Ecclesiastes 6
RileyEcclesiastes 6:1-12
AND Ecc_6:1 to Ecclesiastes 7:29.WE pass over the sixth chapter without treatment. Not because it holds no worthy texts; nor yet because it does not contain valuable suggestions; but, rather, because the former treatments have touched, in some measure, its main contents; and because the limitations of time to be spent in the study of this Book demand progress.The seventh chapter, however, is so rich in practical and spiritual suggestions as to demand more extensive discussion than we will give to it.Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, introduces a comparison between Judaism and Christianity, in favor of the latter; declaring that Christ was “better than the angels” (Hebrews 1:4); declaring that He had brought “a better hope” (Hebrews 7:19) and an assurance of “a better Testament” (Hebrews 7:22); that He was “the Mediator of a better Covenant”, “established upon better promises” (Hebrews 8:6); that “in Heaven” we have “a better and an enduring substance” (Hebrews 10:34); that our anticipation is for “a better country” (Hebrews 11:16); and our expectation is to obtain a better resurrection (Hebrews 11:40).Paul’s method in this matter was not without precedent. No less an inspired writer than Solomon employs kindred comparisons; and this seventh chapter abounds in them. It is a chapter of “betters”. “A good name is better than precious ointment”. Better is “the day of death than the day of one’s birth”. “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting”. Sorrow is better than laughter”. “It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a mm to hear the song of fools”. “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof”.Having, however, in a previous sermon discussed the “betters” we prefer here to follow another line and introduce this text in the light of the following suggestions: The Value of Reputation, The Moral Uses of Sorrow, The Sane Treatment of Criticism, and The True Worth of Wisdom.THE VALUE OF good reputation is a gracious aroma.“A good name is better than precious ointment”.The language is suggestive in the last degree!
There is something sweet associated with a good name. There is a delicate perfume about it.
When in conversation a good name is called there is the odor of violets, the scent of the orange blossoms. It comes to the ears as the sweet, faint song of distant music. There is about it an undefinable delight.There is a legend which Lew Wallace worked into his famous “Ben Hur” to the effect that when the angels who came to announce the birth of Jesus turned back to their Heavenly Home, they left the sky through which they passed roseate; the beauty of the heavens seeming thereby to harmonize with the wonderful joys of the hosts who sang in unison, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men”.We have no disposition whatever to pay undue tribute to sinful man. At his best he is but a sorry representative of what a child of God should be; and yet, when these virtues which we call “honor,” “integrity,” “uprightness,” are so combined with grace of speech, cordiality of manner, and evident sincerity as to give to one “a good name”, there is something about it like the blush of the rose and the sweet perfume of the orange blossom; and the world is pretty much one in its judgment that such a name is precious beyond comparison.The grave but accentuates the value of a good reputation. For the man who bears it, the day of death is better than the day of his birth.At first mention, that sounds like a falsehood. The good man is the one man we would not have die.
He also is the one man whose birth brought a benediction to the world, and whose death bows that world in grief. And yet, paradoxical as it may seem, the day of his death is better than the day of his birth.That is due to several circumstances, the first of which is the fact that his life is complete.
A finished thing is always better than the unfinished —fuller, rounder, riper!Then again, the day of his death is better than the day of his birth because the day of his birth brought nothing to the world but a prospect; and the day of his death left behind the value of a life.Still further, the day of one’s birth is a gamble: the life may turn out well; it may turn out wretchedly. But when a good man dies the gamble is over, the desirable results are known; the unchanging and unchangeable coin is in hand.It was a glad day when Jesus was born; angels came from Heaven to earth to announce the joy thereof, and to join their voices in the jubilee of the hour.It was a dark hour when Jesus died; but the one sentence that passed His lips, “It is finished”, is a sentence that flashed light into the darkness and brought to this world the best announcement it has ever received from Heaven. Out of that “finished” life has come more of the fruits of righteousness than from all other sources combined.We can never take the true measure of a man while he lives. The giant of the forest is estimated correctly only after it has fallen.I have been in the Sequoias and have seen “the Martha Washington” and “the George Washington,” twenty odd feet in diameter; and I have looked on the “General Grant” forty feet in diameter; and have turned my eyes to see him tower up hundreds of feet into the sky; and stand as but a stump of his former great self.My eyes deceived me; they did not look that large, standing. I would not even believe my friend when he affirmed their proportions, until I had gone to the pains of measuring them myself. Nearby was a fallen tree, some sixteen feet in diameter, a sapling beside the General Grant.
I walked beside it; in fact, I walked through its hollow heart and believed all they told me about it. It looked the part; but it was because it lay prone and I could institute a close up comparison between its gigantic girth and my pigmied height.We have a verse that runs “Strange we never prize the music till the bird has flown.” But stranger still that we so poorly appreciate living men.
Adoniram Judson Gordon seemed just a pastor among pastors while he lived, serving a church that seated less than half this one seats; but now that he is gone, we know that a giant once walked among us.Dwight L. Moody was, to the day of his death, a subject of discussion, some declaring him great, and others insisting that his success was a mere emotionalism. Now we all unite in paying him just tribute.Charles Spurgeon was envied and hated by the liberal ministers of London; and while he lived they did their best to disparage his attainments, depreciate the value of his services. When once he was dead those same critics called a solemn assembly and united in praising him as a prophet. It is a fact that the day of death for a man with a good name brings the world the sense of his value; and in that respect is vastly above and beyond the day of his birth.It was a slight step for Solomon to pass to his second suggestion:THE MORAL USE OF SORROWand to say,“It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting.“Sorrow is better than laughter”.To put this into language easily understood, and into speech that correctly interprets the text, let us see two things:1. Sympathy is better than selfish indulgence.That is why “it is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting”.
There are a good many people in the world who behave themselves as did the priest and the Levite on the way to Jericho. They walked around the wounded; they avoided the sight of suffering; they left the dying to the mercy of others.
They had a philosophy that life has enough unescapable sorrow without imposing any avoidable one upon self; and they imagined the way to be happy is to shut one’s eyes against all scenes of suffering and close one’s ears to pathetic appeals.It is a false philosophy, Nietzsche’s advocacy notwithstanding! It may fit in with the brutal evolutionary hypothesis, the struggle for existence in “the survival of the fittest.” But it receives no approval from either the Christian faith or the sane experience of man. The sober philosophy of facts confirms the declaration that sympathy is better than indulgence. The truth is that sin, in its last analysis, is always self-indulgence; and sin is not a virtue.That is why the good Samaritan who, seeing the wounded man on the way to Jericho, moved with compassion toward him, went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil, and seating him on his own beast, brought him to the inn, offering to pay his bill, was commended by Christ, the One and only Man whose words were always the last expression of wisdom.That is why Maggie Tulliver takes honorable place among the heroines of earth, for when a nobleman who loved her, offered his hand and heart in honorable marriage, and laid before her the prospect of a life of luxury, she turned from it all and gave herself to the crippled boy, to whom, in youth, she had pledged her troth, seeking his joy and not her own.That is why it is that Harriet Tubman, that remarkable colored woman, who was believed by John Brown, and perhaps also by Wendell Phillips, to be the bravest spirit on the American continent, when she found herself safe over the Canadian line, was not content to stay in the joy of freedom for which she had so long dreamed and thought, but turned back again and again, nineteen times, into the South to direct the feet of three hundred slaves, by the underground passage way, to personal freedom. Little wonder that she was known as the Moses of the ebony race; and still less that her name is inscribed among the notables of earth.It is true, as Newell Dwight Hillis says in his “Quest for Happiness”, “There are many who practice exclusiveness, pull down their blinds to shut out the sight of the neglected poor, deafen their ears that they may not hear the cries of woe, and give themselves up completely to every form of gratification through wealth and music and friendship. And there are others who make it a rule never to read anything about the world’s sorrows or wars or misfortunes, and by averting their eyes and closing their ears have made themselves believe that there are no troubles in life.
And for such people, there are none. But the law of compensation is working.
In choosing this deliberate exemption from the world’s battles, they must expect also to be exempt from the joy of the ultimate victory. They must expect to come in after death unrecognized, unwaited for, and unloved, while the knight-errant of God’s poor, who has not only recognized the wrongs of society, but has attempted to right them, will come in like Walter Scott’s hero, while all the hosts come out with banners and with trumpets to meet and greet him. The fact is, therefore, that the susceptibility to suffering argues man’s nearness to God.”That fact gives pith and point to this claim by Solomon, as a page of the personal history of two famous sons of Harvard, likewise, does—Edward Everett and Wendell Phillips. They were alike scholarly, alike elegant in person, alike accomplished in manner, and alike in kinship of intellect. But one of them brought forth sentences that struck society like “polished icicles”; the other voiced himself in a sympathetic defense of the black slave, laid his very life on the altar and sacrificed himself to set men free. The first is pretty nearly forgotten; the second is the most honored name known to the middle of the nineteenth century.Yes, it is a truth, Solomon is right, “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting”, and, “Sorrow is better than laughter”. “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”.There is sound reasoning in these sacred sentences.
Shadows are as essential as the shining of the sun; and the clouds are as valuable as was ever a clear sky. The simple truth is that life is necessarily made up of sunshine and shadow, clouds and clear sky, joy and sorrow.
The attempt to live it on any other basis is a foolish endeavor, and is as undesirable as indefensible. Who could endure an eternal day? What monotony! What scorching heat! What blinding light! The night is needful. It cools the breath of life itself, and brings to it the baptism of gentle dew.Who knows a really valuable man that has lived long in the world and suffered in nothing? Who knows a valuable woman, whose path has been bordered with primroses, whose dimpled hands have never had hard service, whose placid mind has never been clouded; and whose heart has never felt the sword thrust?Truly, as Joseph Parker said, “We get more in the School of Adversity than we ever could get in the School of Prosperity.
There is very little learned in times that are close upon the vacation.”It is in adversity that men think and study and pray. I met a man recently, who, in his poverty, had been generous in the last degree, but now that a dozen oil wells gush thousands of dollars into his purse daily, his thought is of station and elegance and honor among capitalists. I have known women, who, when, by the hard day’s labor, they had the modest income that met the necessities of life, were gloriously great, but who, when fortune fell into their laps, straightway began to think more of self and less of God. The boy who was born to the house of poverty, and bred under conditions of hardship, and sent off to school with a scant purse in his pocket, and a wardrobe well nigh rags, may imagine himself the subject of pity, just as the scion of riches who enters Harvard’s walls with an allowance of $5,000 per annum, may compliment himself as being the object of envy. Time will tell another story and prove beyond debate that Solomon was right, and that “feasting”, “laughter” and “mirth” are but the incidents of “folly”, while “mourning” and “sorrow” and hardship are often the greatest friends, in disguise, that God Himself could commission to one’s assistance.We pass therefore, to another and kindred subject:THE SANE OF Here again Solomon writes with the pen of inspiration,“It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools.“For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity”.Just criticism should be made the basis of self-correction. Why should we not be criticised since the same pen declared “There is not a just man upon the earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not” (Ecclesiastes 7:20).But few of us are willing to be criticised.
How sensitive we are on that subject. How resentful as well!
Our very sensitiveness is often the proof of our guilt. My revered teacher John A. Broadus used to tell the story of the man who came, almost with tears, to say of the man who had criticised him, “If he had told the truth about me I would not have minded it.” To which the sage philosopher replied, “Oh yes; you would have minded it, for that might have hurt far more deeply still.” Criticisms that are untrue hurt nobody, and are not to be feared. Criticisms that are true are an occasion of correction of conduct rather than of resentment in spirit.“Criticism” is a word that has been degraded by use. Originally it was meant to voice only what the teacher does when she corrects the student’s scrawl and tries to show him how to make the same more like the copy; what the teacher does when she takes you to task for the use of a double negative in speech or tells you to avoid flatting in song. In other words, it was originally intended to help; but we employ it now as if it were the voicing of calumny.Not so is the rebuke of the wise.
That is not intended for hurt and it should be taken at its face value and converted into the coin of improvement. The world has reached the point where it is difficult to preach the Truth without being accused of a critical spirit.
Dr. H. Clay Trumbull, the great father of his notable son Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, tells us of having had a visitor at his home, who, when he had reported on hearing a sermon by a neighboring pastor, said, “That preacher brought us up face to face with the judgment seat of God today. There were no soft words to ease us down.” And then, as if soliloquizing, he sat down before my grate fire, and as he looked straight into the same, he added, “I tell you Trumbull, in the great day of judgment, we who go over to the left hand, will not feel very kindly toward the men who glossed things over when they had the chance to tell us the plain Truth.”Robert Speer, the great missionary leader of the Presbyterian denomination, declared a while ago, “One great weakness of our Christian life in our colleges and universities is that we have thinned out the Gospel, crowded out the miracle, the magic, the supernatural. We have made it just a veneer, a moral practice, an imagination. We have lost those great dynamic energies by which alone the thing was ever really done.” This is a fulfilment of prophecy.
The day has come when we cry “Peace, peace; when there is no peace”.I believe you will bear me witness that through the years of this pastorate I have not been a scold. On the other hand, I pray God that I may not indulge in the song of mere folly.
There is a rebuke of wisdom and it tends to righteousness.There are criticisms that can be most sanely ignored. Listen to this advice,“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 hast cursed others”.The ancient form of this language may obscure its. meaning. Let me bring it down to-date, “Don’t keep your ears too open; don’t listen too hard; don’t hear too much!’’Dr. Talmage once grew furious over a report written him by a man from Ohio to the effect that he had heard two temperance speakers say that in their former drinking carousals they had often sat at Talmage’s table and drank to their fill his splendid variety of wines. So exercised was he by it that he went to the chief of police in Brooklyn and suggested that he get into communication with the Ohio officers and have these men arrested on the charge of lying. The chief laughed at him and said, “Oh, Doctor; don’t bother your brain about that; forget it.” Evidently that chief had more wisdom than the preacher.I know a man whose name, if called, is well known to every person present here this morning; against whom more has been spoken and written than perhaps any other living minister of the Gospel; and yet in a somewhat close fellowship with him, I have never heard him pay the least attention to a derogatory criticism.
In fact, when people have attempted to tell him about them in my presence, he has simply waved them off and said, “I am not interested in that.” A man is a fool who takes heed to “all words” that are spoken. He will hear the servant curse him, and will not forget that a little while ago he said the same about somebody for whom he has now the most ardent affection.It is difficult for me to forget, in this connection, the story told in a ministers’ meeting by my former friend and at one time co-laborer, John Robertson of Scotland.
He had an obstreperous officer in his church; a man who talked much against him; and who, when he attended church brought with him a book, and when Robertson rose to preach deliberately opened the book to read from the pages of the same, thereby expressing his utter contempt for what the preacher might say. Robertson was a youngster, and this silent, offensive, and oft-repeated criticism got on his nerves, and he could endure it no longer. He went to London to ask Charles Spurgeon what to do with such a man. It was on a Wednesday, and the old verger declared that nobody could see the preacher on that day, but finally consented to carry Robertson’s card in to the great Metropolitan minister. He was admitted, told his story to the last detail, showed how offensive it was for a man to sit there with a book in his hand while he preached. Mr.
Spurgeon listened until he had finished and then said with a peculiar intonation, “Do you mean to tell me that he sits holding a book in his hand while you preach?” “I do,” said Robertson. “Now, what would you do in a case like that?” “Well,” said Spurgeon, “I would pray the Lord to send a fly on his nose, and he would get no pleasure from the reading.” Robertson said, “I went away thoroughly disgusted, feeling that my serious matter had been held to scorn; but on further reflection I saw the utter wisdom of the advice, and knew that Spurgeon meant to say to me, ‘It is a minor matter; forget it and go on.’ And I have treasured that counsel as among the best.” You do not have to hear everything; and you do not have to tell all you hear. There are criticisms that we do not have to hear.THE SUPREME WORTH OF WISDOM“Wisdom is good with an inheritance; and by it there is profit to them that see the sun”. “Wisdom is a defence” (Ecclesiastes 7:12). “Wisdom strengthened the wise more than ten mighty men which are in the city” (Ecclesiastes 7:19).
Wonderful!Wisdom is the easy equal of wealth. That is why Solomon says, “It is good with an inheritance; and by it there is profit to them that see the sun”. Properly translated “Wisdom is as good as an inheritance.” There can be no question about that— as good as an inheritance.If I had to choose tomorrow between sending my sons to a University, one of them with a keen intellect and the other with a plethoric purse, I know which would come out best. “Wisdom is as good as an inheritance.” Yea, better!Wisdom is both a defense and a strength. “Wisdom is a defence”. “Wisdom strengthened the wise more than ten mighty men which are in the city” (Ecclesiastes 7:19).It was the wisdom vouchsafed to Joseph, in answer to his loyalty to God, that kept him in the house of Potiphar! It was the wisdom vouchsafed to Daniel, in answer to his prayer, that defended him against the hundred and nineteen vice-presidents! It was the wisdom given to David, the Lord’s anointed king, that turned the point of Saul’s javelin from doing him hurt; and it was the wisdom imparted to Lot that kept him from perishing in the city of Sodom when the lack of ten righteous men consigned that city to its doom. So it is a fact that “Wisdom is a defence”. “Wisdom strengthened * * more than ten mighty men”!Wisdom is most difficult of attainment.
How many of us have said with Solomon, “I will be wise; but it was far from me”. We decide upon right courses, but, like Solomon, we fail in the execution of our own purposes.
We study and search for wisdom’s ways and the reason of things; then we fall into snares set for our feet, and with a folly beyond that of the birds, we are taken by nets spread before our vision. The fact is, there is a wisdom that is of the earth, earthy, and it is without great value. There is a wisdom that cometh down from above and that is within the reach of every man’s prayer, because it is a part of the Divine promise to them that ask for it. That is the wisdom that is the principal thing. The wisdom that promotes; the wisdom that brings to honor; the wisdom that gives an ornament of grace; and even a crown of glory. It is the wisdom that comprehends God, and looks for salvation to no other than His Son. “We could not do without Thee, O Saviour of the lost,Whose precious Blood redeemed us, At such tremendous cost!Thy righteousness, Thy pardon, Thy precious Blood must be Our only hope and comfort,Our glory and our plea.“We could not do without Thee! We can not stand alone,We have no strength or goodness, No wisdom of our own.How could we do without Thee? We do not know the way;Thou knowest and Thou leadest, And wilt not let us stray.“We could not do without Thee, O Jesus, Saviour dear!E’en when our eyes are holden, We know that Thou art near.How dreary and how lonely This changeful life would be,Without the sweet communion, The secret rest in Thee!”