To Be or Not to Be?

Ecclesiastes 4:1–6 on Oppression and Toil

Today's text is Ecclesiastes chapter 4, verses 1 through 6. Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun. And behold, I saw the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them.

And on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them. So I congratulated the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living. But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun.

I've seen that every labor and every skill which is done is a result of rivalry between a man and his neighbor. This, too, is vanity in striving after wind. The fool folds his hands and consumes his own flesh.

One hand full of rest is better than two fists full of labor in striving after wind. Let's pray. Lord, you are so good. Lord, thank you so much for this people that you've gathered here today. Lord, thank you for how sovereign you are.

Lord, you have given us this text today in time for your glory. Lord, and to sanctify us all. Lord, I pray for us as we go through Ecclesiastes, I pray that we see your faithfulness and your sovereignty, Lord.

Lord, praise you that the people in this room were not severely oppressed, Lord. Thank you so much for the way you care for us, the way you provide. Lord, help us to be a people that are thankful. Lord, I pray for Josh this morning.

I pray that you would bless the preaching of your word. Lord, that it would be illuminated, Lord, and that you would sanctify us. Lord, we praise you and we thank you.

It's in your name we pray, amen. Why did I not die from the womb, come forth from the womb and breathe my last? Why did the knees receive me and why the breasts that I should suck? For now I would have lain down and been quiet.

I would have slept then. It would have been rest to me with kings and with counselors of the earth who rebuilt waste places for themselves. Or with princes who had gold who were filling their houses with silver.

Or why was I not like a miscarriage hidden away as infants that never saw light? There the wicked cease from raging, and there the weary of strength are at rest. The prisoners are at ease together. They do not hear the voice of the taskmaster.

The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master. Why is light given to him who is troubled, and life to the bitter of soul, who long for death but there is none, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures?

Who are glad with joy and rejoice when they find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden and whom God has hedged in? For my groaning comes at the sight of my food, and my roaring pours out like water.

For the dread that I dread comes upon me, and what I am afraid of befalls me. I am not complacent, nor am I quiet, and I am not at rest, and raging comes.". Centuries before Solomon wrote, Job wrote that piece of scripture in response to many counselors around him that would have him introspecting and trying to find, all of this stuff is happening to you, Job, because of your sin.

Or maybe his wife who would tell him, find an end of this. Just curse God and die. And Job will not curse God, and so the answers are elusive. And he continues to listen to the words of counselors, and he continues to groan, and rage, and rumble, and ultimately, as everything is taken away from him, death seems preferable, or better yet, to never have been born.

Job's Lament and the Need for Compassion

This is the classic response to oppression, and in the Christian church, for too long now, I think that we have pillory people who ask the question. This is Job, this is Solomon, who asked these questions.

And I want you to imagine for a second as we begin here, if your friend was talking to you this way, what would you offer? Would you offer a stern rebuke? I think we are pious enough to not offer to curse God and die.

I think we know better than that. But I think that many times through ignoring these things and acting like there is just a Jesus-juke answer to people suffering in oppression, that oftentimes we become terrible counselors, and we do not know how to address people who are crying out for help.

I confess many times being in that camp, as I hear the stories of people who are suffering unimaginable grief and trauma, both inside the church and outside the church, oftentimes I will think, what am I even supposed to say here?

What can I possibly say to comfort when life often seems so pointless, when it seems like evil wins the day, and it seems like good will never triumph again? And this is where Solomon turns. Many centuries after Job wrote a startlingly similar response to suffering, Solomon writes, at all of the oppression he sees, and the issue that we know, and we will never escape on this earth, is that oppression is a fact.

There is someone being oppressed at all times, every time, through all of history. And it's going on today. There are people who are being oppressed even as we speak. In fact, in America, I think that we have made soft forms of oppression that the slave himself even likes to grab a hold of.

And he starts to love his oppression, all the while feeling suicidal. He loves the chains that are put on of government support and assistance, pornography, instant social media scrolling, streaming Netflix.

And all of these chains are put on that are oppressing him and taking his courage away, taking any zeal that he has, taking any sense of purpose. And he will scream out when the chains start to be taken away from him.

That is the nature of the oppression that is going on in America. It's a good time to talk about this, because we know intrinsically, why does the government put huge taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and firearms?

Presumably, because they want to stop that activity, right? You start to tax something if you want less of it. It is October. It is property tax time. And you start to learn that the government actually really doesn't want you to own property, because they are going to charge you exorbitant fees every single year, just for the privilege of owning property.

Now you ask, why would they want that? And the answer is always this, the powerful long to oppress the unpowerful. Now, does Rice sound like a commie? No, and the fact that I have to even say that shows how far afield we are in liberal egalitarianism.

We have found the greatest government ever. None has ever been better than this. Everybody that would say anything about people being oppressed is obviously against individual freedom. That's the world we live in right now.

Solomon's View of Oppression and God's Law

But Solomon, you have to understand the context. When Solomon is looking out, and understand what he's doing in this passage, he despairs of life. He says, maybe it's better to be dead. But being dead, that's scary.

So actually, it would be better if I was never even born, if I never existed. That is the level of despair that Solomon sees when he looks out and he sees oppression, and he sees how those who oppress the poor are not even comforted in themselves.

In fact, they keep oppressing harder and harder because they don't get satisfied in the riches that they gain from oppression. And then you remember, you have to read this and you have to think, well, who was Solomon?

Well, he was in charge of it all. And then the despair kicks in, right? Because Solomon, the righteous ruler, looks out and he sees as the king of all Israel, as the one that other nations are paying tribute to, that Solomon has a huge amount of power and control over justice and over the law.

And at the same time that he has all this power, he can't stop the oppression. Hopeless, isn't it? Imagine if your guy, the best guy you can think of, who believes all the things you do, because you're right, aren't you?

All the things that you believe about government, everything that would fix this country. If you could consolidate all of that power into one man and he would do exactly what we on the right all want, would it stop oppression?

And how would you feel when it didn't? Would you question everything? Would you think, was I wrong? Or is oppression baked into the cake in a cursed world? Because remember, when we look at Ecclesiastes, we have to look back and we have to remember that Solomon has already told us that man adds and subtracts nothing from God's plan.

So the oppression of the slave and the lack of comfort for the oppressor are all working according to God's plans for his purposes. That is a thought that might make you think, well what's the point of even doing any of this then?

That's where Solomon comes from. He is not an emo firing up Avenged Sevenfold and getting in his feelings. Okay, that's not what Solomon is doing. Solomon is looking at his power and he's looking at how he can't stop this wave of injustice that's rolling over his country.

And he says, I'm looking around at all of the acts of oppression, which are happening under the sun. So what is this oppression? Well, here's what's going on, right? The slave is constantly oppressed.

We have a permanent slave class in America today. I hope I don't have to break the glass for you, but here I go anyway. You see adult age people who are working at Whataburger and Wendy's and Taco Bell and Walmart out front, and you wonder, how in the world can this person exist?

Slavery. Now, they don't have to go home to master in chains, but what they are doing is they are taking government assistance so that they can provide us cheap hamburgers. That's what's going on in the world.

And they will continually be in that class, and then they go, and this can get you blackpilled, right? Let me just take you all the way on the black pill. Here's the thing. The slave is oppressed because the rich are going to continually get richer.

They are going to prosper, and they are going to pervert justice for themselves. This has happened time and time again. Rich people control the courts because they have power. And when they feel no obligation for the people under them, then oppression is going to be the definition of the country.

Oppression is nothing short of the abandonment of God's law. See, the law, when perfectly followed, ensures the ability of men to sit under their own fig tree. That doesn't mean that everybody's going to be equal.

That's a fallacy. What the law of God means is that your property rights are going to be protected. You're gonna be protected from murder. You're gonna be protected from theft. You're gonna be protected from adultery.

And you're going to be able to grow your own maybe one fig tree or maybe 10 ,000 fig trees in the case of Solomon, and you're gonna be able to sit under it. The law ensures protection from lawlessness.

But where there is oppression, God's law is being broken. And this happens increasingly in flagrant ways. It begins with subversion and lies. And the enemy is a liar and a murderer from the beginning.

And so where you find his minions, you're gonna find that the ultimate blooming out of all of his plans is gonna be murder. His people are liars. His people are full of malice, and they are swift to shed blood.

And so what you're gonna see is in a society that is gonna have oppression, you are going to have subversive murder, maybe a little light murder. And that might be this beginning of murder that's just a clump of cells because it starts to cause this haze, right?

When we're not working on conviction and we don't hold human life as being sacred, then what we'll see is, well, maybe that life is gonna be really bad anyway if we let it develop any further. And so we'll go ahead and end that life because they would probably be on welfare anyway.

Bam, abortion. Abortion was started, and the argument behind abortion when it began was to put poor slave-bound people out of their misery before it even started. It was to eliminate black people from America.

It was to eliminate welfare recipients. And it's the enemy's plan, and so it comes in with subversion, and then when you see that oppression starts to bloom out, you just have full-blown murder everywhere, right?

Now you can kill infants, you can kill two-year-olds, you can kill old people. More people are dying in Canada from medically-assisted suicide than from heart disease, right? Full-blown murder. You start to see unequal weights and measures.

People are not treated the same under the law. People who have more are treated differently. People who have a certain identity are treated differently. And it begins not in the courts, but it begins in hiring processes, and oppression abounds.

Your ability to get a job doesn't depend on what you're able to do, it depends on who you are or what your name is. You start to see usury grow, right? Where now we extort people and turn money into a tool to extort more money from more people.

And then we see that instead of taxing, because taxing makes people mad in a full-grown economy, right? You want to raise the taxes, you split the kingdom. Isn't that laughable now? The Solomon's son lost his kingdom because he wouldn't repeal taxes that were probably a fourth as much as what we pay today in this country, okay?

But taxes make people mad. No one's going to run on tax increases for the poor and middle class, no one. I've never heard that in my life. You know what's going to have to happen? The middle class are going to have to pay their fair share.

Said no politician ever. They're not going to say that. They're always going to talk about taxing the rich. But now they don't even talk about that. Have you noticed it? Because now they don't need to tax you anymore, they just print more money.

And they cause inflation. And then if you want to get to the most subversive part of all oppression, it is this, is you just give slave education. And what I mean by that is your whole education system teaches everyone how to be a slave.

Now look, I'm in the belly of that particular beast. And I will tell you that what goes on in the education system is that you are taught compliance, you're taught sexual immorality, you're taught that your people were all colonizers and evil, and you're taught that everybody in every opinion is exactly the same.

Except for one, Christians are bigots. This is the world that we live in. And all of that stuff, Christians, we've been blind forever because all we focused on was the obvious sexual immorality and the hatred towards Christianity.

But really maybe the most corrosive part of that whole education program is that it perpetually creates corporate wage slaves. Okay, the idea of compliance in males is why males are out of the education system.

Because men have testosterone. And growing up, men don't want to sit still for seven and a half hours a day. So you get a system that is tilted towards some, away from others, and then the whole point of the system is to create people who will work every day and ask no questions as long as they have recreation.

And that's where we are. And you look out at that. Now listen, you may disagree with parts of what I've just said, but let's look around. Does it seem like there's any end to that possible? You have to admit the sexual immorality has gone off the charts.

You have to admit the murder thing is full bloomed now. You have to admit that there are unequal weights and measures, both judicially and in hiring practices in America. So what was Solomon looking at?

I would probably argue he was looking at a lot less than what we're seeing right now. And he's going, there's no comfort for the slave. They're being beaten down. But see, here's the thing that really makes him despair.

I would argue it's not the first part. It's not the oppression of the slaves. That's bad. But what's worse is this little line, right? The one side, their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them.

The oppressors themselves have no comfort. There's no contentment for the oppressors. So what happens is the oppressor starts to look for all kinds of lies, and Solomon's already gone through several of them, right?

The labor, the money, the pleasure, all of those things that we think, all of you right now, all of you think, at least to some extent, that money will buy you a little bit better life than you have right now.

You all believe it. And don't lie to me and tell me you don't. You think if you just had a little bit more money, that you would be a little bit better off. And Solomon says that's striving after the wind.

But here's the evil thing, is that when the oppressors, who are already extorting everyone under them to get more and more and more, when there's no comfort for them, there's also no breaks. They won't stop.

And that's what we see, is that the oppressors just keep oppressing even harder and even more and even more boldly every day. And because they're in power, they're not gonna get stopped because who's gonna stop them?

They own the power structures. I really sound like a commie now. Do you see how far we've gone down the well? You can't even talk about this stuff. In America, we do have oppressed people. See, the problem with all the stuff from 2018 to 2022 about wokeness, the problem with all that was not that groups of people get oppressed.

That's true. The problem with it was it had it completely opposite, who is getting oppressed, okay? And on the right, we didn't know how to argue. Pastors didn't know how to argue. We were just like, whoa, false gospel.

No, it's a lie. The problem with all of that was that it was a lie. The problem wasn't that it was a false gospel. The problem was it wasn't true. It was never true. There's always going to be oppression.

There's always going to be oppressors. And here's the thing. Here's the thing. When there is no comfort for the oppressors, what they've done, they'll never find comfort because they have thrown off their natural role.

And this comes back in Solomon's writing all the time. There's a natural order of things. And the natural order of people who have been given much is that much will be expected of them. And so for those who are given power, for those who are given a lot, what's expected of them is that there is a hold and a call on them by those that they are in charge of.

See, the servant has a claim on the master. And the servant has a claim to be treated well. We see that all through the New Testament. Notice that Paul, Jesus, the authors of the New Testament, the gospel writers, they never talked about how you're supposed to set your slaves free.

What they did talk about is how you're supposed to treat your slaves. You treat them as people who are created in God's image. You treat them as people with dignity. You pay them their wages. You take care of them.

You do not extort them. You do not treat them as somebody who does not have a soul. And so Solomon looks at all this and he sees, man, this is an escalating thing that's just getting more and more out of control.

The slaves are being oppressed more and the people who are oppressing them are bloodthirsty for more oppression. So they just keep on going. And this is what brings him to the brink. And here's what he says.

I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living. So Solomon's response in the face of hopeless wickedness is that he has a wicked response himself. But listen, Solomon's not going to curse God and die.

What Solomon is doing is he is asking a question and he's going to examine it in this letter. And his thing, his response here is, maybe there is relief from death. We get relief from all this oppression if we just die.

Now we learned last week, you don't take these things in a silo, right? We learned last week that for those who act like beasts, they might think it's better for them to die, but God is testing us all to see if we're better than a beast.

And for the wicked who act like beasts, it's far worse for them because death is only the beginning of the suffering for those who are outside of Christ and who do not fear God. But for those who are in Christ, to answer the question this way is not on the table for us.

I go to the Apostle Paul, famous verses, Philippians 1, 21, for to me to live is Christ and die is gain. But if I am to live on in the flesh, this will mean fruitful labor for me. And I do not know what I will choose, but I am hard pressed between the two, having the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is very much better.

Yet to remain on in the flesh is more necessary for your sake. And convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith. Now, remember a couple of things.

What man is doing neither adds or subtracts from the beautiful work of God. However, we know as Christians, when faced with oppression, when we are faced with hardship, with suffering, with horrible things, we know that to die is very much better.

However, we also know that we are here and that we are here for a purpose. And that purpose is that we are to work for the benefit and the faithfulness and the joy of those who are around us. So friend, when you are despairing and when you think that death would be preferable, it's because you've lost sight of the mission.

Do you understand? When we are deep in our fields and even when real suffering happens and we think that we are better off checking out, what we understand, what we don't understand, is that there is a call on us and there is a mission.

And to wanna check out is to not understand your place in the mission. Now, I know this very specifically because I was given an opportunity to face this. It's a crazy thing. But in 2020, I had death ticking inside of me as my appendix blew up.

I was septic, 105 fever going in, and I knew it was dicey. I knew from the way Kelsey was looking, I knew from the way the nurses were talking as I was getting cleaned up to go into surgery. We had had to wait hours.

And I remember under sedation when I was going into the operating room, I remember saying this prayer. It was, Lord, I'm ready to go, but I don't know if my family is, so take care of them. So it comes back to me this week, and I remember this, right?

I knew, I knew that I would be better off dead. Undoubtedly, right? However, there is a mission. And while we're alive, that mission is more powerful than what we get to do for eternity when this mission is over.

So see, the answer to Solomon's question is gonna be mission-mindedness. And Solomon's mission is not to stamp out oppression all over the earth. Solomon's mission is to stamp out oppression and to enforce judgment where he has the authority and the power to do it, understanding that he will never be able to totally do it.

And that's another thing that we fall into as Christians, is we think if we can't get 100 right, then we're not supposed to do it at all. And that's not the reality of the world. My kids are not gonna turn out 100 the way I want them.

That doesn't mean that I get to check out and just stop. Well, it's gonna fail anyway, might as well not do it. That is total loser talk. And we've been doing that for too long. We think, well, we're not gonna get everything we want, so why would we even try?

And the answer is that God has made the world to where it moves in stages, and we keep fighting. And for you, don't you understand, you add and subtract nothing, what a comfort that is to the fight and to the mission, is because the success of the mission is not dependent on you, just the glory to the creator in you being faithful to him and showing that no matter what happens to you, you're not going to have your allegiance to your king shaken.

That is a king's man, isn't it? Don't you wanna be known as someone who has 100 loyalty to Christ? That's the greatest thing on earth, and that's what Solomon is digging for, but he's gonna go further down the hole, isn't he?

The Despair of Never Having Been and Hope in Providence

He doesn't stop with death, he moves on. And he says, but better off than both of them is the one who never has been, who has never seen the evil work that is done under the sun. Now, I have heard a lot of this, I don't wanna give birth, it's not favorable now, I don't wanna give birth to somebody so that they would have to deal with this awful world.

What a stupid thing to say. If everyone thought like me, we would end the human race because I don't want them to see evil. What a defeatist, loser, stupid, anti-natural order, anti-will-of-Christ sentiment to take.

Don't let that ever be in your mouth. This desire to never have been is actually worse than the desire to die. Because see, the desire to die is the desire to have a natural order. We have it built into us, eternity is built into us, we know that we are eternal creatures.

And so to die, we are not breaking natural law in thinking, hey, we may have something better on the other side of this. But to have never been born at all, that is anti-God, that is anti-His desire.

It breaks natural law and it breaks revealed scripture. Psalm 139 .14 says, I will give thanks to you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works and my soul knows it very well. And Solomon, in his despair, says there's no hope under the sun.

And here's the thing, here's the thing. If your hope is found in the doings of man, it would be better for you to have never been born. Because we are not beasts and we cannot be beasts. See, the atheist and the agnostic and the one who sets themself up against God, they create this fiction for themselves.

And the fiction is that we die into nothing. That's folly, that's a farce. And Solomon knows that, that's why he's not going to camp here, okay? But when you are looking and you place your hope in what's going on on earth, you've placed your hope in the wrong place.

And that is a fool's hope, it's never going to work. We know this, it's baked in to our psyche, right? When things get really hard on us, when we have to do things that we really don't wanna do, we will say something that someone said before, I wish none of this had ever happened to me.

And then the response is this, it's all in Tolkien, so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. So deeply true, so deeply powerful.

You don't get to sit around whining about the circumstances of your life. Instead, you have to understand that God has divinely, he has purposed every single thing that happens in your life because he expects you to give him the glory in that circumstance.

That is a comforting thought, isn't it? That this present suffering that you're facing right now is not only testing your faith, but it's improving your faith and making it stronger. He is using everything that happens to you to conform you from one degree to another into the image of his son.

He is working all things for the good of his people. And everything bad that we groan and we strain and we whine about is happening specifically to make you more holy and to make you glorify him more.

It didn't catch him off guard. Your miscarriage did not surprise God. Your getting fired at work did not surprise the king of kings. Death in the family, cancer, none of it surprised God. And the harder and harder it is, the more he is sanding down those edges of your own sovereignty and teaching you that you are not in control of anything, teaching you over and over again that you do not add or subtract from his work.

The great father in the faith, look at what happened at the great testing of Abraham and remember how he had failed before. He had been going into foreign lands and he was so afraid for his own life that he would give up his wife to protect his own hide.

And yet, when it came down to it, what did Abraham do? When the faith was at its maximum, God told him, take your son, your one son, the one that you love, and sacrifice him for me. And Abraham, Hebrews tells us, Abraham believing that his son would be resurrected from the dead took him up on the mountain.

Why in the world would Abraham believe that? See, because without faith it's impossible to please God. And the reason that Abraham believed that Isaac would be resurrected is because God had promised Abraham that he would have descendants like the sands of the seashore and the stars of the sky and that they would come through Isaac.

They were not going to come through Ishmael. He had already tried his own way. And even in his failure, his faith was strengthened because God even uses our sin to strengthen our faith down the road. And so there's a small test that Abraham failed and another test that Abraham failed.

But then when God wanted to show his own power and his own grandeur, he gives this ultimate test and Abraham passes the test. And do you know why Abraham passed the test? It's not because he's so great.

It's because God in his wisdom wanted to show an exact object lesson of what he himself was going to do. Abraham could not have done any other than to sacrifice Isaac on the hill because God had decreed it.

Isn't this so much bigger than you? And how pitiful is it when we go, I'd rather be dead. Solomon's not pitiful. He has seen this to a higher extent than we can see. He had massive power. He had massive influence.

And yet the oppression reigns. He can't hold it back. But guess what? That's not his job. His job is to rule wisely over his people. His job was not to rule wisely over all the people. There's only one person who can do that.

And he was in Solomon's loins. Right? Jesus rules over all people. And all those who oppress are doing so because of the preordained divine purpose of the God man, Jesus Christ. So then he moves on off of this thought and he says, I've seen that every labor and every success of the work is the result of jealousy between a man and his neighbor.

Rivalry, Laziness, and the Need for Rest

This too is vanity and striving after win. So what are the responses to this hopeless situation? Right? That's where we're at. Oppression everywhere. Pleasure doesn't work. None of it works. It's all vanity.

All the labor now is the result of people being jealous. There's a lot of truth in that, isn't there? So there is worldly response to all the oppression and the brokenness of the world. Worldly response number one is work harder.

Worldly labor is indeed driven by rivalry and keeping up with the Joneses. Why do billionaires become multibillionaires become trillionaires? Because it's never enough. It's never enough. Why do you think that if you had 10 more that your life would be so much better?

Because it's never enough. Worldly labor is driven by looking at what other people have and wanting it for yourself. That is breaking the 10th commandment, by the way. So you are a lawbreaker and a God-hater when you let this be your outlook.

Covetousness drives labor in the world so that you can get everything that you want. And that's why the godless will continue to work on the Sabbath while all the other suckers rest. Why would I give 1 7th of the time up when I can get it all?

What an advantage I have over those stupid Christians. And then they won so decidedly that we all just work all the time now. Can't beat them, join them, right? It's the mantra of the Christian church in America.

If you can't beat them, join them. Just do the same thing, it'll probably work for us. It'll never work. It'll never work. Because see, working all the time is at odds with nature. You're gonna get burnout and you're gonna get breakage.

You can't run it all the time. This is striving after something you will never catch. You guys know that it's the fastest growing restaurant. They took the world by storm. They went from nowhere against giants and vaulted into the top five and they cause traffic problems everywhere they go, right?

Chick-fil-A, what's the one thing they do? They don't open on Sundays. Boy, it's really killed them, hadn't it? Really losing an opportunity. Or God blesses people who even have like a small amount of faithfulness.

It's a crazy thing to think, isn't it? Think about how much allegiance Christians have to Chick-fil-A just because they don't open on Sundays. Now, is that like solving some Rubik's cube out there that nobody else can figure out?

No, nobody else can figure out because God has made them stupid. He ordains all of this. There is a second worldly response to all this striving and it is this, just quit. Just quit. The fool folds his hands in embrace and consumes his own flesh.