Two Are Better Than One
March 19, 2023
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Ecclesiastes 4:1-12
1 Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. 2 And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. 3 But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.
4 Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man's envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.
5 The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh.
6 Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.
7 Again, I saw vanity under the sun: 8 one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, “For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” This also is vanity and an unhappy business.
9 Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.10 For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! 11 Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? 12 And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
While the book of Ecclesiastes is, relatively speaking, lesser known, last we preached through the most familiar passage, the passage about the seasons of life. This week we come to another passage that, even if you’re not so familiar with the Bible, perhaps you’ve heard before—this passage about “two are better than one” and “a cord of three strands not easily broken.” We often hear this passage at weddings. And that’s not wrong. But this passage means more than we’ve given it credit for. Let’s pray again as we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
This week was a doozy. I felt as though I were living the book of Ecclesiastes. I mean that in some good ways but also challenging ways. To be more specific, the challenge from last week’s passage had a strange and unexpected way of bringing me to the hope of this week’s passage. Last we talked about God’s sovereignty over the seasons and our need to live humbly before them and him. To use the words from last week’s passage, you and I, generally speaking, want a time to laugh and a time to dance, a time for healing and health, a time for peace. We want those kinds of times, but, we learned, you don’t get to pick your seasons. You don’t go through the buffet and curate your plate of life with the exact seasons you wish. Instead, the seasons are dictated to us. That can be harsh but we also saw the seasons are dictated to us by a good, sovereign God who makes all things beautiful in time.
That all sounds nice. And it is. Except, my week was ugly. Ecclesiastes talks about life “under the sun,” and I had some life under the weather under the sun. I spent the first four days sick. Most of those, it was not like, “Hey, I’ll just stay away from people and, you know, be polite, but I’ll still work from home and be super productive.” No. It was like, I’m on the couch trying not to move.
Then when I started to feel just a little better, at one point that day I’m at the kitchen table, and my wife asked me a very simple question. And I had this weird, slow-motion experience that even as I was unable to answer the simple question I could also tell that the question was super simple. I could see her being patient with me and yet also confused why I can answer the question. Then I tried to work on this sermon and realized that ain’t gonna happen. Ecclesiastes is hard enough when you’re not doped up on cold medicine.
This week I also missed a huge event my daughter was in and had to watch it on the TV. I also help coach a local track team in the spring, and I missed two days of practice. Also, just for fun, I’ve been training for eighteen weeks for a nine-mile race that’s next week, and twice in the last six weeks I’ve gotten sick, so, yeah, I’m full of woe-is-me.
And I’ll keep going. My first day back to work was on Thursday, and it was a fifteen-hour day that went from before 8 am to after 10 pm. In the evening we had scheduled interviews for the job opening here, which went great. But it was exhausting. Then on Friday I had homework assignments from those interviews, and, meanwhile, I have this little thing called the Sunday sermon chirping at me, saying, “Why don’t you work on me? Why don’t you work on me? Sunday morning is coming.”
I could tell you more, but you get the picture. When I say this week was a doozy, it was.
Now, as preach I often try to give you a sense that I’m a real person because I am. But this week I’m letting you in a bit more because, as I said a moment ago, my week brought the challenge from last week’s passage to the hope of this week’s passage.
Last we talked about God’s sovereignty over the seasons and our need to live in humility before them. And I do believe my challenging week came from God’s hand. It wasn’t a time to laugh or dance or heal. It was a time when I got torn down. And I had no choice about it. God didn’t ask me eighteen weeks ago if this week worked best for me to have children sick and work pile up and my health fall apart. I didn’t give God permission. But I can see some of what God might have been doing. Some, not all. And some of what he might have been doing is to, maybe a little more than I typically would have, feel not only the challenge of one passage but the hope offered to us in a passage. Which is a way to say, under the sun, two are better than one.
There are so many ways our hearts can work against the gift of thick community, the gift of a spiritual family that God has designed us for. There are so many ways that, under the sun, meaningful, life-giving, helping and healing community can break down. This passage from Ecclesiastes 4 is about those ways. But it also offers us a better hope: under the sun, still two are better than one.
So, let’s look at this passage in two sections: four things that prevent community and one encouragement to pursue community.
Preventors of Community
Let me re-read vv. 1–3. The first preventor of community is oppression.
4 Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. 2 And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. 3 But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.
These are sad verses. They are bookended by the phrase “under the sun,” which as we’ve said, is the Preacher’s way of describing the world as it is, to describe the world without a view or understanding of a happy future, without, in a sense, a view to the goodness and sovereignty of God. And life under the sun is often full of oppression. I have apps on my phone, and there’s one on my computer that does this sort of new-feed-headline thing, and I both love it and hate it. The stories of deaths, disease, violence, and oppression are unthinkingly terrible yet frequent. I clicked over at this point in my sermon writing to look at the headline feed and the top story read, “$1,000 reward offered in search for man accused of raping person with disabilities.” That’s the headline. For local news, not national news! I saw that and thought, I’m not even gonna scroll down to get a second example of oppression. I think we’re good. And the Preacher in this passage laments not only the oppression that takes place but that those who are oppressed have no one to comfort them, no one to wipe away their tears.
If you follow news and talking points over the last few years, you’ll know there’s a lot of discussion and noise about oppression and oppressors and power and the powerless and things like Critical Race Theory (CRT) and terms like “cultural Marxists” and so on. These terms get thrown around as though most of us have this vast knowledge of these philosophies when in reality, I fear that, myself included, we all have only a very superficial understanding of these things. Now, I don’t want to make light of those conversations, and I don’t want anything I’m saying here about oppression to necessarily be construed as either support for some understanding of those issues or, on the other hand, as a critique of those issues. I’m just saying that the Preacher, in all his wisdom and all his wealth, is pointing out that under the sun that sometimes people who don’t have the same wisdom and wealth as him, get the shaft. And there ain’t anything they can do about it. And here’s his big point: There’s not a whole lot he can about it. Oppression under the sun, he says, makes meaningful, thick community hard.
I’m slowing down here for a reason. Some people don’t see Solomon as vitally connected to the book we do. They don’t think a king could have written some of these passages. They say that a king as powerful as Solomon could not have been connected to “the Preacher” behind “this Sermon” that is Ecclesiastes because it wouldn’t make sense. “Hey, Preacher, you’re the king. If you see all that oppression, just jump in and make things better, instead of making it worse. Fix things. Be better.”
I don’t buy that. I think the Preacher knows there are things he can’t fix. Not only can’t he fix them, he’s saying that the honest person knows that sometimes you can’t fix a problem because the problem is also in you. I’ll put it like this. As I look around this church after ten years, I smile at what God is doing. But also, I can look around this church and see all the ways that we’re not yet what we should be. I’d love to blame that on you. But so many of the things we’re bad at, we’re bad at because I’m bad at them.
So, oppression is the first preventor of community. Envy comes next. See v. 4.
4 Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.
There’s another happy verse, right? The Preacher, from his super wise, super wealthy vantage point, looks out at the world and all skill, all musical ability, all writing skills, and math skills, athletic skills, craftsmanship, sales, marketing, real estate, counselor skills, pastor skills, mothering skills, lawyer skills, teaching skills, all skills… and he says, you know why people want to get better skills, it’s because their hearts envy skills. They want the skills the other people have, or they want the notoriety that comes with the skills that other people have, or they want the wealth that comes from the skills that other people have.
And you may say, “That might be overstating things a bit.” But is it? Is he not right in saying that one person wants to get good at video games and another person wants to be good at a business thing and another person a certain retirement thing, and behind so much of that desire is a deeper desire to be better than someone else. Every musician who first learns the guitar can close their eyes and see himself in a rock concert. And where this kind of envy exists in a community, genuine community will be hard.
Look at what else he points out in v. 5. The next preventor of community is laziness.
5 The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh.
This is a strange one, I admit. It’s a metaphor. The lazy person, here called the fool, is so unwilling to work and labor and think about others—he’s so consumed with his own needs and wants and desires, and he’s so unwilling to do anything productive to achieve them—that in the end, the community gets tired of feeding him. The only thing a lazy person can do is eat their own flesh. It’s a way to say that, not only is being lazy a drain on the community, but the lazy person is self-defeating. The church, I’ll tell you is not insulated from this. It’s real.
In the final preventor to meaningful community, the Preacher looks at the workaholic. Look with me at vv. 6–8.
6 Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind. 7 Again, I saw vanity under the sun: 8 one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, “For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” This also is vanity and an unhappy business.
The image here is of someone so focused on getting ahead, so busy accumulating stuff, so busy getting wealth and titles and degrees and awards and applause that they don’t even consider that they have no one to share it with. And, frankly, they’ve become the type of person that even if they did want to share it with others, no one what’s to share it with them. Most people would rather go to Taco Bell with a friend than eat an $80 steak and drink fine wine with someone who only cares about themselves.
I know a woman, years ago, started a career with a company in their corporate management program, and after a year she looked around and thought, all the people here are a bunch of divorced suits.
There is an encouragement coming. I’ll get there in a moment. But I’ll ask first, if you’re willing, where you most feel challenged. What if we asked your parents about you or family or your spouse or your friends or your co-workers or your teammates. Are you someone inclined to use your power to get your way? Are you inclined to be jealous of others and constantly manicuring your appearance so that others see you in a certain way? Or are you given to being lazy and your parents or friends or coworkers have to ask you five times to do the same thing until they give up and do it themselves? Or maybe you’ve got your head down griding so hard and you don’t even know why.
If any of those are your reality, God loves you so much. He has something better for you, better for us and our community.
Encouragement to Community
Remember, the Preacher is lowing our expectations about life so that he can same them, and save us. In chapter four he pulls away from the deep question about the meaning of life and offers his listeners practical advice. Having meaningful, thick spiritual community won’t keep our sandcastles from washing away under the sun. But, under the sun, he says, it’s a lot better to follow God with other people. Under the sun, two Christians are better than one. In fact, that was always God’s intention for the world. And he’s preparing us for a new world, where life under the sun will be the way it was always meant to be. And that world will be a world full of people. Look at vv. 9–12.
9 Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. 10 For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! 11 Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? 12 And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
As I said, we often hear these words at weddings. And that’s not wrong, but that application is too narrow. There’s another passage we often hear at weddings that certainly relates to marriage but is also, likewise, too narrow.
Think about Genesis 1–2 and the story of Adam. In chapter 1, God made everything. And over and over he calls what he made good: it was good, it was good, it was good, and finally, after he made man, he called it “very good.” But then God says something is not good. Mark that this is before sin entered the world. God was there, along with a beautiful garden and 72-degree weather and fruit as far as the eye can see—and yet something was off. Something was not good. What? God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Now, again, we too often consider this only something about marriage when it’s a much broader statement. We were made for thick, meaningful, spiritual community.
If you go in our café at church, we have canvases painted by one of our members that say, “Community: God designed us for it.” I’m self-aware that it’s a bit of a joke because our church is named Community. I’m not so egotistical to think that God designed you for Community church… except I think he did. Just as he designed people for community at Living Water Church, Susquehanna Free Church, Second City Church, Grace Bible Fellowship Church, and Midtown Church—and other good churches.
Under the sun, two are better than one, he says. There is a kind of protection and, as he says, warmth that comes from two people or more people. I’ve been camping before and, man, when it gets cold, yeah, the person next to you is warmer than the outside of that tent wall. And the Preacher, writing in ancient Israel, knew something about the dangers of deserts. Traveling alone was dangerous because you could be attacked. And at night you might freeze. Two are better than one. A cord of three strands is not easily broken. It’s not a line about marriage. It’s a line about think, spiritual community.
Consider that line about falling into a pit. The thing about pits are that if you saw them, you wouldn’t fall into them. No is like, “Oh look at that pit with the lion in it and a bunch of spikes and shards of glass. I think I’ll just sit on the edge and, you know, just kind of lean over and see if I can pet that nice looking lion.” The Preacher’s point is that when hard times come—times to mourn, times to cry, times to be torn apart, times to die—you’re going to want good people with you because in those moments, your wealth and power can’t save you, and the skills you’ve acquired can’t save you. Your work ethic can’t save you from stage four cancer. You need thick, meaningful spiritual community. And you need to cultivate them before you stumble into the pit.
So, let’s make it real. Over the last five years, do you feel like the community around you has gotten thicker and more meaningful, more life-giving? Do you feel like you have more people in your life who could tell you that you’re falling into a pit you don’t see yourself? Or do you have less of those kinds of people? And if the answer is, No, I have less people and my community is thinner and more superficial than it was five years ago, then ask Why? Is it because life circumstances out of your control have made it thus? That might be true. Or is it because you’ve not been to others the kind of friend you’d like to have? Am I hurtful to others or lazy or envious or a workaholic? Or something else? After Covid and political issues and all sorts of other issues, so many people who were once friends and in meaningful community, now want nothing to do with others. And it’s wrong and it hurts. God has something better for us and for you.
And this brings me back to where I started. I had a doozy of a week. I had no choice but to take a back seat on ten things that I wanted to lead. I was, as I said, in the challenge of last’s week passage about seasons.
But then I saw the hope of this passage. Thick community that’s been hard won here over many years. We had some critical steps in the job search, and Scott Elder led like a champ. And the whole search team were champs. Just doing a great job. The assistant coaches on the track team took over and did so great. The staff at church covered everything here. Awesome. And on about Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I felt the pressure of the week piling up almost to the point that I wanted to tap out—I mean was in the pit—guess what? I had five or six friends to text and ask, “Could you pray?” They did. And I think I could have texted three dozen people. I could have emailed whole the church. Now, I’m a pastor here and have all your emails in my phone, so most of you can’t do that exactly the same way. But you see my point.
I read the other week an article titled, “You can’t make old friends.” You can make friends and by the grace of God, they might one day become old friends.
This is why the gospel message is so important. As the Preacher of Ecclesiastes looks around—and this preacher here looks around—I think the problems are too great for just man-sized solutions. The challenges to community under the sun are so big that we need the God-sized solution of the gospel. When Jesus lived on earth, he deserved everyone everywhere to become his loyal servants. But do you remember what Jesus said to his disciples?
In John 15 we read of Jesus having a meal with them and saying, “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (15:15). And after that meal, he died for his friends. To purchase forgiveness for them. And then he rose and ascended to Heaven, and from Heaven he sends the Holy Spirit to change people—to actually change us. To make us different. And not just make us different individuals, but a different community, even a spiritual family with spiritual brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. And one day, the “friend we have in Jesus” through faith, will become sight. This world will be the community he designed it to be.
I’ll invite the music team forward as I pray. Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father. . .”
Sermon Discussion Questions
The book of Ecclesiastes forces us to consider questions about life we might often chose to ignore. What big questions surface in this chapter (e.g., the harm of laziness, the evil of oppression, workaholism)?
Are you more given to being lazy or working too hard? What would those around you say is true? How are you countering this tendency?
Do you feel like you have more or less friends than you did five years ago? Why?
In what ways has the church community (i.e., “two are better than one”) been a blessing to in the last six months? If you don’t have many answers to that question, why? Is it because the church community is not what it should be or because you have not been participating as you should be?
In John 15:15 we read of Jesus telling his disciples that he calls them friends. In what ways is Jesus a good friend of sinners?
