Ecclesiastes 9

Since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward, it is the Lord Christ you are serving.

And Ecclesiastes 9.10 tells us whatever you find to do with your hands, do it with all your might.

I love what Dorothy Sayers has to say on this topic.

She writes, What the church should be telling him is this, that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Okay.

So Ecclesiastes 9:14-16.

[clears throat] Ecclesiastes chapter 9 verse 14 to 16.

So this J, j, uh, j- uh, GJ, who is our GJ please here? Can I see her face or text her name? Who's GJ here? What a mighty God.

Specifically, that the race is not to the swift, the Bible says.

Man of Ecclesiastes had that journey, and contention is in his heart.

Says, "I returned under the sun," Ecclesiastes 9:11, "and I saw that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill.

Time and chance happens to them all." There are other aspects that determine the success of a person.

Some of them are spelled in very clear language, and they're readable.

They argue that the dead don't live, right? That they have no consciousness at all.

So passages like, say, Ecclesiastes 9, verse 5, the dead know nothing, or Psalm 115, the dead do not praise the Lord, right? I mean, this is not what she's arguing, right? I mean, there are some texts of Scripture that are, these are laments, you understand? This is not the doctrine of the church.

It's not the doctrine of the Bible.

But there are passages of the Old Testament where the writer says, you know, from my point of view, like, the dead aren't moving.

Yeah.

So Ecclesiastes 9-11.

Okay.

And you have help here to bring it up.

Or I can quote it to you if you would like.

You said Ecclesiastes 9-11?

Right.

And I really love that verse.

That's what the Bible says.

It's Ecclesiastes 9, 11 through 12.

For years, I taught a seminar that was called Born Free.

We taught it in a number of cities across the country.

I think we've gotten away from this next key verse in the Scripture.

It's found in Ecclesiastes.

I love the bookends of Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes 1, life is hard.

Ecclesiastes 12, then you die.

That's why a lot of people avoid that book.

But generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.

Here's the bookends.

We ought to live wholehearted lives because of our relationship with Christ.

All the best reading Ecclesiastes 9.

All right.

Also, how do you reconcile such interpretation of the state of the dead with what scriptures say, for example, in Psalm 146, 1-4, Psalm 115, verse 17, and Ecclesiastes 9, 4-6, and verse 10? Thanks, I await your response.

Well, first of all, I must say that the question you asked, I wasn't too sure what you were getting at.

It was a little bit ambiguous.

And that's what happens at the resurrection.

So I think that the issue that you're trying to do is trying to establish the doctrine of things to come in terms of what happens after death based on purely Old Testament teaching.

The references that you made, for example, Psalm 106, 146, also Psalm 119 and Ecclesiastes 94, those are passages that are normally used by groups to teach soul sleep because they build their whole theology about death based on Old Testament teaching.

You cannot base any final doctrine on Old Testament teaching because they're this what we call progressive revelation.