Common Origin of Changing Experiences (verses 79)

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. You may try to rest in any phase of actual existence, says Solomon, but apart from your relationship to God, you are better dead. Unless you bank your faith in God, you will not only be wrongly related in practical life and have your heart broken, but you will break other things you touch. (Cf. Matthew 18:67. )

(d) Counterfeit Originality of Casual Expressions (verses 1011)

Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. It is only when we are ignorant that we believe in originality. We have such magnificent forgetteries that we obliterate the whole of human history for the discovery we have made, and say This is original. Solomon says the whole thing is an incessant and appalling weariness.

2. Personal Experience (Ecclesiastes 1:1218)

These verses are not guesswork, but the conclusion of the wisest man that ever lived. The Bible indicates that a man always falls on his strongest point. Abra ham, the man of faith, fell through unbelief; Moses, the meek man, fell through losing his temper; Elijah, the courageous man, fell through losing heart; and Solomon, the most colossally wise, wealthy, luxurious, superb king, fell through grovelling, sensual idolatry.

(a) Actual Condition of Thought (verses 1213)

I the preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. These are the words of a man who has tried and experienced the things he speaks of. We say there ought not to be war,8 there ought to be no devil, no suffering, and we fuss and fume; but these things are! If we lived in the clouds, it would be different; but we are here. If only I was not where I am! It is in the present dilemma that practical wisdom is required.

I believe that the atheism of Job and of men to day is more wholesome than to believe in a God about Whom you have to tell lies to prove He is God. Voltairetiraded against the God Who was masqueraded before men in his day. In a mental stress of weather it is better not to believe in a Being Who has not the clear sense of justice we have, than to believe in One Who is an outrage to our sense of justice; better to snatch at the damnation of such a Being than to accept His salvation. We are driven back every time to Jesus Christ I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. Have I seen Him, or do I see only that which echoes myself ? Am I prepared to see in Jesus Christ the outlines of the true character of God, which is holiness? We perceive our friend while we only see the other man, and it is the same with the perception of God. (See John 3:3. ) Jesus Christ is God Man. God in Essence cannot come anywhere near us. Almighty God does not matter to me, He is in the clouds. To be of any use to me, He must come down to the domain in which I live; and I do not live in the clouds but on the earth. The doctrine of the Incarnation is that God did come down into our domain. The Wisdom of God, the Word of God, the exact expression of God, was manifest in the flesh. That is the great doctrine of the New Testamentdust and Deity made one.

The pure gold of Deity is of no use to us unless it is amalgamated in the right alloy, viz. , the pure Divine working on the basis of the pure human: God and humanity one, as in Our Lord Jesus Christ. There is only one God to the Christian, and His name is Jesus Christ, and in Him we see mirrored what the human race will be like on the basis of Redemption a perfect oneness between God and man. Jesus Christ has the power of reproducing Himself by regeneration, the power of introducing into us His own heredity, so that dust and Deity again become one. Solomon sums up the whole thing as follows: If you try to find enjoyment in this order of things, you will end in vexation and disaster. If you try to find enjoyment in knowledge, you only increase your capacity for sorrow and agony and distress. The only way you can find relief and the right interpretation of things as they are is by basing your faith in God, and by remembering that mans chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever. Jesus Christ is the One Who can transmute everything we come across.

The remainder of the outline was Not dealt with.9

In the thick of It

But whoso wants God only and lets life go,
Seeks Him with sorrow and pursues Him far,
And finds Him weeping, and in no long time
Again the High and Unapproachable
Evanishing escapeth, and that man
Forgets the life and struggle of the soul,
Falls from his hope and dreams it was a dream.
Yet back again perforce with sorrow and shame
Who once hath known him must return, not long
Can cease from loving, nor endures alone
The dreadful interspace of dreams and day,
Once quick with God, nor is content as those
Who look into each other’s eyes, and seek
To find out strong enough to uphold the earth,
Or sweet enough to make it heaven: aha,
Whom seek they or whom find? For in all the world
There is none but thee, my God, there is none but thee.
Myers

1. The Culture of Revolt (Ecclesiastes 2:1–11)
(a) Revolt in Every Passion (verses 1–2)
(b) Restraint in Epicurean Appetite (verse 3)
(c) Reconstruction in Aestheticism (verses 4–10)
(d) Reaction in Each Affinity (verse 11)

2. The Culture of Restraint (Ecclesiastes 2:12–23)
(a) Nature of Right Estimation (verses 12–14)
(b) Nemesis of Reasonable Excellence (verses 15–19)
(c) “Nihilism” of Revolving Experience  (verses 20–23)

3. The Culture of Religion (Ecclesiastes 2:24–26)
(a) “The Cult of the Passing Moment” (verse 24)
(b) The Conception of the Prevailing Master (verse 25)
(c) The Centre of Providential Mystery (verse 26)

If a man faces actual things as they are and thinks them right out, he must be a pessimist. Most of us are either too thickheaded, or too prejudiced, or too religious, to think right out to the bottom board of things, until the tension comes and obliges us to face them; then we find out who are the men who point the finest way of thinking.

1. The Culture of Revolt (Ecclesiastes 2:111)

(a) Revolt in Every Passion (verses 12)

I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity. I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it?

In this chapter Solomon gives himself up to the philosophical line Why should not a man take life as he finds it? Solomon was sick of trying to find any rationality at the back of things, he revolted from it, and indulged every passion and appetite without restraint. Always distinguish between the man who is naturally given to passion and appetite and the man who goes into these things from revolt. There is an irony and a bitterness and a criminality about the man who does it in revolt. In the same way there is a difference between laughter that is natural and laughter that is a revolt. There is nothing more awful than to hear laughter that is a revolt. The man who discovers that he can find no way out may go into the pigsty and let every passion have its way; but when a man has been gripped by purity and has seen God if only for one minute, he may try and live in a pigsty but he will find he cannot, there is something that produces misery and longing even while he lets loose his passions.

(b) Restraint in Epicurean Appetite (verse 3)

I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life.

Solomon based all his knowledge of art and education on the desire to satisfy with restraint and wisdom all the natural life of a man. If the basis of life is rational, that should be sufficient. Epicurus was a philosopher of the first order, and he tried to make the basis of life a judicious handling of the pleasures of life, especially the pleasures of the table. I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom, i. e. , not living the life of a beast, but try ing to find out whether it was possible by judiciously handling the right appetites of life to find satisfaction, but that too was vanity. This was not an experiment a man might think of trying, but an experiment that was tried, and tried by a man who had opportunities such as no one before or since has had of proving it.

(c) Reconstruction in Aestheticism (verses 410)

I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards: I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits: I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees: I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me: I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces: I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts. So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour: and this was my portion of all my labour.

Solomon indicates in these verses that he recon structed his life on the aesthetic basis to try and find joy there. On the aesthetic line a man is apt to think he is of a different order from the generality of men, and that whatever pleases his senses is legitimate for him to have. Whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them. But we have to remember that the first civilisation was founded by a murderer on murder, and that all aesthetic developments are based on that level. The origin of art and poetry and music was with God, but their development has been on a wrong basis, and consequently they have been prostituted away from their true service in a mans life. Aestheticism is all very well for the kingdom of heaven, but it wont do for the kingdom of earth. This is anti modern view.

(d) Reaction in Each Affinity (verse 11)

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

This is deep, profound pessimism. All the books of Wisdom in the Bible prove that the only result of sheer thinking on the basis of rationalism is pessimism, fathomlessly profound. The reason most of us are not pessimistic is either that we are religious or we have a temperament that is optimistic. The basis of life is tragic, and the only way out is by a personal relationship to God on the ground of Redemption. Solomon deliberately revolted against everything and found there was no satisfaction in anything he tried.

2. The Culture of Restraint (Ecclesiastes 2:1223)

(a) Nature of Right Estimation (verses 1214)

And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly: for what can the man do that cometh after the king? even that which hath been already done. Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness. The wise mans eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness: and I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to them all.

If a man chooses a right path, does that mean he will find joy? No. Job, for instance, found it did not. He believed that God would bless and prosper the man who trusted in Him, but Jobs beliefs were flatly contradicted by his actual experience. Solomon says he tried folly, but found it stupid; a man is an idiot to live like a beast; the best thing to do is to make a right estimate of things

b) Nemesis of Reasonable Excellence (verses 1519)

Then I said in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool. Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me. And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? yet shall he have rule over all my labour wherein I have laboured, and wherein I have shewed myself wise under the sun. This is also vanity.

You may do the right thing, says Solomon, but it will end in disaster; reasonable excellence has the same nemesis as revolt. It is no use trying to find true joy in being either a fool or a wise man. Solomon drives us back every time to the one thing, that a mans chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever. To day there is a revolt against the Wisdom of the Hebrews and the wisdom expressed in the New Testament. We dont think on the Bible lines, consequently we talk the most ridiculous platitudes. It is absurd to be an ostrich, Solomon would not allow himself to be one, neither will the man who sees life fair and square as it is to day. The only way we can enjoy our tree of life is by fulfilling the purpose of our creation. Jesus Christ prayed that they may have My joy fulfilled in them selves. The thing that kept Jesus Christ all through was not that He held aloof from actual things, but that He had a kingdom within. He so did not hold aloof that when men saw Him they said, Behold a gluttonous man, and a wine bibber, a friend of publi cans and sinners! Our Lords whole life was rooted and grounded in God, consequently He was never wearied or cynical.

(c) Nihilism of Revolving Experience (verses 2023)

Therefore I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labour which I took under the sun. For there is a man whose labour is in wisdom, and in knowledge, and in equity: yet to a man that hath not laboured therein shall he leave it for his portion. This also is vanity and a great evil. For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night. This is also vanity.

Everything ends the same way, though I have been good and clean and respectable, my end will be the same as the brute. Though I labour all my days, I shall end the same way as the man who has not laboured. These are not wild statements, they are the statements of a man who knew what he was talking about. If Solomon is blind to the issues of life, then the teaching of Christianity is unmitigated nonsense. Some folks are persuaded that it is, they are still cock sure, and have the notion that the kingdom of God can be brought in without the Redemption all that is needed is to put certain wise restrictions in vogue. Solomon says he tried to do that, but it all ended the same as if he had lived like a fool. Emerging out of it all comes one VoiceI am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The way out is not by intellect nor by aesthetics, but through con science in contact with Jesus Christ.

3. The Culture of Religion (Ecclesiastes 2:2426)

To serve God in order to gain heaven, is not the teaching of Christianity. Satisfaction cannot be found in gain, but only in a personal relationship to God. The presentation made by a false evangelism is that Jesus Christ taught a man must have his own soul saved, be delivered from hell and get a pass for heaven, and when one is taken and the other left, he must look out that he is the one taken. Could anything be more diametrically opposed to what Jesus Christ did teach, or more unlike the revelation of God given in the Bible? A man is not to serve God for the sake of gain, but to get to the place where the whole of his life is seen as a personal relationship to God.

(a) The Cult of the Passing Moment (verse 24)

There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God. One great essential lesson in Christianity is that Gods order comes to us in the haphazard. We are men and women, we have appetites, we have to live on this earth, and things do happen by chance; what is the use of saying they do not? One of the most immutable things on earth is mutability. Your life and mine is a bundle of chance. It is absurd to say it is fore ordained for you to have so many buttons on your tunic, and if that is not fore ordained, then nothing is. If things were fore ordained, there would be no sense of responsibility at all. A false spirituality makes us look to God to perform a miracle instead of doing our duty. We have to see that we do our duty in faith in God. Jesus Christ undertakes to do everything a man cannot do, but not what a man can do. Things do happen by chance, and if we know God, we recognise that His order comes to us in that way. We live in this haphazard order of things, and we have to maintain the abiding order of God in it. The doctrine of the Sacrament teaches the conveying of Gods presence to us through the common elements of bread and wine. We are not to seek success or prosperity. If we can get hold of our relationship to God in eating and drink ing, we are on the right basis of things.

(b) The Conception of the Prevailing Master (verse 25)

For who can eat, or who else can hasten hereunto, more than I?

The way I eat and drink will show who I regard as my master. Do I regard the restraining wisdom in me as master, or do I regard God as Master? The note of false Christianity is abstinence from marriage and from meats Live away up on the mount, that is, do what no human being can do. If a man cannot prove his religion in the valley, it is not worth anything. Beware of a religion which makes you neglect the basis of your ordinary life. If you can be a beast, you can also be a son of God. The Son of man came eating and drinking. . . . Have ye here any meat? . . . And He took it, and did eat before them. When once a man has learned to get at Gods order in the passing minute and to know that his prevailing Mas ter is God, then he is on the right track. Every other basis ends in disaster.

(c) The Centre of Providential Mystery (verse 26)

For God giveth to a man that is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy: but to the sinner He giveth travail, to gather and to heap up, that he may give to him that is good before God. This also is vanity and vexation of spirit.

There is a difference between Gods order and Gods permissive will. We say that God will see us through if we trust Him I prayed for my boy, and he was spared in answer to my prayer. Does that mean that the man who was killed was not prayed for, or that prayers for him were not answered? It is wrong to say that in the one case the man was delivered by prayer but not in the other. It is a misunderstanding of what Jesus Christ reveals. Prayer alters a man on the inside, alters his mind and his attitude to things. The point of praying is not that we get things from God, but that we learn by prayer to detect the difference between Gods order and Gods permissive will. Gods order isno pain, no sickness, no devil, no war, no sin: His permissive will is all these things, the soup we are in just now. What a man needs to do is to get hold of Gods order in the kingdom on the inside, and then he will begin to see how to handle the riddle of the universe on the outside.

The problem of the man who deals with practical things is not the problem of the universe, but the problem within his own breast. When I can see where the beast in me will end and where the wise man in me will end; when I have discovered that the only thing that will last is a personal relationship to God; then it will be time for me to solve the problems round about me. When once a man begins to know the plague of his own heart, it knocks the metaphysics out of him. It is in the actual circumstances of my life that I have to find out whether the wisdom of worshipping God can steer me. Solomon says nothing else can.

In the whirl

Ecclesiastes 3:1–15

He fixed thee midst this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This present thou forsooth would’st fain arrest,
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three parts pain!
Strive and hold cheap the strain,
Learn, nor account the pang, dare, never grudge
the throe.
Robert Browning

1. Dispensational Durations (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
2. Dispositional Distresses (Ecclesiastes 3:2–8)
(a) Personality and Ploughing, Nature and Nations (verse 2)
(b) Precious and Pernicious Healing (verse 3)
(c) Priestesses of Death and Delight (verse 4)
(d) Pleasures and Pains—Domestic and Devotional (verse 5)
(e) Profitless and Prosperous Commerce (verse 6)
(f ) Programmes of Speech and Silence (verse 7)
(g) Requited and Unrequited Love (verse 8)

3. Decrees of Despair (Ecclesiastes 3:9–10)

4. Discretions of Deity (Ecclesiastes 3:11–15)
(a) Reasonableness (verses 11–13)
(b) Rehabilitation (verses 14–15)

When we are hurt we are apt to become cynical; cynicism is a sign that the hurt is recent. A mature mind is never cynical. Solomon is not speaking cynically; he goes right down to the facts of life, and comes to the conclusion that there is no way out. There is no way out through reason or intellect; the only way out is on the Bible line, viz. , Redemption. Robert Browning wrote from the standpoint of Hebrew wisdom, viz. , that of unshakeable confidence in God, but he also wrote with the mind of Solomon or Ibsen or Shakespeare for the actual facts of life. He blinks nothing, yet underneath is the confidence that the basis of a right direction of things is not a mans reason but his strong faith that God is not unjust; and that the man who hangs in to the honour of God will come out all right.

1. Dispensational Durations (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

The dispensations of God are discernible only to the Spirit of God. If we mistake the dispensations of God to mean something we can see, we are off the track. Solomon is strong on the fact that God has made certain unalterable durations, but he does not say, as St. Augustine and Calvin did, that therefore God is tied up by His own laws. There is a most penetrating criticism of Carlyle 11 by Barry12he said that Carlyle was the intellectual logical result of hyper Calvinism. Whenever we put theology or a plan of salvation or any line of explanation before a mans personal relationship to God, we depart from the Bible line, because religion in the Bible is not faith in the rule of God, but faith in the God Who rules. If we put our faith in a credal exposition of God and our creed goes to the winds, as, for instance, Jobs creed went, our faith will go too. The only thing to do is to hang in in confidence in God. Then will I go . . . unto God, my exceeding joy. Our joy in God depends on what happens. The thing that really sustains is not that we feel happy in God, but that Gods joy is our energy, and that when we get out of this shell we shall find an explanation that will justify our faith in Him. There are certain dispensational things for which God is responsible, e. g. , birth and death. Inside the limits of birth and death man has liberty to produce what he likes. We base all our thinking and reasoning on space and time, hence our difficulty when we think about God or the Hereafter, we think at once of limits that will not hold after this order of things. There is no space or time with Almighty God. We cannot think beyond the limits of birth and death; if we are to know anything beyond them, it must be by revelation. Before a man can make us understand the symbols he uses, he must take ideas we already have in our minds and put them into new combinations. It is only when we receive a like apocalyptic spirit of St. John or Ezekiel that we can understand what they are talking about. Jesus Christ did not use figurative language in talking about the Hereafter. He said: Let not your heart be troubled My business is with the Hereafter. Our business is to live a godly life in the present order of things, and not to push out beyond the durations God has placed as limits. Within the limits of birth and death I can do as I like; but I cannot make myself unborn, neither can I escape death, those two limits are there. I have nothing to do with placing the limits, but within them I can produce what my disposition chooses. Whether I have a distressful time or a joyful time depends on what I do in between the limits of the durations. For by Him were all things created (Colossians 1:16). Did Jesus Christ then create sin? Sin is not a creation, sin is a relationship set up in time between the creation called man and the being who became the devil, whereby man took the rule over himself. My claim to my right to myself that is the disposition of sin. The Bible reveals that God holds a man responsible for acts of sin he commits, but not for the disposition of sin that he has inherited (see Romans 5:12). God Himself has deliberately accepted the responsibility for sin, and the proof that He has done so is the Cross of Jesus Christ. In dealing with practical life we find the fun dament of tragedy underlying everything. Fatalism means I am the sport of a force about which I know nothing; faith is trust in a God Whose ways I do not know, but Whose character I do know. The Bible point of view is that God is ruling and reigning, and that His character is holy. Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him that is the final heroism of a mans relationship to God.

2. Dispositional Distresses (Ecclesiastes 3:28)

These verses point out where distresses are produced in a mans ordinary life and the part his disposition.

plays in them. Everything to do with a mans personal life, or with agricultural life, or with national life, is summed up in this chapter.

(a) Personality and Ploughing (verse 2)

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

We cannot do anything without our ruling disposition instantly being marked in it. We gain our point of distress or of joy by the way we use or misuse our twenty four hours.

(b) Precious and Pernicious Healing (verse 3)

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.

Every art, every healing, and every good, can be used for an opposite purpose. Every possibility I have of producing a fine character in time, I can use to produce the opposite; I have that liberty from the Creator. God will not prevent my disobeying Him; if He did, my obedience would not be worth anything. Some of us complain that God should have made the universe and human life like a foolproof machine, so simple that there would be no possibility of going wrong. If He had, we would have been like jellyfish. If there is no possibility of being damned, there is no need for salvation. In the time between birth and death, most of us are in our shell. There is something in us which makes us peck, and when the crack comes, instead of its being the gentle light and dawn of a new day, it is like a lightning flash. The universe we awaken to is not one of order, but a great big howling confusion, and it takes time to get adjusted. The distresses we reap in between Gods decrees for us, we, together with other human beings, are personally responsible for. If we make our life a muddle, it is to a large extent because we have not discerned the great underlying relationship to God.

(c) Priestesses of Death and Delight (verse 4)

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.

Solomon runs a contrast between animal nature and human nature. Animals are guided by instinct; human beings are not. I may weave for myself what the Scots mean when they say Ye must dree yer weird. 13 There is always a point where I have the power to choose. I have no power to choose whether or not I will take the consequences of my choice; no power to say whether or not I will be born; no power to choose my cage; but within the cage I have power to choose which perch I will sit on. I cannot rule out the fact that between birth and death I have to choose. I have no power to act an act of pure will; to choose whether I will be born or not; but I have power to choose which way I will use the times as they come. Solomon is indicating the times we make within Gods time. This time, this dispensation, is mans day, and in it we may do and say what we choose. Our talk may sound blatant, but we dont do much. I can make my domestic life, my bodily life, and my agricultural life a priestess of sorrow or delight if I watch my disposition.

(d) Pleasures and Pains Domestic and Devotional (verse 5)

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.

Take Solomon in his profundities, and dont make him out to be a beast where he is an archangel. In the Song of Songs he says an extraordinary thing which comes in like a refrain all through I adjure you . . . that ye stir not up, nor awaken love, until it please (rv mg). Many a man has awakened love before the time, and has reaped hell into the bargain. That time is in my power, but if I set myself to awaken love before I should, I may have all hell to live with instead of all heaven.

(e) Profitless and Prosperous Commerce (verse 6)

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.

There comes a time when the only way to save what is of enormous value to a life is to cast away all its possessions. Thy life will I give unto thee for a prey you will have nothing else, but you will escape with your life. There is a time when a man may have to lose everything he has got in order to save himself (see Mark 8:35).

(f ) Programmes of Speech and Silence (verse 7)

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

Sometimes it is cowardly to speak, and sometimes it is cowardly to keep silence. In the Bible the great test of a mans character is his tongue (see James 1:26). The tongue only came to its right place within the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ, because He never spoke from His right to Himself. He Who was the Wisdom of God Incarnate, said the words that I speak unto

you, I speak not of Myself, i. e. , from the disposition of my right to Myself, but from My relationship to My Father. We are either too hasty or too slow; either we wont speak at all, or we speak too much, or we speak in the wrong mood. The thing that makes us speak is the lust to vindicate ourselves. . . . leaving you an example, . . . who did no sin neither was guile found in His mouth. Guile has the ingredient of selfvindication in it My word, Ill make him smart for saying that about me! That spirit never was in Jesus Christ. The great deliverance for a man in time is to learn the programmes of speech and of silence.

(g) Requited and Unrequited Love (verse 8)

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

The most painful and most crushing thing to a man or woman is unrequited love. In summing up the attitude of men to Himself, God says that that is the way men treat Him, they unrequite His love. To most of us it is a matter of moonshine 14 whether Jesus Christ lived or died or did anything at all; God has to recommend His love to us (see Romans 5:8 rv ). It is only when we come to our wits ends, or reap a distress, or feel the first twinge of damnation and are knocked out of our complacent mental agility over things, that we recognise the love of God. Not one of these times are Gods times, they are our times. For example, to call war either diabolical or Divine is nonsense; war is human. War is a con flict of wills, not something that can be solved by law or philosophy. If you take what I want, you may talk till alls blue, 15 either I will hit you or youll hit me. It is no use to arbitrate when you get below into the elemental. In the time between birth and death this conflict of wills will go on until men by their rela tionship to God receive the disposition of the Son of God, which is holiness. This is the Hebrew way of summing up in sen tence after sentence all that makes a mans life in time. Unless a man relates his disposition to God in between birth and death, he will reap a heritage of distress for himself and for those who come after him. The man who is banked on a real relationship to a personal God will reap not the distress that works death, but the joy of life.

3. Decrees of Despair (Ecclesiastes 3:910)

What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth? I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.

Honesty is the best policy; but immediately you are honest for that reason, you cease to be an honest man. To be a good man means I shall be prosperous; to be rightly related to God means I shall be saved. All such considerations as these are beside the mark. To terrorise a man into believing in God is never the work of God, but the work of human expediency. If we want to convince a congregation of a certain thing, we may use terror to frighten them into it; but never say that is Gods way, it is our way. If we do not get conversions one way, then we preach hell fire and produce terror; we dont care what we preach as long as we dominate. To call that Gods method is a travesty of the character of God. The methods God uses are indicated in Jesus Christ, and He never terrorised any one.

When He lifted the veil, He said, How can you escape the damnation of hell? The decrees of despair lie underneath everything a man does when once he rules out his relationship to God and takes rational ism as the basis of life. Solomon sums up the whole matterunless a man is rightly related in confidence to God, everything he tries to do will end in despair.

4. Discretions of Deity (Ecclesiastes 3:1115)

Underlying everything we find the discretion and the wisdom of God.

(a) Reasonableness (verses 1113)

He hath made every thing beautiful in His time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life. And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.

So that a man cannot in time find out the whole purpose of God. We begin by bringing Almighty God to the bar of judgement and saying Why did You make me? Who am I? When we have done our jabbering and disputing we find that the implicit relationship of our personal life which we cannot get at, remains. Then we trace every kind of wisdom but find no direction in it, saving in the Wisdom of the Hebrews which reveals that the real fundamental relationship of our life is that of personal union with God. Until we get there, everything we are related to will go wrong. He hath made everything beautiful in His time. And when God gets His time in you and in me, things will be beautiful again. The rationalist says that the only thing for a man to do is to live a reasonable life.

A reasonable life and a philosophically rational life are totally different. Jesus Christ taught a reasonable life on the basis of faith in God Be carefully care less about everything saving your relationship to Me. Dont be disturbed to day by thoughts about tomor row, leave to morrow alone, and bank in confidence on Gods organisation of what you do not see. Yesterday is past, there is no road back to it, to morrow is not; live in the immediate present, and yours is the life of a child. God re makes things beautiful when He gets His time in us over again. In our teens we begin to get into the throes of life and we lose our sense of the beauty of things, and only after the throes when we get into a personal relationship with God do we find again that everything is beautiful. By means of our relationship to God we begin to find out how God works in our lives. In His time it comes, and we begin to spell out the character of God. This is life eternal, that they should know Thee.

(b) Rehabilitation (verses 1415)

I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before Him. That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.

By the incarnate power of the Son of God, God rebuilds by degree the whole relationship of things, bringing everything back into oneness with Himself. That is the meaning of Redemption God has done His bit. Sin is mans bit. Gods plan and design is not altered, but in the meantime man is countering it by his own design We can bring it out in our own way. God is infinitely patient. He says over and over again Not that way, My son, this is the way for you, a moral relationship to Myself. He, that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy. God will not prevent my breaking my back; if He sees I am determined to go my own way, He wont stop me; but when my neck is broken, He lifts me up and moves me where He wants, no difficulty now. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. When my heart is broken, the husk of individual relationship is merged into a personal relationship, and I find that God rehabilitates everything, i. e. , He puts things back into their right fittings in me. There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed: and hid, that shall not be known.

There is no man but has some spot in his life where there is something dear, something that is a truth to him, a real wonderful possession full of light and liberty and joy, the finest spot in his experience. Jesus Christ says that ultimately through patience and by deliberately going on with God, everything that is now obscure will be as clear as that one spot. Will we hang in in patience? If we do, we shall see everything rehabilitated, and shall justify God in everything He has allowed. Jesus Christ deliberately chose the long, long trail; we choose the short cut, and continually go wrong until we understand the meaning of the 23rd Psalm, The Lord is my shepherd, He leads me in the right paths. It looked as if the way was leading nowhere but beside still waters and green pastures; but I begin to see that it is all unfolding one thing, viz. , a personal relationship to God, which is the meaning of a mans life.

The Bible declares that what is true in personal life will be true in material life; there will be new heavens and a new earth. The Utopian visions of socialists and atheists, dreamers and Christians, are all the same, there is no difference in their vision of a united human race, a perfect order of equity, everything in perfect harmony, But how is it to come about? We are all in the soup just now. No nation under heaven believes it is going to be brought about in Jesus Christs way on the basis of Redemption. We all believe it will be brought about by a line of things that has yet to be tried, viz. , Social ism. * We are on the verge of trying it, and it will be the nearest and the finest approach to fulfilling the vision; but at the point where it seems nearest fulfillment, it will make the biggest departure.

Where did the Christ come from historically? From the people called the Jews. The blasphemy of a Gentile like Voltaire is futile; no Gentile can blaspheme, because no Gentile knows God in the way the Jew does. It takes the race that produced Jesus to produce Judas; and it will take the race that produced Christ to produce the anti Christ. We are on the verge of this discovery. We are insular and closed in, and are looking in the wrong direction for the great big thing to come, instead of taking the Bible revelation. Abide in your relationship to God, and you will see that the anti comes on the same line as the positive.

In the discipline of discouragement

Ecclesiastes 3:16–22

Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid with a voice flying by to the lost on an
endless sea
Glory of virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the
wrong
Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of
glory she:
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.
The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue
be dust,
Would she have heart to endure for the life of
the worm and the fly?
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of
the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a
summer sky:
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.
Tennyson

1. The Perversion of Realised Ambition (Ecclesiastes 3:16)
2. The Prevailing of Righteous Authority (Ecclesiastes 3:17)
3. The Parallel of Perishableness (Ecclesiastes 3:18–21)
4. The Probation of Reasonable Activity (Ecclesiastes 3:22)

“Discouragement is disenchanted egotism” (Mazzini),
i.e., the heart knocked out of self love; I expected things
to go this way and they have not, so I shall give it all up.
1. The Perversion of Realised Ambition
(Ecclesiastes 3:16)
Discouragement is disenchanted egotism (Mazzini), i. e. , the heart knocked out of self love; I expected things to go this way and they have not, so I shall give it all up.

1. The Perversion of Realised Ambition (Ecclesiastes 3:16)

And moreover I saw under the sun the place of judgement, that wickedness was there; and the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there. All through history we find it frequently happen that when a man realises his ambition, he turns it into diabolical perversity right off the reel. In the Bible the conviction is that the basis of human life is in the hand of God, not in the hand of human reason, and that an exalted position, moral, mental or spiritual, makes a man either more Godlike or more devil like, and that by the decree of God and not by chance. When a man has mounted high and has the satisfaction of having fulfilled his ambition, he is compelled to be either a great humble man or a diabolical fiend. Solomon is pointing out that when a man realises his ambition, he may pervert it and become tyrannical. Unless kings and rulers are God fearing men, they may become tyrants of the wildest order. One of the great stirring truths of the Bible is that the man who looks for justice from others is a fool. In moral and spiritual life if a man has a sense of injustice, he ceases to be of value to his fellow men. Never waste your time looking for justice; if you do you will soon put yourself in bandages and give way to selfpity. Our business is to see that no one suffers from our injustice. The man who has satisfied his ambition may suddenly become a miserable tyrant and all his joy will go. These things have I spoken unto you, said Jesus, that My joy may be in you (rv). What joy did Jesus have? He failed apparently in everything He came to do; all His disciples forsook Him, He was crucified, and yet He talked of His joy. The joy of Our Lord lay in doing what the Father sent Him to do. His purpose was not to succeed, but to fulfill the design of His coming For I am come down from heaven not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me (rv). What is the real design of mans creation? Solomon deals with every possible phase of life metaphysics, philosophy, religion, commercial prosperity, moral integrity not as guesswork, he had been through it all, no one has the wisdom of Solomon, and his verdict is that it all ends in disaster. That is the summing up of it all unless a man sees that his chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever, and it takes a long while to get there. To put things on any other basis will end in disaster.

2. The Prevailing of Righteous Authority (Ecclesiastes 3:17)

I said in mine heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked: for there is a time there for every purpose and for every work.

God shall judge the righteous and the wicked. But Who is God? I have never seen God, or spoken to Him. An omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Being does not amount to anything to me; He is an abstract finding of a mans intellect. Can God take on hands and feet and mans ways of doing things, and manifest Himself on the plane on which we live? The Bible says that that is what God did do. Jesus Christ lived a human life on this earth, and He exhibited a disposition not yours and not mine. Any man who does not hoodwink himself knows perfectly well that he has not a disposition like Jesus Christs. We have only to read the Sermon on the Mount and see Gods demand for a fathomlessly pure heart, to know that. What Jesus Christ exhibited was not omnipotence and omniscience and omnipresence, but absolute holiness in human flesh, and He said he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. Jesus Christ is the Judge. The Father . . . hath given all judgement unto the Son ( John 5:22 rv ). Would I be concerned if my cobber were handed over to Jesus Christ to be judged, handed over to the Being Who paid the price of Redemption, Who lived the spell of Gods dispensation between birth and death on the plane on which we live, and manifested an unsulliedly holy life, the Being Who claims He can put His own disposition into me, the One Who says I am the first and the last, the One to Whom all judgement has been given? or would I be prepared to trust His honour and stake everything on Him? We cannot judge ourselves by ourselves or by any one else, there is always one fact more in every ones life that we do not know. We cannot put men into types, we are never at the balance of one anothers heredity; therefore the judgement cannot lie with us. Solomon says that Gods judgement is right and true and that a man can rest his heart there. It is a great thing to notice the things we cannot answer just now, and to waive our judgement about them. Because you cannot explain a thing, dont say there is nothing in it. There are dark and mysterious and perplexing things in life, but the prevailing authority at the back of all is a righteous authority, and a man does not need to be unduly concerned. When we do find out the judgement of God, we shall be absolutely satisfied with it to the last degree, we wont have another word to say that Thou mightest be justified when Thou speakest, and be clear when Thou judgest. In the meantime God has something from which to clear His character when we see Him and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. There is no problem, no personal grief, no agony or distress (and God knows there are some fathomless agonies just now awful injustices and wrongs and evils and nobility all mixed up together) but will have an overwhelming explanation one day. If we will hang in to the fact that God is true and loving and just, every judgement He passes will find us in agreement with it finally. Solomon is saying from his pre Incarnation standpoint that every man when he sees the judgement of God untrammelled 16 by bodily limitations, will say that God was perfectly right in all He allowed. Can any one of us say now that Gods character is clear? It is ridiculous to pin our faith to a creed about God. The experience of Job is a proof that creeds must go. Every now and again we have to outgrow our creeds. Morally it is better to be an atheist than to believe in a God whom to be God is not fit.

3. The Parallel of Perishableness (Ecclesiastes 3:1821)

I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?

There is a philosophy which says that if a man wills it, he need never die; but he cannot will it! There is a limit to will; no man can will pure will. Solomon is saying you may do what you like, but you will die like a dog. He is dealing with the spell of our actual lives; we all die. It is humiliating for our predications to remember that although the spirit of man is indestructible, the phase of life which we bank on naturally passes. We may have labour in it, and delight and satisfaction in it, but it will all pass. When a beast dies, his body disappears and his soul goes downwards into entire nature; the spirit of a man goes straight back to God Who made it; it is never absorbed into God. The essence of Christianity is not adherence to principles; but a personal relationship to God through Jesus Christ at work in the whole of my life. The people who influence us are not those who set out to do it, they are prigs; but the folk who have a real relationship to God and who never bother whether they are being of use; these are a continual assistance.

4. The Probation of Reasonable Activity (Ecclesiastes 3:22)

Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?

The basis of things is not rational. Reason is our guide among facts but reason cannot explain facts. Rea son and logic and intellect have to do with the time between birth and death, but they can give no explanation of before birth or after death. All we infer of either is speculation; it may be interesting but it is apt to blind us to the facts. Solomon deals with the expression of practical life as it is, and he finds it a sorry mess. He says it is a philosophic plaster to say that when a man gives up a thing he makes it easier for those who come after him; a man does not find his true joy in sacrificing or in sin or in labour.

We may be laying the foundations for those who come after us, but who shall bring him to see what shall be after him? It sounds all right, but is there any enjoyment in it? True enjoyment is not in what we do but in our relationships. If a man is true to God, everything between birth and death will work out on the line of joy. If we bank on what we do, whether it is good or bad, we are off the track; the one thing that matters is personal relationship. What, then, are we to do in our ordinary active life? It is not a question of making it easy for those who come after us, but of what a man is to do in the spell between birth and death. According to Our Lords teaching, a man has to base his life on his relationship to God and live according to that relationship with the simple gaiety of a child. If we apply the Sermon on the Mount to our ideas of individual and national life we shall find how we ignore what Our Lord teaches.

Wherever Christianity comes straight home to us, we ignore it; when it gets at others, we preach it for all we are worth. The general history of Christianity is that it has been tried and abandoned because it is found to be difficult; but wherever it has been tried and honourably gone on with, it has never failed. Our civilisation is based on the foundation of murder the first civilisation was founded by Cain; and civilised life is a vast, complicated, more or less gilded over system of murder. This does not mean that civilisation can never be just and right. The Bible speaks of a holy city, a new earth, and reveals that it is to be brought about by the man who lives his life based on God in all his relationships and does not worry about what he is going to do later. When we study Hebrew wisdom we see how terrifically far we have degenerated away from God and from confidence in God. Nowadays the almighty microbe has blotted God out of His heaven. When we come to the soup we are in just now, the catastrophic earthquake that is blasting the whole globe to bits, all we can do is to put on plasters and borrow opportunist phrases. According to Hebrew Wisdom, the thing to do is to bank on our faith in God, and where our duty lies do it like a man and damn the consequences.

When in doubt physically, dare; when in moral doubt, stop; when in spiritual doubt, pray; and when in personal doubt, be guided by your life with God. Base all on God, and slowly and surely the actual life will be educated along the particular line of your relationship to Him.

On winking the other eye

Ecclesiastes 4

Why do they prate of the blessings of Peace?
we have made them a curse,
Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not
its own;
And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better
or worse
Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on
his own hearthstone?
Sooner or later I too may passively take the print
Of the golden age—why not? I have neither hope
nor trust;
May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as
a flint,
Cheat and be cheated, and die; who knows?
we are ashes and dust.
Tennyson

1. The Oppression of Tyranny (Ecclesiastes 4:1–3)
2. The Oppression of Trade (Ecclesiastes 4:4)
3. The Oppression of Idling (Ecclesiastes 4:5–6)
4. The Obsession of Solitariness (Ecclesiastes 4:7–8)
5. The Optimism of Society (Ecclesiastes 4:9–12)
6. The Occasion of Sagacity and Stubbornness (Ecclesiastes 4:13–16)

The title of this chapter indicates the treachery that is in you and in me, and consequently in the other fellow! One of the first things to develop in a boy is the realisation that he can do someone.

Solomon will not allow us to imagine that life is other than full of cunning and craft and deception. The babe in the wood idea does not hold I dont know how he could do it! Not one of us has a sin gle17 motive; the only One Who had a single motive was Jesus Christ, and the miracle of His Redemption is that He can put a single motive into any man. There is no cunning in the Sermon on the Mount. As long as we deal on the line of craft and cunning, Jesus Christ is no good to us. We can easily make a fool of goodness. The romance of the life of a disciple is not an external fascination but an inner martyrdom. Tennyson and Browning and Carlyle all write as men who see things without the glamour of tempera ment or religion or conceit. To look at life as it is, and to think of it as it is, must make a man a pessimist. If we are not pessimistic, it is either because we are generally thick headed and do not think, or because we have temperaments that are optimistic. If we face things as they are, we shall find that true optimism comes from a source other than temperament. According to Solomon, it comes from applying Hebrew Wisdom. To day we are bothered over finding out whether there is a God and what is the origin of things. Solomon faces facts as they are.

1. The Oppression of Tyranny (Ecclesiastes 4:13)

So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

In this chapter Solomon deals with injustice and tyranny; overreaching and craftiness. Verses 13 are a statement of things as they are. The spell between birth and death is mine, and I along with other human beings make the kind of life I live. I cannot make it independently of other wills, unless I happen to be a Napoleon or a Kaiser and bind my will on everything under my power. The oppression of tyranny means that I drive my will on other people, and if they do not do what I want, I break them. It is an oppression in which one power crushes another. The tears of such as were oppressednothing can heal them. Think of the devastations and havoc throughout the world just now. What is going to make up to the people who are broken? To say that every cloud has a silver lining is a kind lie. Unless a man can get into a relation ship with the God Whom the Bible reveals, life is not worth living. Most of us are mercifully shielded, we are not sensitive enough to feel or to experience the terrific things that Solomon experienced and saw in his lifetime; we see things through coloured, or cynical, glasses, but the cynics standpoint is not a true one, it distorts things. In human life as it is, the oppression of tyranny has the biggest run. Take the things we experience out of our own circle where they are balanced by domestic affections, into a set ting where these things do not count, and see if Solomon is drawing a long bow. 18 Jesus Christ in His day submitted to the providential order of tyranny represented by Pilate (see John 18:36; 19:1011); He saw that tyranny was inevitable because the nation to which He belonged had fallen from the standard it should have lived up to. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. There will come one day a personal and direct touch from God when every tear and perplexity, every oppression and distress, every suffering and pain, and wrong and justice will have a complete and ample and overwhelming explanation. The Christian faith is exhibited by the man who has the spiritual courage to say that that is the God he trusts in, and it takes some moral backbone to do it. It is easier to attempt to judge everything in the span between birth and death.

2. The Oppression of Trade (Ecclesiastes 4:4)

Again, I considered all travail, and every right work, that for this a man is envied of his neighbour. This is also vanity and vexation of spirit.

If you go back to the origin of civilisation, you find it was founded by a murderer. Among the good things, the shielding and protecting things, that are the outcome of civilisation, what Solomon mentions is always to be found, viz. , the crushing of someone in order to get gain. It may be done kindly or brutally, but the basis of success must be the crushing of some thing or someone. There is a rivalry between men, and we have made it a good thing; we have made ambition and competition the very essence of civilised life. No wonder there is no room for Jesus Christ, and no room for the Bible. We are all so scientifically orthodox nowadays, so materialistic and certain that rationalism is the basis of things, that we make the Bible out to be the most revolutionary, unorthodox and heretical of books. Jesus Christ echoes Solomons attitude: For a mans life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.

At the basis of trade and civilised life lie oppression and tyranny. Whether you are king or subject, says Solomon, you cannot find joy in any system of civilised life, or in trade and commerce; for under neath there is a rivalry that stings and bites, and the kindest man will put his heel on his greatest friend. These are not the blind statements of a disappointed man, but statements of facts discerned by the wisest man that ever lived.

3. The Oppression of Idling (Ecclesiastes 4:56)

The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh. Better is an handful with quietness, than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.

The best thing to do is to be a Bohemian and have nothing to do with civilised life; to live from hand to mouth and not do a hands turn. This has been a cult in every age of civilised life. We have seen it in our own day in Charles Wagner19 and his plea for a simple life, and in Walt Whitman and Thoreau, who advocated the simple life on a higher line. When a man is fed up with a certain line of things, he revolts and goes to the opposite extreme. To day tyranny and oppression have eaten into menssense of justice, and they have revolted and gone to the other extreme. Solomon tried first of all to get at the secret of things through philosophy and thinking; then he revolted into a reign of animal passion; then as king he insisted on good laws, but found he was oppressing the life out of the people; then he realised the tyranny of trade and tried idling, but found that that too oppressed. In all trade and commerce there is oppression, and we try to justify it by saying that the weakest must go to the wall.20 But is that so? Where are the mighty civilisations of other days? Where are the prehistoric animals, those colossal powerful creatures? It is they that have gone to the wall. The great blunder in all kingdoms amongst men is that we will demand strong men, consequently each kingdom in its turn goes to the wall because no chain is stronger than its weakest link. Jesus Christ founded His Kingdom on the weak est link of alla Baby, Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born anew (rv). Consequently the gates of hell cannot prevail against His Kingdom.

4. The Obsession of Solitariness (Ecclesiastes 4:78)

Then I returned, and I saw vanity under the sun. There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour; neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom do I labour and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail.

There is such a thing as an obsession of solitariness. Hermits, ascetics and celibates cut themselves off in revolt Because I cannot find peace or joy or happiness in the tyranny of civilised life or in commerce, and I cannot be an idle tramp, I become a solitary and live a sequestered life. Solomon points out what history has proved that this is an experiment that ends disastrously, because a man cannot shut out what is inside by cutting himself off from the outside. Jesus Christ was not a solitary man The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold, a man gluttonous and a wine bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! John the Baptist was a solitary man For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. Oh that I had wings like a dove! Then would I fly away, and be at rest (rv ). The desire is to be solitary If only I could get away and be quiet; if only I could live in a sunrise or a sunset! We have to find our true life in things as they are with that on the inside which keeps us right. The true energy of life lies in being rightly related to God, and only there is true joy found. It is an interesting study in psychology to watch people who are engaged in drastic social and rescue work and find out whether they are doing it for a surcease from their own troubles, to get relief from a broken heart. In a great many cases the worker wants a plaster for his own life. He takes up slum work, not because it is the great passion of his life, but because he must get something to deliver him from the gnawing pain of his own heart. The people he works amongst are often right when they say he is doing it to save his own soul.

5. The Optimism of Society (Ecclesiastes 4:912)

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall with- stand him; and a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.

The conclusion that Solomon comes to is that trade is better than idling; that both solitariness and society as it is are pretty bad, but that society is better than solitariness. Domestic life and married life.

and comradeship are all advocated by Solomon (cf. 1 Timothy 4:1–3). The Bible always emphasises the facts of life as they are. Whenever Jesus Christ applied His teaching to actual life He focused it round two points—marriage and money. If the religion of Jesus Christ and the indwelling of the Spirit of God cannot deal with these things and keep a man and woman as God wants them to be, His religion is useless.

6. The Occasion of Sagacity and Stubbornness (Ecclesiastes 4:13–16)

Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and fool- ish king, who will no more be admonished. For out of prison he cometh to reign; whereas also he that is born in his kingdom becometh poor. I considered all the liv- ing which walk under the sun, with the second child that shall stand up in his stead. There is no end of all the people, even of all that have been before them: they also that come after shall not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and vexation of spirit.

It is a disastrous thing for a man never to be ragged, an appalling thing to be a privileged young man! A lad who has been his mother’s pet and has been brought up like a hothouse plant is totally unprepared for the scathing of life as it is, and when he is flung out into the rugged realities of life, he suffers intoler ably. Conceive the suffering of a lad who has been sheltered, never had anything go against him, never been thwarted, when the tension does come. It is better to be a wise youth who can stand being ragged and taken down. One can always recognise the lad who has not been with others, he will not be admonished, consequently you cannot warn him.

Solomon says whether you are wise or foolish, upright or not, a king or tyrannised over by a king, successful or a failure, in society or solitary, stubborn or sagacious, all alike ends the same way. All is passing, and we cannot find our lasting joy in any element we like to touch. It is disastrous for a man to try and find his true joy in any phase of truth, or in the fulfilment of ambition, or in physical or intellectual solitariness, or in society; he will find his joy only in a personal relationship to God. That relationship was expounded by Jesus Christ when He said—”If any man cometh unto Me, and hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (rv). Our first concern is to be personally related to God. Jesus Christ is God manifested in human flesh, and we have to ignore to the point of hatred anything that competes with our relationship to Him.

When once a man is there, he receives a hundred fold more of all he gave up to get there, and he never demands an infinite satisfaction from those other rela tionships. The man or woman who does not know God demands an infinite satisfaction from other human beings which they cannot give, and in the case of the man, he becomes tyrannical and cruel. It springs from this one thing, the human heart must have satisfaction, but there is only one Being Who can satisfy the last abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. When once a man or woman is rightly related to Him, the one never demands the impossible from the other, everything is in its right place. “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself ” (rv), i. e. , deny his right to himself. The essence of sin is self realisation, my prideful right to myself. The disposition that ought to rule is God’s right to me, i. e. , Christ realisation.

It takes a long time for any one of us to realise our need of Jesus Christ personally, and it takes a nation a long time to realise that the only way things can be put right is not on the basis of rationalism, but only on the basis of Redemption. The Bible is neither obsolete nonsense nor poetic blether: it is a universe of revelation facts.

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp”

Ecclesiastes 5:1–7

Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest
thy doom
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled
splendour and gloom,
Speak to him thou for He hears, and Spirit with
Spirit can meet
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than
hands and feet.
Tennyson

1. The Rectitude of Ritualism v. “Rutualism” (Ecclesiastes 5:1)
2. The Rashness of Reaction v. Recollectedness of Religion (Ecclesiastes 5:2)
3. The Refrainings of Reverence (Ecclesiastes 5:3)
4. The Repudiation of Responsibility (Ecclesiastes 5:4–6)
5. Recklessness v. Resoluteness of Righteousness (Ecclesiastes 5:7)

If we try to find lasting joy in any human relation ship it will end in vanity, something that passes like a morning cloud. The true joy of a man’s life is in his relationship to God, and the great point of the Hebrew confidence in God is that it does not unfit a man for his actual life. That is always the test of a false religion.

1. The Rectitude of Ritualism v. “Rutualism” (Ecclesiastes 5:1)

Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil.

There is a use for ritual in a man’s religious life. Because a thing is necessary at one time of life, it does not follow that it is necessary all through. There may be times when ritual is a good thing and other times when it is not. Bear in mind that in the Hebrew religion there is an insistence on ecclesiasticism and ritual. In the New Testament that is finished with (see John 4:21–24); but Ezekiel prophesies that the true worship of God will yet be established on earth as it has never yet been, and there will be ritual then to an extraordinary degree. In the present day the revolt is against ritual and form; with the average man ritual is at a discount. There is a time in a healthy religious21 when the revolt is right. In the history of the salvation of a man’s soul it may be better for him to worship in a whitewashed building, with a bare rugged simplicity of service; but while it is true that a man may go through forms and ceremonies and be a downright hypocritical humbug, it is also true that he may despise ritual and be as big a humbug. When a man is in a right relationship to God ritual is an assistance; the place of worship and the atmosphere are both conducive to worship. We are apt to ignore that ritual is essential in a fullorbed religious life, that there is a rectitude in worship only brought about by the right use of ritual. For instance, when Jesus Christ taught His disciples to pray, He gave them a form of prayer which He knew would be repeated through the Christian centuries.

2. The Rashness of Reaction v. Recollectedness of Religion (Ecclesiastes 5:2)

Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God; for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few. (rv ) When you have been through a bereavement, or have thought you would be found out in a wrong and were not, there is the danger of reacting into a rash spell of devotion. You read your Bible and say things to God, but there is no reality in it. It is like the reaction of a man after a drinking bout, he mistakes his remorse for repentance. Repentance is not a reaction, remorse is. Remorse is—I will never do the thing again. Repentance is that I deliberately become the opposite to what I have been. Solomon says—Beware of this kind of religiousness; don’t be rash with your mouth, hold yourself in. When you go into the presence of God, remember it is not to be in a passing mood; everything a man says to God is recognised by God and held clear in his record. Solomon indicates that it is better to have nothing to do with religious life than to talk religion in rashness only. “These are they who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness; and have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time. ” In this war there has been less of the rashness of reaction than might be supposed; it has rather been the opposite way. Many a man when he has had the “bivvers” (i. e. , a mixture of fear and cowardice and a determination to go through) has said, “I feel inclined to look at my Bible; but no, I haven’t read it before and I won’t now. ” Again, a man may suddenly in the rashness of reaction pretend he is religious; but there is nothing in it. The characteristic of true religion is recollectedness; pull yourself together, stop wool gathering, and remember that you are in the presence of God.

3. The Refrainings of Reverence (Ecclesiastes 5:3)

For a dream cometh through the multitude of business; and a fool’s voice is known by the multitude of words.

If you are busy in your daily life, the dreams you have at night may be simply the refractions of the “multitude of business. ” Any amount of futile religion is based on this line of things—”I have been eating too much, but now Lent has come and I will fast for a time. ” There is nothing genuine in it, it has not the grip of God about it. When a man comes into the presence of God he refrains himself and remembers that he is not there to suffer from his own reactions, to get comfort for himself, to pray along the line of “O Lord, bless me. He is there to refrain from his own personal needs and to get into the scope of God’s outlook.

4. The Repudiation of Responsibility (Ecclesiastes 5:4–6)

When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed. Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay. Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin; neither say thou before the angel, that it was an error: wherefore should God be angry at thy voice, and destroy the work of thine hands?

At the end of the year we hear much about vowing. Solomon’s advice is—Don’t vow, for if you make a vow even in ordinary matters and do not keep it, you are the worse for it. If you make an engagement to meet a man and don’t fulfill it, you suffer for it. It will mean a defect in your general make up. It is better not to promise, better to be uncertain, than to promise and not fulfill. We are all apt to be like Rip Van Winkle and say—”I won’t count this time. ” We reap terrific damage to our own characters when we vow and do not perform. You may not take account of the fact that you made an engagement and did not keep it; but your nerves do, the record is there. Solomon’s counsel in practical life as well as in religious life is—never make a vow unless at all costs you carry it through. Promises are a way of shirking responsibility. We can get over an unpleasant interview by promising to do a thing; but it is an appalling thing to say “Yes, I will, ” and then not do it. Don’t pile up vows before men, and certainly not before God. Jesus Christ was stern along this line. No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. ” When Hezekiah was sick he vowed a vow before God—”I shall go softly [as in a solemn procession, rv mg], all my years”; but when he was out of danger he forgot all about his vow. To face death day in and day out, as men do in war, is a different matter from facing sickness or an accident. If you have had a narrow escape and have come through, don’t be rash in reaction; don’t promise and make vows, but look to God and bank on the reality of Jesus Christ. One of the dangers in modern evangelism is that it lays the emphasis on decision for Christ instead of on surrender to Jesus Christ. That to me is a grave blunder. When a man decides for Christ he usually puts his confidence in his own honour, not in Christ at all. No man can keep himself a Christian, it is impossible; it is God Who keeps a man a Christian. Many a man is kept away from Jesus Christ by honesty—”I won’t be able to keep it up. If Christianity depends on decisions for Christ, it is better to keep away from it; but Our Lord tells us to come to Him because we are not able to decide—a very different proposition. Jesus Christ came for the weak, for the ungodly and the sinful, and He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, ” not—”Blessed is the man who has the power to decide and to keep his vow. Jesus Christ calls the man who says—”I cannot do it; others may have the strength, but I haven’t. ” Jesus Christ says to such, “Blessed are you. It is not our vows before God that tell, but our coming before God, exactly as we are in all our weakness, and being held and kept by God.

5. Recklessness v. Resoluteness of Righteousness (Ecclesiastes 5:7)

For in the multitude of dreams and many words there are also divers vanities: but fear thou God.

There is such a thing as being haunted on the inside of the life. It begins when a man tampers with the borders of spiritualism and communicates with super natural powers; he opens the unconscious part of his personality to all kinds of powers he cannot control. The only cure is to fear God, to be rightly related to God, and these fears and hauntings will go. Put on the whole armour of God. When a man is related to God through Jesus Christ, God protects not only the conscious life but the unconscious life as well. Unless a man is guarded by God, there are forces that can find their way into the unconscious domain. There are dreams and influences that tamper with a man’s life and leave him a haunted man. No man has any right to make curiosity, which is his guide in intellectual life, his guide in moral life. No man ever does it without falling. It is a terrible thing to be haunted, to have your own conscience laugh at you. When we are related to God, He guards from dangers seen and unseen. The man who fears God has nothing else to fear, he is guarded in his conscious and unconscious life, in his waking and his sleeping moments.

The tribune—dust, drudgery, deity

Ecclesiastes 5:8–20

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!
Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after a To-morrow stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries,
“Fools! your reward is neither Here nor There.”
Omar Khayyám

1. Providential Order of Tyranny (Ecclesiastes 5:8)
2. Profit Ordained of Tillage (Ecclesiastes 5:9)
3. Profitless Possession of Treasure (Ecclesiastes 5:10–11)
4. Peace Out of Toil (Ecclesiastes 5:12)
5. Possessions Outwitting Trust (Ecclesiastes 5:13–14)
6. Personality the Only Truth (Ecclesiastes 5:15–17)
7. Predominant Obligation in Time (Ecclesiastes 5:18–20)

God made man a mixture of dust and Deity— “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). The dust of a man’s body is his glory, not his shame. Jesus Christ manifested Himself in that dust, and He claims that He can presence any man with His own divinity. The New Testament teaches us how to keep the body under and make it a servant. Robert Browning of all the poets is the one who insists that we make headway not in spite of the flesh, but because of the flesh, and in no other way. Drudgery is the outcome of sin, but it has no right to be the rule of life. It becomes the rule of life because we ignore the fact that the dust of the earth belongs to God, and that man’s chief end is to glorify God. Unless we can maintain the presence of Divinity in our dust, life becomes a miserable drudgery. If a man lives in order to hoard up the means of living, he does not live at all, he has no time to, he is taken up with one form of drudgery or another to keep things going. The wisdom of to day concerns itself chiefly with the origin of things and not with God, consequently neither the philosopher nor the mystic has time for actual life. The Wisdom of the Hebrews concerns itself with practical life, and recognises that the basis of things is tragic. The Bible attitude to practical life is at a discount with most of us because we are far away from the rooted and grounded confidence in God of the Hebrews. We do not think on Bible lines, we think on pagan lines, and only in our emotional life do we dabble in spirituality; consequently when we are hard hit, our religion finds us dumb; or if we do talk, we talk as pagans. It has been fashionable to have a contempt for anyone who believes in the Book of Genesis. But now the war has hit us a fair blow and we cannot talk so glibly, nor are we so certain that our cocksureness about things is right; we are not so insolent in our attitude to the Bible standpoint. We are beginning to be prepared to think. The Bible has no sympathy with saying things ought not to be as they are. The practical thing is to look at things as they are. What is the use of saying there ought to be no war, in the meantime there is! There ought to be no injustice, there is! There ought to be no violence, there is! Solomon never wastes his time in that way; he says these things are. We can ignore facing them, or we can face them in a way which will lead us either to despair or to the Cross of Jesus Christ.

1. Providential Order of Tyranny (Ecclesiastes 5:8)

If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgement and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter: for he that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be higher than they.

All through the Bible the difference between God’s order and God’s permissive will is brought out. God’s permissive will is the things that are now, whether they are right or wrong.

If you are looking for justice, you will come to the conclusion that God is the devil; and if the providential order of things to day were God’s order, then that conclusion would be right. But if the order of things to day is God’s permissive will, that is quite another matter. God’s order is no sin, no Satan, no wrong, no suffering, no pain, no death, no sickness and no limitation: God’s providential will is every one of these things—sin, sickness, death, the devil, you and me, and things as they are. God’s per missive will is the haphazard things that are on just now in which we have to fight and make character in, or else be damned by. We may kick and yell and say God is unjust, but we are all “in the soup. ” It is no use saying things are not as they are; it is no use being amazed at the providential order of tyranny, it is there. In personal life and in national life God’s order is reached through pain, and never in any other way. Why it should be so is another matter, but that it is so is obvious. “. . . though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.

” We have to get hold of God’s order in the midst of His permissive will. God is bringing many “sons” to glory. A son is more than a saved soul; a son is one who has been through the fight and stood the test and come out sterlingly worthy. The Bible attitude to things is absolutely robust, there is not the tiniest whine about it; there is no possibility of lying like a limp jellyfish on God’s providence, it is never allowed for a second. There is always a sting and a kick all through the Bible.

Solomon says when you see the providential order of tyranny, don’t be amazed at it. According to the Bible the explanation is that the basis of things is tragic; things have gone wrong and they can only be put right and brought into God’s order by the individual relationship of men and women. We find tyranny everywhere. Take it in a personal way—we all think we are the creatures of injustice. There never was a man who was not! Justice is an abstraction at the back of our heads. It is absurd to make abstractions entities. Justice and righteousness are emanations from a personal God, and it is His presence and ruling that gives these abstractions their meaning. We say that God is just—where is the evidence of it? Jesus Christ taught, “From him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away”—where is the justice in that? The great lasting point is not an abstraction called justice, not a question of right or wrong, of goodness or badness, but a personal relationship to a personal God. If I expect to see everything in the universe good and right and I find it is not, I get fainthearted. Solomon won’t have us go off on the limbo of the abstract and say these things ought not to be; they are! Injustice and lust and rapine and murder and crime and bestiality and grab bing are as thick as desert sand, and it is cowardly for a man to say because things are as they are, therefore he must drift. We say we had to take a particular course because the prevailing trend of God’s providence was that way. It is a remarkable thing that two boats can sail in opposite directions in the same wind, they can go according to the steering skill of the pilot and not according to the prevailing wind; and in the same way a man can trim his sails and grasp hold of God’s order however much it costs him. We need to be warned against the books that pander to our weak side, and the folks who say—”Poor fellow, he couldn’t help it. ” It may be a kindly thing to say, but some things should not be treated with kindness. There is a tyrannical order which runs all through life, and if we get slopped over with sentiment we are not only unfit for life, but are of no use whatever to lay hold of God’s order in the midst of things as they are. If the Incarnation means anything to a man, it means fight, “with breast and back as either should be, ” indwelt by the Spirit of God. Beware of the things that are apt to lead you to a side eddy—false spirituality or intellectual contempt will do it.

2. Profit Ordained of Tillage (Ecclesiastes 5:9)

Moreover, the profit of the earth is for all: the king himself is served by the field.

When God created man He made him of dust and Deity; sin introduced the other element, viz. , drudgery. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; . . . thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; . . . in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. The earth is cursed because of man’s apostasy, and when that apostasy ceases in actual history, the ground will no longer bring forth the curse. The final redemption includes “new heavens and a new earth. ” “Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree”; and “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb. ” Instead of the savage ferocity of the beasts, there will be the strength without the savageness—an inconceivable order of things just now. In anything like a revolution or a war, we find what Solomon refers to here is true, that to make profit you must go back to the dust you came from. The curious thing about civilisation is that it tends to take men away from the soil, and makes them develop an artificial existence away from the elemental. Civilisation has become an elaborate way of doing without God, and when civilised life is hit a smashing blow by any order of tyranny, most of us have not a leg to stand on. Solomon reminds us that king and peasant alike can only gain their profit by proper tillage of the soil. The laws given in the Bible include a scheme for the treatment of the earth and they insist on proper rest being given to the land, and make it clear that that alone will bring profit in actual existence. Leviticus 25 is the great classic on the rights of the earth.

3. Profitless Possession of Treasure (Ecclesiastes 5:10–11)

He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity. When goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and what good is there to the owners thereof, saving the beholding of them with their eyes.

To make treasure is different from making profit. Treasure is the thing that is esteemed for itself, not for what it brings. The Bible tirades against possession for possession’s sake. Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, . . . for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. If your treasure is in gold or in land or the possessions of earth, that is where your heart will be, and when wars and rumours of wars arise, your heart will fail you for fear. If a man has his treasure vested in bonds and a war strikes, how can he keep his mind at rest? Panic and devastation and ruin are the result—profitless in every degree.

The manipulation of civilised life has not resulted in the development of the tillage of the land, but in the building up of treasure, and it is not only the miser who grabs. The sense of possession is a snare to true spiritual life. Paul uses the life of a soldier to illustrate a saint’s life (2 Timothy 2:3–4). No sense of property or possession can go along with an abiding detachment. In civilised life it is the building up of possessions that is the snare—This is my house, my land; these are my books, and my things—imagine when they are touched! I am consumed with distress. Over and over again Jesus Christ drives this point home— Remember, don’t have your heart in your possessions, let them come and go. Solomon warns about the same thing—whatever possessions you have will consume the nobility of the life in an appalling way. In the case of Job, Satan asked permission to play havoc with his possessions and God gave him permission, and every possession Job had, even to his bodily health, went; but Job proved that a man would remain true to his love of God though all his possessions went to rack and ruin.

4. Peace Out of Toil (Ecclesiastes 5:12)

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, it recreates him. The Bible indicates that sleep is not meant only for the recuperation of a man’s body, but that there is a tremendous furtherance of spiritual and moral life during sleep. The conception of sleep that Arnold Bennett or any practical man has is that we need just enough to recuperate the body. According to the Bible, a great deal more than physical recuperation happens in the sleep of any man who has done his daily toil in actual work. “He giveth unto his beloved in sleep” (Psalm 127:2 rv mg). This is a phase that is cut out alto gether, because we ignore the deeper issues. “Whether he eat little or much. Paul’s counsel is that “if any would not work, neither should he eat. ” There are plenty of folks who eat but don’t work, and they suffer for it. If we are physically healthy, the benefit of the food we eat corresponds to the work we do, and the same is true in mental, moral and spiritual health. The prayer Our Lord taught us is full of wisdom along this line, “Give us this day our daily bread. ” That does not mean that if we do not pray we shall not get it. The word “give” has the sense of “receiving. When we become children of God we receive our daily bread from Him, the basis of bless ing lies there, otherwise we take it as an animal with no discernment of God.

5. Possessions Outwitting Trust (Ecclesiastes 5:13–14)

There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt. But those riches perish by evil travail: and he begetteth a son, and there is nothing in his hand.

If you have many possessions, it will ruin your trust and make you suspect everyone, and the better type of life is ruined. Again, you cannot hold your possessions, you may just overreach yourselves in a specu lation and “mafeesh” 22 possessions; or you may die and your sons squander all you possessed. You cannot find lasting joy in these things, let them come and go, remain true to your relationship to God and don’t put your trust in possessions. Live your life as a labouring man, a man rightly related to mother earth, and to the providential order of tyranny; trust in God what ever happens, and the result will be that in your heart will be the joy that every man is seeking.

6. Personality the Only Truth (Ecclesiastes 5:15–17)

As he came forth of his mother’s womb, naked shall he return to go as he came, and shall take nothing of his labour, which he may carry away in his hand. And this also is a sore evil, that in all points as he came, so shall he go: and what profit hath he that hath laboured for the wind? All his days also he eateth in darkness, and he hath much sorrow and wrath with his sickness.

Personal relationship brings us to the truth, and it is truth that relates a man personally to God. Jesus said, “I am . . . the Truth. We have to form the mind of Christ, and it is not done at a leap. It is done by a maintained personal relationship to Jesus Christ, and slowly and surely the new mind is formed. How many of us are working things out from the basis of a personal relationship to Jesus Christ? We work things out on the abstract logic of a sense of justice or of right. It is appalling to find spiritual people when they come into a crisis taking an ordinary common sense standpoint as if Jesus Christ had never lived or died. It is a man’s personal relationship that tells. When he dies he can take nothing he has done or made in his lifetime with him. The only thing he can take with him is what he is.

There is no warrant in the Bible for the modern speculation of a second chance after death. There may be a second chance. There may be numbers of interesting things—but it is not taught in the Bible. The stage between birth and death is the probation stage. We are apt to wrongly relate ourselves to books and to people. We often hear such remarks as—”The parson is talking over the heads of the men”; or, “The Bible is all very well, but I don’t understand it. ” It is never the thing you understand that does you good, but what is behind what is taught. If it is God’s truth, you and I are going to meet it again whether we want to or not. The thing we value most in a meeting is not so much what is said, but the release that comes from the different atmosphere that is brought in, and we can begin to think. We benefit most by things over which we cannot be articulate, and if the truths we read or hear are the truths of God, they will crop up again. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp. “

The things we listen to and read ought to be beyond our comprehension, they go into our minds like seed thoughts, and slowly and surely bring forth fruit. This is good counsel for boys and girls in their teens. We should always choose our books as God chooses our friends, just a bit beyond us, so that we have to do our level best to keep up with them. If we choose our own friends, we choose those we can lord it over.

7. Predominant Obligation in Time (Ecclesiastes 5:18–20)

Behold that which I have seen: it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it is his portion. Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labour; this is the gift of God. For he shall not much remember the days of his life; because God answereth him in the joy of his heart.

These verses are an astute summing up of a man’s obligations in time. If a man becomes temporarily “magnoon”23 through anger or lust or false religion, the first thing that happens is that he will stop eating; no man can eat when he is in a rage. If you are in the habit of getting angry, you will soon get physically upset, the connection runs all through. The test that a man is right with God is in eating and drinking. Solomon says, “It is good and comely for men to eat and drink. ” Paul says, Beware of those who teach abstinence from meats; “Whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question for conscience’ sake. ” Remain true to God in your actual life. The right thing to do with riches is to enjoy your portion, and remember that what you lay by is a danger and a snare. Solomon had everything a man could have in life, he had every means of satisfying himself; he tried the beastly line, the sublime line, the aesthetic line, the intellectual line but, he says, you cannot find your lasting joy in any of them. Joy is only to be found in your relationship to God while you live on this earth, the earth you came from and the earth you return to. Dust is the finest element in man, because in it the glory of God is to be manifested. The Bible makes much of man’s body. The teaching of Christianity on this point has been twisted by the influence of Plato’s teaching, which says that a man can only further his moral and spiritual life by despising his body. The Bible teaches that the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, it was moulded by God of the dust of the ground and is man’s chief glory, not his shame. When God became Incarnate “He took not on Him the nature of angels, ” but was made “in the likeness of men, ” and it is man’s body that is yet to manifest the glory of God on earth. Material things are going to be translucent with the light of God. Jesus Christ “came eating and drinking, ” and from Genesis to Revelation eating and drinking, and labouring in the ordinary toil of life in the condition of things as they are, are the things in which man will find his right relationship to life and to God.

The edge of things

Ecclesiastes 6:1–12

When the Soul, growing clearer,
Sees God no nearer;
When the soul, mounting higher,
To God comes no nigher:
But the arch-fiend, Pride,
Mounts at her side.
Foiling her high emprise,
Sealing her eagle eyes,
And, when she fain would soar,
Makes idols to adore—
Changing the pure emotion
Of her high devotion,
To a skin-deep sense
Of her own eloquence
Strong to deceive, strong to enslave—
Save oh! save.
Matthew Arnold24

1. Perils of Inevitable Barriers (Ecclesiastes 6:1–2)
2. Preposterous and Inveterate Brutishness (Ecclesiastes 6:3)
3. Place of Invincible Banality (Ecclesiastes 6:4–8)
4. Perdition of Individual Burning (Ecclesiastes 6:9)
5. Predisposition by Inspired Beginnings (Ecclesiastes 6:10–12)

To say that the basis of things is not rational does not mean that a man has not to be reasonable. A rational ist is not simply one who uses his reason, but one who says there is nothing at the basis of life that cannot be solved by ordinary reason and enlightenment. The question of tragedy, of the gap between man and God, on which the Bible bases everything, has nothing to do with the philosophy of a rationalist. To him sin is not a positive thing, it is a mere defect; consequently the need for Redemption is emphatically ruled out. There is a tragedy and an agony at the basis of things that cannot be explained by reason; it must either be explained away, or faced in the way the Bible faces it. There is something wrong, and it can only be put right by Redemption. Many a man affects his doubts of God, they are purely intellectual. There is a phase when a man gets into tremendous stress of weather mentally, but there is also a phase when his doubts are a mere affectation. The Books of Wisdom are strong on facing facts, and yet there is no touch of despair underneath. In all other books which face things as they are, there is tremendous pessimism and abject despair, no hope whatever; but in Solomon’s writings, while he maintains a ruggedness and an intensity and an unswerving truthfulness to facts, there is an extraordinary hopefulness running all through, and that without blinking anything, or getting sentimental and falling back on the kindness of God. The minor prophets also state appalling facts—slaughters and crimes on foot and foretold enough to knock hope out of any man, but the Hebrew writers never seem to despair however bad the facts may be, there is always the indefinable certainty that there is something to hope about.

1. Perils of Inevitable Barriers (Ecclesiastes 6:1–2)

There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men: a man to whom God hath given riches, wealth, and honour, so that he wanteth nothing for his soul of all that he desireth, yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof, but a stranger eateth it: this is vanity, and it is an evil disease.

A man may have all these things—riches, wealth, honour—and at the same time be the victim of an incurable disease. The Hebrew mind looks upon that as an act of God, something for which the man him self is not responsible. The question of the inevitable barriers comes out very strongly in the records of Bible characters. When the inevitable strikes, there is no whine, but rather an astonishing facing of the situation. These inevitable things are outside a man’s control, he is not asked about them, and when they enter as factors into his calculations they present him with a peril. Suppose a man is very ambitious, and rightly so, then just as he has begun to attain his ambitions, he is alarmed over certain symptoms in himself and consults a doctor and the verdict of an incurable disease is passed, it is madness to think he will ever be able to fulfill his ambitions. The danger is lest the man sink into crushing despair, while the courageous thing for him is to hand over to God what belongs to Him and to wait for His solution. As one of the results of this war men have been ruined in thousands of cases so far as their future life on this planet is concerned. To look at facts as they are and to think them right out to the bottom, makes a man a pessimist, not a despairer, but a pessimist. That means things are as bad as they can be; it is absurd to say they could be worse, it is impossible to conceive things worse. A hopeful attitude does not come by facing facts, or by not facing facts, but only by temperament or religion. The inevitable barriers are there in every one of our lives. They may not be of an intense order, such as a terrible maiming, or blindness, or deafness, or some thing that knocks a man out of fulfilling his ambi tions, they may be hereditary incapabilities; but the peril is lest we lie down and whine and are of no more good. The thing to do is to recognise that the barri ers are inscrutable, that they are there not by chance but entirely by God’s permission, and they should be faced and not ignored. Was there ever a more severely handicapped life on this earth than Helen Keller’s? The peril of the inevitable barriers is that if I have not faced the facts sufficiently, I am apt to blame God for them. There is one fact more that I do not know, and that fact lies entirely with God, not with me. It is no use to spend my time saying, I wish I was not like this, I am just like it. The practical point in Christianity is—Can Jesus Christ and His religion be of any use to me as I am, not as I am not? Can He deal with me where I am, in the condition I am in?

2. Preposterous and Inveterate Brutishness (Ecclesiastes 6:3)

If a man beget an hundred children, and live many years, so that the days of his years be many, and his soul be not filled with good, and also that he have no burial; I say, that an untimely birth is better than he.

In the Hebrew conception it was a disgrace for a man to have no burial (cf. 2 Kings 9:34–35). This conception is remote from us today. Solomon says: a man has no business to be an inveterate brute, to live to breed and eat and pile up goods without the slightest idea of the kind of monument his life is erecting—for himself he lives and for himself he dies. Solomon won’t have the brute aspect of human life ignored; but to remember that I am a brute and to be brutish are two different things. It is a preposterous iniquity to be a brutish man, satisfied with being once born (cf. Psalm 73:3–9). The thing to do is to recognise that I am a brute, but I have the brute well under control. Solomon is talking of the man who will not recognise this. To ignore the fact that I am a man is the action of a fool, or of a mystic. To recognise it and see to it that I am a chaste man is the line the Bible insists on—Don’t deny that you have a body, but insist on it that you can live in your body the kind of manhood that God demands. Solomon is speaking of the man who is a brute and brutish—”Yes, I am an animal, and I will glut my appetites as they come, I shall sink and not rise. ” Solomon says, “an untimely birth is better than he. There is a difference between doing wicked things and being a wicked man. When Jesus Christ saw the pariahs of His day, He did not say to them, “Ye are of your father the devil”; but He did say that to the Pharisees ( John 8:44). The Pharisees were play actors, putting on what did not belong to them; but remember, too, that some of the best men in Our Lord’s day were Pharisees, e. g. , Nicodemus, Saul of Tarsus. Jesus said to the Pharisees: “The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. ” It was not the bad people who were guilty of the wicked things. We are apt to tone down the things Our Lord tiraded against—pride, self realisation, etc. When a man is guilty of wrong things, he recognises instantly that there is a chance of being delivered; but the righteous man sits self governed in his own right, he is his own god.

3. Place of Invincible Banality (Ecclesiastes 6:4–8)

For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known any thing: this hath more rest than the other. Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place? All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled. For what hath the wise more than the fool? what hath the poor, that knoweth to walk before the living?

Solomon is referring to the man who lays up for him self and for others, and he does not commend him. To day we enthrone insurance and economy, but it is striking to recall that the one thing Jesus Christ com mended was extravagance. Our Lord only called one work “good, ” and that was the act of Mary of Beth any when she broke the alabaster box of ointment. It was neither useful nor her duty, it sprang from her devotion to Jesus, and He said of it—”Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her. ” The object of a man’s life is not to hoard; he has to get enough for his brute life and no more; the best of his life is to be spent in confidence in God. Man is meant to utilise the earth and its products for food and the nourishment of his body, but he must not live in order to make his existence. If the children of Israel gathered more manna than they needed, it turned into dry rot, and that law still holds good. When we learn this Wisdom of the Hebrews we shall soon see how far away we are from it and from the teaching of Jesus Christ. Our Lord taught that a man ought to be carefully careless about everything saving his relationship to Himself. We who call our selves Christians are tremendously far, almost opposingly far, from that central point of Christianity: it is not even intimate to us. Generation after generation of civilised life have been opposed to it, and as long as we are on the line of economy and insurance, Jesus Christ cannot have His innings. In personal life, in Church life and in national life, we try Jesus Christ’s teaching, but as soon as it becomes difficult weaban don it, or else we compromise. Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? ” Bank your faith in God, do the duty that lies nearest and “damn the consequences. Who is prepared to do this, prepared to stake his all on Jesus Christ and His word? We do it in preaching and in books, but not in practical life. We put our emphasis on the other line, trusting in our wits, and God is left out of it. When once we are related to Jesus Christ, our relation to actual life is that of a child, perfectly simple and marvellous.

4. Perdition of Individual Burning (Ecclesiastes 6:9)

Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this is also vanity and vexation of spirit.

Lust applies not only to the bestial side of things; lust means literally—”I must have it at once, and I don’t care what the consequences are. It may be a low, animal lust, or it may be a mental lust, or a moral or spiritual lust; but it is a characteristic that does not belong to the life hid with Christ in God. Love is the opposite; love can wait endlessly. “Better is the sight of the eyes, than the wandering of the desire. ” One of the first things Jesus Christ does is to open a man’s eyes and he sees things as they are. Until then he is not satisfied with the seeing of his eyes, he wants more, anything that is hidden he must drag to the light, and the wandering of desire is the burning waste of a man’s life until he finds food. His heart lusts, his mind lusts, his eyes lust, everything in him lusts until he is related to God. It is the demand for

an infinite satisfaction and it ends in the perdition of a man’s life. Jesus Christ says, “Come unto Me, . . . and I will give you rest, ” i. e. , I will put you in the place where your eyes are open. And notice what Jesus Christ says we will look at—lilies and sparrows and grass. What man in his senses bothers about these things! We consider aeroplanes and tanks and shells, because these demand our attention, the other things do not. The great emancipation in the salvation of God is that it gives a man the sight of his eyes, and he sees for the first time the handiwork of God in a daisy. No longer has he a burning lust that turns everything into a howling wilderness of wrong. “But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. . . . And their eyes were opened, and they knew Him” (Luke 24:16, 31). We see our friend, the other man sees a fellow in a tunic, we perceive the man inside the tunic. When Jesus Christ asked His disciples “Who do men say that the Son of man is? ” He was referring to this perception. To the majority of men Jesus Christ was only a Nazarene carpenter, but He says—”Who say ye that I am? ” “Even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more” (2 Corinthians 5:16 rv ). The salvation of Jesus Christ enables a man to see for the first time in his life, and it is a wonderful thing.

Heaven above is brighter blue.
Earth around is sweeter green,
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen;
Birds with gladder songs o’erflow,
Flowers with deeper beauties shine
Since I know, as now I know,
I am His and He is mine.
George Wade Robinson

5. Predisposition by Inspired Beginnings (Ecclesiastes 6:10–12)

That which hath been is named already, and it is known that it is man: neither may he contend with him that is mightier than he. Seeing there be many things that increase vanity, what is man the better? For who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? for who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?

The Hebrew Books of Wisdom are all of a piece with the first three chapters of Genesis. In order to estimate man properly in the “soup” he is in just now, we must remember what he was in the beginning. God created man in His own image, a son of God. Adam was to have control over the life in the air and on the earth and in the sea, on one condition—that he allowed God to rule him absolutely. Man was to develop the earth and his own life until he was transfigured. But instead there came the introduction of sin, man took the rule over himself, he became his own god, and thereby lost control over everything else. It is this that accounts for the condition of things as they are now. If we are going to have a sympathetic understand ing of the Bible, we must rid ourselves of the abomina ble conceit that we are the wisest people that have ever been on the earth; we must stop our patronage of Jesus Christ and of the Bible, and have a bigger respect for the fundamental conception of life as it is. At the basis of Hebrew wisdom first of all, is confidence in God; and second, a terrific sigh and sob over the human race as a magnificent ruin of what God designed it to be, Modern wisdom says that man is a magnificent promise of what he is going to be. If that point of view is right, then there is no need to talk about sin and Redemption, and the Bible is a cunningly devised fable. But the Bible point of view seems to cover most of the facts.

What Price this?

Ecclesiastes 7:1–7

Indeed the Idols I have loved so long
Have done my credit in Men’s Eye much wrong;
Have drown’d my Honour in a shallow Cup
And sold my Reputation for a Song.
Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore—but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring and
Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence a-pieces tore.
Omar Khayyám

1. The Attainment of Sagacious Character (Ecclesiastes 7:1)
2. The Advantage of a Sad Condition (Ecclesiastes 7:2)
3. The Appropriateness of Sorrow and Chastisement (Ecclesiastes 7:3)
4. The Aspects of Shallowness and Censure (Ecclesiastes 7:4–5)

5. The Atrophy of Sagacity by Clownishness (Ecclesiastes 7:6)
6. The Anachronism of Conscientiousness (Ecclesiastes 7:7)

What a man prizes highly, he prices and praises accordingly. Everything has its price and can be bought. Men and women can be bought. We are bought on the low level of swine, or bribery, or moral compromise, or spiritual insurance; and we are bought with the precious blood of Christ. Solomon rattles the bottom board out of every piece of deception. The only true joy in life, he says, is based on a personal relationship to God. You can not find joy in being like animals, or in art, or aestheticism, in ruling or being ruled—the whole thing is passed in survey in a most ruthless examination by a man whose wisdom is profounder than the pro foundest and has never been excelled, and in summing it all up he says that joy is only found in any of these things when a man is rightly related to God. An elemental thing to remember is that we must never read into a man’s words what we mean, but just try and find out what the author of the words means. As a rule we read into his words what we mean and consequently miss his meaning altogether. Before we can criticise a man’s statements we must find out his meaning, find out what kind of a genius or a fool he was who said it. If we do this with the Bible, it will put the statements made there in quite another light. If the man in the street (i. e. , just you and me) is going to prove the truth of Christianity, he must “come off the street owning its power. ” If we do not intend to go out of our own ways of looking at things, we shall never find out the other man’s ways of looking at them.

1. The Attainment of Sagacious Character (Ecclesiastes 7:1)

A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth.

Solomon is speaking of character, not of reputation. Reputation is what other people think of you; “character is what you are in the dark, ” where no one sees but yourself. That is where the worth of a man’s character lies, and Solomon says that the man who has attained a sagacious character during life is like a most refreshing, soothing, healing ointment. In the New Testament “name” frequently has the meaning of “nature. ” “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, ” i. e. , My nature (Matthew 18:20). Everyone who comes across a good nature is made better by it, unless he is determined to be bad. To say a man has a good nature does not mean he is a pious individual, always quoting texts. The test of a nature is the atmosphere it produces. When we are in contact with a good nature we are uplifted by it. We do not get anything we can state articulately, but the horizon is enlarged, the pressure is removed from the mind and heart and we see things differently.

2. The Advantage of a Sad Condition (Ecclesiastes 7:2)

It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart.

Solomon is not implying that it is better to grouse around in the luxury of misery than to feast; he is dealing with finding true essential joy, and he says if ever we are going to have a true estimate of life we shall have to face it at its worst. All through the books of Hebrew Wisdom there is this certainty that the basis of actual life is tragedy. Human nature is a ruin of what it once was, and a man is a fool to ignore that. If you want to know the basis of life, it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of plea sure. Remember, there is death, and there is worse than death—sin and tragedy and the possibility of terrible evil. Solomon does not mean us to live as some folks who seem never to be happy unless they are at a funeral. He means us to keep at the basis of things, to scrape through the veneer and face things, and we learn to do this better in mourning than in feasting. Appear not unto men to fast. ” If you have had a sad dose, don’t pull a long face, cover it up, don’t let any one imagine you are going through what you are. If a man builds his life over a volcano, one day there will come terrific havoc. If we ignore the safety valves in mother earth, we will have to pay the pen alty. Mount Vesuvius is one of the pumps that keeps the earth in proper order; the Creator has put His danger signals there, and yet people ignore them and plant their vineyards on its slopes, then when an eruption occurs we blame God and say how cruel He is to allow it. No wise man will build up his life without knowing what the basis of life is, and Solomon indicates that a man can only arrive at a true view of life by brooding on the underlying tragedy.

3. The Appropriateness of Sorrow and Chastisement (Ecclesiastes 7:3)

Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.

Countenance” means more than the face; the countenance is the whole aspect of a man’s nature (cf. Psalm 42:5, 11). To say “I won’t countenance it” does not mean to show disapproval in my face, but that I refuse to give the thing the approval of my personal life. The man who has faced the fact that the basis of life is tragic is the one who begins to see the true relation of things, and he says “I will go softly all my years. ” We may find that the man who is remark ably cheerful now has gone through a hell that would make us shudder to face. The men and women who have been through things have always plenty of lei sure for others, they never obtrude their own experiences. Many a man has found God in the belly of hell during the war. He has come face to face with God through having had things stripped off and having to face the fact that the basis of life is tragedy.

4. The Aspects of Shallowness and Censure (Ecclesiastes 7:4–5)

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools.

Solomon says that the house of mourning is the place where a man learns wisdom, he won’t be so sharp with his tongue, there are things he might have said but he won’t. If you will only see your “cobber” laid out, you will shut your mouth and not say what you were going to. No man who faces the ultimate tragedy in another’s life can be the cheap and easy cynic we are all apt to be without thinking. Whistler25 wrote a book entitled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies—a miserably spiteful thing to do! Go to the house of mourning and see your friend dead, and it will alter your attitude to things; don’t be shallow. There is a place for the shallow, however, as well as the profound. One of the greatest defects in Christianity is that it is not shallow enough, in this respect it knows a great deal better than Jesus Christ. It is religious enough, supernormally moral, but not able to eat, drink and be merry. Jesus Christ made the shallow and the profound, the give and the take, one.

The art of shallow conversation is one that is rarely learned. It is a great gift as well as a real ministration to be able to say nothing cleverly. It is an insult to be everlastingly introducing subjects that make people think on the deepest lines. It takes all the essence of Christianity to be shallow properly. The shallowness Solomon mentions here is that of refusing to realise that there is a basis of tragedy. A man who tells his chum with a broken heart to go to a picture show is a fool. He ought to know that the house of shallowness is not the place for him, but that Jesus Christ is the only One Who can heal him. It is a question of having a wise heart through facing the reality of things. When a man has “the heart of the wise, ” he is able to counsel his friend in the dark way.

5. The Atrophy of Sagacity by Clownishness (Ecclesiastes 7:6)

For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.

The private history of a professional clown may be one of the saddest. The man who sets himself to make others laugh has often an immensely sad life of his own behind. A man can kill his own wisdom by living apart; he can atrophy his real life by keeping up a certain role. If a man has a name for being smart, he may find it a job to keep up the role. When you take up the clownish line, you kill something that ought not to be killed, you atrophy the wisest part of your nature. It takes a tremendous amount of relationship to God for a man to be what he is.

6. The Anachronism of Conscientiousness (Ecclesiastes 7:7)

Surely oppression [extortion, rv ] maketh a wise man mad; and a gift destroyeth the heart.

Anachronism means anything out of keeping with the time. A wise man who has built his life in confidence in God will appear a fool when he is amongst people who are sleek and cunning. Extortion” makes the wisdom of the wisest appear fools.

You can ridicule anyone, even Jesus Christ. The wisdom of God is arrant stupidity to the wisdom of the world, until all of a sudden God makes the wisdom of the world foolish (1 Corinthians 1:23–25). If you stand true to your faith in God, there will be situations in which you will come across extortioners, cunning, crafty people, who use their wits instead of worshiping God, and you will appear a fool. Are you prepared to appear a fool for Christ’s sake? Very few of us know anything about suffering for Christ’s sake. A man who knows nothing about Christ will suffer for conscience or conviction’s sake. To suffer for Christ’s sake is to suffer because of being personally related to Him.

If you are going to be true to God, you will appear a fool amongst those who do not believe in God, and you must lay your account with this. Jesus said, “Every one therefore who shall confess Me before men . . . ” (rv). and it tests a man for all he is worth to confess Jesus Christ, because the confession has to be made in the set he belongs to and esteems. The “shame” of the gospel. “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, ” says Paul.

No man can confess Jesus Christ without realising the cost to others; if he states this, he rebukes them. The Spirit of God may lay hold of one man among a crowd of men to be related to God, but his sense of honour may keep him from going through—I don’t want to appear different from the others; if I go through with this and relate myself to Jesus Christ, I shall be a speckled bird26 and look superior. Many a man is kept from coming to Jesus because his own crowd is not going that road. It is a standard of honour, but a standard of honour not rightly related. In the life of a disciple it is the honour of Jesus Christ that is at stake, not our own honour. Your crowd matters to you, but your crowd does not matter to me; nor do you need to care what my crowd thinks of you. But take a step aside from your own immediate circle, and you will have to reckon with what they say about you (cf. Hebrews 13:13).

In Christian experience what stands in the way of my obedience to God is not the cost to me, but the cost to my father and mother and others. “If any man cometh unto Me, and hateth not his own father, and mother . . . he cannot be My disciple” (rv). Jesus Christ’s penetration comes straight home. Think what it cost Jesus Christ’s mother and His friends for Him to be true to God. If He had not been true to what He came to do, His mother would not have had the sword pierce her heart; His own nation would not have blasphemed the Holy Ghost. In going on with God this is where we find the anachronism comes in—according to the astute wisdom of the world we live in, we are made to do or say the thing at the wrong time. This is brought home today by the war. It is not a question of what it costs the individual men to join up, but of the cost to those who belong to them; the strain the wives and mothers and fathers and children have to bear. That is the terrific cost to the man who goes out to fight his country’s battles. No man can tell why he enlisted.

The watchword “For King and Country” is too shallow. The sacrifice he makes is never intended for man, it is meant for God, and is to be poured out before the Lord, as David poured out the water from the well of Bethlehem (see 2 Samuel 23:14–17).

Something doing

Ecclesiastes 7:8–12

And is it that the haze of grief
Makes former gladness loom so great?
The lowness of the present state,
That sets the past in this relief ?
Or that the past will always win
A glory from its being far,
An orb into the perfect star
We saw not, when we moved therein.
Tennyson

1. The End Explains—and the Patient Excels the Proud (Ecclesiastes 7:8)
2. The Excitement of Exasperation—and Discretion Excels Domineering (Ecclesiastes 7:9)
3. The Religion of Reminiscence—and the Present Excels the Past (Ecclesiastes 7:10)
4. The Wisdom of the World and the World of Wisdom (Ecclesiastes 7:11–12)

There is a tendency in us all to mourn over some thing—to say that the past was a great deal better than the present, or that the future will be better; the worst time we ever lived in is the present—forgetting that we never lived in any other time! Because a thing is good enough for us, or for an age, or for a nation, is not sufficient to make it the truth. It may be a statement that will do for a time, but unless we have been dumped down on to the basis of things, our experience is of no avail as a revelation of the foundation of life. It is the extraordinary thinker, the man with the extreme experience, rather than the average man, who gets at the truth at the basis of things. When we deal with great thinkers like Solo mon or Shakespeare we get to the truth of things; we do not get the truth through experience. Most of us do not think; we live healthy ordinary lives and don’t bother about thinking at all; but when an upheaval comes from underneath proving that the basis of things is not rational, we find the value of the Bible attitude, which is that the basis of things is tragic and not rational, and the war has proved that the Bible is right. We have to live based on our relationship to God in the actual condition of things as they are.

1. The End Explains—and the Patient Excels the Proud (Ecclesiastes 7:8)

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.

“The end explains, ” not “The end justifies the means”— that is never right. If you live as an animal, the end will explain that you have made a mess of things. If you live morally, the end will explain that you have lived morally. “End” has the meaning of “issue” (cf. Jeremiah 29:11 rv mg). When death ends the present order, the issue will reveal how you have lived. Only when you live in personal relationship to God does the end explain that you have the right secret of life. In the Book of Revelation (which is the Apocalypse of the New Testament as the Song of Solomon is the Apocalypse of the Old Testament), Jesus Christ refers to Himself as “the first and the last. ” It is in the middle that human choices are made; the beginning and the end remain with God. The decrees of God are birth and death, and in between those limits man makes his own distress or joy. Solomon counsels us not to be staggered when we find oppressors and tyrants around, the end will explain all. It is not enough to say that because my religious beliefs do for me, therefore they are satis factory. If everyone were well brought up and had a good heredity, any number of intellectual forms of belief would do. The test of a man’s religion is not that it does for him, but that it does for the worst man he knows.

2. The Excitement of Exasperation—and Discretion

Excels Domineering (Ecclesiastes 7:9) Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.

All through the Bible, emphasis is laid steadily on patience. A man’s patience is tested by three things— God, himself, and other people. An apt illustration is that of a bow and arrow in the hand of an archer. God is not aiming at what we are, nor is He asking our per mission. He has us in His hands for His own purpose, and He strains to the last limit; then when He lets fly, the arrow goes straight to His goal. Acquire your soul with patience. Don’t get impatient with yourself. The Bible is a relation of facts, the truth of which must be tested. Life may go on all right for a while, when suddenly a bereavement comes, or some crisis; unrequited love or a new love, a disaster, a business collapse, or a shocking sin, and we turn up our Bibles again and God’s word comes straight home, and we say, “Why, I never saw that there before.

As long as you live a logical life without realising the deeper depths of your personality, the Bible does not amount to anything; but strike lower down where mathemat ics and logic are of no account, and you find that Jesus Christ and the Bible tell every time. Truth is never a matter of intellect first, but of moral obedience. The great secret of intellectual progress is curiosity, but curiosity in moral matters is an abomination. Moral sophistry says—Go and find out for yourself. If I do, I am a fool. I don’t care what a man’s moral strength is, I defy him to start on the line of moral curiosity without instantly damning some of the finer sensibilities of his life. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17).

We are not to know evil by eating of the fruit of the tree; if we do eat of the tree we shall die. If you are pitchforked into moral filth, you will be kept; but if you go in to it from curiosity you will not be kept, no one goes into it without coming out soiled. You may be physically clean, but you have lost something. The essential element in moral life is obedience and submission. If you want spiritual truth, obey the highest standard you know. If any man will do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God or whether I speak from Myself ” ( John 7:17). Intellectually, curiosity is the thing; morally, obedience is what is needed. One ounce of chastity is worth fifty years of intellect in moral discernment. Moral truth is never reached by intellect, but only through conscience.

When a fine keen intellect and moral obedience go together, we find the mind that is beginning to discover step by step where goodness and truth lie. “Anger resteth in the bosom of fools. ” Solomon’s warning is that a man who excites himself to exasperation is a fool, because simulated indignation pro duces the thing itself. For instance, if in the morning you begin to snarl, in less than half an hour you will feel thoroughly bad tempered. The man who can curb his spirit and control himself is a wise man, and is better than the man who can take a city. Discretion excels domineering. Obstinacy and strength of will are often confounded, but they are very different. An obstinate man is unintelligent; a strong minded man is one who has made up his mind on a matter but is prepared to listen to your arguments and deal with them, and show to your satisfaction that his decision is right.

A stubborn man is always a “small potato. ” We may make up our minds easily, but to make up a mind of any breadth takes time, there are so many sides to every matter. If you have made up your mind on the line of strength and not of obstinacy, when you are questioned you don’t domineer. Domineering is the intellectual side of stubbornness, and is a sign of moral weakness. It is absurd to mistake the expression of physical stub bornness, such as a square jaw, for strength of will; tenacity of will may go with a jaw like a child’s top. Will is not a thing I possess; will is the whole man active. Solomon is pointing out that the man who is excited into exasperation is a weak man, a fool, and if he begins to domineer it shows he has no discretion. There are some things that can be answered straight off and others that cannot. “Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry. ” Anger nearly always covers up a thing that is wrong. Suppose you have been in the wrong in a certain matter and no one knows it but yourself, and then you are wrongfully accused of something else, you are so thankful that the real thing was not discovered that you make protestations of innocence as if you were spotlessly right all through. It is an indication that there is weakness and foolishness somewhere. Never domineer, and never get exasperated unless you want to be a fool.

3. The Religion of Reminiscence—and the Present Excels the Past (Ecclesiastes 7:10)

Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.

At the beginning of the war what was called the Christian religion was mainly a cult of reminiscence. Take any denomination you like, and the religious bodies that do not consider themselves denominations—was their main object the establishment of a family likeness to Jesus Christ? No, their main object was to establish the particular creed they upheld, consequently when the crisis struck us, the religious element of the country was powerless to grip the situation. Individual spiritual people were not powerless; in every denomination there were those who were the true salt of earth, but the external phase of religion was not able to grapple with the situation. The passion of reminiscence was ruling everywhere, the old ways of doing things. A revival adds nothing, it sim ply brings back what had been lost and is a confession of failure. The effects of a revival may be deplorable. “Oh that we had the ancient days of simplicity and sunshine”—days of adversity and humbug! Things are bad and difficult now, but not a tithe as difficult as they used to be. It is of no use to pray for the old days; stand square where you are and make the present better than any past has been. Base all on your relationship to God and go forward, and presently you will find that what is emerging is infinitely better than the past ever was. The present excels the past because we have the wealth of the past to go on. Solomon is not talking evolution, but simple fact.

4. The Wisdom of the World and the World of Wisdom (Ecclesiastes 7:11–12)

Wisdom is good with an inheritance: and by it there is profit to them that see the sun. For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.

“Wisdom is good, and so is an inheritance, but it is more excellent that both should go together. It is all very well to talk about wisdom, but the best thing is to be shrewd, to have wisdom and money, to balance things properly. ” Solomon says that that compromise will deceive you. If a man is honest because it pays him to be, he ceases to be honest. “Ye cannot serve God and mam mon. We say we can because we do not see God. If I only see you, I will wink the other eye—you trick me and I’ll trick you. Civilisation is based on murder, it is wisdom with an inheritance, keep the two things going.

As long as you try the juggling trick you will find the teaching of Jesus Christ is nonsense, but any man who dares to take God at His word will find it work every time. The world of wisdom is to bank all on God and disregard the consequences. Men are told to “decide for Christ”; no man can do it; what a man has to do is deliberately to commit himself to Jesus Christ. We get hold of the size of our dastardly impertinence when we say to God—”No, I can’t trust Your word; I can’t live the kind of life You require. ” Are we prepared to stake our all on the honour of Jesus Christ? Immediately a man is driven to distress and he realises that he must sink anyhow, he goes straight to Jesus Christ and finds that instead of sinking, he is lifted up and receives salvation. Stake everything on the honour of Jesus Christ, and you will find you have struck bed rock. Whenever our spiritual life is unsatisfactory it is because we have said to God—”I won’t”; “You can’t expect me to trust You. ” Then we must take the con sequences. “And He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief. ” If Jesus Christ has done no mighty works for me it is either because I don’t believe He can, or I don’t want Him to. I may say—”Oh yes, I believe Jesus Christ will give me the Holy Spirit”; but I am not prepared for Him to do it, I don’t want Him to.

Will you launch out on what Jesus says? If you will, you will find that God is as good as His word. Get to the place where you make the thing inevitable, burn your bridges behind you, make retreat impossible, then go ahead. Solomon’s counsel is wise— “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. ” It is leaning to our own understanding that keeps the bridges behind.

“Over the top”

Ecclesiastes 7:13–22

1. Inevitable and Attainable (Ecclesiastes 7:13)
2. Instructive and Aggregate (Ecclesiastes 7:14)
3. Irreparable and Anticlimax (Ecclesiastes 7:15)
4. Introspective and Abnormal (Ecclesiastes 7:16)
5. Iniquitous and Anarchic (Ecclesiastes 7:17)
6. Injunction and Anathema(Ecclesiastes 7:18)
7. Intelligent and Animal (Ecclesiastes 7:19)
8. Impeccable and Artificial (Ecclesiastes 7:20)
9. Invidious and Argumentative (Ecclesiastes 7:21–22)

When the time comes to act, it has to be a going over the top—over the top of everything you have been entrenched in—prejudices, beliefs, etc.

1. Inevitable and Attainable (Ecclesiastes 7:13)

Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which He hath made crooked?

All the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament apostles make a distinction between the inevitable and the attainable. There are inevitable things for which a man is not responsible. For instance, I cannot say when I will be born or when I will die; birth and death are inevitable. I have to attain within the two on the basis of things as they are. If this distinction between the inevitable and the attainable is not made, it will lead to a muddle in the presentation of evangelical religion. When a man goes “over the top, ” he sees things as he never saw them before. He comes across things he cannot diagnose or understand, and he begins to flounder and wonders what he ought to do. The thing for him to do is to base on the inevitable and then find out what is attainable. No man can redeem his own soul, or give himself a new heredity; that is the work of the sovereign grace of God. Man has nothing to do with Redemption, it is God’s “bit”; but God cannot give a man a good character, that is not God’s business, nor is it an inevitable thing. God will give us what we cannot give ourselves, a totally new heredity (see Luke 11:13). God will put the disposition of His Son, Holy Spirit, into any man who asks, then on that basis man has to work out a holy character. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God which worketh in you. . . . ” “Who can make that straight, which He hath made crooked? In our talks on the Book of Job we mentioned the refraction of God in the universe. [“Whenever God presents Himself in the present order of the material universe, He appears to go crooked, that is, crooked to our reason; we cannot understand Him. God allows things in the cosmic world which are a refraction; they do not continue in the straight simple line my mind tells me they ought to take. . . . If you try to weave a conception of God out of Jesus Christ’s presentation of Him and then look at life as it is, you will find what is meant by the cosmic refraction of God—the God revealed in Jesus Christ is flatly contradicted in the natural world” (cf. Romans 8:20–22). [Baffled to Fight Better, pp. 57–58. —Footnote in original text. ] What man finds it easy to explain actual facts as he sees them to day in connection with his belief in God? Job is the expression of a man who suffered in this way. In theory God appears to be just and kind, but in actual life things seem to flatly contradict His justice and kindness. It is part of common sense to be atheistic rather than to believe in the refraction of God in the universe. Solomon says that if we try and work things out on the line of intellect, on a theory of goodness or justice, we will always find the refraction. There is something wrong at the basis of things, and it cannot be put right until another inevitable thing happens, viz. , the manifestation of the sons of God. The thing to do is to place our faith in God and attain morally in the midst of things, crooked as they appear. Watch the inevitable things, and don’t try to work out the riddle of the universe.

2. Instructive and Aggregate (Ecclesiastes 7:14)

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: God also hath set the one over against the other, to the end that man should find nothing after him.

The test of elemental honesty is the way a man behaves himself in grief and in joy. The natural elemental man expresses his joy or sorrow straight off. To day in our schools boys are taught stoicism; it produces an admirable type of lad externally, but not so admirable internally. When we are rightly related to God we must let things have their way with us and not pretend things are not as they are. It is difficult not to simulate sorrow or gladness, but to remain natural and stedfastly true to God as things come. Don’t deal only with the section that is sad or with the section that is joyful, deal with them together.

When we accept God’s purpose for us in Christ Jesus, we know that “all things work together for good. ” Stoicism has the effect of making a man hysterical and sentimental, it produces a denseness spiritually. When you are joyful, be joyful; when you are sad, be sad. If God has given you a sweet cup, don’t make it bitter; and if He has given you a bitter cup, don’t try and make it sweet; take things as they come. One of the last lessons we learn is not to be an amateur providence—”I shall not allow that person to suffer. ” Suffering, and the inevitable result of suffering, is the only way some of us can learn, and if we are shielded God will ultimately take the one who interferes by the scruff of the neck and remove him. The fingers that caress a child may also hurt its flesh; it is the power of love that makes them hurt.

3. Irreparable and Anticlimax ((Ecclesiastes 7:15)

All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.

For a man to have doubts is not a sign that he is a bad man. David was up against things in his day—”Surely in vain have I cleansed my heart, and washed my hands in innocency; for all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning” (Psalm 73:13–14 rv). Sum up the life of Jesus Christ by any other standard than God’s, and it is an anticlimax of failure. “It is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful”— not successful. The anticlimax comes when we look for rewards—”If I am good, I shall be blessed. ” The logic of mathematics does not amount to anything in the spiritual realm. If a man has had a good beginning of splendid uprightness, and all the advantages of a good education, we may say he is sure to attain. There never was a sunnier beginning than Samson’s, and yet he ended in a frantic collapse. There are irreparable things and anticlimaxes in life, and the explanation is not to be found on the rational line, but on the line of personal relationship to God. Remain true to God, and remember that certain things are irreparable. There is no road back to yesterday, it is only God on the basis of Redemption Who can get back to yesterday. Logic and reason have to do with things based on space and time, but they cannot push beyond space and time. We are all agnostic about God, about the Spirit of God, and prayer. It is nonsense to call prayer reason able; it is the most super reasonable thing there is. The war has produced anticlimaxes in hundreds of lives, men are maimed and useless for fighting their ambitions. You rarely hear a man who has been through the real agony of suffering say that he disbelieves in God; it is the one who watches others going through suffering who says he disbelieves in God. In the suffering there is a compensation which cannot be got at in any other way. It is not seen from the outside because the compensation cannot be articulately stated.

4. Introspective and Abnormal (Ecclesiastes 7:16)

Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself ?

Solomon is dealing with the fact that a man ought not to be either a religious fanatic or a stupid fool. Don’t be fanatical, he says, remember you have an actual life to live. A fanatic sees God’s order but remains invincibly ignorant about God’s permissive will. The spiritual fanatic ignores the actual life and says—”Jesus Christ said there is no making and giving in marriage in heaven, so there must be none on earth. ” That is being over wise. If you examine yourself too much, you unfit yourself for life. There is a stage in life when introspection is necessary, but if it is pushed too far a man becomes abnormally hypersensitive, either in conceit or grovelling. Introspection is the result of love or of anything elemental. When a man falls in love, he feels he is not worthy to crawl on the earth by the side of his divinity! The same thing spiritually; when once a man sees God he is apt to forget that he has to live on this planet. Solomon’s counsel is to live an earthly life on the basis of things as they are, and not to compromise or be over wise. It is easier to cut ourselves off from actual things and to nourish a life of our own intellectually. An intellectual man sums up other men by their brains, as Carlyle27 did, and he is apt to become contemptuous. A man is more than his brain. A man who lives a mystical life or an intellectual life frequently has an attitude of lofty contempt towards others. No man has any right to maintain such an attitude towards another human being, watching him as a spectator for purposes of his own, as journalistic copy, or as a religious specimen; if he does he ceases to be a human being by pretending to be more.

5. Iniquitous and Anarchic (Ecclesiastes 7:17)

Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?

Don’t go to the opposite extreme and say, I am going to live as I choose. The right attitude is between the two—neither “over wise” nor “over much wicked. ” In the Incarnation we see the right amalgam— pure Deity and the pure human mixed. The talk about pure Deity is an intellectual conceit, it sounds winning to aesthetic culture, but it has no worth in a man’s practical life. An Almighty, Incomprehensible, Incognoscible Being does not amount to anything to me. It is when God becomes Incarnate that we see the right amalgam, dust and Deity made one, human flesh presenced with Divinity. That is the meaning of the Incarnation, and Jesus Christ claims He can do it for any one of us. Man cannot be pure Deity and he cannot be pure dust; he has to have the right alloy—dust and Deity, made one by drudgery, and this produces the type of life with the right balance.

6. Injunction and Anathema (Ecclesiastes 7:18)

It is good that thou shouldest take hold of this; yea, also from this withdraw not thine hand: for he that feareth God shall come forth of them all.

Don’t be fanatically religious and don’t be irreverently blatant. Remember that the two extremes have to be held in the right balance. If your religion does not make you a better man, it is a rotten religion. The test of true religion is when it touches these four things— food, money, sex and mother earth. These things are the test of a right sane life with God, and the religion that ignores them or abuses them is not right. God made man of the dust of the ground, and that dust can express either Deity or devilishness. Remember we are to be not numskulls, but holy men, full blooded and holy to the last degree, not anaemic creatures without enough strength to be bad. The relation to life ordained by Jesus Christ does not un-sex men and women, but enables them to be holy men and women. “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10 rv). Money is a test, another thing which proves a man’s religion; and the way a man treats the soil will also prove whether or not he is a son of God. A man needs to hold a right attitude to all these things by means of his personal relationship to God.

7. Intelligent and Animal (Ecclesiastes 7:19)

Wisdom strengtheneth the wise more than ten mighty men which are in the city.

“He that ruleth his spirit (is better) than he that taketh a city” (Proverbs 16:32). An intelligent man in a city, one who is guided by sagacity, is worth ten strong men who guard the city. In the present cam paign it is the mobilisation of invention that is telling more and more. The man who is able to make use of sagacious inventions is worth a dozen men with mere strength, because he makes use of the strength of others. Our great commanders and leaders have not always been strong men physically. It is not always true that a sound mind is in a sound body; the finest of minds are often in impaired bodies, and some of the most sordid minds in healthy bodies.

8. Impeccable and Artificial (Ecclesiastes 7:20)

For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not. Impeccable—liable not to sin.

The idea that because Jesus Christ was without sin therefore He could not be tempted, has become woven into religious belief. If that were so, the record of His temptation is a mere farce. Could Jesus Christ be tempted? Undoubtedly He could, because temptation and sin are not the same thing. “In all points tempted, . . . yet without sin. ” No good man is impeccable, that is, he never arrives at the place where it is impossible to sin. A man is able not to sin, but it never becomes impossible for him to sin. Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God” (1 John 3:9). The life of God is born in us, and the life of God cannot sin; that does not mean that we cannot sin; but that if we obey the life of God in us, we need not sin. The best of men are but the best of men. Don’t glory in men; don’t say, I am of Paul; I am of Apollos. Bank your confidence in God, not in men. Unless we are damnable, we are not worth saving. If we cannot go to the devil, we cannot go to God. The measure of the depth to which a man can fall is the height to which he can rise. Virtue is the outcome of conflict, not of necessity.

9. Invidious and Argumentative (Ecclesiastes 7:21–22)

Also take no heed unto all words that are spoken; lest thou hear thy servant curse thee: for oftentimes also thine own heart knoweth that thou thyself likewise has cursed others.

“For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. ” This is an inexorable law. “I am perfectly certain So and so has been criticising me. ” Well, what have you been saying about him? Watch the process. It is as certain as God’s throne, the measure you mete will be meted to you, not necessarily by the same per son. Tit for tat is the inevitable law in actual life. Don’t talk too much, says Solomon; if you talk too much, others will too. Don’t be a busybody in other men’s matters. A gossip is not always the bad person he is made out to be, those who listen and don’t talk are the dangerous folk. The scandalmonger gets the blame, but the others are worse. A lie is not simply “a terminological inexactitude”; a lie is a truth told with bad intent. I may repeat the exact words of someone else and yet tell a lie because I convey a wrong meaning. Be careful, says Solomon, not to talk too much, because what you say will be taken up by others.

In the sty

Ecclesiastes 7:23–29

O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?
Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,
Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?
Maybe still I am but half dead;
Then I cannot be wholly dumb;
I will cry to the steps above my head
And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come
To bury me, bury me
Deeper, ever so little deeper.
Tennyson

1. Programme and Plague of the Heart (Ecclesiastes 7:23–24)
2. Prospecting in Pursuit of Happiness (Ecclesiastes 7:25)
3. Persecution and Peril of the HellCat (Ecclesiastes 7:26)
4. Perfidiousness of Perpetual Relation of Man and Woman (Ecclesiastes 7:27–28)
5. Perfection and Perversion of Humanity (Ecclesiastes 7:29)

The Bible deals with the worst tragedy that human nature and the devil could concoct. We seem to have forgotten this nowadays. The Atonement has been made a kind of moral “lavatory” wherein a man can wash and go out and get dirty again. But when a man like Solomon or Shakespeare or Ibsen lifts the veil from the basis of things (which most of us know noth ing of because we are too dense or too remote from it), we find that the Redemption deals with tragedy of an appalling order.

When the war broke out, the ruling note in religion was being struck not by the men and women who knew the basis of things, but by those who were unfamiliar with the abominable tragedy at the basis of human life, such as is being exhibited now; con sequently something feeble and ethereal and totally unlike the Bible was ruling, and being expressed in unrobust prayer meetings and in hymns and poems by anaemic people of both sexes. Our religious life was built up by people who were not dealing with tragedy. When civilised life is burst into we find what Solomon indicates, that the basis of life is tragic. No education, no culture, no sociology or government can touch the fathomless rot at the basis of human life in its deep est down storey. We live in the twenty second storey up, and the tragedies we touch are only personal tragedies; only one in a million comes to understand the havoc that underlies everything. This line of thinking is absolutely important, not relatively important.

1. Programme and Plague of the Heart (Ecclesiastes 7:23–24)

All this have I proved by wisdom: I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me. That which is far on, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?

Solomon deliberately set himself to find out things and to live according to the highest possible wisdom, but, he says, “it was far from me. He discovered what every lad who has been well brought up and has had a decent amount of natural religion in his life experiences, when he finds that his ideals cannot be realised. A lad sees more clearly, dreams more purely and has higher thoughts in his teens than ever he does afterwards. Then he goes through the severest of struggles—I cannot bring my actual life up to the standard of my ideals; I won’t lower my ideals, although I can never hope to make them actual. It cannot be done by prayer or by education; it can only be done in the way Jesus Christ says—”Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, ” i. e. , I will make the ideal and the actual one.

The only way in which ideals can be made actual is by a personal rela tionship to God through Jesus Christ. Solomon was the wisest and the wealthiest of kings, yet he says that “the plague of his own heart” knocked him out (see 1 Kings 8:38). This is the first lesson everyone of us has to learn. To begin with we are not prepared to accept Jesus Christ’s diagnosis of the human heart, we prefer to trust our own ignorant innocence. Jesus Christ says, “Out of the heart proceed fornication, adultery, murder, lasciviousness, thieving, lying, ” etc. (Mark 7:21–23). No man has ever believed that.

We have not the remotest conception that what Jesus says about the human heart is true until we come up against something further on in our lives. We are apt to be indignant and say—”I don’t believe those things are in my heart, ” and we refuse the diagnosis of the only Master there is of the human heart. We need never know the plague of our own heart and the terrible possibilities in human life if we will hand ourselves over to Jesus Christ; but if we stand on our own right and wisdom at any sec ond an eruption may occur in our personal lives, and we may discover to our unutterable horror that we can be murderers, etc. This is one of the most ghastly and humiliating and devastating truths in the whole of human experience. Our convictions are strong on the basis of innocence, and many a man out of havoc and sin and the clanging of the gates of Paradise on the irreparable past, has to come to Jesus Christ with a life exhausted by sin. Why should he? We know what Jesus Christ can do for a man in that condition, but why cannot we see what He can do for the man who is not exhausted by sin? God does rescue the man who is down and out in sin, but there is no reason why any man should get there. Any man can get there, not one of us is immune. We may say—I don’t know how he could do it. But we do. It is done by human beings just like you and just like me, without either our cowardice or our refinement. There is no virtue in not being bad on that line. It is because the vileness at the basis of the human heart has been closed over that we hear the talk nowadays of an “impossible chastity. ” Chastity is undesirable if I want to be a beast; but no holiness or rectitude of character is impossible; it is simply undesirable if I prefer the other way. Education cannot deal with the plague of the heart, all our vows cannot touch it; the only Being Who can deal with it is God through a personal relationship to Him, by receiving His Spirit after accepting the diagnosis of Jesus Christ.

2. Prospecting in Pursuit of Happiness (Ecclesiastes 7:25)

I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness.

Solomon prospected to find out where the true essen tial enjoyment of life lay—was it in being an animal, an intellectualist, an aesthete, a governor, in being educated or uneducated? And he came to the conclusion that a man cannot find the true essential joy of his life anywhere but in his relationship to God. Rationalism can never be the basis of things. Rea son is my guide among things as they are, but reason cannot account for things being as they are. We do not think on the basis of Christianity at all. We are taught to think like pagans for six days a week and to reverse the order for one day, consequently in critical moments we think as pagans and our religion is left in the limbo of the inarticulate. Our thinking is based not on Hebrew Wisdom and confidence in God, but on the Wisdom of the Greeks which is removed from practical life, and on that basis we persuade ourselves that if a man knows a thing is wrong he will not do it. That is not true. The plague with me, apart from the grace of God, is that I know what is right, but I’m hanged if I’ll do it! What I want to know is, can anyone tell me of a power that will alter my “want to”? Education will never alter the “want to, ” neither will high ideals nor vowing; that is where the great fundamental mistake in dealing with human problems has been made. It is only when a man is born from above (rv mg) of the Spirit of God that he finds the “want to” is altered. God does not take away the capacity to go wrong; if He did, we should not be worth anything. It is never impossible to go wrong. We can only deal with the “sty” on the basis of Redemption, not by thinking or by education, but only by Redemption which is worked out by the Spirit of God.

3. Persecution and Peril of the Hell-Cat (Ecclesiastes 7:26)

And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her.

The relationship of man and woman has been totally misrepresented. The revelation in the Bible is not that it is a question of the one being unequal to the other but of the two being one. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him; male and female created He them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created” (Genesis 5:1–2). * Man, the male being, took the government into his own hands and thereby introduced sin into the human race, and when God spoke He said that the Redeemer should come through the woman (see Genesis 3:15–16).

The Mother of Jesus Christ was a virgin. Redemption comes through woman, not through man. A woman can sink lower than a man because she can rise higher; the woman who has not a right relationship to God may become a she devil, e. g. , the attitude of a woman in revenge. The tragedies of human life along this line are appalling. Four things—sex, money, food, and mother earth—make a man a king and a woman a queen, or they make a man a beast and a woman a she devil. Any lad who gets enveigled 28 by the kind of woman Solomon is describing will find that the ten drils will remain to the day of his death unless God blasts them out by Redemption. The bands round his soul will never snap otherwise, it is impossible. The terror and iniquity Solomon is speaking of is being repeated over and over again in our day.

The moral nemesis runs right through, and Solomon’s counsel is right, the only way a man can escape is by pleasing God. If once these relationships are started in a man’s life, the only thing he can do is to go to God, to scurry to Him like a rabbit. A man may give up the practices, but he will never escape the moral nemesis, it will haunt him in his unconscious personality. There is no power in vowing or education or forgetting that can release him, but “whoso pleaseth God shall escape, ” that is, committing himself to Jesus Christ and being delivered. Solomon is not “slanging” woman, but pointing out that the result of sin in the human race is to have made the feminine part of Man which ought to be directly related to God, demoniacal if not so related.

The one who hauls you nearer to God is your mother or wife or sweetheart; but if your woman is not related to God, then the good Lord deliver you! No man is a match for the iniquity that is feminine when it is out of touch with God. When Pope said that “most women have no characters at all, ” he meant the same thing, that a woman’s character comes from the essential relation of her life. If she is essentially related to God, her whole life is a sacrament for God; if not, her life may be a sacrament for the devil. The Bible reveals that the essentially feminine is meant to be the handmaid of God; but if the essentially feminine is prostitute, no man on earth can withstand her.

In all Celtic races there is a terrific suspicion of women, the reason being that woman goes right back to the basis of things, which is inarticulate. A man can neither rise so high nor sink so low as a woman. Any man or woman who falls in love comes right into God’s presence, he or she instantly feels religious. Once love—my sovereign preference for another per son—is awakened, it always goes direct to God like a homing pigeon. It is not hypocrisy on the part of a lad when he begins to pray, he cannot help it, his love is the finest lodestar in his life. That is the contrast between love and lust. Love can wait and worship endlessly; lust says—I must have it at once. The thing that can be hellishly wrong can be marvellously right.

4. Perfidiousness of Perpetual Relation of Man and Woman (Ecclesiastes 7:27–28)

Behold, this have I found, saith the preacher, counting one by one, to find out the account: which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not: one man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found.

Solomon is not talking as a bitter disenchanted man, he is giving the Hebrew conception of things, that the counterpart of the woman is the man of God, and if she cannot find him she is either brokenhearted or she may become a woman of the devil. “I have looked for the essential wisdom in a man and have not found it; in a woman and have not found it there either. ” In human life as it is there is something perfidious in the perpetual relationship of man and woman. Paul’s counsel in dealing with marriage has been misrepresented—”Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, ” because we have taken the word “submit” to mean the obedience due from a slave to his master. It is not the obedience of an inferior to a superior, but the obedience of the equality of love. In the New Testament the word “obey” is used to express the relationship of equals. “. . . though He was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which He suffered” (rv ). For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church. If Christ is the Head of the husband, he is easily the head of the wife, not by effort, but because of the nature of the essen tially feminine. But if Jesus Christ is not the Head of the husband, the husband is not the head of the wife. Our Lord always touches the most sacred human relationships, and He says—You must be right with Me first before those relationships can be right; and if they hinder your getting right with Me, then you must hate them (see Luke 14:26).

5. Perfection and Perversion of Humanity (Ecclesiastes 7:29)

Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

The Bible states that God made man, i. e. , the Fed eral Head of the race, in His own image. The only other Being in the image of God is Jesus Christ, the Second Adam. By eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam knew evil posi tively and good negatively. The Second Adam never ate of the fruit of the tree; He knew evil negatively by positively knowing good, and when a man is reborn of the Spirit of God he finds that that is the order God intended. Until we are born again we know good only by contrast with evil. The bias of the human heart is to find out the bad things first. How many of us are curious concerning the right way of life, concerning purity and nobility, and how many are curious to find out the borderland mysteries? The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil has given human nature its bias of insatiable curiosity on the “sty” line. It is only after readjustment by Jesus Christ that the bias is on the other line, a tremendous thirst after God. This is life eternal, that they might know Thee. “

Some Perspective

Ecclesiastes 8

. . . life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipped in baths of hissing tears.
And batter’d by the shocks of doom
To shape and use.
Tennyson

1. In the Diplomatic Service (Ecclesiastes 8:1–5)
(a) Courtiers, Discretion (verse 1)
(b) Consistency to Decrees (verse 2)
(c) Character and Deportment (verse 3)
(d) Commands of Despotism (verse 4)

2. In the Democratic Scrum (Ecclesiastes 8:6–10)
(a) Power to Wilfulness (verses 6–7)
(b) Powerlessness of Willingness (verse 8)
(c) Price of Will Power (verse 9)
(d) Perversity of Will Worship (verse 10)

3. In the Dispensational Scheme (Ecclesiastes 8:11–17)
(a) Patience of God and Bad (verse 11)
(b) Patience of God and Good (verses 12–13)
(c) Preordination of God and Now (verses  14–15)
(d) Probation of God and Worry (verse 16)
(e) Providence of God and Faith (verse 17)

1. In the Diplomatic Service (Ecclesiastes 8:1–5)

It is easy to despise the man above me because I know nothing about him, but Solomon counsels us to have a wider perspective, to look at things beyond our insular notions. It is a great education to try and put yourself into the circumstances of others before passing judgement on them. Solomon’s counsel in these verses lies with these who in this order of things hap pen to be in the diplomatic service.

(a) Courtiers’ Discretion (verse 1)

Who is as the wise man? and who knoweth the interpretation of a thing? A man’s wisdom maketh his face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed.

In Old Testament days if a man came before an Eastern monarch with a sad countenance, he was liable to punishment (see Nehemiah 2:2). The dis cretion of a courtier does not make him a hypocrite, but puts him in the state of mind whereby his face indicates a strength and boldness which does not quaver. If you watch the faces of men who move much in diplomatic circles you will see exactly what Solomon indicates, an uninterpretable expression.

The discretion of a courtier is to keep a bold face. Society is based on playacting, it must be. You can not say what you really think; if you do, other people will too, and if everyone were absolutely frank there would be no room for us! The Bible point of view about government is that God compels man to govern man for Him, whether he likes it or not. The ordinance of government, whether it is a bad or good government, does not lie with men, but is entirely in God’s hands; the king or the government will have to answer to God (cf. 1 Peter 2:13–14). The conservative attitude—My king, right or wrong—is a degeneration from the one great central point of the government of man by man.

God created a certain nation from the loins of one man, to be His own people; they were not to be like the other nations of the world, but to be the bond slaves of Jehovah until every nation came to know God (see Deuteronomy 17:14–15). Israel and Judah said, “Nay, but we will have a king over us (see 1 Samuel 8:19–20). The best kings Israel and Judah ever had were David and Solomon, and yet the most troublesome conditions as well as the most prosperous came during their reigns. Whether a king is of the order of the auto cratic kings of the East, or the order of the Kaiser, the

explanation of kingship, according to the Bible, is that it is the result of the wrong that entered into the world by the first man taking his rule over himself. Hell is an eternal and an abiding distress to what ever goes into it. Whatever goes into hell can never again be established as a right thing. We say that mil itarism is going into hell just now; but militarism will crop up again in some form or another. Something has gone into hell, but it is difficult to say what.

(b) Consistency to Decrees (verse 2)

I counsel thee to keep the king’s commandment, and that in regard of the oath of God.

Anything bound before the king is bound as by the oath of God, and the consistency of a courtier is to abide by it. If a man lives in that order of things he must not be a traitor, he cannot take the action of a free individual man. The existence of peace and order depends entirely on this being remembered.

(c) Character and Deportment (verse 3)

Be not hasty to go out of his sight: stand not in an evil thing; for he doeth whatsoever pleaseth him.

Deportment is the way a man conducts himself. See that you neither hurry in nor out, says Solomon; your attitude must be both deliberate and careful. In the higher circles of social life this same thing is necessary. It is an easy business for the man who deals in black and white to pass judgement on the man who deals in grey. In the diplomatic service a man never deals with black and white, only with grey. For instance, it is easy to condemn British rule in India or in Egypt, but it is another matter to recognise the vast series of complications which the rulers in these countries have to face. In politics also it is difficult to steer a course; there is a complication of forces to be dealt with which most of us know nothing about. We have no affinity for this kind of thing, and it is easy to ignore the condition of the men who have to live there, and to pass condemnation on them.

(d) Commands of Despotism (verse 4)

Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto him, What doest thou?

If a man is a courtier under a despotic king there is no possibility of replying; he has to obey to the last limit and has no right to a private opinion. The wise man is the one who knows when to speak and when to be silent.

2. In the Democratic Scrum (Ecclesiastes 8:6–10)

All this has nothing to do with us, it is outside our perspective. How a king lives is a matter of moon shine to us; but one day we may have to pass judge ment. Before long the democratic scrum may have to pass judgement on men who are not democrats, on courtiers, and on despotic kings, and before we can pass judgement we must have perspective. It is easy to condemn a state of things we know nothing about while we make excuses for the condition of things we ourselves live in. The state of things resulting in the “democratic scrum” is better than the perfection of a machine. In our own country, rightly or wrongly, we committed regicide; France did the same. The world has never had to pay the price for either Britain or France that it has for Germany. Similarly, if I never correct my child I am making a nice mess for other folks by and by. We have lost sight of these things, but they are elements we have to come in contact with.

(a) Power to Wilfulness (verses 6–7)

Because to every purpose there is time and judgement, therefore the misery of man is great upon him. For he knoweth not that which shall be: for who can tell him when it shall be?

There is a power to wilfulness in man and when it is let loose there is the “wild ass” to account for; no matter what a man chooses, he heads towards evil. The same problem is found in religion. One of the counterfeits of the rule of God is the Roman Catholic Church. It is a perfect system of govern ment. After the Reformation when the people were delivered from the incubus of Roman Catholic domination, many of them went more to the devil. Whenever a man is freed from a dominance that is ostensibly wrong, he has a power of will which may make for his misery. The same thing happened in connection with the freeing of the slaves; instead of using their freedom, many went back to their mas ters, while others abused their freedom.

(b) Powerlessness of Willingness (verse 8)

There is no man that hath power over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither hath he power in the day of death: and there is no discharge in that war; neither shall wickedness deliver those that are given to it.

A man belonging to the democratic scrum may make up his mind that he is willingly going to do good, but no man can do it alone. The democratic rule is made up of people just like you and me, and unless we keep together, either by the right of a king or by the sway of some religious or civilised rule, we will kick things to bits, and the most willing amongst us will have the worst of it. The divine right of kings” is a counterfeit for the true government of human life by man; at the same time it must be reckoned with.

We have to lay our account with the fact that the deepest bias in man is not towards God but away from Him, and if the individual man is allowed a right of way, he has a power of will which will increase the common misery. We have seen the hollow mockery of the diplomatic order of things under the divine right of kings, and today, rightly or wrongly, we are all in the democratic scrum as never before; but nei ther autocracy nor democracy will solve the problem. (c) Price of Will Power (verse 9) All this have I seen, and applied my heart unto every work that is done under the sun: there is a time wherein one man ruleth over another to his own hurt. The man who has power over another may hurt himself by the exercise of that power unless he him self is ruled by a greater power. If I have had a vivid religious experience and have power over people by means of that experience, the danger is that I usurp the place of God and say, “You must come my way; you must have this experience. ” This may damage you, but it damages me more, because my spirit is far removed from the spirit of Jesus Christ, it is the spirit of a spiritual prig. Whenever I exercise will power without at the same time being dominated myself, I damage something or someone.

(d) Perversity of Will Worship (verse 10)

And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of the holy, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done: this is also vanity.

Paul warns of the things which “have indeed a show of wisdom in will worship, ” the idea that you are suf ficient to govern yourself. We have got out of conceit with Neitzsche’s phrase, “the power to will”—if I have enough will I can do it. The despotic rule is full of defect, misery and anguish, so is the democratic rule. Men may make all kinds of rules, but they get back again into despotism. Every man has power to go to hell because by nature man’s will is towards selfrealisation. We may have no affinity with these things, but in passing judgement (and we never know when the time for passing judgement may come), we will be criminally unjust judges if we have not a true perspec tive. After the war it will not be a question of judging the autocrat but of judging the democrat, and the one is as bad as the other unless he is ruled by a power greater than himself.

3. In the Dispensational Scheme (Ecclesiastes 8:11–17)

(a) Patience of God and Bad (verse 11)

Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.

We say, Why does God allow these things? Why does He allow a despot to rule? In this dispensation it is the patient long suffering of God that is being manifested. God allows men to say what they like and do what they like (see 2 Peter 3:14). Peter says that God is long suffering, and He is giving us ample opportunity to try whatever line we like both in indi vidual and national life. If God were to end this dis pensation now, the human race would have a right to say, You should have waited, there is a type of thing You never let us try. God is leaving us to prove to the hilt that it can not be done in any other way than Jesus Christ’s way, or the human race would not be satisfied.

(b) Patience of God and Good (verses 12–13)

Though a sinner do evil an hundred times, and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear God, which fear before Him: but it shall not be well with the wicked, neither shall he prolong his days, which are as a shadow; because he feareth not before God.

God allows the good to develop itself in the heart of the bad, and Solomon banks on the fact that the man who is rooted and grounded in confidence in God will come out right in the end. Nowadays we have the preaching of expediency: If you tell people that, they will take advantage of it. If the Almighty leaves His open knives around, it is not our business to put on the sheath. The rugged truths of God seem to give licence to men; but do they? The prig notion makes us say certain things in order to terrorise people from doing wrong. But how much better are they if they don’t do it? The reward for doing right is not that I get an insurance ticket for heaven, but that I do the right because it is right. Honesty ceases to be the best policy if I am honest for a reason. If any man will live godly, he shall suffer persecution. If a man wants suc cess and a good time in the actual condition of things as they are, let him keep away from Jesus Christ, let him ignore His claims and the heroism of His holi ness, there is no commercial value in it. In the final wind up it is the man who has stuck true to God and damned the consequences who will come out the best; whether he has made the best or the worst of himself in this life is another matter.

(c) Preordination of God and Now (verses 14–15)

There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be just men, unto whom it happeneth accord- ing to the work of the wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous: I said that this also is vanity. Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun.

God’s programme for a man is Now, not what he is going to do presently but what he is now. Solomon says your attitude to life as it actually is now, is to remember you are a man or woman, and that you have to live on the earth as a human being and not try to be an angel. It is your relationship to God which fits you to live on the earth in the right way, not necessarily the successful way. Sometimes you will have the worst of it for doing right.

(d) Probation of God and Worry (verse 16)

When I applied mine heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done upon the earth: (for also there is that neither day nor night seeth sleep with his eyes).

To day men’s hearts are failing them for fear, not the men in the actual fighting, they are wonderfully sustained; but the business man at home. His rela tionships involve a great deal more than “now, ” they involve the presently and his children who are to come after him. How can he have faith in God when he sees the security of the future hauled to bits? Solo mon indicates that the wisest thing to do is to build our faith in God and not far reach so that we have to watch everything and have no room for faith in God, no time to pay attention to how we live in the Now.

(e) Providence of God and Faith (verse 17)

Then I beheld all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea farther; though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it.

The summing up of the whole matter, says Solomon, is that you cannot locate yourself, you are placed in circumstances over which you have no control. You do not choose your own heredity or your own disposition, these things are beyond your control, and yet these are the things which influence you. You may rake the bot tom of the universe, but you cannot explain things; they are wild, there is nothing rational about them. We cannot get to the bottom of things; we cannot get behind the before of birth or the after of death; there fore the wise man is the one who trusts the wisdom of God, not his own wits. The amateur providence trusts his wits, and if he has not been knocked out by the hard problems of life, he can say cheap and nasty things; but when once he is hit by the real tragedy of life he will find it is not in the power of human wits to guide him, and he becomes either a man of faith or a fatalist. Faith is trust in a God Whose ways you cannot trace, but whose character you know, and the man of faith hangs on to the fact that He is a God of honour. Fatalism means “my number’s up, ” I have to bow to the power whether I like it or not; I do not know the character of the power, but it is greater than I am and I must submit. In this dispensation we do know the character of God, although we do not know why His providential will should be as it is. Solomon indicates that the only thing to do in the present condition of things is to remain true to God, and God will not only see us through but will see the whole thing out to a perfect explanation. That is the faith of a Christian, and it takes some sticking to.

Time, death and trifles

If there be good in that I wrought,
Thy hand compelled it, Master, Thine.
Where I have failed to meet Thy thought
I know, through Thee, the blame is mine.
Take not that vision from my ken;
O, whatso’er may spoil or speed,
Help me to need no aid from men,
That I may help such men as need!
Rudyard Kipling

1. The Indiscernible Public Power of God (Ecclesiastes 9:1–2)
2. The Interim Probationary Programme of God (Ecclesiastes 9:3–4)
3. The Invincible Powerful Portion of Death (Ecclesiastes 9:5–6)
4. The Instructive Practical Prudence of Time (Ecclesiastes 9:7–9)

5. The Imperative Performing Practice of Work (Ecclesiastes 9:10)
6. The Incalculable Precarious Preference of Life (Ecclesiastes 9:11–12)
7. The Invidious Petulant Price for Wisdom (Ecclesiastes 9:13–16)
8. The Inveterate Popular Prejudice for Grab (Ecclesiastes 9:17–18)

We are apt to imagine that if we cannot state a thing in words it is of no value to us. What counts in talking and in reading is the atmosphere that is produced and what is opened up that would not be otherwise, There is a literature of knowledge and a literature of power. The former gives us informing stuff and we can say—This is what I have got; by the latter you cannot say what you have got but you are the better for it, your mind and heart are enlarged. We need more than information. The domain of things represented by the literature of power is that which comes with a knowledge of God’s Book. One of the great secrets of life is that obedience is the key to spiritual life as curiosity is the key to intellectual life. In the spiritual domain curiosity is not only of no use but is a direct hindrance. When once a man learns that spiritual knowledge can only be gained by obedience, the emancipation of his nature is incalculable

1. The Indiscernible Public Power of God (Ecclesiastes 9:1–2)

For all this I considered in my heart even to declare all this, that the righteous, and the wise, and their works, are in the hand of God: no man knoweth either love or hatred by all that is before them. All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath.

Indiscernible—you cannot discern exactly why the power should take the turn it does. The old divines spoke of a miracle as “the public power of God. ” God emerges suddenly and does something beyond human power. Our Lord’s miracles were cinematograph shows to His disciples of what His Father was always doing (see John 2:1–11). Our Lord never worked a miracle in order to show what He could do; He was not a wonder worker, and when people sought Him on that line, He did nothing (cf. Luke 23:8–9). Solomon is referring to the indiscernible power of God in that He completely mystifies any calculations you may make in life. If you go on the mathematical or the rational line, you will come across something you can not calculate, something that can only be described as an act of God. You cannot say that because a man is good and has been well brought up and behaves well that he will reach success and prosperity; you will find that bad men who overreach and tyrannise come to prosperity while good men do not (see Psalm 73:1–18). It is much easier not to look at the facts of life but to take an intellectual view which acts as a search light, and has the tyranny of an idea or an intuition.

A man’s intellectual view reveals what it does and no more, everything looks simple in the light of it; but when we come to the daylight of facts we shall find something that knocks the bottom board out of all our calculations. If you read a book by a philosopher about life it looks as simple as can be, no complications or difficulties; but when you are flung out “into the soup, ” you find that your simple line of explanation won’t work at all. Just when you thought you had found the secret, you find you are off the line. Fundamentally, not shallowly, life can never be guided by principles. In the Christian domain we make the blunder of trying to guide our life by the principles of Jesus Christ’s teaching. The basis of Christianity is not primarily virtue and honesty and goodness, not even holiness, but a personal relationship to God in Jesus Christ which works out all the time by “spontaneous moral originality.

Principles are of a lesser order, and if they are applied apart from the life of Jesus Christ they may become anti Christian. Things cannot be worked out on a logical line, there is always something incalculable. You may think to reach your goal through obedience to a set of principles, but you will find it won’t work that road. Solomon says that neither the good man nor the bad man ends where you expect him to. All you can say is that every man has his own setting from a starting point he knows nothing about. One of the finest and wisest books ever written for young men is Leckie’s Map of Life. Leckie was not a genius, but a man of intense moral earnestness and a careful intellectual collator as well.

2. The Interim Probationary Programme of God (Ecclesiastes 9:3–4)

This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.

The Bible always states the obvious, and we find it to be the thing we have never looked at. Very few of us see the obvious, consequently when it is stated it strikes us as being original.

For a living dog is better than a dead lion. ” “The Lord spake unto Joshua, saying, Moses My servant is dead”—now therefore go to mourning? No—”now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them. The Bible never allows us to waste time over the departed. It does not mean that the fact of human grief is ignored, but the worship of reminiscence is never allowed. “We have to remember the departed and live in the light of them”—the Bible won’t have it. While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, Who can tell whether god will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? In the Garden of Gethsemane the disciples went to sleep when they should have watched with their Lord, and when Jesus came He said, “Sleep on now, and take your rest: . . . Arise, let us be going” (rv ). That opportunity is lost for ever, you cannot alter it, but arise and go to the next thing. We find this inevi table vanishing all through the Bible, and a man has to “ring out the grief that saps the mind. One of the most deeply ingrained forms of selfishness in human nature is that of misery. The isolation of misery is far more proud than any other form of conceit. The interim between birth and death is a school training, a programme of which we have not the lay ing out. We may calculate and say we are going to do this and that, but “ye know not what shall be on the morrow. It is a haphazard life, and we have to bank on God’s wisdom, not on our own. It looks as if Solomon were counselling the Bohemian life, and as if Jesus Christ did the same when He said “There fore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life. A Bohemian is careless about everything, and neither Jesus Christ nor Solomon teaches that. Jesus Christ taught that a man was to be carefully careless about everything saving his relationship to God. The great care of the life, Jesus says, is to make the relationship to God the one care. Most of us are careful about everything saving that. The life we are living has a programme which we fulfil but about which we know nothing. We have been put into a programme that we have no say in, and we bungle our part by trying to be our own organisers. There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. Shakespeare

3. The Invincible Powerful Portion of Death (Ecclesiastes 9:5–6)

For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any- thing that is done under the sun.

There is no further reward in practical existence for a dead man. We must lay our account with the invincible portion of death, it will come every time. Remember that your friend will die and act accord ingly, and many a mean thing will wither on your tongue. There is a difference between sensitiveness and impressionableness. A sensitive man never says anything that would sting another, whereas the one we are apt to call sensitive is only impressionable to what stings him. Very few of us are sensitive; we are all impressionable. It is remembering the invincible portion of death that makes things different. Solo mon says you cannot bank on insurance, or speculations, or on any kind of calculation; you can bank on only one thing, that your interim of life may at any second be cut short; therefore your only confidence is to remain true to God.

4. The Instructive Practical Prudence of Time (Ecclesiastes 9:7–9)

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy van- ity: for that is thy portion in this life. and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun.

“Let thy garments be always white, ” i. e. , live suitably attired to your station in life. Solomon’s insistence is on the haphazard. These things—food, sex, money and mother earth, must always have their place in the life of any man of God, and they either make men and women devils or make them what they should be. The man of God uses these things to express his relation ship to God; whereas the man who does not know God tries to find his lasting good in the things themselves. Paul in riddling false religion says that it will deny the basis of life, that is, it will teach abstinence from meats and marriage. The practical test of a man’s life in Time is how he lives in connection with these things. The devastations of war are appalling, but there are compensations, and one compensation of this war will be that we shall be driven back to the elemental. Some problems will not be revived again, they are finished; but every man will have a totally new atti tude to these things and a new reverence for them. They will have a hold now which the refinement of civilisation had made us lose.

5. The Imperative Performing Practice of Work (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

The Bible nowhere teaches us to work for work’s sake. That is one of the great bugbears of the anti Christian movement in the heart of Christianity to day. It is Work with a capital W in which the worship of Jesus Christ is lost sight of. People will sacrifice themselves endlessly for the work. Perspiration is mistaken for inspiration. Our guidance with regard to work is to remember that its value is in what it does for us. It is difficult not to let ulterior considerations come in— “What’s the good of doing this, we are only here for a short time, why should we do it as if it were to last for ever? Solomon’s counsel is—”Whatsoever thy hand attaineth to do by thy strength that do” (rv mg). He is not recommending work for work’s sake, but because through the drudgery of work the man himself is developed. When you deify work, you apostatise from Jesus Christ. In the private spiritual life of many a Christian it is work that has hindered concentration on God. When work is out of its real relation it becomes a means of evading concentration on God. Carlyle pointed out that the weariness and sickness of modern life is shown in the restlessness of work. When a man is not well he is always doing things, an eternal fidget. Intense activity may be the sign of physical weariness. When a man is healthy his work is so much part of himself that you never know he is doing it; he does it with his might, and that makes no fuss. We lose by the way we do our work the very thing it is intended to bring us. At the back of all is the one thing God is after, what a man is, not what he does, and Solomon keeps that in view all the time. It is what we are in our relation to things that counts, not what we attain to in them. If you put attainment as the end you may reap a broken heart and find that all your outlay ends in disaster, death cuts it short, or disease, or ruin.

6. The Incalculable Precarious Preference of Life (Ecclesiastes 9:11–12)

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

Life is immensely precarious, haphazard. A Christian does not believe that everything that happens is ordained by God; what he believes is that he has to get hold of God’s order no matter what happens in the haphazard. And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28 rv ). All things are permitted by God, but all things are not appointed by God, they appoint them selves; but God’s order abides, and if I maintain my relationship to Him He will make everything that happens work for my good. God on the one hand, myself on the other, and the rush of the haphazard in between will work toward the best. “The race is not to the swift. ” The lad who is exceptionally clever at school very often becomes nothing afterwards; he attained too early. No boy has any right to attain too early or mature too quickly. By the time he comes to the age of twenty or thirty the power that ought to mature is not there, he has ripened too soon. The boy who gives the grandest promise does not always become what you expect, while the lad who is stodgy to begin with may come out top. One of the finest commentators on the Bible was an ignorant dunce as a lad, with no promise at all to begin with. There is always an incalculable element in everyone, therefore, Solomon argues, you cannot calculate. The crisis reveals what a man is made of. You cannot say what you would do in circumstances you have never been in because of this incalculable element, and when you are put in new circumstances you may suddenly find forces in yourself you never dreamed were there. You have no idea what is in you either for good or bad; you cannot estimate and say what you will do; therefore, says Solomon, don’t bank on calculations. For man also knoweth not his time. ” You never know when your opportunity is going to come. Every man has to go out to sea to break from his moorings, whether by a storm or by a big lifting tide. There is a preference in life you cannot get at. Why does God choose one man and not another? “For promotion cometh neither from the east nor from the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: He putteth down one, and setteth up another” (Psalm 75:6–7).

7. The Invidious Petulant Price for Wisdom (Ecclesiastes 9:13–16)

This wisdom have I seen also under the sun, and it seemed great unto me: There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it: now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man. Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard.

We do not put any price at all on wisdom when we have got what wisdom brings. When we attain success we do not remember the one who gave us the right counsel; the wise man who guided things aright is not taken into account. When a thing is done successfully in the Army or the Navy, it is very rarely the men of the regiment or the crew that are mentioned but only the figure head at the top. Any man with wis dom knows that that kind of preference is conceded, and there is no use losing heart over it. The discern ing man understands that it is what lies behind the scenes that accounts for success. In the same way there has often been a remarkably good but obscure woman behind a prominent man who has done great things. Solomon’s counsel is to take into account the fact that you cannot expect to be recognised. Remember that your lasting relationship is with God, otherwise you will find heartbreak and disappointment and become cynical.

8. The Inveterate Popular Prejudice for Grab (Ecclesiastes 9:17–18)

The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good.

It is difficult to maintain a high standard when you are working in a community which has a lower standard. For example, we are told that the natives here do not understand any treatment but kicking and cursing and if they are not treated in that way will take advantage of you. That may be true, but you will also find that when they see you are allowing yourself to be taken advantage of, they themselves will begin to climb. When we are over reached most of us get sick and give up. The counsel given by Jesus Christ all through is on the line of abandon. When a life is taken from the shelter of its ignorance it goes through a stage of transition, often worse than the stage of ignorance, before it comes to real emancipation. Witness the Reformation and the freeing of the slaves. In the transition stage we want to grab things for ourselves and ruin all progress in life. Evolution, like Christian Science, is a hasty conclusion. There may be nine facts which seem to make a thing clear and conclusive, and one fact that con tradicts. There is always something that swerves away from the explainable. The only explanation lies in a personal knowledge of God through Jesus Christ, not on the basis of philosophy or of thinking, but on the basis of a vital relationship to Him which works in the actual condition of things as they are. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. “

Differentiation

Ecclesiastes 10

Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the
heart’s desire!
Thro’ the gates that liar the distance comes a gleam
of what is higher.
Wait till Death has flung them open, when the man
will make the Maker
Dark no more with human hatreds in the glare of
deathless fire!
Tennyson

1. The Best of Men Are but the Best of Men(Ecclesiastes 10:1–3)
2. The Besetters of Men and the Behaviour of Men (Ecclesiastes 10:4–7)
3. The “Before” of Men Determines the “After” of Men (Ecclesiastes 10:8–10)
4. The “Beyond” of Men Decides the “Breed” of Men (Ecclesiastes 10:11–15)
5. The Beginnings of Mastery Disposes the Mastered (Ecclesiastes 10:16–17)
6. The Bungling of Men Spells the Beggary of Men (Ecclesiastes 10:18–20)

It is one of the sharpest disillusionments to learn that “the best of men are but the best of men, ” and it takes us some time to learn that it is true. The Apostle Paul brings out the same truth—Don’t glory in men; don’t think of men more highly than you ought to think. We always know what the other man should be, especially if he is a Christian. We are all lynx eyed in seeing what other people ought to be. We erect terrific standards, and then criticise men for not reaching them. The standard of Christianity is not that of a man, but of God; and unless God can put His Spirit into a man, that standard can never be reached. According to New Testament wisdom and to Hebrew wisdom, until we are rightly related to God we will always be cruel to other men. Take it in the matter of love: if I am not related to God first my love becomes cruel, because I demand infinite satisfaction from the one I love; I demand from a human being what he or she can never give. There is only one Being Who can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ.

1. The Best of Men Are but the Best of Men (Ecclesiastes 10:1–3)

Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour. A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left. Yea also, when he that is a fool walketh by the way, his wisdom faileth him, and he saith to everyone that he is a fool.

How many remember that Solomon ruled Israel magnificently for many years? We remember his supreme acts of folly, and Solomon says that is the way human life is summed up. We remember the bad a man has done but not the good. It is possible to blast a man’s reputation by raising your shoulders; but you can never blast a man’s character. Charac ter is what a man is; reputation is what other people think he is. A long and splendid possible friendship has often been ruined by the agile cleverness of some men for labels. ” You meet a man and sum him up in a phrase. There were possibilities of his becoming a friend, but he will never be that now. This kind of clever business ruins the possibility of friendship. Again we are apt to lose all distinction of right and wrong and to make excuses and say—Oh yes, there is always one fact more. “There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behoves any of us to talk about the rest of us. ” Although you know that the best of men are but the best of men, it is part of moral calibre to hold true to the highest you know, and to remember that “there is none good save one, even God. ” “A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart is at his left. A wise man’s heart guides the decisions of his mind; a fool makes decisions of mind and his heart drags after him. In laying your account with men, whether it be with a government or with a drillsergeant, remem ber there is no such being as a perfect man. You are bound to find shortcomings; and beware of the snare of remembering only the bad things a man does. We are all built that way.

2. The Besetters of Men and the Behaviour of Men (Ecclesiastes 10:4–7)

If the spirit of the ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy place; for yielding pacifieth great offences. There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, as an error which proceedeth from the ruler: folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen ser- vants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth.

Solomon is stating the obvious; most of us are too clever to be obvious. He is dealing with the man who happens to be placed under a providential order of tyranny. The difficulty of a man’s behaviour is the kind of men that beset him as rulers, and Solomon’s counsel is amazingly shrewd: Let him say what he likes, it will blow over in time. In practical life it is the providential order of tyranny that embitters men more quickly than anything. We all shirk the counsel of Jesus Christ when He says, in effect, Never look for justice but never cease to give it. If you do look for justice, you will become bitter and cease to be a dis ciple of Jesus Christ. You are in a providential order of tyranny in which your behaviour is to be deter mined by your previous relationship to God, that is, your conduct is to be determined by the relationship which reaches furthest back. In the same way if you are the servant of men for their sake you will soon be heartbroken; but if you serve men for the sake of Jesus Christ, nothing can ever discourage you (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:5). Solomon’s counsel is to keep your mouth shut if you are under a tyranny where you can gain nothing by expressing yourself. Behave yourself rightly, and if you wait long enough the thing will be put right. After all, the man who loses his temper quickest is the one who finds it quickest. The man you need to beware of is not the man who flares up, but the man who smoulders, who is vindictive and harbours vengeance. “Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. ” A ruler who is not a wise man places the fools in dignity through favouritism, and the man who lives at the basis of things and all in between have to be the cat’spaw of the man who has obtained his position through wire pulling. You can never hold a steady course unless you are rightly related to God first of all. One of the most difficult things to do is to place men. A man who knows men and can place them rightly is worth his weight in gold, and Solomon points out that such men are rare.

3. The “Before” of Men Determines the “After” of Men (Ecclesiastes 10:8–10)

He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it; and whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him. Whoso removeth stones shall be hurt therewith; and he that cleaveth wood shall be endangered thereby. If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct.

Many men are determinate, but not deliberate, and sooner or later they have to revise their decisions. The thing that comes after in a man’s career is frequently determined by his having gone too hot headedly into things to begin with. Don’t be too earnest in clearing away the hedges. What makes me act determines the result of my action in the record of my life. Earnest ness is not everything; I may be an earnest lunatic. We use the phrase “drunk and incapable, ” but it is just as possible to be sober and incapable. The great thing is to be enthusiastic and capable. Solomon’s warning is that earnestness may often cover up an evasion of concentration in a life. John McNeill29 said about the student of Elisha who lost the axehead—”If he had been of the modern school, Elisha would have said “Whack awawi’ the stump, man; earnestness is everything. ” “Solomon points out that earnestness may be the characteristic of a fool. Earnestness in prayer is often put in the place of right relationship to God. If you read the New Testament carefully you do not find that Jesus Christ ever counsels earnestness in prayer, except in Luke 11, and there it is earnestness in connection with importunate prayer on behalf of others. The prayer Jesus Christ counsels is that based on simplicity. “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him. Prayer is never heard on the ground of earnestness, but only on the ground of the Redemption (see Hebrews 10:19).

4. The “Beyond” of Men Decides the “Breed” of Men (Ecclesiastes 10:11–15)

Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment; and a babbler is no better. The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself. The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness: and the end of his talk is mischievous madness. A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him? The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, because he knoweth not how to go to the city.

If you are a wise man, you will lay your account with the fact that you cannot calculate. You cannot say that your charmer will charm the snake, it may sting you first. The before of a man’s birth determines his breed. That one man is as good as another is a theory that does not work out in practice. Some men are handicapped before they are born; others are perfectly fit before they are born, their heredity is clear. Breeding counts every time, but if you over breed you produce genius and lunacy. Breeding counts for nothing in the value of a man in God’s sight, it is the heart relationship that counts, and one man cannot judge another. When Jesus Christ came He paid no attention to breeding. In matters of practical living, says Solomon, if you are wise you will watch a man’s breeding; but when you estimate men in God’s sight, you must estimate from another standpoint, that of their relationship to Him.

5. The Beginnings of Mastery Disposes the Mastered (Ecclesiastes 10:16–17)

Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning! Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness!

When rulers eat in the morning they reorganise God’s order and are simply shallow Epicureans. The man who masters men merely by his position determines the kind of men he masters. Some men are completely crushed and broken, sulky and taciturn, and their mas ter is to blame. Whereas the influence of one man of integrity over men is incalculable, e. g. , Donald Han key’s Beloved Captain; and it is a terrible condemnation if a man’s influence is without that characteristic. A man’s character tells over his head all the time. The mastership of a man who does not defy the ordinances of God is that of worth ship, he is worthy; whereas men who are mastered by those given to defying the law of God come to an appalling condition.

6. The Bungling of Men Spells the Beggary of Men (Ecclesiastes 10:18–20)

By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through. A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things. Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

“By much slothfulness the building decayeth. ” Solomon is pointing out that the bungling of men spells the beggary of men. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. ” Our version of that too often is—”There’s a thing to be done, but why should I do it? ” Or, “Why should it be done properly, it is only for a little while?

” That line spells beggary. No man if he is wise will be content with a knockup job. 30 “Money answereth all things. ” Although money may cover up defects, yet ultimately it may lead to disaster.

“Curse not the king, no not in thy thought. ” We can not think anything without the thought having its consequence. Jesus Christ warns us of this—”With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you” (rv ). The basis of life is retribution, but Our Lord allows no room for retaliation.

Timidities of rationalism

Ecclesiastes 11

Time was I shrank from what was right
From fear of what was wrong,
I would not brave the sacred fight
Because the foe was strong.
But now I cast that finer sense
And surer shame aside;
Such dread of sin was indolence,
Such aim at Heaven was Pride!
Newman

1. The Counsels of Extravagance (Ecclesiastes 11:1)
2. The Confusion of Economy (Ecclesiastes 11:2–4)
3. The Confines of Exposition (Ecclesiastes 11:5–6)
4. The Consciousness of Experience (Ecclesiastes 11:7–8)
5. The Concentration after Expansion (Ecclesiastes 11:9–10)

The boldness of Rationalism is not in what it does, but in the way it criticises. Rationalism is a method of criticism, but when it comes to action the rationalist is amazingly timid. Nothing bold has ever been done in the name of rationalism. In all the big crises of life the rationalist is at a discount. He is great at writing books, at pointing out the futilities of religion, etc. , but no rationalist has ever produced the heroism, the adventure, or the nobility that the people and the things he criticised have produced. The reasonable man is, after all, the timid man, when it comes to certain things he refuses to venture. We hear it said that Jesus Christ taught noth ing contrary to common sense: everything Jesus Christ taught was contrary to common sense. Not one thing in the Sermon on the Mount is common sense. The basis of Christianity is neither common sense nor rationalism, it springs from another centre, viz. , a personal relationship to God in Christ Jesus in which everything is ventured on from a basis that is not seen. We are told that God expects us to use our “sanctified common sense”; but if we mean that that is Christianity, we will have to come to the con clusion that Jesus Christ was mad. If you go on the economical basis you get into confusion. Rationalism makes us timid, shrewd in criticising, but nothing else. We never do the things that foolish people do.

1. The Counsels of Extravagance (Ecclesiastes 11:1)

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.

Solomon states what Our Lord elaborates in the Ser mon on the Mount, viz. , that our reason for giving is not to be because men deserve it, but because Christ tells us to give. All through the Old and New Testa ments the counsel is on the line of hospitality. As long as we have something to give, we must give. How does civilisation argue? “Does this man deserve that I should give to him? ” “If I give that man money, I know what he will do with it. Jesus Christ says, “Give to him that asketh thee, ” not because he deserves it, but because I tell you to (see Matthew 5:42). Some folks are so hyperconscientious that they are good for nothing. Extravagance is the only line for the reli gious man. We do not believe this to begin with, we are so completely reasonable and common sense, consequently we base everything on self realisation instead of on Christrealisation. The counsel of extravagance comes out all through the Bible. We are apt to ignore it by the timidity of our reasoning. The one thing Jesus Christ commended was Mary of Bethany’s extravagant act. It was not her duty nor was it useful, and yet Our Lord said that wherever His gospel should be preached “that also which this woman hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her” (rv ). The disciples, who were perfectly reasonable, said, What a waste! Jesus Christ said, “She hath wrought a good work on Me. ” The true nature of devotion to Jesus Christ must be extravagance.

2. The Confusion of Economy (Ecclesiastes 11:2–4)

Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth. If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth: and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.

Death transforms nothing. Every view of death out side the Bible view concludes that death is a great transformer. The Bible says that death is a confirmer. Instead of death being the introduction to a second chance, it is the confirmation of the first chance. In dealing with the Bible, bear in mind this point of view. “Economy is doing without what you want just now in case a time may come when you will wan what you don’t want now. ” It is possible to be so economical that you venture nothing. We have deified economy, placed insurance and economy on the throne, consequently we will do nothing on the line of adventure or extravagance. To use the word “economy” in connection with God is to belittle and misunderstand Him. Where is the economy of God in His sunsets and sunrises, in the grass and flowers and trees? God has made a superabounding number of things that are of no use to anyone. How many of us bother our heads about the sunrises and sunsets? Yet they go on just the same. Lavish extravagance to an extraordinary degree is the characteristic of God, never economy. Grace is the over flowing favour of God. Imagine a man who is in love being economical! The characteristic of a man when he is awake is never that he is calculating and sensible. Common sense is all very well in the shallow things, but it can never be made the basis of life, it is marked by timidities. We may say wise and subtle things, but if we bank on common sense and rationalism we shall be too timid to do anything. Today we are so afraid of poverty that we never dream of doing anything that might involve us in being poor. We are out of the running of the mediaeval monks who took on the vow of poverty. Many of us are poor, but none of us chooses to be. These men chose to be poor, they believed it was the only way they could perfect their own inner life. Our attitude is that if we are extravagant a rainy day will come for which we have not laid up. You cannot lay up for a rainy day and justify it in the light of Jesus Christ’s teaching. We are not Christians at heart, we don’t believe in the wisdom of God, but only in our own. We go in for insurance and economy and speculation, every thing that makes us secure in our own wisdom.

3. The Confines of Exposition (Ecclesiastes 11:5–6)

As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all. In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.

The rationalist demands an explanation of everything. The reason I won’t have anything to do with God is because I cannot define Him. If I can define God, I am greater than the God I define. If I can define love and life, I am greater than they are. Solomon indicates that there is a great deal we do not know and can not define. We have to go on trust in a number of ways, therefore, he says, be careful that you are not too emphatic and dogmatic in your exposition of things.

A Christian is an avowed agnostic. I cannot find God out by my reason, therefore I have to accept the revelation given of Him by Jesus Christ. I do not know anything about God, things look as if He were not good, and yet the revelation given by Jesus Christ is that He is good, and I have to hang in to that rev elation in spite of appearances. “In the morning sow thy seed, ” i. e. , don’t bother about the origin of things. Solomon teaches all through the things that Jesus Christ insists on. Don’t be careful whether men receive what you give in the right way or the wrong way, see to it that you don’t withhold your hand. As long as you have something to give, give, let the consequences be what they may. There is no possibility of saying a word in favour of a man after death if he did not do things before his death. The wisest thing is to make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when you pass from this life they may receive you into everlasting habitations (see Luke 16:9).

4. The Consciousness of Experience (Ecclesiastes 11:7–8)

Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun: Yea, if a man live many years, let him rejoice in them all; but let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity. (rv)

Solomon is stating the practical attitude to things in the midst of the haphazard. You have to live this actual life, he says, with our confidence based on God, and see that you keep your day full of the joy and light of life; enjoy things as they come. When we have a particularly good time, we are apt to say, “Oh well, it can’t last long. ” We expect the worst. When we have one trouble, we expect more.

The Bible counsels us to rejoice—”yet let him remember the days of darkness. The Bible talks about drinking wine when we are glad (see Psalm 104:15); this is different from the modern view. It is bad to drink wine when you are in the dumps. Solomon is amazingly keen that a man should enjoy the pleasant things, remembering that that is why they are here. The universe is meant for enjoyment. “. . . God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy. ” “Whatsoever ye do whether ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God. ” We argue on the rational line—Don’t do this or that because it is wrong. Paul argues in this way: Don’t do it, not because it is wrong, but because the man who follows you will stumble if he does it, therefore cut it out, never let him see you do it any more (cf. 1 Corinthians 8:9– 13). Solomon’s attitude is a safe and sane one, that when a man is rightly related to God he has to see that he enjoys his own life and that others do too.

5. The Concentration after Expansion (Ecclesiastes 11:9–10)

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement. Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh: for child- hood and youth are vanity.

For all these things God will bring thee into judgement. ” “Judgement” means being brought into the arena of your own expansion. It is not that God is an almighty detective hiding round corners to catch and punish you, but that every time you have an expansion of heart or mind in thinking you have to pay for it, and pay for it in an added concentration. There are times when we feel enlarged, we have met someone who has expanded our life; Solomon reminds us that we have to pay for that enlargement, and live up to the limit of the expansion by an added concentration. If we don’t, we will come a terrible smash. It is an appalling thing to see a young man with an old head on his shoulders; a young man ought not to be careful but to be full of cheer. Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth.

” Solomon is not advocat ing the sowing of wild oats, but that a man should enter into his life fully and remember that he must pay the price in the right way, not the wrong. When you have an opening up of your nature either in love or religion or adventure, you will have to pay for it in an added concentration. That means you have to bring all your life into keeping with the particular expansion; if you don’t, you will become an arrant sentimentalist. To get hold of this truth is a big emancipation. Remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh. ” Youth is youth and age is age, and we have no business to require the head of age on the shoulders of youth. One of the affectations before the war was that we should never be enthusiastic about anything. That is not the style of a young man.

According to Solomon, his life ought to be full to the last degree of expanding ecstasy, and he counsels him to do right things to the limit of his ability. Be enthu siastic and capable, go into things with all the vigour of life. But be prepared to pay for it. To pay for it means you must concentrate your life on a bigger plan; if you don’t, you will become a dreamer. When a man has the vision of a poet or an artist, he has to learn to express himself, to become his own medium. There are more artistic people than artists because folks refuse to do this. Artistic people have art like a severe headache, they never work it out; they spurt out artistic ability, which is of no use to anyone. That is artistic disease, not art. Solomon’s counsel is robust and strong—”Let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart. ” The young man who cannot enjoy himself is no good, he has a sinister attitude to life. The man who can enjoy himself is not pretending to be what he is not. The best thing to do is to burn your bridges behind you, make things inevitable, and then go ahead.

The dissolving Tabernacle

Ecclesiastes 12

1. Lively Youth and Lingering Age (Ecclesiastes 12:1)
2. Luminous Skies and Beclouded Vision (Ecclesiastes 12:2)
3. Lordly Mansion and Tumbling Dwelling (Ecclesiastes 12:3–5)
4. Life’s Shapely Instruments and Death’s Broken Things (Ecclesiastes 12:6)
5. Languishing Dust and EverLiving Spirit. (Ecclesiastes 12:7)

We have been shown how to enjoy life. Now we are told of the days when such enjoyment abates. The sparkle of youth will depart. The keen sense of things is diminished; sun, moon and stars are beclouded. This is a chapter of contrasts.

1. Lively Youth and Lingering Age (Ecclesiastes 12:1)

Remember also thy Creator in the days of thy youth. (rv)

We need a personal knowledge of God through all our life. The time to discover Him for ourselves is in Life’s earliest morning—”that from a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, ” wrote Paul to Timothy (2 Timothy 3:15). And ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but nurture them in the chasten ing and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4 rv ). We are so built that in childhood we can more easily come to a knowledge of God in simplicity than in later years. And in those formative years the per sonal life can be shaped and fitted to God’s standard more surely than later on. In the flower of your days when life is known in its rich fullness, when the natural powers are in undiluted vigour, then make place for God in personal consciousness. The prodigal remembered his Father when he had spent all. He should have remembered him, gratefully, and with increasing understanding of his love and care, when his Father was bestowing on him his goods. God gives us all things richly to enjoy, and in youth and early manhood heaps rich precious bounties upon us, God must be remembered then, else we shall grievously hurt Him, and defraud ourselves. While the evil days come not”—age with its infirmities is part of our human lot. Of Moses it was written, “His eye was not dim, neither was his natural force abated” (Deuteronomy 34:7). But that was some thing unusual. There is “An Old Man’s Parade” in the Bible, and we see decrepitude and frailty and fear showing their marks on bodily life. Isaac was old and his eyes were dim that he could not see. And Jacob too—”one told Joseph, Behold thy father is sick, ” and the old man, sitting on the bed, stretched out his hands to bless his grandchildren. It is a pleasant sight to see the old man with his worn out frame passing on the Divine blessing to those in their youth, and praying “The angel which hath redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads” (Genesis 48:16 rv). We catch glimpses of the same thing in the New Testament: old Zechariah, and Simeon; there is “Paul the aged”; and Peter ready to put off his earthly tabernacle. They had remembered their Creator in the days of their youth, and in their old age He was precious to them.

2. Luminous Skies and Beclouded Vision (Ecclesiastes 12:2)

While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain.

There is a loss of the sparkle of youth; there is not the same power of recovery after strain. How fascinatingly beautiful this earth can be to the keen vision of youth. The great poets wrote their abiding poems in their early years. It is God’s order that the world should be a bright place for bairns. They have the capacity for entering into such natural joys; and it should not be denied them. There is a richer vision for mature minds who have been “born anew” (rv ) and seen the Kingdom of God. Milton in his blindness saw rarer beauties than through the opened eyes of his youth. Only the cynic will despise the loveliness and allurement of youthful days; but the saint will learn that even that bears the fatal hall mark of “vanity. ” It too must pass. The happy delights of youth slip through our fingers as we hold them.

3. Lordly Mansion and Tumbling Dwelling (Ecclesiastes 12:3–5)

In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of a bird, and the daughters of music shall be brought low; and when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.

Man’s body is frequently described under the figure of a house. What a lordly house man’s body is. We go back to watch its first construction in Genesis 1:27. The artistry of God is upon it all. Our bodies now are damaged by Man’s Fall; but even so, how wonderful they are. No wonder we have the injunction, “Glorify God therefore in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:20 rv ). Verses 3–4 is a description of Old Age in its frailty. The keepers of the house (arms) and the strong men (legs) are weak and trembling; the grinders cease (teeth) and the windows are darkened (eyesight dimmed), the doors shut (ears are deaf ), the grinding low (slow and tedious mastication), the easily startled nerves, and the loss of voice, the inability to climb, and the fear of highway traffic; the whitened hair like the almond tree in blossom, when any work seems a burden, and the failing natural desire, all portray the old man nearing the end of his earthly journey.

4. Life’s Shapely Instruments and Death’s Broken Things (Ecclesiastes 12:6)

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

The figures here used suggest the beauty and service ableness of the human organs. The spinal cord as a silver chain; the shapely head as a golden bowl, the tireless heart as a household pitcher in constant use, and the circulatory blood system as a wheel in use at the well, all these show us Life’s vital ministry. Until Death invades and begins to destroy the precious things—the silver cord put out of action, the bowl broken, the pitcher broken, the wheel bro ken. Here is Death in his fearsome aspect as house breaker and destroyer. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). Our Lord “became obedient even unto death” (Philippians 2:8 rv). “But Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him”— nor us either (Romans 6:9).

5. Languishing Dust and Ever-Living Spirit (Ecclesiastes 12:7)

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Man is dust and divinity. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). Man is constituted to have affinity with everything on this earth. This is not his calamity, but his peculiar dignity. We do not further our spiritual life in spite of our bodies, but in, and by means of our bodies. (Biblical Psychology) The dust shall return to the earth, but resurrection means the restoration of the fullorbed life of a man. What is sown a natural body will be raised a spiritual body.

This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:53). The spirit that returns to God shall find future embodiment. Saints like Paul have had a deep long ing to be clothed upon with “our house which is from heaven. ” Jesus Christ has brought to us His Redemption which affects spirit, soul and body. Already we experience an amazing spiritual renovation through identification with Jesus Christ in His death and res urrection (Romans 6:4). But though we have received “the firstfruits of the Spirit, ” we are waiting for the “redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23).

We turn to the New Testament for the full word on Man’s final form. The earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19 rv). For that great hour we hope and long, when we shall pass from beneath the Shade of His Hand into the full Shine of His Face.