Intro
Hedonist. If you hear that word, what associations do you make with it? Would you say it is generally a positive or a negative word? If you’re like me, the word has almost entirely negative connotations. I think of someone who is selfish and short-sighted, whose whole world revolves around themselves, who lives wastefully. If you look up the dictionary definition of the word, it will read something like, “a person who believes that the pursuit of pleasure is the most important thing in life” (Oxford). That sounds selfish, doesn’t it? But here’s the startling, counterintuitive thing I’m going to tell you: understood from a certain perspective, the Bible actually encourages you to be a hedonist. I’ll explain more at the end, but let’s get into a text that points us in that direction, Ecclesiastes 9:1-12.
So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them. 2 All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not. As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. 3 This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead.4 Anyone who is among the living has hope—even a live dog is better off than a dead lion! 5 For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten. 6 Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun. 7 Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. 8 Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. 9 Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. 10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom. 11 I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. 12 Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so people are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.
Ecclesiastes 9:1-12
1. In light of death
a. Inevitability
We’re going to track the thought in this passage and then push the idea even further in light of some other biblical texts. The author of Ecclesiastes starts by talking about death, and in verses 1-6 he particularly talks about the inevitability of death. He says that all share a common fate: the good and the bad, the righteous and the unrighteous alike.
On one level, you can see this in everyday life. Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, said something similar: that God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45). These general occurrences in life happen to everyone, no matter how they’ve lived. Can you imagine if that wasn’t the case? Imagine it’s November. We’ve had 40 straight days of rain. However, everywhere Nate walks, as a righteous man among us, it’s just sunshine. Our youth ministry would be enormous! But it doesn’t work like that! You live in a place like North Vancouver, you get rain no matter how well you’ve lived! Life happens to everyone.
Having said that, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes’ emphasis here isn’t just life in general, it’s how the common final fate for everyone is death. That’s where everyone ends up. He talks about the madness in people’s hearts while they live. Think about the frantic, panicked pace of life some people live at. They are rushing from one place to the next, trying to accumulate as much as they can, trying to attain as much status and notoriety as they can, rushing, rushing, rushing, madness in their hearts…and then they die. It’s all gone. They’re in the grave. You can hear the Teacher of Ecclesiastes going, can you believe it? What’s the point of all of that?
Now, for all the Teacher’s apparent angst, he does admit that there’s something good about being alive. He says, well, at least they know something! Even if the only knowledge they have is that they’re going to die! But the dead, they know nothing. They have nothing. They’re gone. Keep in mind that the author of Ecclesiastes speaks these words before Jesus, before the hope of eternal life. Like I said, we’re going to take the thoughts here and track them through the Bible and give them fuller color. We have further revelation in Jesus that shows us that death is not quite as final as the Teacher thought. However, we can agree with him about this: everybody ends up there. Nobody escapes the grave. I’ve mentioned a few times before how some very wealthy mega-billionaires like Jeff Bezos are investing their riches in medical technologies, trying to tack on a couple hundred more years to their lives. Maybe that works, but even if it does, it’s just a delay of the inevitable. That’s because so far, death has nearly a perfect record. With one notable exception, death has conquered every human being, no matter how strong, healthy, or smart they were. Death is inevitable.
b. Unpredictability
And not only is it inevitable, but it is unpredictable. The Teacher, again, makes this point about life generally. He says that “the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all”. Life is unpredictable. It can be random. Your skill, your strength, your intelligence, those things might increase your odds of favorable outcomes in life. But anything can happen. Going with the running race metaphor in Ecclesiastes, I remember when I was younger watching the Olympics. Most of us know nothing about these athletes or sports except for two weeks every four years. I know zero things about the women’s 110 meter hurdles. But here I am, years ago, watching the Olympics. The announcers tell me that Perdita Felicien, a Canadian, is the overwhelming favorite to win a gold medal. This is exciting! We’ve got a dominant athlete running for the gold, everyone expects her to win, she’s outperformed everyone for a while now, she’s the fastest, strongest runner. This is great. Gun goes off, Felicien trips over the first hurdle, knocks over another competitor, it’s over. Bad luck, no medal for the fastest runner there. It was a seemingly random event.
Think about the battle imagery. This past summer, I read Prince Caspian to my kids. That’s one of the Chronicles of Narnia books. Peter, one of the main characters and a teenager, is having a high-stakes sword duel with King Miraz. Peter’s injured and is sure he’s going to die. He is clearly outmatched by this much stronger man. Suddenly Miraz trips over a root, falls on his face, and two of his right hand men plunge a sword in his back in an attempt to usurp the throne. The battle is not always to the strong. Life is unpredictable. That realization should do something to human pridefulness and boasting.
But like before, the Teacher’s special emphasis here is on the unpredictability of death. That’s what the Teacher gets at in verse 12. “No one knows when their hour will come”. He compares the time of our death to a fish being caught in a cruel net. You’re swimming along with your tuna pals, chumming with your school through the clear waters of the Sea of Galilee. Suddenly a circular net descends, wraps itself around you and your tuna friends, and it’s game over. He compares it to a bird. Imagine a crow, happily hopping around on your yard, pecking away at the turf and completely and gleefully destroying it, before suddenly being caught up in a snare. Sweet justice, I say, but totally unexpected by the crow! Not so smart anymore, are you! That’s the way, says the Teacher, death is. It may come when you least expect it.
I’ve been thinking about this a little more recently. I’ve been thinking about my own mortality. Not because I have any sickness or condition, but- and I realize this is going to sound kind of goofy to some of you- I’m becoming more aware of getting older. I was having a conversation a week ago with a 21 year old. Somehow age came up and I said, “well, I’m still young, aren’t I?” And he asks how old I am. I tell him that I’m 36- turning 37 next month. He says, “yeah, you’re middle aged”. Middle aged!?! That’s how 21 year olds see me!? What a wake-up call! It really had me thinking…I’m not so young anymore. My life could be half over. I mean, it could be 99% over for all I know. And it raises the question: what has my life been lived for? If my life was taken tonight, would I be pleased with how it was spent? When you consider the possibility of death, it leads to a sense of urgency.
I heard a story by Dwight Moody that’s really impacted me. Moody was one of the most prominent evangelists in the 19th century, speaking to crowds of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic. Once, while preaching in his home city of Chicago, he encouraged his listeners to take the next week to consider who Jesus was and to return the following week. He didn’t encourage anyone to make a decision then and there, he just invited them to think about it for a week. The worship leader rose up and began a closing song. However, that song never concluded because at that moment the roar of fire engines whistled past, and by the next morning much of Chicago had burnt to the ground. The fire had killed 300 and left 100,000 homeless. The fatal event shook Moody and he deeply regretted not encouraging people to make a decision about Jesus right then and there. He realized that he would never again get to address those people, and that death could come for any of them at any moment. He said afterward: “I would rather have my right hand cut off than to give an audience a week now to decide what to do with Jesus”. You don’t know when death will come, so make sure you’ve decided on the most important things in life before it does. I’ll come back to the part about Jesus, but for now, understand that there’s an urgency in life because death is unpredictable. Don’t think you’re immune, no matter how strong or healthy you are.
2. Enjoy life
Now, we could do a lot of things with that urgency. Here’s what the author of Ecclesiastes says you should do with it, and this is moving into our second major point. In light of the inevitability and unpredictability of death, the Teacher tells us to enjoy life. He tells us to be clothed in white and to anoint our heads with oil. Those are symbols of that joy. There’s a bit of a carpe diem idea here- that famous Latin phrase that means “seize the day”. Make the most of life! Enjoy it! Your time is limited, so don’t let it go to waste!
Before we delve into the avenues for that enjoyment, I do want to make an important disclaimer. In speaking of happiness and joy in light of death, I don’t mean to brush aside the heaviness of death and evil and much of life in this world. As you’ll see, I certainly am not encouraging a shallow obsession with adrenaline rushes or a numbing of the pains of life through various vices and addictions. That’s certainly not what the Bible advocates. And as Ecclesiastes says in chapter 3, there is a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to weep and a time to laugh. Jesus says blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. The Psalms are filled with lament. There’s a whole book in the Bible called Lamentations. If you read the book of Job, there’s a lot of heaviness. You get it. But all of that perspective also needs to be balanced with this: that it is good and right to seek enjoyment in life, if it is properly understood and pursued through the proper avenues.
a. Through goodness of creation
Here’s one major avenue of that enjoyment according to Ecclesiastes: he tells us to find happiness through God’s good creation. He tells us to eat food with gladness and to drink wine with a joyful heart. Some of us eat as quickly and cheaply as we can, purely as a means of sustenance. Others of us eat junk food as a way of covering over hurts and rejection. The Bible tells us to eat food with gladness. I think what we’re being encouraged to do is to eat good food and eat it intentionally, with thanksgiving and gratitude. I will admit that I don’t always do this. The cost of good food can be prohibitive, and I’ve eaten my fair share of junk. But what a difference it makes when you eat well, with thanksgiving. In July, when we were in the Okanagan with some other families from the church, we ordered a pork shoulder roast from a BBQ food truck guy in Oliver. It was some of the best food I’ve ever tasted, my apologies to any vegetarians here. It was simply mouth-watering. The meat just fell apart, it was so tender, and those sandwiches, wow! We just sat around making very satisfied-sounding noises! There was a lot of gladness!
He tells us to drink wine with a joyful heart. Again, some people drink wine or other alcohol to alter their state of mind, to plaster over the pain they feel. This is not that. It is possible and even good to drink wine in a way that glorifies God and gives thanks for His creation.
The Teacher says that you can do all this because God has already approved what you do. One scholar suggests that this approval is an allusion to Genesis 1 and 2, where God places Adam and Eve in the Garden and gives them every seed-bearing plant and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. From this we can see that He approves of us enjoying His creation. After all, He enjoys it! What is God’s repeated refrain through the six days of creation in Genesis? Over and over he says, it’s good. It’s good. It’s good. He finds pleasure in what He has made and invites humans into it. You also see this in Genesis 2:9, where we read that the trees in the Garden “were pleasing to the eye and good for food”. In the Hebrew language, word order matters, and often the more important thing is put first. In that case, despite the functionality of the trees, it’s even more important that the trees are pleasing to the eyes. God creates them to have this aesthetic beauty. He makes them to be enjoyed.
As a bit of a side note but a really important one, this is one of the foundations for the idea that it is good to enjoy life and to experience happiness: because this is actually a characteristic of God! In Nehemiah 8:10, which also mentions the goodness of food and drink, we read that the joy of the Lord is the source of strength. That refers to the joy that God gives, but I believe it also refers to the joy that God has. The joy that characterizes Himself. We see it in Jesus’ life. Jesus is someone who turns water into wine at a wedding feast, leading to astonishment and joy in those present. In the Gospels, Jesus feasts. He celebrates! Jesus speaks about his own joy in passages like John 15:11, where he says “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete”. Of course, there is also a deep seriousness in the holiness of God. We see His anger and wrath towards sin in the Scriptures. But there is also joy and enjoyment, including in His creation. And this is something He wants us, His image-bearers, to experience as well. This is not just in food and drink but in all creation.
There is such beauty in the world and we honor God when we find happiness in it. Back to our July week in the Okanagan. In the mornings, we would work, including all the kids. When we were finished our work, which because of our high efficiency and large group size was usually mid to late morning, we were free to do whatever we wanted. And because it was 40 degrees every day, “whatever we wanted” was always getting to the water. Each day we went to a different beach or water source. On the Friday, we decided to hit up a beach in Okanagan Falls which exactly none of us had heard anything about. It turns out it was the greatest beach of the week, maybe even of all time. Somebody said it was better than Hawaii. No joke. Great sand, great for kids because it was still waist deep water a hundred meters out, it wasn’t very busy, there was a playground and splash park right beside it, and it was stunningly beautiful. A few of us were sitting in this warm, bathtub-like water, watching the kids play and have a great time, and we exclaimed, this is incredible! This is so enjoyable. It’s something we’ll desperately try to remember during the 40 days of rain in November.
So: in light of your short days, make the most of life and enjoy it. Enjoy it through the goodness of God’s creation, giving thanks to Him. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” Enjoy life through God’s creation.
b. Through obedience
I said we’d take the thoughts in Ecclesiastes and push them even further through other passages of Scripture. There’s an avenue of enjoyment in life that is alluded to in Ecclesiastes and given fuller expression elsewhere. That avenue is obedience.
At the very end of Ecclesiastes, in chapter 12:13, the book concludes this way: “now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: fear God and keep his commandments for this is the duty of all mankind.” But while this is our duty and responsibility, it is not just a duty. It is a source of enjoyment in life! Psalm 19 says, “the precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes” (19:8). Remember that verse from John 15, where Jesus tells them that he wants his joy to be in his disciples and for their joy to be complete? His very next words are these: “my command is this: love each other as I have loved you.”
I know you’ve probably heard someone say this at some point, including me, but we often think of rules as representing a deprivation of our joy. And they can be. Bad rules restrict human flourishing. They keep humans from living as God intended. Good rules, particularly the command to love God and to love one another, are an avenue of enjoyment in life.
You can see this in a number of ways. For those of you who are married, you tell me: do you enjoy life more when you honor your spouse, when you truly love them, or when you pursue your own selfish satisfaction? Men, let’s say you’re walking with your wife somewhere and some very attractive woman runs past in a sports bra- you will receive fleeting satisfaction in taking a good look, but I promise you you will be deprived of much longer-lasting joy in your marriage. That deprivation will be immediate if she catches you looking. The Bible’s instructions about purity and marital faithfulness are meant to cultivate enjoyment.
You see it in the act of mission and service. God commands us to love others, and Jesus’ parting instructions to his disciples are to do this by making disciples and teaching others what Jesus has commanded us. We experience happiness when we live in line with this. If I think back to that trip to the Okanagan in July, the six of our families served with the Okanagan Gleaners. This is a Christian ministry that takes produce rejected by stores, chops it up, dries it, and packages it as soup mix to be sent to developing countries to feed the hungry. In our week there, we helped prepare 70,000 servings of this soup. All of this is done in the name of Jesus. Before the week started, I will tell you that my son Zachary was not looking forward to it. Why? Because of the work. The word “work” sounded like the most unpleasant thing in the world to him. At the end of the week, we all took turns talking about what stood out to us and how God had spoken to us. Zachary’s highlight, along with a bunch of the other kids, was the work. They loved it. And I think that part of the reason was because that work was the kind of Kingdom-building work that God instructs us to do.
Another highlight of that week was the family worship times we did each evening. We’d sing to God and someone would share a devotional. I loved watching some of our kids enter into worship more fully than I had seen them do before. I myself found so much enjoyment in just looking to the Lord and adoring Him for who He is. Worship, as well, is something we’re instructed to do in the Bible. Thank God for that, because when we do it, enjoyment comes!
So, summary of this point: in light of your short days, make the most of life by enjoying it, which comes through obedience to God’s commands to love Him and to love one another. After all, it’s what we were made!
C. Through righteousness
Finally, let’s talk about how we are to experience enjoyment in the short days of our life through the avenue of righteousness. Now, I know that’s a big, scary sounding theological word. The most basic meaning is that righteousness is about right relationships. Because your days are limited, don’t waste them in bitterness towards others. There are a lot of variations of this kind of quote, but as a basketball fan I’m going to go with the late great Kobe “Bean” Bryant: “life’s too short to sit around and hold grudges, it doesn’t make any sense to do it.” The Teacher gets at this with his admonition to enjoy life with your wife, whom you love (9:9). That, of course, will only be possible if your relationship with your spouse is strong and healthy. Forgiveness and reconciliation need to be a regular element of your marriage. Lots of happiness comes in life when your relationship with your spouse, if you’re married, is right.
But the Bible pushes this idea of right relationships deeper, to the most fundamental relationship we have: the one with our Creator God. And it tells us that enjoyment especially flows when this relationship is right. Psalm 68:3 says, “may the righteous be glad and rejoice before God; may they be happy and joyful.” Psalm 37:4 instructs us to “take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” We experience the greatest degrees of happiness and enjoyment in life when we find it in God. When our relationship with Him is right, and our eyes are set on Him and we are pursuing more knowledge of His love, then everything else is put in its right perspective and can be enjoyed for what it’s worth.
For a few weeks this past July, I had a change of pace. I’ve already told you a lot about our family service trip in Oliver. That was the third week. The first week I took as a study week at Regent College, and the second week was a vacation week with Carolyn’s family at a campground in Oliver, which we do every year. Those first two weeks ended up providing space for a lot of reflection on my part. I was coming off a particularly busy stretch of ministry, including preaching for something like 21 out of 22 weeks. I was exhausted and somewhat disillusioned. There were the typical questions, like: why isn’t there more fruit? Why isn’t ministry more satisfying? As I spent time traveling to Regent on the bus, or lying on my paddleboard in the middle of the lake, I reflected on how I had been trying to derive much of my identity and meaning, and yes, joy, from ministry here at The Bridge. Not for the first time, I was reminded of how ministry success can become like an idol to me. Those weeks were an opportunity to lay that idol down in a fresh way and to say to God, you’re the only one who can satisfy these deep longings. Your love is the only love that is truly dependable. Marriage and ministry and kids, these are all good things. But they can also be fleeting. They can be stripped away. God can’t be. I resolved in a fresh way to make my relationship with Him central.
This is so crucial, this enjoyment of a right relationship with God, exactly because death is inevitable and unpredictable. The thing is, right relationship with God is what actually determines my eternity. It’s what will last forever. You might find some happiness in creation or in relationships with others, but if your relationship with God is not right and you are not deriving your greatest happiness from Him, then death really will have that kind of finality Ecclesiastes speaks about. It is the righteous who will inherit eternal life. It is the righteous who, according to David in Psalm 16, God will fill with joy in His presence, with eternal pleasures at His right hand.
That’s why Dwight Moody felt that urgency for people to decide about Jesus. We are sinful. Ecclesiastes 7:20 proclaims that “there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins.” Our sin, which is effectively our denial of true joy and happiness that comes through obedience, means we are not righteous. And this is what Jesus does. He gave his life for us as our substitute, a sacrifice for sin, so that we would be made righteous. We are not made righteous because of what we had done but because of what Jesus did. Paul writes in Romans 3:22-24:
“This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
Romans 3:22-24
This, my friends, is joy and happiness in the short days of our life- to walk in a relationship of love with our Creator God, our sins forgiven, assured that the joy we have in Him now will last eternity. This happiness allows us to experience joy and happiness in other realms of life, including God’s creation here and now. Life is short. Death is inevitable and unpredictable. So enjoy it! Make the most of it! Don’t be a worldly hedonist, pursuing empty, fleeting, shallow illusions of pleasure. Be a hedonist in the biblical sense! Pursue pleasure, real, lasting, God-honoring pleasure! Pursue happiness in God!
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