C. The
Life and Death of the Wicked and the Righteous (9:2-6)
“My
God, My God,
O Why Have
You Forsaken Me”
or
“The
Final Vow”
A
Sermon on Ecclesiastes 5:1-7
December
1, 2002
by Rev. Stephen C.
Magee
Introduction - The Center of the Center
When one thinks of worldly
accomplishments, of great works, and surpassing wisdom, it is hard to imagine a
greater success that of Solomon, the son of David. For this reason, it is striking that this man
wrote a book about the relative worthlessness of human works and wisdom when
compared with the perfect work and wisdom of God. There are three cycles in this book. The first speaks in an autobiographical way
about the fleeting nature of even a very productive and wise life. The second cycle looks at human work
considered in light of the work of God, and the final cycle investigates human
wisdom and the unfathomable wisdom of God.
The passage before us today is at
the very center of the central cycle, and thus is at the very heart of the
entire book. We approach this passage
expecting the most important insight from this wise man concerning our
work. Solomon began this book with this motto,
"Vanity of vanities! All is
vanity!" He ends the book with
these words:
Ecclesiastes 12:13-14
13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:
Fear God and keep His commandments,
For this is man's all.
14 For God will bring every work into judgment,
Including every secret thing,
Whether good
or evil.
At
the very heart of the book we find the text before us this morning:
TEXT: Ecclesiastes
5:1-7
1 Walk
prudently when you go to the house of God; and draw near to hear
rather than to give the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they do
evil. 2 Do not be rash with your mouth,
and let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven,
and you on earth; therefore let your words be few. 3 For a dream comes through much activity, and a fool's voice is known by
his many words.
4 When
you make a vow to God, do not delay to pay it;
For He has no pleasure in fools.
Pay what you
have vowed --
5 Better
not to vow than to vow and not pay. 6 Do
not let your mouth cause your flesh to sin, nor say before the messenger of God
that it was an error. Why should God be angry at your excuse and destroy the
work of your hands? 7 For in the multitude of dreams and many words there is
also vanity. But fear God.
What is an Old Testament vow?
Just as this passage is at the very
heart and center of the entire book of Ecclesiastes, verse four is at the
center of the passage. That verse speaks
of the making and paying of vows as part of the worship of the Old
Covenant. While the passage clearly
tells us that, in general terms, we need to be very careful about the words
that we say before God, there is a more specific meaning here that could be
easily missed if we do not understand Old Testament vows.
There are many vows recorded in the
Scriptures. Jacob made a vow in Genesis
28.
Genesis 28:20-22 20 Then Jacob made a vow, saying,
"If God will be with me, and keep me in this way that I am going, and give
me bread to eat and clothing to put on, 21 so that I come back to my father's
house in peace, then the LORD shall be my God. 22 And this stone which I have
set as a pillar shall be God's house, and of all that You give me I will surely
give a tenth to You."
Hannah
made a vow in First Samuel 1.
1 Samuel 1:11 Then she made a vow and said, "O
LORD of hosts, if You will indeed look on the affliction of Your maidservant
and remember me, and not forget Your maidservant, but will give Your
maidservant a male child, then I will give him to the LORD all the days of his
life, and no razor shall come upon his head."
David
made a vow in Psalm 22, where he asks to be delivered from dangerous
enemies. This is the psalm which begins
with this famous verse:
Psalm
22
1
My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
Why
are You so far from helping Me,
And
from the words of My groaning?...
Later in the psalm David makes
his request,
19
But You, O LORD, do not be far from Me;
O
My Strength, hasten to help Me!
20
Deliver Me from the sword,...
and then He promises a payment to the Lord, a payment of
the praise of people. Here is where the
word vows is used.
22
I will declare Your name to My brethren;
In
the midst of the assembly I will praise You....
and a little later
25
My praise shall be of You in the great assembly;
I
will pay My vows
before those who fear Him.
Before we can proceed, we need to consider
more carefully just what an Old Testament "vow" was. Our problem is this. We use the word "vow" today in a
very general sense of a solemn declaration, as in marital vows - almost
synonymously with the word "promise."
Three observations about Old Testament vows will help us to understand
what Solomon is speaking about when he uses the word "vow."
First, the Old Testament vow was a
conditional promise. The one who
took a vow promised to make a given payment, if and only if the Lord performed for him some requested
act, such as deliverance from some great danger or from imminent death. If God did not perform the requested action,
then the Old Testament worshiper was under no obligation concerning his vow.
Second, the vow was a part of the
religious worship system of the Old Testament. There are laws in the Scriptures that
regulated the vow system. The vow was
often made in the temple, although the nature of a particular emergency might
make that impossible. But if the Lord
provided the requested help, the payment of the vow was always to be done in
the place of corporate worship, giving God the glory for His great work of
deliverance (Deuteronomy 12:17-18).
Third, the vow was a serious
obligation upon the worshiper. If
the Lord performed the requested action, then the vow was to be paid
promptly. There were many laws in the
Old Testament about which the worshiper of God had no choice. Vows, however, did not have to be taken
(Deuteronomy 23:21-23). Once taken, they
were serious obligations. Solomon
indicates that it would have been better not to have taken a vow at all, than
to take a vow and not pay.
What is the unifying subject matter of
this passage? What advice is given to
the Old Testament worshiper?
This teaching presented in verse
four concerning the importance of paying a vow without delay is found in other
parts of the Old Testament (Numbers 30:2, Deuteronomy 23:21-23). What is important for us to see here is the
placement of this teaching within this passage.
Solomon proceeds verse four with three verses and follows the verse with
three similar verses, in both spots urging silence before the King of
Kings. If not strictly silence, the
worshiper of God is told that his words should be few and well-considered. The fear of God is mentioned. God's wrath is noted. The vast gulf between the Creator and the
creature who worships Him is brought to our attention. We are told not to come babbling into His
presence like a fool who is sleep-walking through some crazy dream after a hard
day of work. This is God who we are
meeting with. Reverence! Hear the Great King!
The whole passage is about
worship. The payment of the vow, a
reverent act of Old Testament worship, is placed in this group of verses that
remind us of our appropriate reverence, and our posture as listening servants,
as we come before our Almighty King.
Even a casual reading of this
passage ought to give us pause as we consider our ways of relating to God. Before going any further, every one of us
should see something very plain in this text.
When we come to worship God, we had better pause for a moment and
consider who He is, and who we are, and we best be ready to hear His Word
preached from the Scriptures. If this is
all we get today, then we have heard a message worthy of this important spot in
Solomon's book.
What happened to the Old Testament
vow? Why don't we do them today?
But there is another point to be
made here that requires some more thinking.
If keeping our mouths closed and our hearts ready to obey is part of the
corrective teaching that we can readily glean from these words, there is
another side to the passage that should not be missed - a part of the message
that speaks to the positive work of God the Son on our behalf, and it has to do
with this Old Testament practice of vow-taking and vow-paying that I have been
laboring to explain to you.
Let me continue on that topic by
addressing an important question. Why
don't we do Old Testament vows today?
Why don't we have a section in our worship services, where people come
forward and say before God and His people, "If God you will give me a
baby, ..." "If Lord you will
deliver me from cancer, ... " "If, Father you will keep my children
from death on the field of battle, then I will ..." then I will do thus
and such at this or that time to the praise of your glory?" Why don't we do that? The easy answer is that there is no
indication in the New Testament that the distinctive role of taking and paying
vows of the kind that I have described has any place in the worship of God in
our day. But that just causes us to ask
again, "Why?"
To be sure we do make solemn
promises in the presence of God, and we may even use the English word
"vows" to describe these, as the Westminster Divines did. Yet it ought to be very clear that we have no
situation in New Testament worship where we make conditional promises to God as
an act of worship, and then publicly bring Him the payment that we promised to
Him.
Why?
It cannot be enough for us to say that this vow thing was a part of the
Old Testament, so we don't do it.
Why? The reading and the
preaching of the Word of God were part of Old Covenant worship,
and they have been carried into New Covenant worship. The singing of praise and offering of prayer
to God were part of Old Covenant worship, and they
have been carried over into New Covenant worship. We know that the offering up of animal
sacrifices to God was a part of Old Testament worship, and it is no longer
properly a part of our worship today.
The reason for this is clear. The
Old Testament sacrificial system pointed forward to the ultimate sacrifice of
Christ on the cross. When the final
sacrifice came, all of the preparatory sacrifices were done away with. They served their purpose. Now it would be wrong for us to do them
again. Their time has come and gone.
But what about these vows - these
special conditional promises and special public worship payments? Only one thing can explain the elimination of
the vow as a way of worshipping God, and that is the ultimate fulfillment of
the vow, one great vow, that the whole practice of vowing in the Old Covenant
was pointing forward to. As we examine
the evidence, we do indeed find that THE ULTIMATE VOW has been made by THE
ULTIMATE RIGHTEOUS WORSHIPER OF GOD.
The Final Vow
The evidence for this ultimate vow is found in both
the Old and New Testaments. In Matthew
27:46, Christ quotes the first verse of Psalm 22 that I read earlier. He said these words as He was performing the
ultimate sacrifice in His death on the cross for sinners:
Matthew 27:46 And about the
ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" that is, "My God, My God, why have
You forsaken Me?"
This
psalm has long been recognized as a messianic psalm. It is quoted or alluded
to some twenty times in the New Testament.
In the gospel narratives of our Lord's death, the writers describe the
great humiliation of Christ using the familiar images from the early verses of
Psalm 22. In those verses the Psalmist
cries out to God in distress.
Psalm
22:1-31
6
But I am a worm, and no man;
A
reproach of men, and despised by the people.
7
All those who see Me ridicule Me;
They
shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,
8
"He trusted in the LORD, let Him rescue Him;
Let
Him deliver Him, since He delights in Him!"
...
13
They gape at Me with their mouths,
Like
a raging and roaring lion.
14
I am poured out like water,
And
all My bones are out of joint;
My
heart is like wax;
It
has melted within Me.
15
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
And
My tongue clings to My jaws;
You
have brought Me to the dust of death.
16
For dogs have surrounded Me;
The
congregation of the wicked has enclosed Me.
They
pierced My hands and My feet;
17
I can count all My bones.
They
look and stare at Me.
18
They divide My garments among them,
And for My clothing they cast lots.
In
verse 19-21 the Psalmist asks God to deliver Him, and in verses 22-31, he makes
a vow. While the first few verses of the
vow section are not particularly unusual, verses 27-31 could only have been
fulfilled by Christ.
Psalm
22:27-31
27
All the ends of the world
Shall
remember and turn to the LORD,
And
all the families of the nations
Shall
worship before You.
28 For
the kingdom is the LORD's,
And
He rules over the nations.
29
All the prosperous of the earth
Shall
eat and worship;
All
those who go down to the dust
Shall
bow before Him,
Even he who cannot keep himself alive.
30 A posterity shall serve Him.
It
will be recounted of the Lord to the next generation,
31
They will come and declare His righteousness to a people
who will be born,
That
He has done this.
I may be able to promise my own
obedience to God. Perhaps for me and my
house I can say that we will serve the Lord.
I might even be able to say that in my town or nation, in my generation
that many would be brought to the Lord by my efforts, although it would be a
presumptuous and arrogant promise. But
could I promise God all the ends of the earth?
Could I go beyond the limits of my own mortality and promise to bring
Him those who had not yet been born - a future generation? Only the Messiah, the God-Man who cried out
for deliverance from God on the cross could make such an extravagant vow and
have the ability to keep it. He is the
ultimate righteous worshiper of God, and He has made this vow, the ultimate
vow, to deliver the kingdom to the Father.
If the evidence of Psalm 22 was the
only evidence that we had of such a vow, we would know from that psalm alone
that an extravagant vow such as this could only be kept by Christ. But this is not the only evidence that we
have. The author of the letter to the
Hebrews says this in chapter 2:10-12:
Hebrews
2:10-12
10 For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing
many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through
sufferings. 11 For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified
are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren, 12
saying:
"I will declare Your
name to My brethren;
In the midst of the assembly I will sing
praise to You."
This
last quote is from the twenty-second verse of Psalm 22. The writer here has put a section from the
vow portion of the psalm on the lips of Christ.
Later in Hebrews 5:7 we read this:
Hebrews 5:7 ...
in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications,
with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and
was heard because of His godly fear, ...
Do
you hear the similarity to the words of Psalm 22 again? Verse 24 of Psalm 22 says, "when He cried to Him, He heard." In Hebrews 5:7 we learn that when Christ
cried out on the cross in anguish for deliverance using the words of Psalm 22:1
"My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?"
his Father in heaven HEARD and answered his plea for deliverance.
What should be obvious is now very
clear. Christ was not quoting Psalm 22:1
out of context. Hebrews shows us that
the whole psalm was on the lips of our Savior.
He was taking the vow as He was making the sacrifice. He was heard by the Father. He was delivered from death. He will pay His vow, for we know from Solomon
- back to Ecclesiastes 5 - that the righteous worshiper of God only makes a
well-considered vow, he pays what he vows, and he pays without delay.
What was this vow: "If, Father, You will deliver me from
death, then I shall deliver the kingdom of ransomed and perfected sinners from
all ages and all nations to You at the end of
time. In Ephesians 5:26-27 we are
assured by Paul that Christ is now sanctifying the church, preparing her as a
living offering of persons to be given to God.
It says that He is doing this
with the washing of water by the word, 27 that He
might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or
any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.
We
will be the payment of the final vow eternally, for Christ, at the end of time,
will deliver up the kingdom to the Father (First Corinthians 15:24).
Why is this passage at the center of
this cycle?
This passage is all about the perfect cross-work of
Christ, as well as His ascended work that he is doing now on our behalf in heaven,
and His great work of glorifying the church at the resurrection, which is yet
to come. It is perfectly placed within
the center of this second cycle, because it speaks of our humility before God
when we consider the futility of our own works.
God in Christ has made the vow perfectly, and He will keep the vow
perfectly. Now with all diligence, go
about the work that He calls you to, with that confidence that God's work shall
stand. Humble yourself before Him in all
that You do. He
alone can establish the work of your hands.
Because of His great cross-work, His great ascended-work, His great
glorification-work, your labor is not in vain in the Lord, for His work shall
stand. As Paul writes to the Corinthian
church:
1 Corinthians 15:56-58 56
The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is
the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the
victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 58 Therefore, my beloved brethren, be
steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your
labor is not in vain in the Lord.
Why is this passage at the center of the
entire book?
But this passage is not only at the center of
Solomon's consideration of human work, it is the central passage of the entire
book. Every fear and doubt can be put
away in the light of the perfect work of God on our behalf. If you are discouraged with your life in some
way, consider this final vow of Christ.
Is there something lacking in this vow?
Did He not cry out to the Father in order that He would be delivered
from death? Was He not heard? Did He not promise that if the Father would
deliver Him from death that He would deliver up the Kingdom to the Father? Did the Father deliver Him from death? Will
He not pay His vow to the Father? For
Him to ignore His vow would be sin. Will
Christ sin? No, He will pay what He has
vowed. Will He offer up a sacrifice full
of spots and blemishes? No the sacrifice
will be perfect. Christ has the moral
will to keep His vow. Christ has the
power to keep His vow. Christ will keep
His vow.
This passage is at the center of the
book of Ecclesiastes, because if we are to live in the fear of God, in this
world of fading vanities, we must live as humble worshipers, who trust not in
our own works, or our own wisdom, or our own promises, but trust in the work of
God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Applications for New Testament Life and
Worship
In closing, when you think of this
book, I want you to think of this passage.
And when you think of this passage, I want you to let this passage
inspire you in your service of the Great King Messiah. Simply stated,
1) Keep your word. You have promised
to worship God. Let your "Yes"
be "Yes."
2) Listen to God through the reading
of the Holy Scriptures, but especially through the preaching of the Scriptures
in the assembly of His worshipping people.
3) Hear especially His word of
assurance for the church in light of the perfections of His Son, and don't
count on your own works and wisdom.
Vanity of vanities! Our work - Our wisdom -
Nothing in my hands I bring, simply
to thy cross I cling. And on that cross
He cried out, "My God, My God, O why have You
forsaken me." In the days of His
flesh He offered up prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the
one able to save Him from death, AND HE WAS HEARD. Cling to that cross, and to the one who made
the ultimate vow, and who will most certainly keep His vow.
Let me tell you what will happen
when the end comes. He will deliver up
the kingdom to the Father, perfect in holiness, without spot, without
blemish. He made the ultimate vow to
God. He will not be late in paying
it. He will pay what He has vowed, to
the glory of God the Father, forever and ever.
AMEN.
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