Today's a Gift

Are you enjoying your life? Or is it something you just muddle through because you have responsibilities you feel you must attend to? Do you live in the moment, or are you constantly attacked by the problems that may arise in the future?

I rather like this quote (it’s been attributed to various people in various forms, but I like this version best), and I think it fits perfectly with the ideas conveyed in Ecclesiastes 9:1-10: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift from God, which is why we call it the present.”

Solomon begins to tackle the ideas presented in this quote from verse 1. “Indeed, I took all this to heart and explained it all: the righteous, the wise, and their works are in God’s hands. People don’t know whether to expect love or hate. Everything lies ahead of them.”

He skips the history because it’s not relevant to his point, but he tackles the mystery of tomorrow with “People don’t know whether to expect love or hate. Everything lies ahead of them.” This is fairly clear. We don’t know what’s coming next, so we have no way to determine the outcome of our actions until we live through them. And then Solomon qualifies this further while relating back to chapter eight’s themes.

Verses 2-3 say, “Everything is the same for everyone: there is one fate for the righteous and the wicked, for the good and the bad, for the clean and the unclean, for the one who sacrifices and the one who does not sacrifice. As it is for the good, so it is for the sinner; as for the one who takes an oath, so for the one who fears an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun: there is one fate for everyone. In addition, the hearts of people are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live—after that they go to the dead.”

See, while you can’t know a lot of what’s coming, there is one thing that comes for us all: death on this Earth. As we discussed last week, the consequences of sin affect everyone, even if you feel like you’re a good person, even if you follow closely the commands of God. The product of being in a sinful world is sinful consequence. So, the one thing about your future that is not mystery is death. You won’t know the time or hour, but you know it’s coming.

So, for many, it’s difficult to not live for the future, to plan and prepare in hopes that they can determine what’s coming. In doing so, they often forget to live for today. But God gives us three gifts if we choose to live in the present. The first is the ability to hope.

Verses 4-6 say, “But there is hope for whoever is joined with all the living, since a live dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead don’t know anything. There is no longer a reward for them because the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate, and their envy have already disappeared, and there is no longer a portion for them in all that is done under the sun.”

I think this points directly to salvation and the ability of people to pursue God and find His salvation while they are still alive. We know, for a fact, that once you’re dead, your chance is gone for good, so it only makes sense that this is what Solomon’s referring to.

The comparison between a live dog and a dead lion is striking in this case for a number of reasons, but mainly the position of each animal in a food chain. A dog is one who relies on a master to feed and care for it, while a lion is a top predator in its habitat. Once a beloved dog is dead, its body is cared for and it lives on in the memory of its master. But once a mighty lion dies, its body is torn apart by scavengers and memory of it, its loves, hates, whatever, is gone. Similarly, a believer who is taken care of by God is taken care of and remembered after death by God, but a predator of sin who chooses no master but herself dies and is torn apart by other predators. That’s a pretty clear image of humanity’s treatment of the dead. If given the chance and the provocation, a dead man’s reputation will be torn down without hesitation just because he’s no longer around to defend himself. There’s no place for the dead among the living. In essence, the gift of hope God is providing is for safety, both in life and death.

The second gift God provides is a reward. It comes with having your name listed in the Lamb’s Book of Life—the Lord your God will remember you and care for you, just like a master would his dog. Your reward is undying loyalty, love, and care that only God can provide.

The third gift God promises for today is joy from peace, from verses 7-9, which say, “Go, eat your bread with pleasure, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God has already accepted your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and never let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife you love all the days of your fleeting life, which has been given to you under the sun, all your fleeting days. For that is your portion in life and in your struggle under the sun.”

This is also fairly cut and dry. God grants us the ability to enjoy the days we have in this life in the moment with the pleasures of good food, drink, and companionship. These are all things we are granted by God, knowing that He had already planned out the days, weeks, months, years, decades, and centuries ahead. He has already accepted us into Heaven when we become His children, so we are granted the peace to enjoy the gift of today.

But the real power of these verses becomes apparent when we reverse the gifts and apply the consequences to nonbelievers. While believers are granted the gift of hope, nonbelievers are not. Hope disappears with worry, and for many nonbelievers, all they can do is worry about tomorrow, next week, next month, etc. That’s not to say worry isn’t a problem with believers, but the stress that comes with the belief that you are fully in control and responsible for everything in your life reduces the chance of hope being alive and well.

Straight from verse 5, we know that they don’t receive a reward because they declare themselves to have no master. When they do well, they have no one to whom they can turn to be rewarded except themselves, and when they’re dead and gone, their only reward is to be devoured by scavengers.

Finally, they can have no joy, no pleasure, because they aren’t capable of living in the present. Their circumstances are always monitored, always important to them. In the same way worry blocks hope, worry blocks joy and pleasure because worry is a distraction to what is good.

This works with the quote, too. For believers, our yesterday is history, as God has removed our transgressions from us, freeing us from the past. Our tomorrow is a mystery, but not to the God who has it planned out. And we are truly able to enjoy the gift of the present because we have no need to despair over the past or future.

But for nonbelievers, their yesterday is no history because they must account, and face punishment, for their transgressions come judgment day. Tomorrow is a mystery, but one they believe they must work tirelessly to uncover and change. And because they are so obsessed with tomorrow, they are incapable of living in the gift of today. The worst part is that these beliefs set them up for a rude awakening come time for them to pass on from this life.

Verse 10 says, “Whatever your hands find to do, do with all your strength, because there is no work, planning, knowledge, or wisdom in Sheol where you are going.”

Sheol refers to, basically, death. Its meaning is complicated and somewhat confusing biblically, but it’s pretty much just the land of the dead, a euphemism for the afterlife, if you will. The depth of the frustrations of nonbelievers in life will become apparent in death because nothing they’ve lived for will prepare them for what death is like and the things that come from it. Work, planning, knowledge, wisdom, none of the things that matter to a nonbeliever on Earth will matter in death.

And that takes us back to verse 4. There remains hope for any who are still alive to turn from being a proud, dead lion to become a living, loved dog. The life of a nonbeliever, the mindset of a nonbeliever, will not prepare anyone for death and eternity. Only God can do that, which I think is a key point of these verses. The other is a reminder to believers to have faith and take the gifts that God gives you.

Value of Wisdom

A lot of people, even a number of Christians, try to find satisfaction in life through the things they do or own: work, partying, sex, money, houses, cars, pets, a spouse, kids, etc. Last week, I wrote about Solomon’s experience trying all of these things to achieve that satisfaction and realizing exactly how unfulfilling they are.

The way Solomon makes it sound in Ecclesiastes is as if living life and achieving things here have no meaning, then, but that’s not the case either. At the end of my last article on Ecclesiastes, I left you with this:

See, as Christians, we can have happiness in the things we do here because we have the joy of Christ in knowing that, once we’re done here, there is everlasting joy to look forward to. We can enjoy the things of this world because we are already satisfied by Christ. We will never be satisfied by the things of this world, but we can have a little fun doing the things that are not sinful. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing some of these empty things if you’re already full.

Solomon tackled the why behind this in verses 13-17, but specifically, I want to point your attention to verse 14. “The wise man has eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness.”

See, we’re all, prior to Christ, walking around on the road of life. None of us know where we’re going or how to get there. It’s like we’re stumbling around, trying to feel the road with our feet, or grasping for a guardrail that lays alongside it. That’s the fool walking in darkness. The worst part: the fool even has the ability to see. The fool has eyes, but either does not know how to open them or willfully refuses to do so.

The wise, on the other hand, have had our eyes opened by God. We see clearly the road that lies ahead of us and know exactly where to put our feet. We have no need to feel the road with our feet or grab onto the guide rope or a guardrail to go in the right direction. God is above us shining brightly on the entire road so that we can always see to follow it.

But the rest of verse 14 says that the same thing happens to us all: “Yet I also knew that one fate comes to them both.” But at the end of it all, whether you can see the road you travel or not, every person will eventually come to the end of their life on this Earth and find an eternal existence. There is an end to the road of life.

Think of it this way: the road of life isn’t a very nice road. There are portions of the path that are overgrown with vines and trees and thorned plants. Some parts have giant holes with a thin beam of wood stretching across it. Some portions of the road are guarded by wild animals. But just as much as it has bad parts, the road has good parts, too.

At one section of the road, there’s a quaint restaurant giving away refreshing drinks and food. At another, the road changes from hard asphalt to a nice, soft grass so you can take your shoes off and walk barefooted. At one point, you even get to take a ride in an air conditioned limousine. And if you make it to the end? You walk off the edge and fall to your death. But afterwards, you are resurrected to live eternally with God.

But some people walk along this road and, because they cannot see, they stumble into the nasty traps laid out on it. Some may get past a few obstacles, but if their eyes remain closed, they will eventually succumb to one of the traps and die. Instead of finding eternal life in Heaven, they are condemned to an eternal existence of suffering in Hell.

But all of that isn’t the real point of this section of Ecclesiastes. The real point is made to those of us who had our eyes opened to see the road. Some of us who are blessed with wisdom take it far too seriously.

When we come to the restaurant handing out drinks and food, we walk by it without partaking because we’re suspicious it’s poisoned. When we reach the soft, grassy section, we keep our shoes on and step gingerly, afraid of potential spikes hiding in the soft grass that could pierce our feet. When we get to the limousine, we ignore the chauffeur telling us to get in out of fear that it would turn off the road into disaster.

When I say we take it too seriously, I mean it. There are some believers out there who don’t allow themselves to have fun with anything, and that’s just not it. Yes, our absolute, primary goal is to turn people to Christ, but what good is it to walk this life on Earth just to die without enjoying some of the pleasures that God has put here for us to experience?

Solomon realized that, as he says in verses 15-16. “So I said to myself, ‘What happens to the fool will also happen to me. Why then have I been overly wise?’ And I said to myself that this is also futile. For, just like the fool, there is no lasting remembrance of the wise man, since in the days to come both will be forgotten. How is it that the wise man dies just like the fool?”

See, there’s no special reward for ignoring the restaurant, the grass, and the limousine. You don’t get an extra commendation from God because you forsake the pleasures He provided for us on the path we walk. Not everything that exists on this Earth is a lie from the pit of Hell meant to distract you from Christ. You can build up some things on this Earth without it being sinful.

The important thing about each of these enjoyable parts of the road of life is the perspective of the one experiencing them. For the believer, we know that it is just a blessing on the road to our final destination: Heaven. We know that there’s no point in putting our stock in those enjoyable activities. We partake and continue on, preparing for our eternal life.

Wisdom, sight, is valuable not because it is the be all end all but because it can give you perspective for each situation. It allows you to determine that the pits and thorns are surpassable. It shows you that the restaurant, soft grass, and the limousine are not the end of the line.

Foolishness, blindness, however, blocks the perspective of those who come across the obstacles and pleasant experiences on the road. While a believer might eat a meal at the restaurant and move on, the nonbeliever will sit at the restaurant for days, stuffing himself with food believing that the death that comes from overeating is the fulfillment of the road.

Whereas she with sight might see the grass and feel the softness of it on her feet until she crosses to the next section of the road, she who is blind might frolic in the grass until she dies of starvation thinking that the ultimate joy of life is to experience the softness of it on her feet.

While the wise man might ride in the limousine to the stop, exit, and thank the driver for the ride, he who is foolish might ride in the air-conditioned limousine long after he was supposed to get out, reveling in the coolness of the air and the comfort of the leather seat until it careens off the edge and takes him to his death.

And that’s what Solomon is saying in verse 13, “And I realized that there is an advantage to wisdom over folly, like the advantage of light over darkness.”

See, on the road of life, we all get to experience some hardship and some happiness. The advantage believers have is that we know that neither the hardships nor the happiness are the end of the line, but that the end of the road is us being smothered in absolute, never-ending joy as we experience an eternity of worshiping Christ.