Ecclesiastes 11:7-12:8 - A word to the young

Good morning, everybody. I'd like to find your seats.

Thank you. So after three months, or was it

4, we've finally come to the last chapter in the book of

Ecclesiastes, the most important thing in life.

Next, next slide, please. Thank you.

So I I searched the phrase wasted life on Google and this

is a page that came up. It says hello my name is Julian

and I am an addict. Really.

I didn't fix this. It's genuine OK.

My addiction has made me depressed and anxious, put a

strain on my marriage and wasted years of my life.

But here's the good news. I have been Twitter free for

three months now. Three weeks.

So Julian Notselli then explained his phone lag and

phone log and showed that he had been spending four hours a day

on social media. So Julian on Twitter and the

author of the book of Ecclesiastes have something in

common. Both of them were depressed and

they felt they'd wasted their lives.

Next slide, please. Thank you.

So historians debate if Solomon really wrote the book of

Ecclesiastes. Some say that Ecclesiastes was

written by a person who pretended to be Solomon.

So I'm going to stick with Jewish tradition.

I believe King Solomon wrote the book which starts by saying the

words of the preacher the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

So Ecclesiastes uses the personal pronoun I over 80 times

in the book, and many of the sentences start with I did this

or I thought that. And many of the passages in

Ecclesiastes match events in Solomon's life.

So he wrote the book in old age, after he'd turned away from

following God. And Ecclesiastes is his

confession. This is mea culpa of a wasted

life and he is warning young people to learn from his

mistakes. Next slide, please.

So his favourite word in the book is vanity.

He starts by saying this in verse 2.

He says vanity of vanities, says the preacher vanity of vanities.

All is vanity. That Hebrew words also

translated as meaningless in some versions.

The NIV says this verse is meaningless.

Meaningless, says the teacher, utterly meaningless.

Everything is meaningless. And then the last chapter

returns to verse 2 and repeats it talks about vanity for the

38th time in the book. Next slide, please.

It's a pretty gloomy book. Solomon is saying our time on

earth is meaningless because nobody will remember us 100

years after we've died, death is the great equaliser, and that

all our daily activities are meaningless.

And here are some more of Solomon's depressing statements.

I hated life. I hated all the things I'd toil

for under the sun. I praised the dead who are

already dead. It's better to go to the House

of mourning than the House of feasting.

Sorrow is better than laughter. And this one, I found one

upright man among 1000, but one upright woman I could not find

among them all. We'll come back to that later.

Big one, that big one that. Yeah.

So Solomon's statement, statements in the book of

Ecclesiastes, they reflect the depression in his final years.

And he he probably died in his mid 50s.

And he calls himself in the, in this book 7 times.

He calls himself a teacher or a preacher.

Now if Solomon was the pastor of this church, I'd probably go

somewhere else on a Sunday morning because he wasn't a

great teacher. And here are three reasons why I

believe. Firstly, there's something,

there's an adjective called narcissistic.

Narcissistic people, they talk at length about themselves.

They like to talk about their achievements, they like to voice

their opinions, they even steer the conversation to make it

about themselves regardless of the topic.

And often wealthy and powerful people do this.

They're often narcissists and at time we see this in some other

church leaders. Unfortunately we see it in some

mega church leaders especially and Solomon in Ecclesiastes.

He sounds like a narcissist preacher.

He's talking about his pursuit of wisdom, his pursuit of

pleasure, and his pursuit of wealth and Ecclesiastes.

He doesn't sound like this servant hearted pastor who cares

for the flock and faithfully teaches God's word.

Secondly, second reason why I wouldn't go to his church is

because he seems fixated on life, on death, on dying, and on

meaningless. If Solomon had come into my

surgery, I was a doctor. If he'd come into my surgery,

I'm sure I would have diagnosed him as having clinical

depression. And maybe he's at risk of taking

his own life. And he's repeating messages of

doom and gloom in this book. And they're not exactly

edifying. They don't exactly build up the

flock, make mature Christians, help them to be soul winners and

overcomers. And the third reason I think

that's why Solomon wasn't a great teacher was because he

doesn't meet the qualifications of a spiritual leader.

Ephesians, sorry. One Timothy talks about how to

be a spiritual leader and it says it's all about character,

about how well you live your life, how well you live in your

family, how well you live in your community, whether you're a

good role model, whether you obey God.

It's not about how well you can preach.

And Solomon, as he got older, he made a shipwreck of his faith.

The apostle Paul used that phrase.

He described Hymenius and Alexander, who were two

Christians in in Ephesus who'd backslid, and Solomon according

to one kings. He did what was evil in the

sight of the Lord and lack the qualifications to be God's

spiritual leader. Jesus spoke about such

narcissistic Jewish religious leaders in his day.

His statement about them was that they preach but they don't.

They don't what? Practise.

Yeah, they preach but don't practise.

Solomon might have got an A for his preaching, but his practise

didn't just let it down, it caused him to waste his life.

Amazingly, God used him mightily.

He built the temple, he led the nation of Israel and the Holy

Spirit even inspired him to write 3 books of the Bible,

Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and the Song of Solomon.

So this morning I want us to see how Solomon ended up as a sad

old preacher telling the story of a wasted life.

So I'm going to begin by describe by describing stage 1,

next slide, please, Solomon's solid start.

So Solomon had a great father. His father was King David.

David was described in Scripture as a manner to God's own heart,

and one king, three says Solomon demonstrated his loyalty to the

Lord by following the practises of his father David.

So Solomon started his adult life when he was a young man,

following in his father's footsteps.

After David died, Solomon became king of Israel.

And last Sunday Isaac was speaking about Solomon having a

dream. And in the dream God told

Solomon, tell me what I should give you.

And Solomon's reply was showed wisdom and it showed humility.

He asked God for an understanding mind to govern

Israel. And God was pleased with that

reply. He gave Solomon the greatest

gift of wisdom ever bestowed on anyone.

And as a bonus, he threw in extraordinary wealth.

And Solomon, in the 10th century, was a superstar.

He was the Elon Musk of his day. He was a great influencer.

People admired him for generations, but it was the

young king that they were admiring, not the sad and lonely

old man. So Nehemiah wrote this.

There was never a king like Solomon in any of the nations.

God loved Solomon and made him king over Israel, Two Chronicles

says. Solomon, the son of David

established himself in his Kingdom, and the Lord his God

was with him and made him exceedingly great.

And the billionaire queen of Sheba heard of King Solomon and

travelled over 1000 miles to visit him.

And when she met him, she said she told him this.

This report was true, that I heard in my own land of your

words and of your wisdom. But I didn't believe the reports

until I came, and with my own eyes had seen it.

And behold, half the greatness of your wisdom was not told me.

You surpassed the report that I heard.

Next slide, please. Jesus 1000 years later also

spoke, spoke about Solomon's greatness.

This is what he said. He's talking about the Queen of

Sheba here. The queen of the South came from

the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon and

behold, someone greater than Solomon is here, which implies

that he thinks that Solomon was pretty great as well.

So Solomon had become king of an empire by the time he was 20,

and you think he was set up for a lifetime of happiness and

success? King David called him just

before he died, and he gave him an advice.

This is what he said to him. He urged him to know the God of

your father and serve him with a whole heart and with a willing

mind. And then he gave this prophetic

warning to Solomon about God says if you seek him he will be

found by you and be sorry but he but if you forsake him, he will

cast you off forever. I wonder if David had seen

something in Solomon's character that disturbed him.

Perhaps he'd observed Solomon's Achilles heel that could trip

him up. The chink in Solomon's armour

was that he passionately desired the company of beautiful young

women and Solomon's foundations as a young man were already

collapsing and his world and would eventually bring him to

ruin. So second stage in Solomon's

life, Solomon's sensual struggle.

You know, millionaires today like to collect expensive works

of art for their collections. Solomon also had a hobby.

He collected wives. He became king by the age of 20,

by which time he already had two wives.

The first was an Ammonite beauty and the second was an Egyptian

Princess. Now, Ezra didn't mince his words

when he wrote this in one Kings. He just bluntly wrote He said

Solomon loved many foreign women.

Solomon was wise when he was young and served God with a

whole heart and a willing mind. And usually age and experience

make people wisely wiser and Godlier if they're Christians.

But that doesn't always happen, and it didn't happen in

Solomon's case. His desire to love young,

beautiful foreign princesses got the better of him as he got

older. You know the story.

He ended up collecting 700 wives and 300 mistresses.

If you work it out, that's two new bedmates each month of his

life. He copied the practise of other

Eastern rulers and established A hareem.

And those Solomon loved? 700 wives.

They didn't love him back. Really, none of them were his

friends. It says in Scripture that he

couldn't find one upright woman among his thousand lovers.

No wonder he became lonely and depressed in his old age, he

wrote in Ecclesiastes. Better a poor but wise youth

than an old but foolish king who no longer knows how to heed a

warning. I wonder whether he was thinking

back to the warning that his father, King David gave to him

before he died, whether he wrote this proverb about himself now

being foolish when he was wise, so wise when he was the young

Prince. No doubt there were many people

around Solomon's day who were asking the same question that

Nehemiah asked 500 years later. This is what Nehemiah wrote.

He said did not Solomon king of Israel sin on account of such

women among the many nations? There was no king like him, and

he was beloved by God, by his God, and God made him king over

all Israel. Nevertheless, foreign women made

even him to sin. Next slide.

So one king says this says when Solomon was old, his wives

turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was

not a wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of

David his father. Solomon did evil what was evil

in the sight of the Lord, and did not completely follow the

Lord as his father David had done.

So Scripture says Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord.

Now his big sin wasn't having numerous wives, not even was it

marrying foreign women, women, although that is prohibited in

the books of the law. Solomon suffered from heart

disease. His big sin was his heart.

His heart was turned away from following God and turned towards

worshipping idols. He built altars to foreign gods,

the foreign gods that his wives worshipped.

We never hear about his wives worshipping Yahweh, the God of

the Bible. Instead, we hear of Solomon

worshipping idols himself. Rather than helping his wives to

start worshipping Yahweh. His foreign wives LED Solomon to

worship Chimosh and Baal. Say Solomon went after

Ashtaroth, the goddess of the Sardonians, and after Milkom,

the abomination of the Ammonites.

And that idolatry that he was practising, that he was

promoting, eventually led to civil war in Israel when the

nation broke into two, two separate nations.

Now the kings of both of these nations of Judah and Israel,

almost all of them worshipped foreign gods or promoted or

tolerated foreign gods over the next 400 years.

And idolatry became so established that 500 years

later, 400 years later, God judged both nations and allowed

them to be conquered and their populations to be scattered

throughout the world and the temple to be destroyed.

So when Solomon was young, he followed God wholeheartedly, but

when he got older, his wives turned his heart to follow other

gods and believers today still backslide, maybe due to

Solomon's sin. That a Christian may follow God

wholeheartedly, but then if he or she falls in love with an

unbeliever rather than the unbeliever turning to God,

sometimes the Christian may end up turning away from God.

Next slide please. So the final stage of Solomon's

life. Solomon's sad senility.

Chapter 12 continues Solomon, his sad reflection on his wasted

life. And it finishes with a short

poem. And he's painting a picture of

various complaints associated with getting old.

Solomon may. Maybe he was even suffering from

some of these complaints himself.

I'm going to walk you through these poetic descriptions one

phrase at a time. And with each phrase, I'll

suggest a medical condition that Solomon might be picturing.

Next slide, please. He starts the poem before the

sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened, and

maybe he's talking here about his eyesight failing.

He goes on, and the clouds return after the rain.

There's one problem after another in his life, in the days

when the keepers of the house tremble.

He's probably picturing Parkinson's disease here, in

which sufferers have shaky hands and the strong men are bent, so

it's common for the elderly to have difficulties because their

back is bent forward. Next slide, please, he goes on,

and the grinders cease because they are few.

This is obvious, isn't it? It's our teeth.

And those who look through the windows are dimmed again.

Another mention of eyesight failing and the doors on the

street are shut. If your mouth is like a door,

then that suggests difficulty talking.

And when the sound of the grinding is low, we often have

problems hearing as we get old. Next slide and one rises up at

the sound of a bird. Difficulty sleeping or insomnia.

Hear a bird wakes you up, can't get back to sleep and all the

daughters of song are brought low hearing problems again.

They are also afraid of what is high, problems keeping your

balance and terrorists are on the way.

Maybe this is the increased anxiety and fear which is

common. The almond tree blossoms.

We have a few almond trees blossoming in the congregation

today. You know what what this is.

Next slide please. The grasshopper drags itself

along, probably meaning difficulty walking due to

weakness and desire fails. Anyone have any idea what that

might be? Yeah, you're thinking it sexual

problems. There was no Viagra around in

Solomon's day because man is going to his eternal home.

Now he's finishing the poem. He's clearly talking about the

process of dying here. And the mourners go about the

streets. And that's a clear reference to

death. Need mourners to have death.

Next slide please. His poem concludes with a few

more images, and these are events that occur at the time a

person dies. Let me read it before the silver

cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the picture

is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit

returns to God who gave it. And Solomon's probably picturing

a broken back here, a broken brain and a broken heart in this

final poetic description. Next slide, please.

So I want to to land now. So Solomon's started his adult

life well, but finished it badly.

And as he wrote Ecclesiastes, he must have had memories.

He must have remembered the time when, as a young man, he had a

close relationship with God. God spoke to him directly on a

couple of occasions through a dream.

But now he's nearing his at the end of his life, he's got many

regrets. He's wasted his life chasing

after women, wealth and idols rather than walking with God.

And he's sought earthly pleasures.

When he left God out of the occasion, out of the equation,

nothing satisfied him. He's sad, lonely and depressed

and leading the nation astray spiritually as well.

Now he wants to atone for his sins by preaching to young

people. He wants them to listen to his

experience so that they don't repeat his his mistakes.

And so at the end of Ecclesiastes, he's making a

couple of very true statements. Not everything in the book of

Ecclesiastes. We should be taking his gospel,

taking his true. A lot of it is about

recollections of a saddle man, but these things were, I

believe, true. He says this, remember also your

creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come

and the years draw near of which you will say I have no pleasure

in them. He's saying that there is a

purpose in life and it's found in knowing God and keeping his

commands. And the other verse is this.

Now all has been heard. Here is the conclusion of the

matter. Fear God and keep his

commandments. Now he's talking to young

people. I don't know what I would do if

I was a young person listened to King Solomon on his deathbed.

Would you listen to his sermon and think, Oh yeah, learn from

his mistakes. If you don't preach what you

practise, you're useless as a as a role model, as a teacher, as a

good preacher. So let me finish with a few

applications. Next slide please Right The best

time to know God is now. When I was 18, I was a medical

student. I was a mathematics student in

London, and I decided that God didn't exist.

And one day I was walking in London and I nearly had a

serious accident. And after getting to safety on

the other side of the road, I remembered what a student friend

had told me. He'd said he'd shared the gospel

with me, that I could receive forgiveness for my sins by

trusting him. And though I came to accept that

Jesus had died and had risen again for several weeks, I chose

not to trust in God. I wanted to carry on living my

simple life. I believed in that Jesus died,

but that didn't make me a Christian.

Another student visited me and with AI believe a word of

knowledge. He laid bare what I was thinking

that I could put this event off until the end of my life.

And he said without knowing what I was thinking, Jeff, if you

don't surrender your life to God tonight, I don't believe you

ever will. And I did that and that made all

the difference to the rest for me is history.

So the best time to come to know God is when you're young.

That's when your heart is most likely to be opened to the

gospel. It's the time when God can speak

into your life and guide you and help you and shape the future

course of your life. If you start young with Christ,

you can continue with Christ and stay close to Christ.

And that way you'll you'll end up with God at the end of your

life. Says in Scripture today is the

accepted time mate. So mate today the day of

salvation. If you don't know Jesus already,

mate today the day that you seek him and ask him to be a saviour.

2nd is a word for pensioners. That old age can be your golden

years. As of today that includes Libby,

my wife, because she now qualifies today for her

Lancashire County Council bus pass.

She's a but she's a ways to serving God at the moment.

She's on her conference at the moment in Derby Fort called

Hands of God for British Sign Language interpreters.

Psalm 92 says this. The righteous flourish in the

courts of our God. In old age they still produce

fruit. They are always green and full

of SAP, showing that the Lord is upright.

We shouldn't get our understandings about old people

from those who think of the elderly as those who passed

their sell by date. We should get it from Scripture.

And Psalm 92 paints a picture of older believers as trees that

are still producing fruit and testifying to the goodness of

God. It can be a joyous and

fulfilling thing in old age. Do you agree, Clem?

Good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Provost 2029 says the glory of young men is their strength,

Grey hair, the splendour of the old.

So what strength is to the young people, age is to the old.

Age isn't a liability, it's an asset to the Lord through prayer

and to the world through ministry in His church.

My father-in-law turns 99 later this year, is still active in

his church, and a old age is not a detriment to serving God.

Scripture said this of Moses when he was died he was 120

years old and his eyesight was clear and he was strong, as

strong as ever. Thirdly, a word, a word for

those in love. Don't let love draw you away

from God. Like Solomon.

If you're single, don't date an unbeliever.

Even if you think you can, your your belief will win out over

his or her belief. And that it would come to trust

in God and trust in Christ. It's dangerous.

It's dangerous. Solomon's example proves that

don't think someone was thinking of converting his wives, was

thinking of something else. Instead, wait until the person

you fancy is born again before starting to date.

And if you're married to an unbeliever, stay faithful to

them. One Corinthian says that if

you're unequally yoked, the unbelieving partner is made

wholly by the believing spouse can work out.

We've seen it happen. Finally, a word for those who've

lost their first love for God. It's possible to come back to

God. Solomon's life story proves it.

It demonstrates that God can use in his service people even if

they've sinned or sinned badly that Solomon did.

You're still his child even if you've lost your first love, and

the way to return to him is by asking God for forgiveness. 1

John 19 says God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and

to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, and God is

gracious. The Holy Spirit drew you to

respond to God in the first case, and He will keep you.

The Holy Spirit that He gives you when you're born again is

His guarantee that He will keep you until the day of Jesus

Christ. Solomon backslid badly and

wasted his life. God still used him to write the

book of Ecclesiastes, and I believe he'll be there in heaven

because Jesus said not one of his chosen ones will be lost.

So will you be in heaven if you've placed your trust in

Jesus that he died for your sins in order that you can receive

eternal life and enjoy eternity in in heaven?

Let's just pray, shall we? Yahweh, we thank you for helping

us to understand Your goodness and your faithfulness through

the life of Solomon. Your promise to us is that if we

ask anything in the name of Jesus believing, we will receive

it. Lord, we want to ask for our

children and our youth to come to know you as Saviour while

they're still young, and then to follow you all the days of our

lives, of their lives. And thank you Jesus, that You're

faithful and just. And we ask for those who've lost

the first love and are not following you.

Help their hearts to give the idols that they cling to by

confessing their sins. And thank you, Lord, for the

promise that you will cleanse us from all unrighteousness and

forgive us our sins. And Lord, we want to pray for

senior citizens right now. For those who've never asked you

to forgive them, please open their eyes, Lord, that they may

see Jesus. For those who struggle with

health issues of one kind or another, we ask you, Lord, you

are Yahweh, a Rafa, the Lord who heals.

Bring healing to their bodies and minds and make them fruitful

trees with righteousness. Thank you God for your grace in

Jesus name, Amen.