Let’s take our Bibles and turn to Ecclesiastes 3 for a fifth and final time. Somebody said to me this week, “It’s about time you stop talking about time.” So we’re here and we’re going to just take time to read the whole chapter and then look at some of the concluding verses. And then next week we’ll move into Chapter 4, which I believe you’ll find very instructive as Solomon takes up the theme of loneliness. We live in a very competitive, ugly world, and Solomon will take that up in Chapter 4, so don’t miss it next week. If you do, hopefully it’s because we’re in heaven together.
Ecclesiastes 3:1, “For every thing there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant, a time to pluck what is planted; a time to kill, a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to gain, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
“What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of man are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice and to do good in their lives, and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor. It is the gift of God. I know that whatever God does, it shall be forever. Nothing can be added to it, nothing taken from it. God does it, that men should fear before him. That which is has already been; what is to be has already been. God requires an account of what is past.”
“Moreover, I saw under the sun in the place of judgment, wickedness was there. In the place of righteousness, iniquity was there. I said, in my heart, ‘God shall judge the righteous and the wicked.’ for there is a time there for every purpose and for every work. I said in my heart concerning the condition of the sons of man, ‘God tests them, that they may see that they themselves are like animals.’ For what happens to the sons of man also happened to animals. One thing befalls them. As one dies, so dies the other. Surely they all have one breath. Man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity. All go to the one place. All are from the dust and all return to dust. Who knows the spirit of the sons of man who goes upward, and the spirit of the animal which goes down to the earth?” So I perceive that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his heritage. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him?”
Trust that God will use his precious Word in each of our lives this morning. In the critically acclaimed movie, Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams plays John Keating, an English teacher at an elite New England preparatory school. And if you’ve seen the movie, there comes this poignant part of the film where on the first day of a new semester, teacher Keating wants to confront the youthful and inbred carelessness and callousness of his students. And to do that, he invites them to leave their desks and to come out into the hallway, a hallway furnished with pictures of young men from past years, a hallway bedecked by trophies of past glories and victories. And there he bids the students to step forward to peruse some of the faces that line that hallway, faces that they don’t stop to look at on any given semester. He encourages them to gaze fully into the faces of the past.
And as they look, John Keating says this. “They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts, full of hormones just like you, invincible just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see, gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear their whisper, their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen.”
And as the students move even closer to those framed photographs, the teacher goes among them whispering in each of their ears the Latin term, carpe diem, carpe diem, carpe diem. It’s a Latin term that means seize the day. And so he tells those boys, “Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” It’s a very poignant part in the movie, and it teaches us a great lesson. In fact, it’s a lesson that Solomon teaches us here in Ecclesiastes 3. You see, that sentiment of seizing the day is one that Solomon cherishes and communicates here in the passage before us, a passage now we have looked at for some successive Sundays. Remember we picked up the thread of this chapter back in Chapter 2. Solomon’s argument in Chapter 3 really begins in 2:24. “Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy the good of its labor because this is from the hand of God.”
Solomon the preacher reminds everyone that they ought to take life on a day-to-day basis as a gift from the hand of a loving God. That’s a theme he’ll pick up again here in Chapter 3. Life is a gift. It’s not to be squandered. Look at 3:12. “I know that nothing is better for them,” speaking of mankind, “than to rejoice and do good in their lives. And also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor. It is the gift of God.”
Solomon is adamant that God has certain purposes for all of us to fulfill, and God has certain pleasures for all of us to enjoy before the sun sets on all of our lives. There’s a time to be born and there’s a time to die. And in the in-between we must seize the day. We must make our mark in life. And we must seize the day confidently, joyfully, and urgently. I think that’s a summary of the message of Ecclesiastes 3. We must seize the day confidently. Why? Because as we saw from verse one on, God has ordered our lives according to his sovereign plan and within his sovereign purpose. To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. And according to verse 11, God will make it all beautiful in his time. God is weaving a beautiful tapestry across the loom of time. And the threads of our life are all part of that beautiful tapestry, the bright threads and the dark threads.
We as Christians, we as those who fear God, can live confidently. We should seize the day with confidence, because we are not at the mercy of blind fate. We are not in the grip of natural law. We live our lives in the palm of his sovereign hand.
Seize the day, my friend. Seize it confidently. Because the implication of the sovereignty of God is that in the ultimate sense, every day is a good day, even the bad day. Because he works it all together for good. Remember what we said, Ecclesiastes 3:11 is the Old Testament counterpart of Romans 8:28. Seize the day, carpe diem. Seize the day confidently, seize it joyfully. Solomon says in Chapter 2 and then twice in Chapter 3, “There’s nothing better for a man to do than to eat and drink and enjoy the labor of his hands and the fruit of his life. It is from the hand of God. It is a gift from God.”
What’s his point? It’s this, that there are things to be enjoyed in life even though there are many things to be endured in life. Is that not true? You are enduring certain things right now. But in the midst of that, you can also enjoy certain things right now, such as life. It will always be the case. That’s why happiness is a today thing, because it’s not like tomorrow will be so good that you will have no reason not to be happy. No, happiness is a today thing. It’s found in the simple things. It’s found in what you perceive to be that which is bejeweled by God’s goodness and mercy. Oh, we’re to seize the day because God has ordered our life and we can seize it confidently, we can seize it joyfully.
But we also must seize it urgently. That’s where we were last week. This takes us to the back end of this chapter. Why should we seize the day urgently? Because Solomon tells us that really when it comes down to it, as the animal dies, so man dies. We all go to the one place. We all will fertilize daffodils some day. We will all become worm food some day. That’s the destiny of all flesh. And therefore, when you grasp the fact that time is a perishable commodity, then life is not to be wasted. You and I live under the shadow of death. But if that’s the case, that should push us out into the light of every new day with great gusto, with passion, and purpose to make this day count. Because when you count your days, there’s not many. Therefore, apply your heart to wisdom.
The approach of death should cause us to run after life. And it is approaching. In fact, if you want to know how near it is, let me give you a website. I just came across it this week. Deathclock.com, look it up. I did this morning. It wants some data from you and then it’ll compute roughly the day you’re going to die. I actually put my statistics in today. It asks for your weight, it asks for your sex. It asks do you drink, do you smoke? It asks what country you live in. And then it takes that data and given the data that’s available to [inaudible 00:12:39], it says, bar being struck by lightning and run over unduly by a vehicle, here’s probably when it’s going to happen for me. Jen, I haven’t told you this, for me, it’s going to be the 31st of March, 2039. I’ll die at the age of 77 and six months. Who knows? Hope so, actually. Hope so.
But that’s a fact. That’s being generous. I’m telling you. In fact, if you go onto the website, it’ll actually start a clock and your life will start counting down. It’s not a bad thing. Because there’s a time to be born and a time to die. And when you understand that, you’re going to seize the day. You’re not going to sit around on your rear end and waste Monday through Saturday. No, the Christian doesn’t do that, because Solomon has taught us to seize the day confidently, joyfully, urgently.
Let’s go back into this passage here and just look at the remaining verses here, really from verse 16 through to the end of the chapter. We made a start. We outlined this chapter as this, the blending of time, verses 1 through 8; the sending of time, verses 9 through 15; and now the ending of time, verses 16 through 22. Because as we saw last week, and I’m not going to rehearse what we covered last week, Solomon takes up the themes of death and judgment. Solomon takes up the themes of death and judgment. You see, the culminating issue of Solomon’s appointed time discussion is that there actually will be a time for judgment. He brings that up, doesn’t he? In verse 17, “God shall judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time therefore every purpose and for every work.”
Solomon wants us to seize this thought that in life there is a time for everything, and then at death there’s a time for nothing. And what will follow death is judgment. The life we lived, the deeds we did, the thoughts we thought will be judged. We will give an account for our attitudes and for our actions. And Solomon picks that theme up here. He really has before us what the writer to the Hebrews so clearly states, “It is appointed unto man once to die and then the judgment.”
We covered the issues before us as Solomon likens man’s death to the passing of an animal. We clarified the fact that Solomon is not saying there’s no distinction between mankind and the animal kingdom, simply that in one sense there’s a similarity, in a sense the greatest sense of all that as the animal dies, so do we. But unlike the animal, we face judgment after death as those made in the image of God, those who have immortal souls that will travel through the gates of time out into eternity.
Which brings me to two thoughts that we didn’t get to cover last week. As Solomon takes up this thought of death and judgment and eternity, there are two things this text tells us. In fact, we’ll reach back into verse 11, but it casts its shadow over the whole chapter. Solomon talks about what we might call the anticipation of eternity, and then Solomon talks about the adjudication of eternity.
Let’s pick up this theme of the anticipation of eternity. As John McArthur notes in his Study Bible, man’s breath or physical life appears on the surface to be little different than that of the animal. But in reality, man’s soul differs in that God has made him eternal. Look at verse 11. Speaking of God, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has put eternity in the heart of man.” Mark that. You and I need to realize that every one of us is a pilgrim soul, a wayfarer, someone journeying through time and space to a place of endless existence. This life is but the preface of a never ending story. Because we all go to the one place, but the soul of man does go upward and then he faces the judgment. So you and I need to anticipate this. In fact, when you scratch beneath the surface, we do anticipate it because God has put eternity in our hearts.
Let me just say this, the whole thought of eternity is something that our intellect doesn’t have the bandwidth for. We are creatures of time. We live within the boundaries of our everyday experience. But there is a dimension to life that is timeless, and we don’t think enough about it. I think it was Jonathan Edwards’ prayer, “Lord, stomp eternity on my eyeballs.” We’ve become blind to this concept. We’ve become so rooted in life that we forget that someday we will live forever somewhere. And it’ll either be glorious in the presence of Jesus Christ, or it’ll be horrid and dark should we die without Jesus Christ.
All preachers have used this as a kind of illustration for eternity. Visualize a bird coming to earth every million years taking one grain of sand to a distant planet. At that rate, it would take thousands of billions of years before the bird would carry away a single handful of sand. Then multiply that. It’s just beyond our comprehension. Multiply that. How long would it take that bird to gather up the sand of Newport Beach and Huntington Beach and Long Beach? Thousands and thousands and thousands of billions of billions of years. What about removing the earth grain by grain? It’s incomprehensible. But even if the bird should do it, on the day the last grain of this planet is transported to that other planet, eternity will not have officially begun. It is appointed unto man once to die, and then. There’s a then. There’s an after. Then judgment. And our destinies will be determined forever with God through Christ, without God because we’re without Christ.
We need to think about it. And you know what? When you scratch beneath the surface of a man’s thinking, he does think about it, because God has planted that idea in his heart. Solomon believes that God has sewn into the lining of a man’s soul a sense of concern for his future. Man is fascinated with his fate. He’s innately curious about his destiny. Man has a deep-seated inquisitiveness about what lies ahead. He knows that this life is but the beginning, and death is not the end. That’s why man is incurably religious. Lenin even acknowledged that, didn’t he? That religion is the opium of the people. But he didn’t get it. He thought that being gypped, they needed to be free from that mythology and silliness. But he didn’t understand the nature of man.
Man isn’t an animal that can be harnessed for some communist system. Man is a fallen creature made after the image of a glorious God who innately knows that there’s more. He has an ache in his heart for the transcendent. He believes in the extraterrestrial, the supernatural. He has, he does, he will. That’s why, by the way, when all the communist countries fell, people went back to the churches, to the mosques, to the synagogues because all the communists could do was muffle that inbred, innate knowledge that there’s something more, something more to this life. There’s an afterlife because God has put it in our hearts.
When Paul gets to Athens, Acts 17, he notices this statue to the unknown God amidst a plethora of idols. And what does he say to them? “I perceive that you’re very religious.” Every culture is like that, because God has put eternity in their hearts. Australian Aborigines pictured heaven as a distant island beyond the western horizon. The early Finns thought heaven was the distant island in the faraway East. Mexicans, Peruvians, Polynesians believed that they went to the sun or the moon after death. Native Americans believed that in the afterlife their spirits would hunt for the spirits of the buffalo. In the pyramids of Egypt, the embalmed bodies that had maps placed beside them to guide the pharaohs into the future world. The Romans believed that the righteous would picnic in Elysian fields while their horses would graze nearby. Remember that scene in the movie Gladiator? The fields, the horse. It’s Roman thought of the afterlife. Whatever culture you look at, anthropology gives evidence to the fact that there’s this God-given innate sense of the eternal. Misguided, deceived often, but it’s there. Very few people have a flat earth philosophy of life.
Solomon recognizes that and he would tell us to cultivate that kind of thinking, because we are going to live forever somewhere. And this passage tells us that man has this anticipation of eternity. And remember, that’s the whole thesis of the book. Solomon tried to fill an above the sun hunger with an under the sun lifestyle, and it didn’t work. Why couldn’t he find ultimate satisfaction? Why couldn’t he just get to that place, even momentarily, of perfect happiness? And if anybody could have done it, this man. He could buy anything, have anything, have anyone he wanted. But there was a big gaping hole in his heart. Why? Because he was made by God, for God, and without God he couldn’t be his true self. Without God, he couldn’t enjoy real life.
That’s why Augustine, the Church Father, said that there is a God-shaped vacuum in our hearts that cannot be filled by any created thing. That vacuum can only be filled by the Creator. Listen to these telling words. I think they’re good words by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exist. A baby feels hunger; well, there’s such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there’s such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there’s such a thing as the companion of a female. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy, only to arouse the suggestion of the real thing.”
That’s why I think elsewhere, C.S. Lewis said, “When a man goes to the brothel, he’s actually looking for God.” He’s got an itch that nothing seems to be able to scratch. It’s an eternal itch, my friend. That’s where you and I are without God. That’s the state of existence that mankind endure apart from faith in Jesus Christ. They go around like the little chick. Remember in the children’s story that lost its mother hen? And it goes around asking every animal subsequently, “Are you my mommy?” And we go from one thing to another thing trying to find that fatherly love that’s only found in our Heavenly Father. We’re lost. Thank God Jesus didn’t leave us in that lost the state. He said, “I came the seek and save those who are lost.”
I hope you find Christ this morning, because in him you find that real life experience, the beginning of that eternal satisfaction that’s found in God’s presence where there are pleasures forevermore. But this passage doesn’t only just talk about the anticipation of eternity, it talks about the adjudication of eternity. Verse 17, “I said in my heart, ‘God shall judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every purpose and for every work.'” Not only does Solomon talk about a sense of eternity that awakens man, but a sentence within eternity that awaits man. Every man, woman, and child will have their day in God’s court. Think about that. That’s what Solomon says here. In fact, this is where the book will finish, 12:14. “For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.” According to King Solomon, God will judge all man and all matters on a future day. He has determined the period, he has determined the person.
In fact, if you go over to Acts 17, Paul speaks to those who are very religious. He introduces to them who this unknown God is. He says, “Hey, you have many gods, but you’ve missed the one, true, and living God. The one who’s not worshiped in temples made with hands, the one who sets the boundaries of our life, and the one,” who according to verse 31, “has appointed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained.” Who is that man? It’s the man Christ Jesus. He’ll either be your mediator or he’ll be your judge. The choice is yours. But there’s coming a day when God will judge this world in righteousness by Jesus Christ. And if you want to know that’s going to happen, then look at the empty tomb, because God proved it in the raising of Jesus Christ from the grave. There’s coming a cataclysmic day when righteousness will be rewarded, wickedness punished.
In fact, look at 3:15. “God requires an account of what is past.” Scholars have a difficult time agreeing on the translation of this phrase literally, but it could be translated, “God seeks what hurries along.” Solomon seems to say that time goes swiftly and gets away from us. God keeps track of it, and will, at the end of time, call it to an account. God is keeping a record, and that record is written in indelible ink that won’t fade with the passing of time. Someday the books will be opened, and each life will give an account of itself.
And that’s an important thought, isn’t it? This whole idea of judgment is set against the backdrop of perceived and unpunished injustice in this world. That’s what triggers this statement. Verse 16 triggers verse 17. See, Solomon acknowledges that life under the sun is full of inequity and injustice. He says, “This is one of the vanities of life, that sometimes the bad guy wins.” Sometimes the crook gets away with his crime. Sometimes truth is on the scaffold and wrong is on the throne. Look at verse 16. He says, “I looked under the sun, and in the place of judgment wickedness was there. And in the place of righteousness, iniquity was there.” Those are repetitive lines in the Hebrew text, and when a phrase is repeated, it’s often for emphasis. This is a great injustice. This is something that’s there.
And perhaps Solomon is taking up this issue because people might say, “Well, you’ve said that God makes everything beautiful in his time, and you’ve said there’s a purpose for everything under the sun. What about injustice? Where does that fit within the sovereignty of God? A just God? A holy God? Well, Solomon, look out your door. In fact, walk up the steps of the courthouse and go in, and you’ll find in the very place of justice injustice.” That’s what verse 16 means. In the place of judgment or in the place of justice, in the courthouse there is injustice. You’ll find villains dressed up as judges in the pocket of big crime or big business, and the little man gets stumped on and his case is never heard. What about that, Solomon? Where does that fit in to every purpose and time and season under the sun?
Well, Solomon’s answer is God will judge the righteous, and he will judge the wicked, and there will be a time for justice. Now, the implication may be that that time comes within time, but it certainly doesn’t rule out, and I would think more properly anticipates, that that justice comes after time. Wrong will not forever be on the throne. God’s answer comes in reminding his readers that those whose hearts are not pierced by the sword of God’s temporal justice will be cut down by the acts of God’s eternal judgment. We need to hold onto that. In fact, I’d love to turn to it, but time won’t de allow me.
Psalm 73, you see this played out in the life of a man. And he’s bothered by the fact that violent men are winning. Crooks are prospering. And he says, “Have I washed my hands in vain?” You know, what’s the point of following God? Doesn’t get you anywhere. You get stomped on. The good guys become mincemeat. The bad guys win. What do you read? You read in Psalm 73, read it later. It’s one of my favorite passages. In fact, when I was a police officer in Northern Ireland and I literally had to walk down the street of men I believed that were involved in murder but got away with it, I often turned to this Psalm.
And then there comes a point in the psalm where the psalmist says, “But then I went into your sanctuary.” I went into the house of God, I heard the preacher, I listened to the Word, and I got a whole different picture. God’s judgment may grind slowly, but it grinds surely. And read that in the end, he says, “I went into the house of God, and then I saw their end.” Awful, awful end. A horrible end where they go to the place where the worm never dies, to the outer darkness, to the backside of God’s presence and blessing. It’s an awful end. And all of a sudden the psalmist finds his feet again. And in fact, he probably begins to pity the very people that look like they’re getting away Scot-free.
Remember that, my friend, when you get all worked up about injustice in this life, you’re forgetting the doctrine of eternal punishment. Go into the house of God, read your Bible, look at their end. Their five minutes in the spotlight won’t be worth it. Pity them. Pity them. In fact, win your enemy to Christ, because he lives under the sword of God’s impending judgment, and his end will be awful. You wouldn’t wish His end on your enemy. Solomon reminds us of that here.
In fact, in the context of the book of Ecclesiastes, this truth of man’s future accountability before God is an important theme. Because listen, does this not make sense? If you’re going to have purpose in this life, you’ll need to have an accounting of your actions. The doctrine of God’s judgment is an important doctrine for a whole lot of reasons, and one of them is it brings purpose to life. You say, “Pastor, make sense of that.”
Well, listen. If there’s no God, and if there’s no judgment, and if there’s no accounting and no consequences to one’s actions, then man is free to act improperly and impulsively because it doesn’t matter in the end. If tomorrow doesn’t matter, today doesn’t count. That’s where humanism leads us. That’s where the doctrine of evolution leads us. My friend, the doctrine of evolution is a sad and pernicious theory of life because it turns men into animals and it turns life into a jungle, where people prey on one another because they have no thought of God, no thought of judgment, no thought of accountability. It cuts the throat of any motivation to do right, pursue Christ. Hopelessness and lawlessness go hand in hand. Listen, when you believe, it cannot get any worse. There’s no reason not to do worse. But Solomon’s dealing with the vanity of life, and he wants to remind us, “But there is a God, and there is judgment, and there is a final accounting, and our choices have long term consequences.”
Tell me this, who’s the most dangerous man on planet earth? I’ll tell you who he is. He sits on death row in many of our state penitentiaries. He’s got no chance of appeal, no chance of repeal. Therefore, he’s the most dangerous man on the planet. Because whatever he does, there’s nothing to lose. It can’t get any worse. Why not do worse? If you’ve murdered one person, why not a prison guard? It’s not like your sentence can get any more horrible. You see where that kind of thinking leads? And that’s Solomon’s reminder to us, and it fits within the corpus of this book. Be reminded that although life is fleeting, our actions count. There is a time that God has purposed and planned for the judgment of mankind, and it is sure to come, and it will be swift when it does come, and it will be like a thief in the night.
Therefore, you and I need to seek the Lord while he may be found and call upon him while he is near. We need to realize that today is the day of salvation. God says today, the devil says tomorrow. There is a time for judgment, but all in God’s good time. And don’t mistake his patience for passivity. Peter would remind us of that, wouldn’t he? When he says, “Hey, God made a promise long ago.” And people say, “Yeah, our fathers told us that. But you know, que sera, sera. Whatever will be, is. It’s been the same since they’ve said that, blowing smoke. Peter says, “Hold on a minute. God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”
God’s patience must never be mistaken for passivity. God is holy, my friend. There is a day of judgment. He has appointed it. I know the modern theologian wants to sweep the ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah under the proverbial carpet, but God will judge sin and God will judge the sinner. And if you do not die in faith and live in loyalty to Jesus Christ, your end is a horrid one, a horrible one. And therefore, do not pass up the opportunity to receive Jesus Christ. Do not mock the patience of God. There’s an old story told of the farmer who challenged God and took on his religious neighbors. At the same time he lived in a community that sought to honor the Sabbath, and so no work was done on a Sunday even in that community. But he got a bumper crop that year, and he wrote to the local paper saying, “I’ve been conducting an experiment with one of my fields. I’ve plowed it and sown it and irrigated it and tended it on a Sunday. And it has reaped me the biggest harvest of all my fields. I want to tell you that.” When the editor of the newspaper read that comment, he added as a footnote, “Sir, God does not settle his accounts in October.”
My friend, there’s only one way to survive the coming judgment, and that’s to put your faith in the one who took the judgment of God. You wonder what all that darkness was about that afternoon on Calvary’s Hill? Darkness is the symbol of God’s judgment. And amazingly, Jesus Christ, God’s Son, bore our sin in his own body on the tree. It pleased the Lord to bruise him. He took our judgment. He became the lightning rod for God’s wrath against sin. That’s why when we put our faith in him, according to John 5:24, we pass from death onto life. And listen, is this glorious? We will not come into judgment. We will not come into judgment. Romans 8:1 says, “There’s therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ.”
Do you want to know how Paul describes salvation? Salvation isn’t described in the New Testament as something that bolsters your self-esteem. It’s not something that’s described as the panacea to broken relationships or the path to health and wealth. No, I’ll tell you how it describes it. 1 Thessalonians 1:10, “Through the Son of God, we have been delivered from the wrath to come.” We need a new crop of hellfire and brimstone preachers, because God has a day of judgment planned and he has appointed the person who’s going to oversee it. And that time is coming. Don’t mistake his patience for passivity. God doesn’t settle his accounts in October, December, January, but he will settle his accounts.
My friend, if you haven’t put your faith in Jesus Christ who paid the debt of your sin, you will pay for that sin yourself, and that means hell forever. Do you know how, Christians, as we close and the team comes forward? Do you know how Christians are described in the letter of Jude? I love it. Those who are plucked from the burning. That’s a real picture of a Christian, because that’s what Jesus Christ came to do, to save us from the wrath to come.
Just this week I was reading something of the life of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church. When he was a boy, he almost lost his life. Did you know that? There was a fire in his father’s rectory. The family all got out but John. He was left to burn on the second floor in Epworth, England, until a neighbor heard his cry from a window and rescued him. And God used that in a number of ways in John Wesley’s life. John Wesley believed that God had spared him for a special purpose, and later on he was to become a wonderful evangelist and win many people to faith in Jesus Christ. And then he often used that as a picture of the danger mankind was in, that man’s life is a burning building that Jesus Christ has come to rescue him from. He died February 9, 1750, 40 years after the fire. Do you know he wrote his own epitaph? Here’s the words he wanted on his gravestone. “Here lieth the body of John Wesley, a brand plucked out of the burning.”
My friend, he wasn’t just thinking about the far in the parsonage. He was thinking about the very flames of hell itself. They’re real. It is appointed unto man once to die, then the judgment. But if you’ll put your faith where God put your sin, you can pass from life unto death. And hallelujah, you’ll never, never, never come into judgment. Don’t you want that?
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for this trumpet blast in our deaf ears this morning. We thank you for reminding us to seize the day as the sun sets. There is a clock and it’s winding down, and we all have a date with destiny. Lord, help us to live life confidently, live life joyfully, live life urgently. God, help us to anticipate eternity and to live for what is eternal. Help us, Lord, to think of that adjudication, that judgment, that sentence that awaits on the other side of the veil in the valley.
Oh, may we flee to Christ today, our Savior, who bore God’s wrath for us. May we nestle beneath him like a chick beneath its mother’s wings. Lord, may he become the cleft in the rock for us to hide us from that future judgment. Lord, help us indeed to have eternity in our eyeballs. Lord, help us to live righteously. Help us, Lord, to pity those who seem to get away with their sin and take some false comfort in it as if God is indolent, God’s a doting old man. Oh God, you will wake someday, and it will be nightmarish for this world. We pray for them. We pity them. We long for them to come to Christ. In Jesus’ name. Amen.