We turn this evening once again to the book of Ecclesiastes. If you open your Bibles and turn there, we'll pick up at chapter 11, verse 7, and then go through chapter 12 up through verse 8. This is God's Word. Please give careful attention to it. Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun. So if a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all, but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many, and all that comes is vanity. Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart, in the sight of your eyes, but know that for all these things, God will bring you into judgment. Remove vexation from your heart and put away pain from your body for youth and the dawn of life are vanity. Remember also your creator in the days of your youth before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say I have no pleasure in them before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain. In the day when the keepers of the house tremble and the strong men are bent, And the grinders cease because they are few. And those who look through the windows are dimmed. And the doors on the street are shut. And when the sound of the grinding is low. And the one rises up at the sound of a bird. And all the daughters of the song are brought low. They are afraid also of what is high. And the terrors are in the way. And the almond tree blossoms. And the grasshopper drags itself along. And desire fails because man is going to his eternal home. And the mourners go to bout in the streets. Before the silver cord is snapped, where the golden bowl is broken, where the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, where the wheel is broken at the cistern. And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanity, says the preacher. All is vanity. So people tend to forget their death, and so a question arises, how can we remedy such a thing? John Donne, the famous English poet term pastor, had one remedy, lived from 1572 to 1631. He actually had a coffin brought into his bedroom in order to remind him of his mortality. Sometimes he even slept in that coffin. I don't think we need to go to these same extremes, but our tendency to suppress the reality of our coming death raises another problem with humans as well. People not only forget their death and suppress the reality of their death, they also tend to forget God. And that, of course, is the story of the history of redemption in the Old Testament, and it is to some degree our story as well. And why this passage is so important to us as New Covenant Christians. So first of all, I'd like to make some preliminary comments before diving into the text. This passage from Ecclesiastes, if you're not here this morning, that's the English title of the book in the Hebrew Bible. It's often called Kohelet because that's the name of the preacher who's identified in chapter 1, verse 1. So tonight I'll be referring to Kohelet, who's the main speaker throughout the book. And his voice is represented all the way from the beginning up to chapter 12, verse 8, as we talked about this morning. Now this passage, which you've read this evening, has two main points. Number one, to celebrate life while you can. And that's taught in chapter 11, verse 7, up through 11, 10. And then to remember your coming death. So first of all, to celebrate life while you can. Robin Williams made this famous when he upped the ante with everybody's Latin and said, carpe diem, you'll remember, seize the day. And then the next part is, momento mori, remember your death, chapters 12, 1 through verse 8. That's very simply the outline. The first point is communicated there at the beginning, and the second part of our passage is more difficult, and so we'll spend more time on that. In fact, in the oft-quoted paraphrase, Kohelet chapter 12 verses 1 to 8 is the most difficult passage in an already difficult book, so we'll try and spend a little more time on that. Even during Jerome's day in the early church period, he said that there were almost as many opinions on this passage, chapter 12 verse 1 to 8, as there are people. And in our day, there are even more opinions than in Jerome's day. So let's look at these two sections this evening and see what God has to teach us for tonight. Basically, what I'll be trying to do is explain the passages and the metaphors that occur here, especially in chapter 1 through verse 8. Notice, first of all, in the beginning of our passage, 11-7, 11-8 in particular, rejoice in your youth is the point that Kohelet wants you to hear. Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun. So if a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all. But let him remember that God will bring judgment. So rejoice is repeated twice here in the span of a couple short verses, verses 8 and 9. Remember boundless joy, but remember also your death. First of all, remember to rejoice. Several times in our passage, in different ways, God tells you to rejoice in the good life that he has given you to enjoy. Indeed, now is the time to enjoy it while you have your life breath under the sun. The teacher in this passage does not want to encourage loose living. Neither does he enjoy the enjoyment of the goodness of creation, as if one could use this as a pretense for sinning. Rather, what he does is he enjoins the good enjoyments and participation in all of God's creation while you still have it within your power to do so. You see, young people, God is not a killjoy with the aim that he does not want you as a Christian young person to enjoy life. He does caution the young person against taking this principle so far that one forgets that God will bring us all into judgment for how we treat this life and his good created order. And that is why Kohelet brings in the theme of judgment here and to underscore and direct just how we ought to enjoy God's good gifts. But it seems to me that this is a very practical application that we need to repeat within the church. That is, to enjoy life, to enjoy creation and all its benefits in a responsible manner. This, of course, will mean enjoyment in a very different way than the world encourages enjoyment. For example, God is not against fulfilling our desires for sensuous pleasure. Through Kohelet, God does not want to encourage us to use this command as a pretense for sin. He wants us to enjoy pleasure responsibly. And therefore, for example, God is not against sex. Rather, he gives us the proper boundaries to express those God-given desires. God is not against food. He is not against drink. He is not against wholesome recreation that does not bring injury to ourselves or others. He does warn us about being promiscuous, about indulging in these things that are harmful to our eyes, and possibly to our bodies. And therefore, although this passage and others in Kohelet would never encourage hedonism, especially chapter 2, nevertheless, the thrust of this passage is against a kind of pharisaical legalism. The thrust of this passage is rather that we should responsibly enjoy what God has set before us in his creation. It can even make somewhat better the absurdities of life that we spoke about this morning. But more so, he wants us to understand that we ought to remember our death. And this next section is a seven-verse sentence, broken only by the three-fold repetition in verse 1, verse 2, and verse 6 by the word before. Now, the metaphors in this difficult section have been interpreted in three different ways. I hope when you walk out tonight you not only understand this passage better, but you might understand how to read metaphors in your Bible better as well. They have been understood allegorically, literally, and then also with references to the end of time. The allegorical interpretation basically says that all these metaphors are allegory for growing old. So when the grinders are few, that's when your teeth grind down and fall out and you have to go visit Dr. Carlson or somebody else. Or, literally, this is actually a description of a funeral procession that Kohala is describing. Or, finally, these are references to the end of time. Not cosmically, not of the entire universe, but the end of time for every individual who hears or reads them. So the allegorical approach, as I said, sees these metaphors as references to different parts of the body. The literal view takes the view that this is a funeral procession that's being described. The final view is the view that I'm going to argue is the right view, and it has to do with the finality of one's death, namely end-time experience that death brings to individual people. This is the view I think that was originally intended by the author because the syntax that is the alignment of the language and how the sentences and phrases fit together demand it and furthermore it fits with how we understand metaphors and how they work as human beings. It allows us to see metaphor clusters. In other words, how these metaphors all work integrated with one another, not individualistically. They have mutually explanatory power. Let me explain. We must respect the way in which language of the passage works. The images at the beginning basically give us a cue of how we ought to understand the images throughout the passage. Let's read the opening verses again. Chapter 12, remember also your creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near, of which you will say I have no pleasure in them, before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day which the keepers of the house tremble, et cetera, et cetera. Now, my argument here is that the leading allusions prime or activate the reader's mind, the listener's mind in this case, in order to understand the later metaphors. So, in other words, these opening metaphors are what prime all that that follows, and all that follows becomes dependent upon what precedes it. Therefore, understanding these leading images are crucial for understanding the rest of the metaphors in this passage. Look, this is not that hard, actually. Most of you probably own a gas-powered lawnmower, or perhaps even an electric lawnmower. And what do you do? You go out and you push the little red button to pump, if it's gas, some gas into the engine. And then when you pull the cord, it ignites the engine, and therefore it's primed and it fires off. Well, this is exactly how the human mind works in processing metaphors as well. Let me give you an example. If I said, quote, he fell off the bar, there's actually no way that you can understand that statement without understanding the context precisely. Let me explain. If the immediately preceding conversation, he fell off the bar, had happened at a gymnastics event, then you would understand that one way. If I told you a more edgy illustration, that you were in a group of college students who were having a celebratory pub crawl, and I said he fell off the bar, then you might understand that statement in quite a different fashion. You see, this is how human language works. It's context dependent. In other words, the previous and the opening metaphors prime what follows, and therefore we have to understand what follows according to the opening metaphors. Not only that, the syntax, the language demands it. It suggests that all these images, up through verse 7, are primed and conditioned by the opening images. They have to do with the end of time, the end of time and the individual death of an individual person. And if we can find responsible explanations from the ancient world for all these images here that would have fit in the original context, then it's incumbent upon us to understand exactly what Kohelet is saying at this point. He's not teaching an allegorical view. He's not describing failing health and failing teeth and lack of desire as a sign of old age. He's not describing, strictly speaking, a funeral ceremony. What he's describing is your incumbent and absolutely necessary coming imminent death. And that's how we should understand the interpretation of what follows. Notice rain is normally seen as a blessing in the Hebrew Bible. However, that does not seem to be the case here. Rain here is a sign of divine destruction. You see, the poet is now, and I quote, depicting a cosmic disaster. as a metaphor for the end of life, close quote. Now, is that justified? Well, it's justified based upon meteorology in the Syro-Palestinian quarter and possibly even intertextual kind of quotes and allusions being made here. You see, the word for cloud here is only a thundercloud. And therefore, he's talking about more rain, more storm coming. And did you notice that the thundercloud brings in rain after it's already rained? This is like watching on the news a tsunami. And the one thing you don't want is another tsunami or more rain and more bad weather. This is like a hurricane washing through a town. And the one thing you don't want to add to that disaster that has so much destruction in its wake is more rain. That's exactly what Kohelet is describing here, that the rain will come after the rain. And that these images are a probable indicator of God's day of judgment coming in death. Strengthened by the fact up until this point that the sun has been shining throughout Kohelet up until this point no less than 35 times. But after this, there is no sun. Moreover, the sun is darkened. There's even an echo here at the beginning of the larger unit, 11-7. Remember what it said. Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun. So there the sun is paired with light, but now the moon and stars are included. And moreover, up until this point in Kohelet, darkness has always been present at various points, but there's always the possibility of the sun shining again. Now Kohelet says, no longer. This is it. This is final. Furthermore, as is well known in the Hebrew Bible, the language of the day of the Lord is about God visiting judgment. Think of Christ's own death, and this comes right out of the minor and major prophets. The moon being turned to blood red, the sky being darkened, often associated with strong east winds and thunder and such. That's the language of the day of the Lord that's here. These images of the world-ending disaster are strengthened, again, by the rain clouds that are referred to. Return after the rain, or perhaps with the rain, is surely a sign of divine destruction, and the original audience would have understood that as these early metaphors had primed their minds for what they heard. Therefore, you're to remember your creator before this death, which is characterized as the judgment day of the Lord overtakes you. See, all these signs have to do with the universe and the cosmos, and they're being reinforced by verse 3. Notice what it says. On the day when. So when he talks in verses 1 and 2, remember your creator in the days of your youth before the evil days come, the years draw near, before the sun, the light, the moon, the stars are darkened, and the clouds return after the rain. On the day when, and that's when all these subsequent metaphors are evoked, on the day when this happens, the guards of the house tremble. In other words, if his argument is from the greater to the lesser, or the lesser to the greater in ancient rhetoric, it's the same category. If the Navy SEALs cower at this day, that they would be in harm's way, and they would face when the metal would hit the jacket, and they would die. How much more so those of us who are not so stalwart ought to fear the day when it should come. You see his argument on the day when the strong men are bent over. And then he moves on, and this indicates a single day. On the day when the events of verse 2 inform those of verse 3 and 5. And all these signs, importance in the heavens, the darkening of the moon and the sky, This informs, this primes, this biases our interpretation of what follows. It's priming, like the lawnmower I referred to earlier, kicking in. The previously mentioned days of darkness refer to the following verses, which are governed by images of death, mourning, and demise. And if this is the case, then we are referring to a single day. One's death is like a judgment day of the Lord. Let me explain. My point is simply this. If you follow the argument, and verses 1 and 2 prime what follows, moreover, if there are ancient examples of these particular metaphors that fit, and they're to be governed, all these subsequent illustrations by what followed earlier, then all these metaphors are about one's final death. To my understanding, Kohelet leads with the analogy, One's death is like the judgment day of the Lord. The death is decisive, as one author says. Quote, for the person who is dying, it really is the end of the world. Civilization, nature itself, fails along with the dying individual. Close quote. Or another, quote, it is as if Kohelet is saying, When you die, the world is ending, your world, close quote. Therefore, you ought to remember your creator on the day when the guards of the house tremble, on the day when the men of substance are bent over, on the day when the women who grind cease their working because they are few. Now, it's hard for us to appreciate this image in the modern world, But the grinding mill would have been incessant in making noise in an ancient village. But now there's just silence. People would have been so used to its noise, it would have become almost imperceptible normally, like white noise. But now for this dying individual of the one man, there's no noise internally. His experience of the outside world is nothing. When it is ceased, then it would be silence. Some of us can remember when the plane stopped flying overhead after 9-1-1, except for the F-18s, the F-16s. On the day when, those who eagerly look through the window only see dimly. Now that's a common theme in the Bible for waiting women, looking out their windows for their man to return from the battlefield or perhaps from a hunting venture. But no more. That's done. On the day when the doors of the street are closed, on the day when the noise of the grinding mill fades low. See, now you have a repetition of these images, but all economic activity has now ceased for the dying man. The point of view now is external, not internal to him. This is the view of those left behind, if you will, not the dead individual. But nevertheless, all those round about, because of the effects of this death of the one individual, all are left silent, and normal activity ceases. Someone in the community has died, and now there is a cessation of economic activity. On the day when the sound of the birds rise, verse 4. It's probably best to take these as eerie hoot owls who come into a desolate place. They move into a depopulated place because the man has died. And although the movement has stopped from other points of view, the poet has introduced a subtle undulating up and down movement here in verse 4. You can see the rising and the falling. On the day when all the daughters of the song come low, and even from on high they see the terrors in the road. Here is the song of communal mourning after the death, so perhaps a little hint of a funeral. On the day when the almond tree and the locust tree droop, perhaps the most difficult image in the whole thing. But there is a tree that when it is defoliated is actually repugnant to the site. And that's probably the tree that's being referred to here because nature is now imaging what's happened in the community with regards to human death. And it's ugly. It's repugnant. For the man, verse 5, ESV says, for a man has died. No, it's Ha'adam, the definite article. The man, the individual has died. And when the mourners are walking around in the street. And now notice the dark cloud in the wake of the grim reaper who hangs over both private and public spheres. Even the natural world mimics and images what has happened to this particular person. Nature is portrayed as poetically languishing at the events. And then notice in verses 6 to 8, he drives the last nail in to emphasize the permanence of this description of death. He says, if you look, before the silver cord is snapped or the golden bowl is broken or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain or the wheel is broken at the cistern and dust returns to the earth as it was and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, all is vanities. We know from archaeological remains, I'll not go into detail, from the second temple period that all of these images can communicate and signify death. Dr. Vanny and myself were in the Middle East last May, pot sherds all over at places of death. So many of you could bring them home and they didn't care as long as there wasn't writing on them. The silver cords snapped above the cistern, an image in paraphrase for individual death. It's a very poignant, ancient picture poem of a person's life and death and the seismic changes that it brings about. It is quiet in here. No, when you begin to understand the poetry, it grabs you. Because Kohelet shakes you and says, you know, especially young people, you think you will go on forever and live. you're but a thin veil of glass away from going out into eternity and once again Kohelet wants to grab us and have us notice that but of course we can't stop here does the passage preach Christ? of course it does not directly through typology but rather through redemptive historical contrast. We see Christ and his work in this part of scripture. For remember, we who live in the new covenant have seen the fullness of redemption in the incarnation and in the life and in the death and the resurrection and the ascension and the session of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to Kohelet and Ecclesiastes, those who die go to their eternal home and God brings back their life breath. For the modern man, the notion of a resurrected body, one that is united with a soul persisting into a state of eternal bliss, is incoherent. What's more, the modern man will say the idea of a resurrected body soul may persist in eternal torment is not only incoherent, but morally unacceptable. And it was no different in the ancient world. Both to the Greeks and the Romans, when Paul preached the resurrection, he was preaching an idea that had no traction on the ground with the culture. Some things never change. But this is not the case with Holy Scripture. We know from the whole Bible's teaching that the soul continues after death and eventually the body as well. What a comfort it is to a Christian in light of Kohalad's death poem. Jesus said to the thief on the cross, quote, truly I tell you today you will be with me in paradise. Luke 23, 43. Our Lord said to his earnest followers, quote, in my father's house there are many places And if I go out to prepare a place for you, I will come and again, and I will take you to myself, so that where I am, there may you also be, John 14. Paul also says, For we know that if in this earthly tent we live, it is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, 2 Corinthians 5. Or Paul, as the other letter to the Corinthians, The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is in the law, but thanks be to God. He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain, 1 Corinthians 15. Although our passage is addressed to the young man in 11.9, And it's good advice and counsel to be taken seriously by young men, young women, regardless of one's gender or age. It's sober-minded advice that we should all heed. The unbelieving world has no hope and can or should only hang their head in dismal despair and sadness at the end of the day. But not so the Christian. I mentioned the English poet-preacher John Donne, the one who put a casket in his room to remind him of his own death. He penned the following sonnet, many of you will remember, obviously in the spirit of the Apostle Paul. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For those whom thou thinkest thou dost overthrow, die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me from rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow, and soonest our best men with thee do go. Rest of their bones and souls delivery, thou art slave to fate, to chance, to kings and desperate men. And dust with poison, war and sickness dwells, and poppy, he means opium, or charms can make us sleep as well. And better than thy stroke, why swellest then one short sleep past, and we wake eternally. And death shall be no more. Death, thou shalt die. Christian, thanks be to God that Jesus has conquered death. My message from God's word tonight is very simple. Enjoy life, and do so responsibly. Remember your death, your coming, definite, inevitable death. However, most of all, remember Christ, your Savior, who has conquered death and set you free from the tyranny of the devil and sin and all the consequences of the fall and death. And he will absolutely usher you into the world to come if you but trust in him and have faith in him. Let us pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your goodness to us. Although, Lord, sometimes your word is hard to hear, nevertheless, it reminds us, O Lord, and gives us the right orientation as we pilgrimage towards the world to come. Thank you for these reminders. Thank you especially, O Lord, that we can turn to Christ and know that he has given us victory over this death that we face. O Lord, we thank you for that. Help us to showcase it before the world, to showcase it before the younger ones who watch us. And, O Lord, may we die well as well as live well. We ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen.