Frustration with Injustice (Pt 2)

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Well, you can take out your copy of God’s Word this morning and turn to Ecclesiastes chapter 8, where the goal this morning is to finish another chapter, leaving us only four to go. And since my commitment, at the beginning of the school year at least, was to finish the book of Ecclesiastes by the end of the school year, I’m feeling pretty good. Though I think that means I’ve only done two chapters from September to December, and there’s still four more to go. I think it can happen. We’ll have to see. One of the things I think about our own culture, one of the things it seems like for most of us is that we feel like if we just could have all the information about something, we feel a lot better.

desire for control that each one of us has, I’m not sure it always is equal to wanting to be God. In fact, I don’t think anybody would ever say, I think you guys are smarter, you’re smarter than that, you won’t ever say out loud, I want to be God because then you’ll be looking for the lightning bolt coming down through your roof. You know that that’s not a good approach, we’re not supposed to take God’s place. And yet, it still seems like when we run into a difficulty, when we face a trial, when we come across some upcoming event or some upcoming responsibility, we feel better if we can just get enough information about it. That’s one of the reasons why WebMD has become such a popular website. Because instead of trusting doctors, you know, the people who have gone to school for maybe 10 plus years and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars learning about how to diagnose problems. We feel like if we just go to a website we can probably figure out more appropriately and more quickly and more accurately what’s

wrong with us than somebody who’s profession that is. Of course, we’ll just get the information for ourselves and then we’ll be able to help ourselves out better. And of course that happens with medical stuff, that happens with all kinds of future stuff. I think that even as we look back, if we could just know the reason why something happened, we feel like that would make it better. If we just knew why the person did it, or maybe even if we’re thinking on a theological level, if we just knew why God chose to have that happen, then we’d be more at peace. Then we’d be more comfortable. Then we could go on. And yet I want you to consider this morning that there is a benefit in a certain kind of, and junior high guys, I need you to pay attention to this because this is a very specific statement, there is a benefit in a certain kind of ignorance. Now why I say I want the junior high guys to pay close attention to that is because I can just hear it years from now. Well I remember Pastor Sean when you were teaching that message from Ecclesiastes chapter 8 and

I’d be really impressed if you were instead of it was a selected scripture thing where you’re talking about it and you said ignorance was good. Now there is a certain kind of ignorance that can be very beneficial for your heart now and for your eternity. Now, it’s a certain kind, and we’re going to talk about that from Ecclesiastes chapter 8. But most of us feel like our problem is not ignorance, or our problem is ignorance, and that’s something that we’ve got to get over. We need more information. We need more wisdom. If we just had the knowledge, then that would make things better. And I want to suggest that that is not actually the way to great joy in your life or in your eternity. There is a certain kind of ignorance, or at least responding to that kind of ignorance that can lead to joy. And hopefully we’ll see that as we go along this morning. So, you remember last time we were dealing with and considering some frustrations with injustice. And we’ve seen these various injustices already starting in chapter 8 verse 10. Let’s

read the passage. I’ll try to give a quick recap of what we looked at three Sundays ago in verses 10 through 15 and then we’ll cover verses 16-17, hand you off into your small groups. Ecclesiastes chapter 8 verse 10. Then I saw the wicked buried. They used to go in and out of the holy place and were praised in the city where they had done such things. This also is vanity. Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God because they fear before him, but it will not be well with the wicked. Neither neither will he prolong his days like a shadow because he does not fear before God.

There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity. And I commend joy. For man has no good thing under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful. for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him unto the Son. When I applied my heart to know wisdom and to see the business that is done on earth how neither day nor night do one’s eyes sleep, then I saw all the work of God.

That man cannot find out the work that is done unto the Son, however much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out. And we’re talking about then three frustrations, three common frustrations under the sun that people have. And we’ve looked at the first two. The first frustration was that wicked people go unpunished. We looked at that in verses 10 through 13. In society and we know that this is the case. This is what Solomon tells us. This is what God reveals to us. And this is God’s truth to us. This isn’t just Solomon’s observations, though it is that as well. This is what God is telling us about life on this planet and certainly we see it when we watch the news or when we read the newspapers or when we’re looking at the internet or just when we live. Our own experience is that we see people who don’t deserve to be praised. People who did bad, wrong, sinful, unjust kind of things.

And they often don’t get punished for it. We saw that in verses 10 through 13, the example of this guy, probably some kind of political official or leader. This was not somebody just Joe Hebrew I said, who nobody knew. This was somebody who had some position of visibility in the culture, in the city. And this was the person who was always going in and out of the holy place. I think that’s the temple. They were always there for worship. And though they lived the rest of the week, the rest of their lives was full of injustice and treating people poorly and treating people wrongly. And even then in verse 9 where man has power over man to his hurt.

You get the impression based on the connection here, the flow of thought. What you have here is somebody with power, somebody in a position of authority who is hurting other people underneath them and yet they were always going in and out of the temple and now that they’re dead, people praise them in the city where they did all the evil. I mean that is infuriating.

I mean that should make us mad to see that here this person who did evil should have been punished for it, and at least if nobody had the courage while they were alive to stand up and tell them that they were doing what’s wrong, at least now that they’re dead and they don’t have the power anymore, we should not praise them and give them glory, and yet it’s like we’re throwing parades in their honor. And we’re naming streets in the city after them, and that is, that’s true in American society, that’s true in societies and cultures all over our world, that was true in Solomon’s Day, and you know what, frustration is a fact of life and Solomon says, that is vanity. That is meaningless. That is frustrating that wicked people often go unpunished. The second frustration that we looked at comes in verses 14 and 15, and that is wicked people often prosper. Not only do wicked people do it and get away with with it. Nobody punishes them, nobody holds them to account, give account for themselves

and their actions. But sometimes they even prosper. They prosper, maybe it’s financially, maybe they prosper so far as popularity goes. You realize that the people who are popular today are not the righteous people for the most part. The people who make a name for themselves are the people who do wicked evil things. Even just this past week, the kid, I think it was who went into the mall and started shooting, his suicide note talked about all he wanted to be was famous. So he killed people and then he killed himself. And now, to some extent or another, the media has made him famous for his 15 minutes or whatever it is, but his face, not the victims, but his face is now the one that people know.

It’s his name that people are going to remember. And while he is not prospering, it’s an example of the fact that people who do evil often are the ones with their names known, and they oftentimes prosper, and yet just the opposite is true, that sometimes the righteous people suffer and we know again from experience not just from revelation we know that that’s the case.

I was telling the staff a few weeks ago after having watched Amazing Grace. How many of you have watched Amazing Grace the William Wilberforce story? Great movie if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend that you watch it. I don’t typically give movie reviews or recommendations but but I think that that was a good one. It was very encouraging to me. And of course, if you know anything about the story, you know that William Wilberforce was really the human instrument that God used to abolish the slave trade in Great Britain. And sure, God could have used somebody else, but who he used was William Wilberforce. And so clearly, I had just finished preaching this three weeks ago, and I watched Amazing Grace the next night. And if you You remember the scene in the movie where it was the first kind of victory that they had where the slave trading ships had to have a certain kind of flag.

So it wasn’t the abolishing of the slave trade yet, but it was making them have a certain kind of flag. I don’t even remember what all the details were. Basically, it was a major victory and it was going to at least start to slow down the slave trade as they were working to abolish it. And so major victory. There weren’t enough people in parliament that day to vote to stop it and so it was successfully voted in, this new law. And so major victory and what’s happening to him that night? Instead of being able to go out and celebrate and have a big party, his ulcerative colitis was acting up so bad that the scene is where he is, he’s trying to get his wife who’s pregnant to distract him from how much pain he’s in. And here’s this guy who is not just living a righteous life, he is fighting in the right way for the sake of righteousness.

He is fighting on behalf of most people he had never known so that they could be freed.

Fighting against injustice for the sake of justice and here he is suffering a significant amount of suffering. And you know what? It is the case. It’s not necessarily true that every wicked person always prospers. It’s not necessarily true that every righteous person always suffers. But it happens enough of the time that it seems out of place. The wicked people prosper and the righteous people suffer. And so we are frustrated by the fact that wicked people often go unpunished. We’re frustrated by the fact that wicked people often prosper. There is however a response, and you remember we talked about it from verse 15, in the middle of seeing all of that, in the middle of seeing authorities, use their power to hurt people. In the middle of seeing those wicked people go unpunished and even praised after they’re gone. In the midst of seeing wicked people prospering and righteous people suffering and enduring agony and pain, Solomon has the audacity to say, but you can still enjoy the process. Somehow knowing all of that information,

you can still enjoy the process. Look at verse 15, I command joy, for man has no good thing under the sun, but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun. This is untouchable. And we gave a quote from Senior Chris McCullough. Don’t let others dictate the happiness of your heart. If you are more concerned with God than what other people are doing around you or even to you, you can have a kind of joy in the midst of great suffering, great personal pain, and great injustices and wrongs that you see around you or done to you, you can still have joy. And that requires a kind of mindset that is just not typical in our day. We are a culture, and I think we are a culture of Christians who are whiners. I don’t know if it’s just that we’re that selfish, or if it really is that bad, or if we just think that people will appreciate us when Can we tell them how bad it is?

But for the most part, we are really good at being able to communicate our stories of complaining. I love, I’ve told you this before, I love the Greek word for grumbling. It’s gagesmes. And it’s the onomatopoetic idea of grr grr grr grr grr grr grr grr where you’re just kind of frustrated and upset and that just comes out and boils over and your ugly complaining Spill’s out on everybody else. Well that’s obviously because we’re not enjoying the process and I think that’s because we’re not fearing God. We’re not trusting Him. We assume that because it’s painful for us or because somebody else is being treated wrongly when they shouldn’t be. We must assume that God is doing something wrong and that That then gives us right to complain about it when in fact we’re not fearing and trusting him which would enable us to have joy, an untouchable kind of joy.

Not getting out of work but in the midst of work. Not getting out of injustice but going right through it. If you have a perspective that is eternal and spiritual and God-ward, you can have this kind of joy that is making for a very powerful life. So the two frustrations, number one, wicked people often go and punish. Number two, wicked people often prosper. The third frustration is found in verses 16 and 17 and that is wisdom is severely limited. And this comes back to what I said at the beginning of the message this morning that oftentimes Sometimes we feel like if we could just get more information, if we could just get the right amount of wisdom, that that would explain everything and then we could be joyful.

And I want you to know that knowing why everything happens is not what leads to your joy. It is not accumulating all the information on a situation. It is not having perfect wisdom about what God is doing or even about the motivations of others.

is not what enables you to have joy. In fact, let me promise you this. If you think that information accumulation, if you think that wisdom is the answer, you are setting yourself up. You are guaranteeing for yourself a life of misery. If you think that just getting the right amount of information is going to make you peaceful, if you think that having all wisdom is what is going to make you joyful, I guarantee you, you are going to have just the opposite. You’re going to be absolutely miserable. And the reason for that is because you will never have all the information. And you will never be completely wise. And you know who made it that way? God. Do you realize God is the one who has set limitations on what we can cram into our brains, God is the one who has set that. Now again, please don’t use that to your parents and tell them why you flunked your test. Well, Mom and Dad, God has set a limitation on my ability to get wisdom and that is apparently what he wanted. Now that’s the limitation he put on me. It’s like a constrictor for your brain.

God has set up limitations. God has put those in place to keep you from knowing all things and from having all wisdom. God has done that. And there is a benefit in that, potentially. We’ll see that in just a moment. Under the sun, as the finish of chapter 8, verses 16 and 17 are providing a summary to all of the injustice that we’ve seen.

under the sun, you cannot figure out what God is doing, totally and completely. Joy is great. You just said that in verse 15. And joy is possible, but joy does not come from understanding everything God is doing it or why he’s doing it. That is not where Joy comes from is information. Joy does not come from wisdom per se. Joy comes not from knowing God’s plan, but from trusting God’s character and his sovereignty. Joy does not come from knowing God’s plan perfectly, but from trusting, fearing God, and knowing his character and his sovereignty. Verse 16, When I applied my heart to no wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, how neither day nor night do one’s eyes see sleep. Then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done unto the sun.

However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out, even though a wise man claims to know he’s a liar. He cannot find it out. We want, and this is perhaps just human, I don’t know, it’s at least American. We’re a very pragmatic kind of people. We want to identify the formula. If you do this, then this will happen. We’re cause and effect related people. If you do this, this is going to happen for sure. If you don’t do this, then this is going to happen. And we think that there’s a cause and effect. We’d like to be able to know that formula for everything. And yet the fact is, that’s not how it works. Because even though God says to be righteous and righteousness is what makes somebody truly blessed, righteous people still suffer.

Where’s the problem in that formula? I mean, what’s happened there? Isn’t God in control? So then if He said to be righteous, and I’m trying to live righteously as He said, shouldn’t I prosper? Isn’t that how God made it up? Well, the equal sign doesn’t always make it to the other side. What about wicked people? God says don’t be wicked. And so we see wicked people who are doing exactly what God says is not supposed to happen, and yet they seem to prosper. How does that work? And if you think that life is a formula and you figure this, then this, equals this for sure you are guaranteed to be frustrated. His ways are not what? Our ways. And his thoughts are above and higher than our thoughts. And his timetable doesn’t always fit on our calendar.

You can try to schedule it in. And that’s when I would legitimately say good luck trying to put God’s timetable onto your calendar and figuring out when he’s supposed to do such and such a thing based on what you’re doing. Solomon says, when I applied my heart to no wisdom, God gave him more wisdom than anybody else. He used the wisdom that God gave him to try to get more and more. The whole book of Ecclesiastes has been telling us he observed this, he saw this, he tried this, he did this, he experienced this. Solomon gave great effort here to trying to figure it out. And he saw the business that is done on earth how neither day nor night do one’s eyes sleep. Life is hard. There’s a lot of work to do. It never ends. You’re going to get up early. You’re going to go to bed late.

That’s what God has given for men to do. And then you die. How God’s justice works was not something he could figure out. I saw all the work of God that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. He acknowledges that God is in control. He acknowledges that God’s control is absolute and unqualified. There is nothing that is outside of God’s very purposeful and particular control. And yet, Solomon says, I couldn’t figure it out. I knew that it was true, but I can’t explain how it happens. And God made it to work this way for at least two reasons. Number one, God made it. God does his work so that life is unpredictable. That’s the part we hate, isn’t it? We hate that we can’t, based on our formula, predict what’s going to happen. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the pattern is pretty clear and we see. And then other times we do the thing 9 out of 10 it’s just happened nine out of nine times, but on the tenth time it’s just not guaranteed to happen because God is not forced to work that way and he’s made it so that it’s unpredictable. And the second reason God has made it that way,

he’s made life to be unpredictable so that we will fear him. You know what your tendency would be is if you could predict everything you would not need God. God. You would then, and like I said, I don’t think that we would then make ourself little buttons and say, I’m now God. It’s not a karate thing where you get certain colors of belts. And then eventually you arrive to black belt Christianity where now you have identified all the patterns and you have all the information and so with your black belt of Christianity you now are able to control what’s happening in your life.

That doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen that men replace God. He made life unpredictable so that we would fear Him. Look back at Ecclesiastes chapter three. This is not new stuff. Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun, but Solomon himself has already told us stuff that’s very similar to what we’re looking at in chapter 8 verses 16 and 17, look at chapter 3 verse 10. I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. Again, same kind of terminology. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also he has put eternity into man’s heart yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

I perceive that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live, also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil. This is God’s gift to man. I perceive that whatever God does endures forever, nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it. God has done it so that people fear before Him.” Look, God does not want you to figure out the formula so that you’ll do this and do that and get this information and have this wisdom so that then you can have joy. He wants you to fear Him and to trust Him regardless of what happens. And that kind of joy can’t be stolen, no one can rob it, no one can take it from you. And so whereas in chapter 8, obviously he’s saying that the joy can come even in the midst of injustices. And when wicked people prosper, clearly, even as he already told us in chapter 3, there is a connection between that enjoying the process and not having all the information.

We look to so many things to give us satisfaction, to explain why stuff is happening or to be able to predict what’s going to happen.

If that is your strategy for joy, I am promising you for as much as you feel like you fill up your information funnel, there is always going to be that hole at the bottom that God has opened up to make it so that the satisfaction you’re trying to pour in with information and joy is going to leak out sometimes slowly and sometimes very quickly and your joy will be gone if it is not a joy in trusting and fearing God, not in getting the right amount of information or knowing what’s going to happen, being able to predict and understand the future. Even though a wise man claims to know he cannot find it out. Now that’s the wisest guy who ever lived on the face of the earth who just said that. He says, I’ve looked for it. I have tried to figure it out. And it is unpredictable. It’s with God. It’s not unpredictable to God, but to everybody else it is. He says, so a wise man may claim to know, but he cannot find it out. Let me just give you three conclusions on this paragraph. What do we learn here? These will just kind of summarize this whole

last part of chapter 8. Number one, judgment may not be immediate, but it is inevitable. This is a helpful principle to keep in mind. Judgment may not be immediate, but it is inevitable.

When we see the wicked people going unpunished, when we see the wicked people prospering now, it is crucial. And if you fear God, you’ll be able to remember this. It is crucial to keep in your mind that just because nothing bad is happening to them now does not mean it is escaping God’s notice and that they are going to go unpunished forever. It may may not be immediate, but it is inevitable. That is, it is a guarantee. And can I just point out as a parenthesis that that’s actually a good thing. We don’t always like it when it applies to other people, but you realize that if judgment was immediate, that that would mean your judgment and my judgment was immediate too. And so if there was no delay and no patience on God’s part, we would have already been killed and punished and sent to eternity forever because of our own injustice. If you have never sinned against somebody else and done something wrong to them, well then you now have lied and therefore God will judge you for that. That’s how powerful our sin is. We have not done things to other

people appropriately, whether that’s responding to authority, for however bad it is wrong for the authority to be unjust, it’s just as wrong for those under the authority to disobey their authority. So if you have ever disobeyed your authority, if you have ever had some position of power and treated other people underneath you inappropriately, let alone any other kind of sin, if God’s judgment was immediate, we would all have already been suffering it. So it is actually beneficial that God is patient, but remember that even though it may not happen as soon as the injustice happens, God is not forgetting about it, avoiding it, not dealing with it. It is coming in the future. Number two, life isn’t always fair but you can still enjoy the process. You know, often times when people come to me and they tell me that, you know, somebody in their small group is treating them in a totally unfair way. First of all, I’m typically glad to know so that we can try to make it right. I think that we need to work at making things right. That’s good, but it all depends

on the person’s attitude when they come to talk about it. Because if they come with absolutely no joy whatsoever, if they come to say somebody has treated them inappropriately, they need some help in dealing with that, and they are just totally miserable, they have absolutely no joy whatsoever at all, that concerns me. Because that demonstrates that issue number one is wrong. And issue number one is not the fact that somebody treated them inappropriately.

Issue number one is that they’re not fearing God. Because if they were fearing God, there would at least be a measure of joy underneath the frustration on top. There would be a graciousness in dealing with the person who offended them. There would be an interest in working it out, not just seeing the other person punished. But many times people go to their small group leader, they go to their parents, or they come to me and they’re complaining about various ways that they’ve been treated and it has nothing to do with actually making it right except for the other person getting what’s coming to them and then the person who’s making the complaint being vindicated and their name being shown as right.

And there’s no joy in the process. The fact is, even though life isn’t fair, and people are going to treat you in ways that are wrong, not just that you don’t like, but people are going to treat you in ways that are wrong. That may happen later today, that may happen this week, that’s going to happen in your life and you know what, it’s going to happen over and over and over and over and over again, where people don’t treat you in a right way. How are you going to respond to that? This is profound wisdom for you that if instead of depending on the situation to be right. You depended on God. You could still have joy. That changes really all of life and certainly your attitude. Life isn’t always fair, but you can still enjoy the process.

The third thing to take away from this is work is hard. Wisdom is limited. God is God. Work is hard and wisdom is limited, but God is God. Just that statement by itself, work is hard, wisdom is limited, God is God. That is either ridiculously frustrating to you, or it is unbelievably peace-giving to you. If you are fearing God and submitting to God and trusting in his character that even though you don’t have all the information, you can’t predict everything that’s going to happen. If you trust him, there’s a kind of peace and a kind of joy that comes from that that just nobody can touch. If, however, you still think work is hard, wisdom is limited, and God is God, and he’s then just out to frustrate everything that you’re doing and trying to accomplish and organize for your own life, then you will be miserable. Absolutely no hope. A couple questions you might want to use to get you started in your small group time. Like, why is injustice so infuriating?

Why does that make us mad? And that shouldn’t just be because it’s bad. I mean, there’s way more that you can talk about. Why is injustice so infuriating? Here’s another question. If God can stop injustice, why doesn’t he? I think we’re going to agree, we would have to agree that God could stop injustice. So why doesn’t he? And what does that tell us about God? What does that tell us about his character? What does that tell us about his plan? If he could stop it and he doesn’t stop it, why? What is he trying to communicate?

What does he want from us to get from the fact that he doesn’t stop injustice? How How about this? Should you try? And if the answer is yes, you should try, how can you stop injustice? Is it appropriate for us, when we see injustices, to try to do something about that? And if we’re supposed to, how do we do that? What should our perspective be? How about this one? Can you hate injustice and enjoy the process at the same time? At At the exact same time, I’m going to give you the answer to that is yes, you can, and I know that you can because God does. Is that blowing your mind? It should. At the exact same time, God hates wickedness and injustice, and yet is the most happy being in the entire universe, the exact same time. Can you do that? How does that happen? And then what are the limits of wisdom? And is the limitation of wisdom something that is helpful to you or hurtful to you? And again, I’m suggesting based on what we’ve studied, that the limitation of wisdom can be the most helpful thing for you if that leads you to the right response.

Having all the information might be the greatest blessing that God ever gives to you if you respond to that lack of wisdom the right way. Father, we need your wisdom, we need your spirit to help us figure these things out. And we certainly then need your word and your spirit to enable us to enjoy the process because left to ourselves. We’re trying to get the wisdom to control the situation to guarantee the right outcome so that then we’ll be happy. Then we’ll have joy and you are totally capable and often do. Throw the wrench into those plans to take away any trust in that kind of joy that we might have hoped in. And yet you offer a more long lasting, a more full, and a more secure joy than that. And that’s what we want, to help us to dig for that and to work for that and to fear you to get that. We pray all this in the name of your Son. Amen.