How It All Adds Up

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.

You can take your copy of God’s Word this morning and turn to Ecclesiastes chapter 7 Entitled of the message this morning is how it all adds up And I don’t know about you, but there are math people science people and then there are English people history people and I am definitely not one of those math people. I’m married a math lover My wife loved math love taking math classes In fact, she was probably gonna be a math teacher if I hadn’t rescued her from such a purgatory, but nevertheless When they say opposites attract that is definitely true when it comes to math because I hate math and school There was no subject. I disliked more than math Well, there’s algebra or geometry or whatever was supposed to come next trigonometry calculus never got to those because I just hated math. Could never figure out how the formulas and the proofs were supposed to work. Seemed to me like you always had to show your work.

Teacher always wanted to see how you came to your conclusion, to see how you got it to add up the way that it was supposed to. And I just could never figure out any of that. So math was not my favorite subject by any means. When you talk about how it all adds up. There are life problems as well, not just math problems. And in life problems, sometimes you hear two sides of the story and try to make it add up and things just don’t fit together. Just recently I’ve been part of some conversations where clearly there are two sides to the same story and you hear one side and you’re like, well, how could it be anything other than that? It has to be that. And then you hear the other side and you’re like, well, they must be right. And the things just don’t fit together. They don’t add up. And in this last part of chapter 7, Solomon is going to tell us about his search for meaning and life under the Sun. And specifically in verses 23 through 29, he’s going to tell us how it all adds up, what he finds. And

verses 23 through 24 are the first major point, and it’s going to be what Solomon could not figure out. And then verses 25 through 29 are going to tell us what he could figure out. So go back to chapter 7, Ecclesiastes verse 23 and 24. Solomon says this, all this I have tested by wisdom. I said I will be wise but it was far from me. That which has been is far off and deep very deep. Who can find it out? Verses 23 and 24 like I said are telling us what Solomon could not figure out but But he didn’t do anything or say anything without thinking about it or applying his wisdom to it. The entire book of Ecclesiastes has been a revelation of his wise search for the meaning of life under the sun.

And in chapter 7 he has pumped out no less wisdom. In fact, last week we studied earlier in chapter 7 in his wisdom, his counsel, to enjoy life while fearing God and then to get wisdom with humility. And as he moves into this new section, he just says, all this I have tested by wisdom. I think that means to say this is not an assumption or guesswork or his imagination at work. It said he jumped in, he tested, he observed the results and all of this he says I’ve tested by wisdom. That goes to everything he already said and I think that’s gonna cover the next few verses as well, specifically because you see the word find use numerous times in verses 25 through 29 as well as then verse 24 who can find it out.

So there’s totally a connection. But for all of his pursuit of wisdom, there are still limitations of Solomon’s wisdom and comprehension. Though he was more blessed by God than anybody else ever with wisdom, even he didn’t get it all. Verse 23 continues, I said, that Solomon said, I will be wise, but it was far from me. Seems like this is his personal determination and disappointment. He wanted wisdom, but in some cases at least it was far from him. Explanation continues in verse 24, that which has been as far off and deep, very deep, who can find it out? And the rhetorical question implies that some things are just beyond comprehension.

It’s hard to get below the meaning of things. Wisdom is deep. Very deep. And that we can observe certain things, at least on the surface level, the what that happens. Sometimes we can’t get down to why something happens. The why is a deep thing. I think that this should absolutely stop us in our tracks. If Solomon says that some things were far from his understanding, then we need a healthy dose of humility in our own minds. Because even though we have our own completed copies of God’s Word, though we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit in a way unlike Solomon, we ought not to think that we are going to excel him in wisdom.

That’s just not going to happen. Not to mention the fact that too many of us are unfamiliar with scripture and we are infrequently walking in the spirit. So we’re not even taking advantages of the extra things that we have that Solomon didn’t have. But Solomon had wisdom in a way that we don’t have. And I think that that’s the point of this whole paragraph. In the previous paragraph he was telling us about the benefits of wisdom with humility.

And now he’s saying he himself had to have some humility because for all the wisdom he had, he still couldn’t figure everything out. So there are at least some things in life that we may never completely understand. Even when we devote ourselves to figuring them out, they’re just not going to add up. That was the case for Solomon. That’s the case for us as well. Well, so clearly, verses 23, 24 tell us there are some things that Solomon could not figure out, but verses 25 through 29 tell us some things that Solomon did figure out. And though there were limitations on his wisdom, there were also some things that did add up that he was able to compute. And let’s see what those are. In verse 25 then he tells us about this search. Verses 26 through 29 he’s going to tell us about his findings, but his search in verse 25. He says, I turn my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. Just look at the verbs of vigor he piles on top of each other as he

talks about his pursuit. He aimed his heart to know, to search out, and to seek. To know, to search out, and to seek. And though he’d mentioned each one of these already in his book, the repetition here just highlights that these findings are not a result of sloppy inspection or shoddy research, let alone just bitter musings and complaining from an old guy. Instead, his search, his scrutiny was intense, methodical and thorough. And he says what he wanted to know was the scheme of things.

In fact, he repeats the exact phrase in verse 27, so that is obviously a key to the whole paragraph. And the Hebrew word for scheme is chizbon. And it’s a mathematical term, term meaning to reckon or to calculate or to add up to try to figure out how it fits together and I think that’s the reason for the title of the message how it all adds up. In Ecclesiastes the word chisbon refers to how the world works it’s the sum of things it’s the explanation behind the scenes and the preacher wants to know how it all adds up he’s trying to get behind the scenes and figure out what makes the world go round, what makes things tick. But it’s even a little bit more specific than that general pursuit. It isn’t just that he’s trying to figure out what makes the world go round in general. Specifically, he says he’s searching out an understanding of the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. Now originally I thought that was really weird. I thought, what is the point of adding those things in there? I was

hoping that some of the commentators and interpreters would be able to help me out. There are more suggestions for how to interpret the last part of verse 25 and more possible interpretations than I even care to know about, let alone I’m sure than you care about. Well, the conclusion that I think he’s trying to make is he is trying to learn wisdom from its contrast. He is trying to learn how things fit together, how it all added up by seeing what doesn’t work and what isn’t right. He’s trying to learn wisdom from its opposite. Sometimes we do that. We try to learn something by considering its opposite or what is contrary to it.

We contrast those two things together to get a better understanding of both sides. And so I think that’s what he’s telling us. He’s searching out wisdom, how things fit together, how it all adds up, but he was specifically looking at what was wrong, wickedness and foolishness to see what he could understand about what makes the world go around. Well he gives us his findings in verses 26 through 29 and the key word repeated in verses 26 through 29 is the word find or found. In fact some form of find or found is used seven times in these four verses. That’s clearly got to be the point he’s making. He was searching, he tells us that in verse 25, now he gives us his findings and there are three findings. Number one, the agony of entrapment. Verse 26, the agony, the bitterness, the tragedy of entrapment. His first discovery here in verse 26, and I find something more bitter than death. The woman whose heart is snares and nets and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her.”

Now, none of the findings, none of the three things he found are very pretty. This one is definitely not a very pretty finding, but remember he says in his search he wasn’t going out to search to find bunnies and little flower blossoms. He wasn’t looking for the pretty things in life anyway. He was looking for wickedness and foolishness to learn wisdom from its opposite. So definitely all of these signings are not pretty. This one starts us out with a pretty negative description. In fact, before telling us what he found, he tells us about how bad it is. This particular thing is something more bitter than death. If you’ve heard any of the messages on Ecclesiastes so far, you know he hasn’t had a lot of positive things to say about death. In fact, he said some pretty unpleasant things about death, like you don’t know when it’s going to happen. It is going to happen. Your life is going to be hard and then you are going to die and then you’re going to leave all your stuff to people who don’t deserve it and to fools.

You die just like the beast, just like the animals. You lose your breath. Death is the ultimate equalizer. Everybody dies whether you’re wise or you’re a fool. There was nothing positive for Solomon about death even though he acknowledged that sometimes death is better than a miserable life. And here’s the first fast track to a miserable life. The woman whose heart is snares and nets and whose hands are fetters. Now there are some people who think that this applies to any and every woman. In fact, I read, most of the commentators I read suggested that this is not just the strange woman or the foreign woman or the adulterous or the prostitute that Solomon Solomon talks about on a regular basis in the book of Proverbs.

If you remember back to some of the Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted series, and as we studied through Proverbs 5, you read all of chapters, chapter 5 and Proverbs, all of chapter 7 almost. There’s just things over and over again about this strange woman, this foreign woman, this adulterous, modern day vocabulary, like I said, might be a prostitute. And some people think that because Solomon doesn’t use that word, he just uses the typical word for woman, they assume he means that every woman is like this. And that especially in marriage, anybody who gets married is going to have this kind of conflict and going back to the curse in Genesis chapter three, where the woman is going to desire to rule over her husband, as most people think that means, that she’s just going to make life miserable for him.

And so every and any woman is something to be avoided. Now, I don’t think that that’s what he’s saying. In fact, I don’t think that that’s what he’s saying at all. I do think that Solomon is talking about a particular kind of woman. And this kind of woman is the woman who’s identified by what kind of heart she has.

Her heart is one that is like snares and nets and her hands are like fetters. This is the huntress. This is the hunting woman. This is the woman who is trying to seduce. I know that’s a strong word, but this is a woman who is trying to get what she wants from some guy by talking sweetly to him. And wherever she is on the line, that’s what her heart is like. And so I think that the strange woman, the adulterous woman that Solomon talks about so much in Proverbs is definitely a woman like this. I mean, that is the kind of woman who has a heart that has snares and nets and whose hands are like fetters. And so I think that this verse applies to that specific group of women, though I think he’s just broadening it out and saying that there are other women who are not necessarily prostitutes who are like this and who do try to get what they want and who do try to control men, seduce men to get what they want and they are like hunters.

That’s the particular kind of woman that he’s talking about. But look at the end of verse 26. This is a very important thought. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. Now that is not how most men think. They think that they are free and clear when just the opposite is true. They are like the ox who thinks that he’s being led on a nice walk right to his slaughter. They think they’re being taken out to stretch their legs and see what it’s like outside the fence when in fact they’re going right to their destruction. The being seduced, the being trapped by that kind of woman is punishment. I’m going to say that again.

Being trapped like that is part of the punishment, even though most men think that’s part of the thrill. That’s part of the excitement. Look at verse 26 again. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. Doug Wilson summarizes it like this.

He says, immoral men tell themselves they are escaping God’s restrictions at the very moment when they are falling into the trap which he has set for them. Do you realize that when you fall that that is part of God’s abandoning wrath to give you exactly what you want? And most of us act like, oh well God must not really care or he’s not paying attention because he’s let us do that when in fact him letting us do that and get what we want is part of his punishment. Maybe you think, well, that can’t possibly be right, but the same truth is communicated in Proverbs 22 verse 14, the mouth of forbidden women is a deep pit. He with whom the Lord is angry will fall into it. God is not creating the pit, but he is not keeping those people who are pursuing sin from falling into it. But those that please God, and as we’ve seen and Ecclesiastes, those who please God are those who fear him, those who fear God and who please him, then God protects from this kind of miserable life and from this kind of entrapment, this kind of agony and bitterness of life.

Avoid those kind of women and if you fear God, he will protect you and keep you from them. Well, that’s his first finding is the agony of entrapment.

second finding comes in verses 27 and 28, the scarcity of virtue. The scarcity of virtue, his second discovery, verse 27, behold, this is what I found, says the preacher while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things or to figure out how it all adds up. This is what I found, which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found one man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found.” Now in verse 27 he repeats his quest. He repeats that this is what he was pursuing. He introduces us to his next, his second finding. He says he was adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things. This was an inductive approach. He was getting in, getting his hands dirty, trying to figure out how it all added up, putting two and two together and this is what he found. Now apparently this was not something that he did just once or on occasion as the beginning of verse 28 says he says his soul has sought repeatedly. It was an ongoing search but in this quest, in this

search, he kept coming up pretty much or almost empty. Now still without telling us explicitly what he was looking for he tells us that this is what he found. one man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found.” Now you can imagine how many people this ticks off, in particular how many women don’t necessarily like what he said. You might imagine that most people even in our day don’t like that. They think that this is a very anti-feminist statement on Solomon’s part. I don’t think that he’s being anti-feminist. And by the way, we don’t even know what he says he hasn’t found women. What if he had said, you know, he hadn’t found, he was looking for ugliness and one man in a thousand was ugly, but no women in a thousand were ugly.

What if he had said that? What if that’s what he meant? Then we shouldn’t be mad at him. But that’s not actually what he’s saying. We do need to figure out what it is that he was looking for and then go back and figure out what it was that was so scarce. I’m convinced in light of verse 29, the following verse, I am convinced that what he was looking for, what he could not find was men and women who were upright. Men and women who had virtue. That’s why the point I gave you was the scarcity of virtue. In verse 29, men are no longer upright. And the flow of his argument so far is to say that he was looking for these virtuous, upright people, and yet they were almost non-existent.

Looking for uprightness for virtue. And so go back to verse 28. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. Now why am I suggesting this is not anti-feminist? Well, first of all, because this is Solomon’s report of what he found. Is it not possible that in his search, That is what he found.

That doesn’t mean that all women at any time, anywhere in any place, that there have never been virtuous women. In fact, we know that there must have been at least one virtuous woman. She was described at the end of Proverbs in chapter 31, a virtuous woman who can find, but then it gives descriptions of what that virtuous woman is like. And so we know that that is possible, But that doesn’t mean that they were all around in Solomon’s search. So it doesn’t make him anti-feminist if in his own search he couldn’t find that. I mean, there were some 1,000 women in his harem with 700 wives and 300 concubines.

And for us, we would have probably thought that at least one of them would have been upright, But maybe it’s possible that they weren’t. But maybe he’s just kind of frustrated by what he allowed women to do in his life. I mean it was through women that he at least, I’m not saying it was their fault, that’s why I said what he allowed women to do to him, but it was women that he was enticed by and that pulled him away for a period of his own life in his love and fear of God. He pursued satisfaction to women. He told us about that in Ecclesiastes chapter 2. So it really is possible in his own search he couldn’t find a virtuous woman. And this isn’t really a positive statement for men either. One virtuous man in a thousand, that’s better than none in a thousand, but I think if you were to do the math on that, you would probably realize That percentage is very low.

Isn’t one out of a thousand point zero zero one. Come on math people. Point zero zero one is the percentage of upright men he found. So that’s not really encouraging or real exciting about being a man.

So if you were to read verse 28 and be like, yeah, at least I’m a man, then you’d be a fool for thinking that because unless you’re in that 0.001% then you fall into or you would fall into this lack of virtuous group as well. And really his point is not what he found, his point is what he didn’t find, what was missing was virtue. I was thinking about who probably the first people would have been to read this passage. Probably the very first people who would have read this paragraph would have been alive during Solomon’s time, and probably those people were connected with the palace, maybe even part of the king’s court. And I guess I was thinking that if I was reading this, if I was part of Solomon’s court, if I was part of the palace crew, I would have read the verses we covered last week about not being overly righteous or too wise, not being overly wicked, I’d have read that and I’d been like, yeah, I’m balanced. I’m good. And then I would have read the verses about getting wisdom, not overreacting, being humble. I

would have read those verses and I’d probably been, yeah, he’s probably even thinking about me as he describes those wise people who live like that. And And then I would have come to this section. Because if I’m close to the king and he says he has searched and he can’t find virtuous, upright men and women, that would have absolutely floored me and not in a good way. I likely would have been devastated. Or as a guy, I would have assumed I was the one. I was the one in the thousand that he found.

But what he’s doing here is he is describing to us that most people who probably think to themselves, I’m not one of those, are one of those. We tend to think of ourselves as virtuous and upright people, and at least in Solomon’s time, that was not the case. And I fear that in many ways that’s not the case today as well. I think in our own room, I mean, if I were writing this, I would have difficulty saying I only found one in a thousand and I didn’t find any women. I would not be able to say that. I think our numbers would be a little bit higher. The point is though, not to assume that you are in that upright and virtuous category.

And Solomon says that virtue is scarce. It is the minority in a major way. Well, that leads us to his third finding, and this is just going to finish out why we need to be humble. Verse 29 is his third finding. It’s the irony of corruption. The preacher’s third discovery, verse 29, see this alone. I found that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” This is the third, and I think it’s the ultimate finding that he tells us about in this pursuit of wisdom in its contrast to wickedness and foolishness. This is the third one and the ultimate one because he says, this alone I found. This only I found.

This is his conclusion as well as his finding. you add it all up, men are perverse. They are corrupt. And the current state of affairs is due to man’s own fault. God made man upright. This goes all the way back to the beginning chapters of Genesis, where God goes through creation and he pronounces it all what? He He pronounces all of it good. There was nothing corrupt or perverse or wrong with his original creation. That includes man. Man was made upright. The word upright is a word that refers to having moral excellence, honesty, goodness, virtuous. God made man upright. That was their original state, and yet, though they were made upright, the irony is they have turned and sought out everything that is not right.

I mean, this is not just a reference to the fall. This is not just a look back at what men did in Genesis. This was also describing the current depravity that he saw all around him, and that still exists today. Men are corrupt. God didn’t make them that way. They sought out their own schemes, their own way to go against what God had revealed. The grand total of the whole thing is that men are not upright. Let me give you just four quick things about this corruption. First of all, the corruption is universal. The corruption is universal. I say that because it says they have sought out many schemes. Who’s the they?

The they is man. Who is man? That’s humanity. God made man. He’s not just talking about Adam. He’s talking about the human race. God made man. God made humans upright and they and the idea is that all of they, all of them, there’s one in a thousand that he found at that time and no women that he found, they. This is a universal corruption. Corruption is a universal problem.

Corruption is universal. Number two, the corruption is deliberate. I think that’s communicated by the idea of they sought out. They intentionally, they purposefully went looking for ways to disregard and disobey what God wanted. God made them originally upright, but they have pursued what they wanted. They’ve done their own thing. That is very deliberate. Third, the corruption is deviant. They have sought out many schemes, many plans, many ways. It’s a deviation from the course that God has set. God has given standards of what is right and men have gone against that. That is then devious. So corruption is universal, it’s deliberate, it’s deviant, and then lastly the corruption is diverse. They have sought out many. They have sought out various schemes. It’s not just one way of getting away from what God wants, it’s many ways.

The irony here of corruption is that that’s not how God made men, but that is what they have turned into. That’s how powerful and dominant sin is in their lives. Now before we head off to small groups, I just want to talk for a couple moments about two things that I think make this paragraph crucial for us to get.

Number one, this is a paragraph that explains the world we see around us. It is an explanation of why people do such bad things and why there is so much wickedness and foolishness that we see on a day-to-day basis. Why our newspapers are filled with evil and sin. It’s why even in our own lives we see sin because God has made man upright, but there is a scarcity of virtue. I think really that goes back to the fact that there is a scarcity of fear of God. And that totally explains why we see so much junk happening around us. The world is currently, it’s not going to forever be like this, but the world is currently under the control, it’s a delegated control, but of the prince of the power of the air who is Satan himself.

The God, lowercase gee, the God of this world is Satan and men are doing what Satan wants for the most part and that is the majority. True virtue is scarce. True God-fears are not the majority, they are always the minority. And so I think this is important to remember just as an explanation for the world. But secondly, and I think most importantly, this is an indictment on our own personal sin. Like I said before, I think too many of us are those ones who say, well, that’s not me. I’m not the overrighteous. I’m not the over wicked. I’m that balanced person. And we consider ourselves the wise. We consider ourselves the ones who shouldn’t be, you know, we shouldn’t be spoken poorly against by other people. We looked at in the paragraphs last week. We think that we are not over righteous, not over wicked. We think that we are wise.

We assume that we are upright and virtuous. You know what? People who assume that that That is their own condition. Do not fear God. They don’t fear God because they don’t think there’s anything to fear because they assume that they are okay. Even as I was thinking about it this week, I am fearful for many of you who continue to love the things of the world and think that you’re okay. You’re upright. You’re a God-fear. You’re a virtuous person. There’s no doubt in my mind that people who were reading this originally who were connected with Solomon would have assumed they would be in the category of virtuous and upright. And yet Solomon’s own search found such scarcity of virtue of God-fearers And will we take that seriously or will we continue to think that applies to somebody else?

You know we went Friday night over to Pill Chuck passing out the tracks. And you know as you watched most of the behavior that was taking place from the students, it ranged from ridiculously foolish to just really wicked. In some cases, even what they were wearing, certainly how they spoke, and in some cases, very clearly what they were doing or what they were doing with each other. And it’s so easy, I think, for most of you to be like, well, I’m not like that, so I’m okay. And the fact is, if you are seeking satisfaction from anything under the sun as pleasant and as happy and as non immoral as you might think it could be.

If you are not fearing God above all else, if you are drinking from any of those broken cisterns, God is not pleased with you. And some of us just act like we’re okay. We’re not messing up. When in fact, we’re not living for, we are not God fearing in our lives to such an extent that then he would be pleased. We would have joy in him now and then have joy in him for eternity. And so as you read especially like I say verses 25 through 29, examine if that applies to you.

Father, your spirit is the one who’s got to do that work and bring that conviction and open those eyes and open those ears and make those hearts sensitive. Your spirit has to do that. But we do believe that your spirit loves to use your word. And so I ask that even though undoubtedly so many of us think that doesn’t apply to me, show us how it does and provide the conviction that needs to be there so that we would fear you as is right. This is not only then something that is right, it is something that enables us to have the greatest joy because we have you, which was his whole point at the beginning of chapter seven that when trials and suffering and difficulties come, they wean us off of the world.

We just get so comfortable. We’re so happy with our stuff and our mediocre lives that we don’t realize the kind of trouble that we’re in and what it is that you’re looking for. that in our hearts cause us to fear you in a generation that does nothing and has no concern, is not upset or disturbed at all about you or about hell. Help us to live opposite of that for your sake. Amen.