The Security of Joy

 October 10 2021

Ecclesiastes 5:10-20, 6:1-12

         It goes without saying that the Bible is a book of surprises. Perhaps one of the things that most surprises people when they begin to study scriptures is that they speak volumes about wealth. Now, this catches people off guard, I guess, because most people don’t consider that money or riches belongs in a book which is supposed to be about spiritual matters. So it takes some doing to come to an understanding that wealth very much indeed has spiritual implications. For those people who like their life to be parceled out in neat little compartments, this creates some hardship because just which box do our finances belong? You know, you have your secular stuff over here in this box and the spiritual stuff over there in this box and it would make sense for money and wealth to go over there in the secular box but the Bible seems to indicate otherwise.

         This difficulty of understanding wealth as a spiritual matter is seen anytime the subject is brought up in church because there are quite a few people who think the church only speaks about money because they need money to run the church. You see, when people believe that the church only speaks about finances in this way they are revealing that there can’t possibly be some other reason why the church might bring up the subject, like the fact that the Bible quite clearly makes no bones about wealth and what we treasure being quite definitely issues of our spirit. How else do you explain what Jesus says in the sixth chapter of Matthew where he teaches us that where are treasure is, there are hearts will be also. Our hearts are the seat of our emotion and will, our inner guidance system, the sum total of which makes up the spiritual side of ourselves.

         So, yes, wealth and finances are a spiritual subject, believe it or not and the reason why this subject comes up is for the very fact that God loves us and wants the very best for each of us. The Bible doesn’t speak about money so that the church has amble funds to run its programs. Finances aren’t part of what we talk about just so we as pastors can be tour guides on some kind of guilt trip. No, the reason why the Bible says anything at all about wealth is that God loves us better than we can love ourselves and he loves us enough to want us to not settle for anything less than the very best life he has created us for.

         You see, I know how good church going folk are when the subject of wealth and money comes up. I served Stewardship Committees too many times to count. That’s why I knew that before I dive into what the writer of Ecclesiastes has to say about wealth I had to first speak to how people think about their finances being brought up in church. I hope that when we understand that what is written about concerning money in the scriptures that we will understand that it is there because there is a God who loves us who knows we need to hear what is being said and we will lean in to learn about the spiritual side of finances.

         The first bit of wisdom that the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us is that the one who loves money will not be satisfied with money nor will the one who loves wealth with his income. When goods increase, they increase who eat them and what advantage has their owner but to see them with their eyes? When I read about the one who loves money I can’t but help but hear what Paul tells Timothy in the sixth chapter of his first letter to him that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Now, we have to be careful when we read this to hear Paul correctly, that it isn’t money, in and of itself, that is the problem. No, the problem, Paul tells us, is the desire to be rich because this desire only leads to other desires, harmful  and senseless desires which plunge people into ruin and destruction. Its amazing that what Paul is teaching Timothy here is the very same teaching as the writer of Ecclesiastes that the love of money will not be satisfied with money and the riches that they have kept are only going to be a source of hurt for those who keep them. As the writer of Ecclesiastes goes on, he further states that what is the point of such pursuits of wealth because as we came into this world, in this same way we will go out; there will be nothing from our work that we have done here that we will be able to carry in our hands. When we consider such an ending, just what is the point for such people to spend their lives stressed out, being sick and angry? Do you see how our attitude toward our finances really is a spiritual subject?

         The writer of Ecclesiastes being a person who is trying to figure out just why so much of life doesn’t make sense, ponders as to why it is that there are people who are so obsessed about money that they can never have enough even when they know that they can take none of what they have when they go. To the writer of Ecclesiastes, it was a grave evil that here was someone who had been seemingly blessed by God to have abundance beyond belief but surprisingly enough they found no enjoyment in what they had been given. I mean, isn’t this a tragedy when you see people and they seem to have everything going for them but they are the most miserable people on Earth? How can we explain such a life? Well, the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that if a person has a beautiful family and a long and healthy life but his soul is not satisfied with life and the good things he has been given then, you know, in a way, it would have been better off if he had never had been born. So, we begin to pick up on a theme running through this section of Ecclesiastes, of people who love their wealth and are never satisfied and how those who have been blessed with abundance but have no joy and the answer to both of these peculiar states of being is that they are in the same manner of being as the person who in spite of his good fortune, just can’t get no satisfaction.

         Here again, Paul is right there with the writer of Ecclesiastes because that warning to Timothy that the love of money is the root of all evil begins with Paul warning Timothy of those who were using their godliness, their supposed devotion to God as a means to create financial gain. I’m sure glad that we have eliminated such people in the last two thousand years, aren’t you. Well, all kidding aside, these people who professed to be devout worshippers of God had missed the point of their devotion because as Paul tells Timothy where there is the greatest gain, the largest profit, we might say, is when our devotion to God is united with contentment, when our devotion to God leads us to a satisfaction with the life God has blessed us with because just as the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote thousands of years before him, Paul explains that we brought nothing into this world and we take nothing out of this world when we go. It is this understanding, that one day, we know not when, our life will cease to be, and all our toys will have to go back in the box, this is the very reason for the desire we have to store up treasures. You can watch the squirrels this time of year being busy gathering up all the nuts which have fallen. These are their treasure which they instinctively know that they will need to survive the winter until spring arrives once again. They too are never satisfied because they too do not know just how much is enough. Even so, we unlike the squirrels and every other animal on the planet, we were created for something different, within us, the writer of Ecclesiastes explains, God has placed eternity in our hearts. We are the creation of God which has been created to hear the voice of the eternal God and this is the time when God is testing us to see if we are those created in the image of God or are we like all the rest of the beasts, just those who listen to the voice of our desires. If we have chosen to listen to the voice of God, if we have made listening to God our way of life which is a way of understanding what godliness is, then it just follows that we need to be satisfied, contented with the provision of God. This is what Paul tells Timothy and it is exactly what the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us. At the end of the fifth chapter, the writer of Ecclesiastes writes that what he has seen to be good and fitting is to eat, drink and find enjoyment in the work that God has us to do for the few days of our life . Everyone to whom God has given wealth, and possessions and power are to enjoy them, to accept their lot, to rejoice in their work because all of this is a gift from God. 

         As we read through the book of Ecclesiastes, it becomes pretty evident that joy is a crucial part of our finding contentment in this world. We aren’t just to eat and drink what God has given us, no, we are to do so with joy. So, we have to figure out just what is meant by this idea of joy? Perhaps the best definition is found in the word in the Greek that is translated as joy. This word as you study it is found to have the same root as the word grace so that to be joyful means that we have a recognition of grace. Grace is the favor or welcome of God and we grasp this connection between joy and grace in the parable Jesus told of the servants who had received talents from their master. To the servants who returned with double the amount of talents that they were given they received from their master the commendation, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your master.” Joy is experienced when we enter into the welcome given to us by God. This is a key discovery that the writer of Ecclesiastes had come to. Yes, as he states in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, we cannot figure out what God has done from beginning to end, and that what God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it nor can anything be taken from what God has done, this is why people are to fear God. As we learn in the ninth chapter of Proverbs, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom but what the writer of Ecclesiastes figured out is that, the fear of God is just that, the beginning. Through his experience of joy, the writer of Ecclesiastes began to understand that while there is much we cannot begin to understand about God, what we can know is that God loves and welcomes us into his presence. This we know to be true because it is God who gives us all that we need for life. The writer of Ecclesiastes went further in his thought process and concluded that in a moment of joy we experience a moment of life beyond fear, beyond even the fear of God when in that moment we experience the very favor of God. In giving this experience what God is doing is giving us a taste of his life, an existence absent of fear. This is what is in this very profound statement of the writer of Ecclesiastes where he writes that we will not remember the days of our life because God will keep us occupied with joy in our heart. No longer then does one have to be constantly focused on death or be consumed by the fear of death because in our experience of joy we are overwhelmed by the favor and welcome of God. Once again this truth discovered by the writer of Ecclesiastes is echoed in Paul’s instructions to Timothy when he tells him at the end of the sixth chapter of his first letter, that Timothy was to charge the rich of this age to not be arrogant nor were they to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches  but instead they were to set their hopes on God who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. What we have then is to be thought of as being a gift from God and it has been given to us that we might know that he does so in order that we might enter into his favor and welcome and by dwelling upon that experience of joy we will find that we no longer are gripped by the fear of death.

         You see, with this understanding of life then this is how we can find the abundant riches that are ours when our godliness, our devotion and worship of God is united with contentment with what God has provided us. This being contented is not something that is an easy state of mind for any of us to achieve. The world we live in depends on us being discontented so that we will crave the latest and greatest new objects for us to desire. So it should come as no surprise to us when we read in the fourth chapter of his letter to the Philippians, Paul admits that he had to learn, in whatever situation, to be content. We often read these words of Paul and forget that this means that at one time he was a very discontented person, the person who is described to us in the previous chapter of Philippians. There Paul tells us of how he had lived a life seeking to find confidence in what his own strength could do. He was the best of the best when it came to being one of God’s people, he was a Pharisee, a person who lived according to the strictest standards of purity, so that as measured by the law his righteousness was without question. He was on fire for God, willing to persecute the church to prove his devotion. All of this he felt was a profitable way for him to live right up until the day that Paul had an encounter with Jesus, with the one who is the embodiment of God’s grace, the one who welcomed Paul despite the unworthiness of Paul to be given such a gift. In the light of this grace which had overwhelmed Paul, what he once thought to be worth so much to him he came to see all of it as a loss, worthless, being nothing more to him than the muck which stuck to the bottom of his shoe. What he came to know as being the greatest riches was the grace and favor he had received as a gift from his Lord Jesus Christ. It is no wonder that Paul could encourage the church at Philippi to rejoice and if they didn’t get the message he again states that they were to rejoice. This from a man who was waiting execution at the hands of the Romans. He could encourage people to rejoice because he knew what it meant to be in want and he knew what it was like to experience abundance. In any and every circumstance, Paul had learned the secret of facing plenty and the secret to being hungry, to experience the whole realm of human experience, that of having more than enough and also that of being in need. Here is what Paul had learned: he could go through all that he had experienced because of the power he had through the one who strengthened him. This one who was his power is Jesus, God in the flesh, the God of all grace and favor who gave all Paul needed so that Paul could find a contentment, a peace which was beyond all human understanding, no matter what circumstances that Paul had found himself in. This is the power of God’s grace, his magnificent favor, which when we recognize it is the source of our great joy. In this joy, as the writer of Ecclesiastes came to know, we have an experience of a life beyond our fears which is the source of our contentment. This is why the writer of Ecclesiastes knew that it was a great tragedy for a person to have received gift after gift from God only to end up never being satisfied because these gifts were God’s way of demonstrating his love and his grace from which one could find enjoyment that was greater than their fears. 

         Paul tells Timothy in his first letter to him that if we have the simplest necessities, food and clothing, nothing more was needed to be content. When we hear these words of Paul it is not hard to hear the echos of the words of Jesus from the sixth chapter of Matthew where he tells his disciples, “Therefore do not be anxious, we might say discontented, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ Or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the people of this world search after these things and your Heavenly Father knows you need them all. Instead seek first the kingdom of God, seek his righteousness and to this godliness, God will provide everything you need so that you might be satisfied. In this way, as the writer of Ecclesiastes teaches us, we will not be so obsessed with cares and worries that plague the days of our life because God instead will keep us occupied with the joy that fills our hearts. To his honor and glory. Amen!