Proverb Killers

We live in a culture that likes to put a smile on everything and look on the bright side.

Stop saying the glass is half empty.
Nobody wants bad news, bleak, despondent, gloomy, pessimistic outlooks.
Teams are encouraged to think positively and focus on the good.

People prefer smiles. I was at coffee shop recently and they had a bulletin board filled with notes. People can come in and write their own proverbs.

Be Kind; Kindness matters
Give Compliments Freely; You might just make someones day.
Hard work pays off
I want a boyfriend and get married in 3 months (not gonna accuse her of pessimism).
Live more; think less
You are worth it
Focus on self love and not always try to please others (that’s gotta be in the Bible somewhere.)
Grandma and Unicorn Capachinos

Now you definitely get a lot of positive thinking from a board like this, no doubt. I can’t help but smile imagining Solomon walking up to a board like this having just finished Ecclesiastes. Imagine him. What do you think Solomon would write?

We are in the end of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 today and the first part of chapter 4 and the text we are about to read could be reduced to three sticky notes.

Now there is some cheer. Talk about negative energy. Now I want to warn you out of the gate that this message is not a happy one. But, that doesn’t mean it’s not important and healthy.

Solomon is the realist that comes and dumps a bunch of cold water on all these Starbucks pipe dreams.

You think getting married in 3 months is going to make you happy? I married 3 women a month for 300 months straight. Marriage won’t fix your problems.
Hard work pays off? Really? In what way. I worked harder than all of them and my soul is still clawing for fulfillment.

In this next section, Solomon adds some reality juice. He posts a few of his own sticky notes. He speaks for the person who doesn’t experience any of the beautiful seasons we talked about last week.

I’ll grant you that these seasons of life exist. I’ll grant you that some people appear to be served up rainbows and unicorn capachinos. You guys who live in America, in Boise, the best city in the best country in the world, of course you can be happy.

But I live in Syria. I live in North Korea. I live in Sudan. I’m a woman born into the lowest cast in central India. What in the world does this poem have to do with me? The only season I’m familiar with is suffering. I was born into mourning. I was schooled in death. All I ever experienced was loss, casting away, tearing, war and hate.

If there was a season of blessing, I missed it. There’s no beautiful season that I get to enjoy. So today he addresses three objections to Solomon’s observation that everything is beautiful in its time.

And just to warn you out of the gate, there are not a lot of answers just yet. He’s just putting to words the frustration that many feel about life.

Here’s his first objection to verse 11 that everything is beautiful in it’s time.

Life is not fair.

Why is it that in school, the girls who disobey God, are flirts, who are totally focused on the external, who are immodest are the ones who get the attention of the guys while the girls who focuses on the quiet internal person of the heart, dresses modestly and wait for guys to initiate are ignored?

That straight up is not fair. That’s an injustice.

Why is it that a very talented athlete is born into a slum and must stay in a slum because he never has opportunity and had he been born in the US he would be a demi-god. That’s not fair.

What if LaBrone James was born here in this Rohingya refugee camp. Statistically, almost certainly, a world-class athlete of some sport was born in here but we will never know it.These guys fled from the genocide in Myanmar. That’s not fair.

Now what I’m describing here is equality. But the text takes it a step further. It’s not necessarily talking about equal opportunity. It’s talking about injustice.

Life is full of wickedness. That word wickedness in Hebrew is literally the word bending. The property line goes from this stake to that tree a half mile down. But then you slightly bend it so you can get the spring and the pond on your side. The law is like a ruler. Straight with markings at predictable intervals…unbending. Wickedness is bending that law and making exceptions that benefit the evil doer.

Inequality is always going to be part of the warp and woof of life, but we can have justice. We can say, you have broken the law and deserve this consequence. You have kept the law and are allowed to go free. But what really depresses Solomon is that he turns his gaze to the place of justice, the courts, the courtrooms and what he sees slashes his soul, "In the very place I would expect to see justice, there I find the worse corruption of all."

And do we not see this in our very own country? I mean we still enjoy tremendous equity in our courts and I am very thankful that I do not live in a country whose gears are lubricated through bribery, whose cops are on the drug lord’s payroll.

But even in our country, we can look to the courts, the place where justice ought to reign, and see tremendous injustice. Our courts have somehow ruled that it is the just and right thing to do to give mothers the right to kill the life that is growing inside of them. We have a law in our country that you cannot murder. But that law is bent in favor of the more powerful pregnant mother for her benefit. How is that just? How is that fair? And yet the courts have ruled in that manner.

Injustice is horrible. But injustice does exist.

You want to know what Solomon is saying? Certain kinds of injustice never resolve. If you just look at what happens in this life, it is often the case that the bad guy wins.

This sermon is entitled proverbs killers because while the Proverbs are most of the time true, they are not always true.

This seems to say that if we trust in God, justice will prevail.

Tell that to the family of Pastor Wang Yi, the founder of Early Rain Covenant Church, who right now is in prison serving a 9 year prison sentence and the forfeiture of a large percentage of his assets

It just doesn’t feel very true. Where Oh Lord is your justice? I trusted in you and I am not safe. I am behind bars.

Tell that to

I’m sure this poor girl is tempted to feel betrayed by a proverb like this. How can God really care about me? It sure doesn’t seem like it. Where is your justice, Oh Lord?

I don’t want to exploit these two people to make a point in a message. Let’s pray for them right now.

[Can we just pray for them right now. ]

Now open your mind to the reality that there are many, many people who live this life right now. It’s horrible. And justice is not ruling in their favor. The governments of these countries, the very institution you’d expect to defend these people, are actually ignoring them.

Sometimes life is horribly unjust and there’s never an end to it and there’s nothing we can do about. And this messess with our conception of how life ought to be. Proverbs tell us, essentially, do good and good will follow, do bad and evil will follow.

Then Ecclesiastes comes along and says, yeah, but sometimes bad happens to those who do good, and good happens to those who do bad.

Just in case we want to use Proverbs to turn life into a formula for how to live the good life, God gives us Ecclesiastes.

Here is the question of the skeptic. Everything is beautiful in it’s time, huh?

What’s the answer according to the text. Just because there is not justice today, does not mean that there will not be justice in the future. What ever gave us the idea that delayed justice means no justice?

Justice is coming. We need to be very, very careful of the obvious logical fallacy that if it doesn’t exist now it will never exist. If i can’t understand it, it can’t be true. Since I don’t like the idea of delayed justice, and since I don’t like the idea of a God who allows that sort of thing, I don’t think God exists.

Man, how many things EXIST that you don’t understand. Pretty much everything. It shouldn’t be surprising to us that there things about God we don’t understand.

So what do you do when you don’t understand something but there is a much smarter person who does understand? You trust them. And here is what God says about the matter. No there will be a day when God makes right. And I want you to trust me that this day is coming. We trust that God will one day, ultimately call a day of reckoning. What we are to do is trust in the Promise of Psalm 37:5-6 and leave the timing to God.

The important point about Psalm 37 and every other promise like it in the Bible is that the reality is true, but the time table of God’s justice is unknown. I love how this is illustrated in Hebrews 11.

These are the happy endings. Faith in the sovereign, justice-loving Lord sometimes results in this outcome. “Commit your way to the Lord and you will see him work and justice will shine like the noonday sun.”" What a great ending!

I could imagine some of us in the room being really inspired by this list and saying, “Man I just need more faith like these guys. Wouldn’t it be cool to see God work in these ways.” Yes, that would be really, really cool. And I hope he does. And he very well could. But he also might not.

I’m going to memorize Psalm 37!

Because look at what comes next. There’s not even a transitional sentence; there’s no hint your even going to get a transition. This is not just mid chapter, mid paragraph. this is mid-verse, mid-sentence!

What about these guys? Where is your justice, Oh God. And they literally died without receiving what was promised?

Commit your ways to the Lord; trust in him and he will act. he will bring forth your righteousness as the noonday light. Where is he?

That makes God a liar right? God promised and did not fulfill? This is EXACTLY what Solomon is observing. If life “under the sun” is all that exists then God would be a liar, life would be pointless and we should all just mail it in right now.

The promised justice is coming. Judgment is coming and that allows us to accept the current injustices. You might die without having ever seen that justice, but it is coming. It does eliminate the pain, but it allows you to still have hope in the middle of a very otherwise hopeless situation.

There’s a second objection

Your dog and you end up in the same place.

And for all our technological advances, it’s pretty hard to see how we are really all that much better off than the beasts.

We are supposedly super advanced. After all we have the opposable thumb. We have a really big brain which supposedly can manipulate nature in our favor. And that is true to a degree. But if the holy grail is more life, we still have a ways to go before we’ve even caught up to certain animals.

The greenhead shark can live to be as old as 350 years. To put that in perspective, Rembrandt died 350 years ago.
The bowhead whale lives to be 200 years old.
the red sea urchin lives about 200 years.
The gallopigose turtles are 150+ years.

If life is the most precious thing in the world, than these beasts are better off than us and happier too, I might add, since they don’t have cell phones.

What does all our advances in technology and health care gain us? It’s hands on the steering wheel as you shoot off the cliff. Solomon is observing the physical, observational, parallels.

Both man and beast die. When Solomon says, who knows whether the beast goes down and the soul goes up, that’s not Solomon the agnostic talking. Solomon knows more about the resurrection than that. Keep in mind, everything in the book is to be interpreted by the phrase, vapor and life as experienced "under the sun." What he’s saying, is if all you had was your observational powers to observe the corpse of a man and the corpse of a beast could you say through the power of observation, oh, clearly the beast just went to the grave to be no more, but the soul of the human, you see here by these decomposition marks, clearly went to heaven. You can’t say that. They look the same. They end up as bones and dust.

And if you were among the living, could you explain to that dead man what became of all his work? No you are cut off from him. We are here and he is elsewhere.

How much different are we than a beast?

Solomon does not answer it here directly, but the greater context of Solomon does answer it and certainly the Bible answers it. Our end is not dust. Dust is not our end. We are awaiting a glorious transformation. Life is full of injustice and suffering and physical decay. But we already knew that.

Yes there is a certain fatalism about. The creation is subject to futility. Life is like doing a bunch of pushups. At first it’s easy. It gets harder and harder and then eventually you give up. That’s life. It’s a giant race to see who can keep moving the longest. When you stop moving, you lose. It’s over. There are forces at work pulling us down to the grave. It’s inevitable. It cannot be stopped. Death is the most powerful force we know turning us back to dust. But dust is not the end.

We await the REDEMPTION of our bodies. Can I get an AMEN? For in this hope, WHAT HOPE? (The redemption of our bodies) we were saved. Do you see that the Christian faith is not mystical. We are awaiting bodily TRANSFORMATION.

Now there’s a third and final objection for today but more to come next week.

In chapter 3 and 4 Solomon is soured and the tone comes across.

This is one of the major learning points for us as readers of Ecclesiastes. I find myself wanting to reshape this book and consequently this sermon to sound like the apostle John or Paul. I want to quickly align the book with the language with happier portions of the NT.

At face value, when I read what Solomon has to say, I’m terrified. Whoa brother! We can’t walk into Sunday morning looking like that. That bed head medusa hairdo you got going on there is going to freak people out. You need to tame that! You need to comb the hair, get out of those gothic clothes and chains, take off the headphones and please, when we get up in front of people, don’t embarrass me. Please, for goodness sake, remember your manners, shake people’s hands.

But Solomon won’t allow it. Here he is today folks. We can’t bend it to our comfort zone, and if we do, we will miss what this God-inspired text reveals about God. So don’t try to unsay what he says here today. Just let it sit and learn what he’s trying to teach us.

Power imbalance is the warp and woof of society since the dawn of time.

It’s not fair that some are born with privilege and others are born in poverty.
It’s not fair that because of your race or ethnicity you are denied access to power
It’s not fair that some people are born with the best education, the best food, the best connections. Of course they are going to succeed.

The financial inequality in the world has been decried all through history. And of course it’s not the inequality itself that is the problem. It’s the fact that those who have the power use it to hurt not help. They oppress those who have no power and either take advantage of them or marginalize or even murder them.

How can everything be beautiful when the power is so imbalanced? Not only that. There’s something even worse. It’s one thing to be oppressed but it’s like the ultimate blow to be oppressed alone.

And the way this aloneness usually happens is not how you are probably thinking. It is often the case that those who undergo the most unspeakable torments are the ones whose stories go untold and unread and NOT because they are not around to tell them. They are around, but nobody wants to listen.

I have a book on my shelf called “Tortured for Christ.” Many of you have that book, but probably only a few have read it. Why? The title tells you it it’s going to be a tough read. If I’m sitting down after a long day, I’m not sure I want to pick that up. It’s going to take some emotional strength to be able to bear what I know is in that book.

And it’s that impulse to resist hearing about evil that forces so many to suffer alone.

I remember reading a book called, “Prisoner of Tehran.” And it described the torture of this young girl in the the Evin prison in Iran. It was such a terrible thing to have to absorb. But the worse part of the book by far for me was the scene where she returns to her parents. She comes home and she sees her parents, and her parents know she’s been in the prison. They know the prison is infamous for just brutalizing it’s victims. But she’s had time to heal so she looks pretty normal. And her parents just talk small talk. They won’t ask her about the torture she endured, the beatings, the nights of freezing cold, the clubbings, the firing squad she escaped. They ask her nothing. And for her, the fact that her parents would not ask her about it, the fact that in order to protect themselves from pain, they pretended like it never happened, was worse than the torture itself. It was the loneliest place in the world.

Are we not all guilty of this? We don’t want to hear about the suffering of the world because it hurts us. So the victims end up suffering alone or die in silence.

Solomon says, “Where is the justice in that? The worst suffering is so terrible, nobody can handle it, nobody wants to hear it, so they have to suffer alone.”

I am so torn on this because I actually just hate to even think of this kind of cruelty. It’s mentally excruciating to have to come to grips with the fact that this kind of suffering exists. But I don’t want to be guilty of the even greater crime of protecting myself from discomfort by allowing them to suffer alone.

I absolutely detest the thought of torture. I can hardly live with myself to think that people have to suffer such cruelties alone. Why have I been blessed? Why do they have to suffer?

Solomon says, “If you just look at life under the sun, it’s madness. There’s no sense to it. There is no answer to that question.”

Torture and death is as common as bread. The amount of power abuse that has resulted in people being oppressed and even murdered because of race, or religion or ethnicity is staggering. In just the 20th century.

6 Million in Nazi Hollocaust about 2/3 of the Jewish population of Europe in 1941-1945.
That doesn’t count the 2 million poles.
1-2 Million Indonesian genocide during the communist uprising in 1975-1979
2 Million in the Cambodian Genocide where 100% of Cambodian Viets and 50% of Cambodian Chinese were killed from 1975-1979
1.5 Million Kazakh during the Soviet famine in 1932
1 Million in the Armenian Genocide where 50% of Armenians were killed in Turkey in early 1920s
1 Million in the Rhwanda Genocide where 70% of Tutsis were killed in 1994
1 Million of the Bengali Hindus in Bangladesh in 1971
1 Million, 90% to 97% of total Circassian population perished or deported by the Russian forces in

The wikipedia article on genocide lists over 50 genocides most of which happened in the 21st century.

Solomon is looking at the oppression he’s aware of it just haunts him. In this small section here. There’s no answer. He just says, it would be better if you had never been born.

It’s hard to disagree. You just think about the suffering and it’s so terrible.

Why does he do this? Why does God put this in the Bible? Why are we forced to face into these harsh realities where people die without justice, where the wicked win? Solomon is here with messy hair, bad church manners in a style so unpresentable to our church environment. Why does God allow this in his precious Bible?

Here it is: Ecclesiastes is a BEACON OF LIGHT illuminating the Old Testament waters of messed up patriarchs and sinful kings. It surges forward into a first-century world that crucifies criminals on the street for anyone to view. And it fast forwards clear to the 20th century complete with it’s 170 million murdered in genocide. This “Life under the sun” reminds of what we fell from and why a Savior is needed.

The injustice in the world reminds us that we are longing for the Justice giver, the justifier to come.
The persecution reminds us that we are awaiting a deliverer.
The diesease and sickness reminds us that we are awaiting the great healer.

We are to be reminded this morning that this world is broken. In a Jewish wedding they always break the wine glass. Why do they do that? To remind everyone, that as joyous as this day is, there is suffering that needs remembering. Joy needs to be tempered because suffering has not been eliminated. We need a Savior. If God has given you good work to do and you find yourself in a season of blessing, then by all means enjoy it. You don’t have to apologize for the royal flush you’ve been dealt. Use it to glorify God and serve others. But don’t make the mistake of thinking you are free from the suffering that other’s experience and that somehow you can now silo your life out and build heaven here on earth. For many, earth is hell and they can’t wait to get to heaven. Heaven is their only hope.

We read Psalm 76 this week in our elder meeting and in it we found some harsh language of God being vindictive against his enemies.

And when you read this in nice suburban Boise in 2020 you think, “Well, that’s not very nice.” But think about living through a genocide. Would this not be your prayer. Would you not long to see anger in the eyes of God coming to save the humble of the earth? Would you not love to see God make right the terrible injustices?
Conclusion Prayer
We have a responsibility, even while we enjoy God’s gifts on earth, to suffer along side those who suffer.

To weep with those who weep as Romans 12 says.

So I want to close this morning by giving you a few resources and way to pray.

VOM

Boko Haram is Jihadist terrorist organization in Nigeria. Leah Sharibu’s

After we first spoke to Leah’s parents, I began thinking of the best practical support my wife and I could give the family. After a big traumatic event, a person can easily feel isolated. We decided to invite them to stay with us. We can’t just pray for them from a distance, they need us to walk beside them so that they know they are not alone.

Nathan calls me almost weekly and I can hear the expectation in his voice. He wants me to give them good news about Leah, about when she will be reunited with them. This is the difficult part for me, not being able to give them the news they so eagerly want. I pray that I can give them good news soon.

Leah’s mother is doing okay under the circumstances. But if we’re being honest, can you really be okay, knowing that your daughter is still with her kidnappers after nearly two years? We don’t know for sure where she is and exactly what has happened to Leah—and that uncertainty is difficult.

Sometimes Rebecca has this distant look in her eyes, and you immediately know that physically she is here, but her mind and spirit are with Leah. Nathan is a supportive husband and father, but how much can one family endure?

…We must pray constantly. This is also my commitment. It’s important that we, their faith family, keep praying. Speak their names. The Bible orders us to pray without ceasing. We know that God can release her in His sovereign power, but He wants us to persistently and faithfully ask Him. We do not always understand His ways, but we trust He knows best. He is our Father and He has a plan much bigger than we can ever understand.

I encourage the global community to pray incessantly. Pray that He brings Leah home. We may ask, is it God’s will that Leah is released? Yes! But when? Only He knows. And in the meantime, we continue to pray for Leah to be strong. We pray that God will continue to strengthen her faith and that her captors will be touched by Leah’s persistence and faith in God.
Prayer after the service.
If you want to continue praying after the service, there will be a prayer team up front here who would love to pray with you.