25 Sept 2022

Today we had a message from Ecclesiastes 7:1-14; it was a clear and helpful message: “ The end is better than it’s beginning”. It is accompanied by other proverbs: “the day of death is better than the day of birth”; “it is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting; “frustration is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart”;”It is better to heed the rebuke of a wise person than to listen to the song of fools”…

The message communicated that facing death, sadness, and mourning helps one to reflect on the brevity of life and enables one to ponder soberly on one’s direction and pursuits in life, and to evaluate accordingly.

Thus far, we have looked at the first 6 chapters of Ecclesiastes and we probably remember the recurring theme: ‘All is meaningless and vanity, and a chasing after wind’ – whether it be wisdom, pleasure, wealth, status – All do not satisfy – the conclusion of the preacher who had all the resources to observe and experience all known areas of life.

Chapter 7 begins with the preacher ‘throwing’ out a list of proverbs and some of them are mentioned above. If we recall the previous chapters, we will remember the preacher saying, ‘The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise?’; ‘Like the fool, the wise too must die! So I hated life, because the work done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless…’; ‘And I declared that the dead who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is the one who has not yet been (born), who has not yet seen the evil that is done under the sun’.

Recalling these statements, when he mentioned that the day of death is better than the day of birth and that the end of a matter is better than the beginning, the preacher probably had the previous statements in mind. If all must die, and life is full of evil and meaninglessness, then the dead are happier, and the unborn are even in a better situation; hence the day of death is better than the day of birth, and the end of a matter is certainly better than the beginning. After all, the dead no longer need to encounter and bear all the frustrations and evil under the sun, and death ends all the ‘sufferings’, whereas the one who is just born has a lifetime of frustrations and meaninglessness to go through.

I take the liberty to state that the end of a matter is better than its beginning and the day of death is better than the day of birth provided that that “the end is a beginning of a new life in Christ” – this is a privileged understanding that the preacher, wise as he was, could not comprehend because he lived on the other side of the “life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul the Apostle understood this clearly when he declared that ‘For me to live is Christ and to die is gain’. Paul knew that the beginning of life with Christ after death is surely much much better than to die without Christ; for Paul, the day of a new life and birth in Christ is far better than the day of earthly death.

But we need to understand that after being born again in Christ, we are not perfectly renewed at once – sin’s dominion has been toppled, but still indwells believers. Repentance and faith are gifts that God gives us by His Word and Spirit, but we exercise them as a deliberate act of the will. Let us not downplay the difficulty of this struggle. Every believer fights against insurgents within and without ( we are familiar with the enemies – the world, the indwelling sin and the evil one). Such a struggle might also raise questions and doubts on the part of Christians somewhat akin to the questions raised by the preacher in Ecclesiastes, but thy are certainly miles apart in substance.

Christian growth is not automatic – we may quench the Spirit by refusing His promptings; if we do not communicate with our Father and if we abandon the fellowship of our brethren, we become drifters instead of pilgrims. It is the one who is assured of God’s favour in Christ alone who is free to love his or her neighbours simply for their own sake and for God’ s glory, rather than for one’s own self-improvement and self-justification. Life for believers can take the form of a struggle but it is a struggle from a position of victory at the beginning with the assurance of victory also at the end – we are united with Christ in His life, death and resurrection, and we are in Him and He in us in this battle and struggle with victory in this war already secured by our Lord Jesus!