Before the Evil Days Come
April 2, 2023
Preached by Noah Gwinn
Scripture Reading
Ecclesiastes 11:7-12:8
7 Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.
8 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. All that comes is vanity.
9 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 and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.
10 Remove vexation from your heart, and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are vanity.
12:1 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”; 2 before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, 3 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,4 and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low— 5 they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets— 6 before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, 7 and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. 8 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
Good morning, everyone! If you haven’t noticed, today is what we’ve been calling “Student Service Sunday” for the last few years. And I don’t know about you, but man am I encouraged to see our students serving and to be led by them this morning. So cool. I’ll just say, there are a few reasons that we do this each year. I don’t have time to go into all of them, but we think that making this a priority each year gives our church an opportunity to see our students do real, vital ministry. Leading God’s people in worship, and greeting people at the door, and reading Scripture, and (as we’ll see later) helping to serve the Lord’s supper – these are no small acts of service, this is real ministry that our students get to do. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, “youth are the church of tomorrow” or more likely you’ve heard youth referred to as “the future.” That’s partially true, but Student Service Sunday is an opportunity for us to remember that these young people are not just the church of the future – they’re a vital part of our church, even the church of today. So, if you see one of our students after the service, thank them for being such a vital part of what God is doing at Community.
Before we dive in together to a text that has a lot to say to both young and old, let me pray for our time together, that God would teach us from his Word.
Heavenly Father…
INTRODUCTION
Well, if you haven’t been with us for a little while, we’ve been in the book of Ecclesiastes. Today we’re going to start looking at the final chapter in the book, and then we’ll finish the book out next week on Easter. But to kind of orient us to where we are in the grand scheme of the book of Ecclesiastes, what we’ve seen is that this Preacher, as he calls himself, has made it his mission to plumb the depths of all that this world has to offer. Money, career, sex, fame… anything that you could imagine that has some kind of allure, our preacher dissected, and was left wildly unfulfilled. A few weeks ago, our guest speaker Pastor Greg said it this way, using the analogy of a ladder. He said:
“so many of us spend our lives climbing a ladder of pleasure [or you fill in the blank – pleasure, career accomplishment, financial planning, etc.], only to get to the top and realize that we leaned [our ladder] against the wrong building…. Here [in Ecclesiastes is the Preacher], having climbed to the very top of the ladder, unable to go up any further, shouting down at us, ‘there’s nothing up here! We leaned our ladders against the wrong building.’”[1]
An image that has been helpful to me as I’ve thought about Ecclesiastes is this. When I was in college, I had a few friends who were studying to become pilots. The school I attended had this state-of-the-art facility, which, in conjunction with the local airport, gave them access to a flight simulator. In this flight simulator, all of the book knowledge that these students had been poring over for months and years was put to the test. They would be given an assignment to get from point a to point b, and they had to figure out just the right route to take at just the right altitude, and then various simulated dangerous scenarios would be thrown in on top of it, and they would have to learn to respond when the pressure is on to prepare them for real life in the air. And so much of this learning comes by seeing all of the flight paths not to take so that they can learn which is the best route to take. And this preparation is important because, near the end of their program, they had to fly a real plane from point a to point b, thousands of feet in the air, and then their instructor would tell them, “Cut the engines” at which point they would… cut the engines and begin freefall, and they’d have to know how to respond like a reflex. Other times pilots spend a crazy amount of time in a flight simulator to prepare to fly through tight spots in mountains, or to practice landing in tight spaces. And if they have not spent hours in the simulator preparing for these moments, they won’t stand a chance.
This image is helpful to me because as we read Ecclesiastes, it’s like we get to hop into a flight simulator. We get to observe all that the Preacher has tried, all the ladders he has climbed up, like a pilot testing out all the possible flight paths. One of the reasons this book is in the Bible is so that we know – endlessly pursuing money? That route doesn’t work. Devoting my life to my career goals? That ladder isn’t worth climbing up. Self-indulgence? That’s vanity. It’s smoke. You’d be better off trying to eat soup broth with a fork.
And so here we are, at the end of the book. The Preacher is an old man now, nearing the end of his life. In our passage today, the Preacher is introducing his one last lesson, namely that we aren’t to wait until tomorrow to get serious about our faith. So, for the sake of our time together this morning, we’re going to ask two questions of our text: “what’s coming?” and “what do we do about it?”
WHAT’S COMING?
First, “what’s coming?” If you still have your Bible open, please read with me from chapter 12 again, verses 1-8. I’ll preface this by saying, I know it’s going to be a lot to read at once, but I think it’ll help us to see it all. Chapter 12, Verses 1-8:
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”; 2 before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, 3 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, 4 and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low— 5 they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets— 6 before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, 7 and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. 8 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
I’m not sure if you picked up on it, but the section that we just read is one long, illustrative, beautiful poem about growing old and dying – as verse 5 says, “going to [our] eternal home. Or, as verse 1 calls it, “the evil days.” What does that mean?
Well, we can be sure that when the Preacher calls the days “evil” he isn’t making a statement about wickedness or anything like that. From the rest of that verse, we get the sense that this preacher is just brutally honest about the fact that getting older is rough, especially physically. He spends the rest of the poem illustrating what the evil days – what growing old and dying – looks like.
First, we see in verse 2 this image of getting older being described as the sun and moon and stars going dark. One Bible commentator says that this verse uses creation language and things going dark to almost give us this sense that the very things created to give us light are being unmade, just as all of us who are made by God will be unmade by old age and death.[2] Also in verse 2 we see the image of a storm returning over and over and over, just when you think the clouds are going to break and the light will shine through. But it doesn’t. Another storm rolls in. In verses 3 and 4 we see a house that is falling into disrepair, with different parts of the house becoming dilapidated to illustrate the way our body does the same over time. Verse 5 comes down from the lofty language of poetry to get at the gritty reality that as you get older, there is a real fear of falling, in a way that is not true of a teenager who willingly volunteers for tackle football, because they think it’s fun. Verse 6 resumes the illustrative language to talk about a silver cord that would hold a golden lamp. When the silver cord is snapped, the golden bowl breaks and the light is extinguished. Also, the Preacher describes a well, which has a bucket at the bottom that is shattered, and a wheel that would typically be used to pull the water up, but that is also broken. He finishes the poem by again using language from just after the creation story in Genesis to tell us that just as we were created from the dust, we will return to it. And our very spirit will return to God where it came from.
That’s a lot of images. But they serve to show us something. Or some-things.
They show us that aging and death are unstoppable and unavoidable. Benjamin Franklin is known to have said that the only certainties in this world are death and taxes. The preacher here is stealing some of Benjamin Franklin’s thunder thousands of years before he would say it. While he isn’t making any comments about taxes, he is saying that death comes to all of us, and that the process of aging is no respecter of persons.
Another thing these images show us are the dignity of growing old and dying well. This may not be as clear upon first reading but notice some of the intentional language that the Holy Spirit has inspired regarding the aging process. Verse 5 – “the almond tree blossoms.” In a book, and even a poem, that can feel dark and sobering, we see here an image of beauty, and actually an image normally associated with life. Here, aging is described as the blossoming of an almond tree. When an almond tree blossoms it is a beautiful white that graces the top of the tree, almost like snow. This is to be an image of someone’s hair as they age, and it turns white. Look also at verse 6 – “the silver cord… the golden bowl.” The silver cord and the golden bowl are items made from beautiful, precious metals that would have been used as a decorative lamp. This is intentional language. So, to those of us here that have been mailed an AARP card, when we read “the evil days,” do not be discouraged. Rather, know that the God who inspired these words knows that growing older is hard.
As we go about our lives, do you think about how you will never be as young as you are now? Does that change the way you live today? One of the benefits of getting older is that it’s much harder to forget the fact that the “evil days” are approaching, so youth, this is a challenge that you will have to be aware of.
WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?
So if the “evil days” – aging and death – are inevitably coming our way, what do we do about it? Well one option is denial. We can deny that aging and death are headed our way and so we can do all in our power to fight against it. From people hundreds of years ago spending years of their lives searching for an actual fountain of youth, to a more modern example of spending a crazy amount of money on cosmetic plastic surgery, to a generation of people singing “forever young, I want to be forever young” there is something deep within us that has always desperately hated the idea of growing old. By the way, next year that song will be 40 years old, and the guys who sang that song haven’t done a great job at staying forever young. Probably a more common way for those of us in this room to deny the fact that we’re getting older is to simply ignore the facts. To distract ourselves with the next Netflix series, or endless social media scrolling, or living vicariously through your kids and your grandkids. Resorting to denial about getting older, to use an analogy from earlier, is a flight path that isn’t going to get us to ultimate Christian joy. It's a crash landing in pursuit of satisfaction on our own terms.
Another option we have is giving up. We can see that the evil days are coming, and we can throw in the towel. In America, there are 10 states plus Washington, D.C., where physician-assisted suicide is a viable option for people who have been diagnosed with a terminal disease and have been given less than 6 months to live.[3] Thousands of people have taken advantage of this, and even the name of the law has reflected the positive spin that people are trying to put on this, calling this the “right-to-die” law. And I know this is a sensitive topic, so I want to be careful. But we also need to face the reality of what it means to live and die well. As Christians, we believe that human life is deeply valuable and really, really matters because we have been created in the image of God. The Bible affirms this sanctity of human life in many different ways, not least among them being that God has commanded his people not to murder – not to take human life. Why would a medical prognosis be the one exception? Pastor Benjamin has spoken about living and dying well in a way that I have found very helpful. He’s said that, at the end of your life, you preach something by the way you hang on and keep fighting, and you preach something by the way you let go. What he means by this is that as Christians who are deeply committed to the value and dignity and sanctity of human life, we have an opportunity to preach that in the way that we hang on and keep fighting for life when it looks like our time is drawing near. Over the past few years at this church I have seen a number of examples of faithful Christian brothers and sisters who I can say this of. They ran their race well, all the way to the end. But just as they hung on well and kept fighting well, they also preached something good and true by the way they let go when it came time. Namely, they trusted that the Lord Jesus would meet them on the other side of death. That they could die peacefully knowing that the best is yet to come and that they would soon hear, “well done, my good and faithful servant.” That’s the sermon I want my life to preach.
So, we can live in denial, we can give up, but a third option that we have in response to the evil days coming is to listen to the words of the preacher. Look with me again at verse 1 of 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”
Here’s your third option – remember your Creator. Our response to the evil days inevitably coming at us should be this – to remember your Creator. What does it mean to remember? Well, it could mean to call something to mind. For example, if you’re in biology class in high school and someone were to ask you, “do you remember what the powerhouse of the cell is?” You would say… the mitochondria! Or an example like that. It's purely a mental exercise. Or another example would be if I asked you to remember a time when you were really happy. You would think about it and remember something. You would call it to mind, but it would stop there. I don’t think that’s the kind of remembering that the preacher is calling us to here.
There is another kind of remembering that doesn’t just involve a mental exercise because this remembering also requires action on our part. An example of this would be more like my wife Hannah saying to me, “Noah, remember that tomorrow is our anniversary.” As I go about my day the next day, I remember, “ah! It’s our anniversary!” and then go back to whatever I was doing before.[4] Do you think I have done a good job remembering? No! Why? Because there is a type of remembering that requires action. Similarly, students, if your mom asks you if you remembered to take the trash out, she’s not asking if you just called to mind “hmm, I should probably take the trash out” and then continued to pound a family size bag of Cheetos and play Call of Duty. When your mom asks you if you remembered to take the trash out, she’s asking if you actually took the trash out. Remembering my anniversary doesn’t look like simply calling to mind that “ah yes, 2 years ago today we got married” and be satisfied with the facts. And remembering to take out the trash isn’t simply calling to mind the fact that my mom told me to take out the trash. There is something different in that kind of remembering than in the way that we remember that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Biblical remembering means that I have to actually do something. Remembering my anniversary and remembering taking out the trash mean that I order my day around those facts. I call it to mind, and I do something about it.
So, when the Preacher of Ecclesiastes says, “remember your Creator in the days of your youth,” he’s calling you to do something about it. He’s calling you to order your life around it. One commentator said it this way, that to remember your Creator means “to drop our pretense of self-sufficiency and commit ourselves to him.”[5] This is a radical call for you if you are young enough that you do not yet feel the sting of the evil days approaching. As a young man or a young woman, you feel so self-sufficient. As you begin to taste more and more of what it means to grow old, you recognize your need for your Creator even more.
And this too is why the Preacher refers to God specifically as Creator. In recognizing God as Creator, we naturally must reckon we the fact that we are created. We are needy. We are not self-sufficient. However, the good news is that God cares for his creation. He cares for the birds of the air and the flowers in the field. How much more does he see to our needs?
Throughout the book of Ecclesiastes, we’ve heard the phrase, “vanity under the sun, vanity under the sun, vanity under the sun, vanity under the sun.” There is a way to continue living our lives just focused on life under the sun. Remembering God as Creator is the ultimate way to get our head above the sun – above the fog and the vanity of life under the sun and see the one who created us and the world we live in.
How are you doing at this? In what areas are you tempted toward self-sufficiency? What are reasons that you have forgotten your Creator?
CONCLUSION
As we head toward a close, I’m just going to make a few brief comments. One to the older saints among us, one to the students, and one to all of us.
To the ones among us that are currently feeling, or starting to feel, the sting of the evil days. Some of you have lived wonderful lives that you look back on and you’re very thankful for the way that God has used you and worked in your life to get you to where you are now. Praise God for that. But there are some of you here today who likely look back on your life and you are just riddled with regret. Regret for the way you lived, regret for the way you treated people, regret for the way you ignored or even cursed God. Maybe you didn’t remember the Creator in the days of your youth. To you I want to say two things. First, not only does the Bible dignify aging, like we talked about earlier. It also allows us to name that regret as real, but it doesn’t define me/you/us anymore. Regret isn’t the heavy backpack I have to carry around for the rest of my life. God wants to use you. You have not outgrown ministry; in fact, these could be your most fruitful years of ministry. Which leads me to my second comment. Think about how to spend your years helping the younger people among us remember the Creator in the days of their youth. In this way, there is no retirement from ministry. Teach children’s Sunday school, hold babies in the nursery, volunteer with the youth group, have a young family over for dinner each week, intentionally be in a community group with younger people, go with the church plant in Midtown to minister to the younger people in the city… the list could go on. The temptation of the older folks among us is the opposite of the temptation of our youth. As we get closer to our eternal home, in the words of the Preacher, the temptation can be to believe the lie that we were once more useful for the kingdom of God when we were younger. Don’t buy that. Our church is not yet where we ought to be if we don’t have young and old locking arms in ministry together. Older saints, we need you.
To the youth among us – students – I know you don’t feel it all the time, but you need God. You can’t do this life on your own. One of the biggest lies that you are tempted to believe as a young person is that you can wait to get serious about your spiritual life later, when you’re older. Let me tell you, do not wait. You may believe that all of this is true, or you may not believe any of this is true. Or, if you’re honest, you might just look at Christianity as a whole and just yawn – we call this apathy. Fight the temptation to not care. Fight the temptation to be apathetic. For those of you, who like myself in high school, do find yourself here with a spirit of apathy, I will just tell you that Christianity is saying something about you that you cannot ignore. Christianity gives you a cancer diagnosis for your soul that says that the prognosis is not good. You are going to die. And not only will you die, you will continue experiencing that death forever. But they have a cure. There is this man named Jesus who is the Son of God. He came and swallowed up your soul cancer by facing death for you on a cross. But, being God, not even soul cancer or death could keep him in the grave, and he rose victorious over sin and death and grave. And your soul cancer can be cured completely, if you believe that he did that for you. Do you see how this isn’t something to ignore or push off for later? If you were diagnosed with a deadly disease in your body, you wouldn’t wait until you were older to deal with it, you’d start treatment as soon as possible. So why are you treating what God says any differently? Your life is short, and you don’t know how long you have. In our passage today, the Preacher has gotten older. The amount of time he has left on earth is growing shorter, which means that he feels the urgency of the message he needs to pass along. And what he finds of upmost importance to give to his young son is this – do not live your life forgetting God. Remember your Creator.
Now to all of us, whether younger or older. Our time on this earth is growing short. What are we going to do with it? Pastor David Gibson says that one day you will come undone and die. He continues, “Maybe it will happen without the help of old age. It could come sooner rather than later. Or it may not begin to show for another thirty years. But the preacher of Ecclesiastes is taking you by the hand and gently asking: before that day comes, how will you then live?”[6]
What does it look like practically to remember your Creator? How do we order our lives around this remembering? Well, it starts with spending time with him where he promises to be found – in his word and in prayer. Seek desperately for him in his word and hear him speak to you there. Pursue him passionately in prayer and respond to him there. And don’t do these things alone. This is why we have the church. This is a family that is committed to reminding each other of their Creator and the good news story of the cure for our soul cancer. Be committed not only to personal study of the word and prayer. Be committed not only to Christ but also to his body, the church. Ultimately, whether in private times with the Lord or with corporate times with the Lord in his church, we remember the Creator because of the work of our helper, the Holy Spirit. He is the one fueling our study and our prayer. He is the one uniting us together as a Church to praise Jesus and remind each other of our Creator, and of his good news story, the gospel. And he is also the one through whom our safety and security in the gospel is realized. Because all of this could feel very legalistic if we aren’t careful. Like this is all just me or Ecclesiastes scaring us into ordering our lives around our Creator. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. You see, us remembering our Creator is simply a response. It is worship. It isn’t where our security comes from. The rock-solid assurance of our salvation does not come from us remembering God, but rather God remembering us.[7] Our call to remember God is simply a response to the good news that he will always remember us.
I heard a pastor say recently, “when’s the best time to plant a tree?” What would you say? This isn’t some kind of botany question. The answer is “20 years ago.” But what’s the second-best time to plant a tree? Today. So, when do we begin? Not tomorrow, not when we’re older, not when we feel like it or clean ourselves up or feel like we have time. Today. This starts today. For young and for old, plant the tree today. If you are listening to this sermon now, death has not come for you yet and so there is still time to plant your tree. As the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).
Let’s pray . . .
[1] Greg Kabakjian, Screaming from the Top Rung, March 5, 2023.
[2] David Gibson, Living Life Backwards, 142.
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2014/11/26/us/physician-assisted-suicide-fast-facts/index.html
[4] I got this idea from Mike Bullmore in his sermon, Remember Your Maker
[5] Derek Kidner, The Message of Ecclesiastes, 100.
[6] David Gibson, Living Life Backwards, 144.
[7] I got this idea from Phil Ryken.
Sermon Discussion Questions
As we go about our lives, do you think about how you will never be as young as you are now? Does that change the way you live today?
Think about some of the people you have seen in your life that have lived and died well – people who have preached something good and true by the way they hold on and let go. Talk as a family about ways that you saw different people live that out.
What are specific ways you can structure your life to remember your Creator?
Why is it good news that God will remember us even when we forget him?
