Sermon Discussion Questions:
1. Read Eccl 5:1-7 together. What does this tell you about God and what does it tell you about you?
2. What do you think the "foolish talker" looks like today, in our context?
3. What does practicing "wise listening" look like for you in your personal devotions? In corporate worship?
4. Where did Nadab and Abihu (Lev 10:1-7) and Ananias and Saphira (Acts 5:1-11) go wrong?
5. How does the transcendence of God affect your view of His immanence (nearness)?
Charles Misner, a specialist in Relativity Theory commented on Albert Einstein's view of Christian preaching. Misner writes: “The design of the universe is very magnificent and shouldn't be taken for granted. In fact, I believe that's why Einstein had so little use for organized religion.
He must have looked at what the preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. He had seen much more majesty than they had ever imagined. And the preachers were just not talking about the real thing.”
What is the *real thing*? A felt sense of the **grandeur of God.** Is God a reality here? Is God the main headline? Is God the center-of-gravity? When church’s make their primary message about how to live a stress-free life, or how to fix your marriage, or how to raise your kids, they inadvertently portray the sovereign Lord of the universe as a butler or divine vending machine that serves *your* ends. But when the transcendence and weight and profundity of the living God fall upon a church, then the church members and leaders *stop* saying: *God, what are you going to do for me?* and start saying, *God, whatever you want from me, I’m yours.*
A Church that has God, and nothing else, has infinitely more than the church that has everything the world can offer, but lacks the presence of the transcendent Lord.
But this is harder than it sounds. We live in a God belittling world where the floor is tilted away from God. When we come into faith, we come with a sense of God, but with a great deal of self-centeredness as well. Here is something embarrassing: when I was first converted, I don’t know how long I walked around with a slightly smug sense superiority in my decision. I walked away from a life of worldliness and felt like I had done something rater impressive, and, if I am honest, thought that God must feel quite lucky that I was willing to join His team. Lord, forgive me. But this is how we come into faith, and sanctification is the process by which the Lord gradually pulls our eyes up so that we would stop looking at ourselves and look up to Him. If you are looking for a church, look for a church that will lift your eyes up to see God!
In our passage in Ecclesiastes today, the Preacher will help us with this, and he will warn us: if you come to God assuming He is a safe kitten, watch out: He is a dangerous lion. If you come to God assuming He is a peaceful summer day at the lake, watch: He is a hurricane. He is not safe, but He is good.
Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. 2 Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. 3 For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.
4 When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. 6 Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? 7 For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear. - Eccl 5:1-7
There are three characters presented in this passage: the fool (whom Solomon describes), the wise man (who heeds Solomon’s advice), and the fearful God.
The Foolish Talker
In the book of Proverbs, one of the defining hallmarks of the fool is the abundance of words, and the failure to listen. For instance,
A fool takes no pleasure in understanding,
but only in expressing his opinion.
- Prov 18:2 (cf. 18:13)
The fool is a verbally confident person who thinks that through the sheer volume of his words, he can get what he wants out of life. If we think of the abundance of words of a fool as just the jabbering of unintelligence, then I think we miss the thrust of what the Proverbs are warning us of. There are many different kinds of foolish over-talkers. There is the gossip who cannot stop whispering secrets to others. There is the man who refuses to listen to others because he has already arrived at his conclusion and refuses to examine any contrary evidence. There is the man who speaks first, and thinks later (*ready-fire-aim*). And there is also the smooth-talker: he can overwhelm them with his speech or his volume, he can verbally unload on others, he can paint situations in such a way with his words that he gets the desired outcome he wants. But, eventually, it catches up to him:
A fool’s lips walk into a fight,
and his mouth invites a beating.
7 A fool’s mouth is his ruin,
and his lips are a snare to his soul.
- Prov 18:6,7
Here, in Ecclesiastes we are told that fools are “rash with” their “mouth”, are “hasty to utter a word before God,” and their voice is always accompanied with “many words.” While the book of Proverbs has much to say about the danger of an excess of words in general, here the Preacher is zeroing in specifically in the realm of worship. He says in verse one that “to draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools.” What is the sacrifice of fools? Whatever it is, we know that it obviously excludes “listening.” So, it could be a thoughtless gesture to God, while one’s mind is elsewhere. But I think the Preacher zeroes in on a very specific act in worship: a vow to God.
*“When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay.”* Eccl 5:4-5
What is a “vow” to God? “Temple vows were a common feature of Old Testament worship and involved promises to consecrate such things as sacrifices or money to God in return for granting a request in prayer (Lev. 7:16 – 17; 22:18 – 23; 27:1 – 25; Num. 6),” (Provan, NIVAC). For example, in 1 Samuel, we are told of a vow he barren Hannah made: “*And she vowed a vow and said, “O LORD of hosts, if you will indeed look on the affliction of your servant and remember me and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a son, then I will give him to the LORD all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head,*” (1 Sam 1:11).
Vows, when used rightly, were ways of praying to God that expressed a person’s desperation: *God, I need your help so badly, I will give up this thing if you answer my prayer.* But, when put in the mouth of a fool? A vow just becomes another mechanism to try to control the world around, to game the system to get what you want. But, instead of smooth-talking other people, the fool here is trying to smooth-talk God. He thinks that God might forget what he has vowed to pay, and once he has gotten his answered prayer, he doesn’t need to follow-through on his vow.
*Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? - Eccl 5:6*
The messenger here could refer to a priest in the temple who has come to follow-up on collecting what was vowed—but the word “messenger” is also the same word for an angel. So, whether or it is a human or angelic being, someone has come to collect on what was promised, and the fool with his verbal dexterity replies: *Oh, you thought I vowed this? There must be some mistake, I never intended to put this on the line.* And so the man who tried to use words to get what he wanted from God, no similarly uses words to pull the wool over His eyes. Which is ridiculous when you say it out loud, but, the fool who acts like this, in his heart of hearts, doesn’t really think God exists: “*The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.*” (Ps 14:1)
Can you talk yourself out of any situation? Are you good at lying? Is the gap between what you say you would do, and what actually happened, easily filled with your shifting words? Maybe you are lying about something right now. Maybe something is hidden. Maybe you made a promise that you have no intention of fulfilling. And you know what, maybe you have gotten away with it. Here are two things to consider: (1) People will eventually find out, and even if they lack the details, they will slowly begin to know that you are not a trustworthy person. (2) Even if no one ever found out about your deception, two people always will: yourself and God.
You will know, in your heart of hearts, that you have no integrity, and that will rob you of the joy of a clean conscience. And God, who is not fooled by anything, will see you. I wonder if Solomon thought of the story of King Saul here. Saul was a man who was gifted with verbal gymnastics when confronted in error. In both instances where Saul flagrantly disobeyed God’s command, he paints the situation like there was some misunderstanding and insists that *he did* really obey (1 Sam 13:8-12; 15:13-21), in fact, in both instances he is technically disobeying, but he is offering sacrifices to God! Shouldn’t God be happy with that?
*Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,
as in obeying the voice of the LORD?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
and to listen than the fat of rams.*
- 1 Sam 15:22
Saul offered the sacrifice of a fool, and so too does anyone who thinks that can buy God off with a token act of worship, while their heart remains far from him.
What does God want from us, if not these outward acts of worship? He wants us to *listen.*
The Wise Listener
*Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. 2 Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. 3 For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words. - Eccl 5:1b-3*
Here, the Preacher is instructing us on how we approach God through the temple—the “house of God.” Now, today, we don’t have a Temple that we worship in. Yet, that doesn’t erase the teaching for us here. In the New Testament, Christians are individually referred to as temples of God because we have the Holy Spirit indwelling us (1 Cor 6:19), and the gathered church is referred to as the temple (Eph 2:11-22). Jesus teaches us that when a church gathers in His name, He is present in a way that He is not present in any other way (Matt 18:18-20). So, the Preacher’s teaching here about approaching God in worship could apply to us when we individually approach God in prayer, but it *especially* applies to us today as we gather on the Lord’s Day for worship. And we too want to guard our steps when we come to the house of God.
Solomon encourages two things for our worship: *be quiet and listen.*
This admonition may strike us as odd. Are we to silently file into church on Sunday morning? Or are our prayers in our personal devotion to be limited by a word count? Didn’t Jesus pray all night on occasions (Luke 6:12)? Doesn’t the New Testament teach us to pray without ceasing (1 Thess 5:17)? That is true…in fact, if you go read Solomon’s prayer of dedication he gives when the temple is finished being constructed, it is a rather long, ornate prayer. Long prayers are not inherently forbidden here. I think Solomon is doing a couple of things here:
1. He is looking to undermine the fool he thinks that his verbal skill in worship can fool God. Even if the fool knows how to proclaim the vows he is making, if he has no intention on following through, then the more words he speaks, the more sin he heaps upon himself. So too, the man who gathers for worship, sings along, shouts out *amens,* and maybe rather publicly draws attention to the financial gift he leaves…but whose heart still says: *God, what do you got for me?* Jesus taught us: "*And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words,” (Matt 6:7).* Some people think that they can get God’s attention through verbal bloat, but Jesus tells us: *you don’t need to do that.* God is not impressed or tricked with verbosity.
2. There is something about entering the presence of God that ought to make you quiet. When Elijah was on Mount Carmel and God was to commune with him, it wasn’t in the windstorm, or the earthquake, or the raging fire that God spoke. It was in the thin silence, the quiet (1 Kings 19:11-13). When Jesus is transfigured before Peter and John and James, Peter can’t help himself from filling the quiet with his own voice, though he didn’t know what he was saying. But then the Father booms over Peter’s voice and says, “This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!” (Luke 9:35). In other words, *be quiet, Peter, listen.
"Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter even in the holiest places.” (Lewis, *Perelandra*). One of the reasons we insert moments of silence into our service is to help expose and correct this inner chatter in us.
3. The reason that inner quiet is needed is because we must **listen. In the Temple, God’s Law was taught by the priests. In your prayer time, your prayers should be a response to what you have heard in God’s Word. In our worship service, you draw near primarily to listen. Of course, this means that you are in a rather passive stance, you are not having a dialogue right now, nor are having a back and forth with God in your personal Bible reading. When you read God’s Word and when you gather for church, you are not shutting your brain off, you are not forbidden from asking questions, from thinking critically, from saying *God, this doesn’t make sense, help me understand.* But the overall posture of your heart as you approach God’s Word is one of submission: *God, You are the Potter, I am the clay! Shape me.* Listening is a passive posture, but it reveals to you the very nature of salvation. You are saved entirely through what Jesus Christ has done on your behalf. You contribute nothing to it. Your only job is to receive, the way you sit here Sunday after and Sunday and receive the message of God’s Word. Every Lord’s Day, God is reminding you of how you are saved: a declaration of news of what Someone else has accomplished on your behalf. And the question for us all is…are we listening?
Christianity is a religion of teaching, of education. When Jesus commissioned His disciples He sent them out to *teach,* He builds His church through the preaching of God’s Word, He gives pastors to churches to feed you with God’s Word. God creates His people through His Word. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ. So, the most important thing you can do in your life is to prioritize hearing God’s Word—draw near and listen, and find life.
This all has practical import on our lives. How do you approach God’s Word in your personal devotions? Friend, have you ever considered that ignoring your Bible is a subtle way of rejecting God? It is a way of saying, *I do not need to listen.* This also has bearing on how you prepare for and approach your Sunday morning. Do you find your mind distracted and wandering through the service? Do you feel the itch to reach for your phone and scroll just a bit? Or do you approach Sunday morning with a scrutinizing attitude, certain that you already know the Bible well enough that you need not pay attention that well? Do you pray prior to the service for God to bless you hearing? Do you pray for your pastors as they have to undertake the fearful responsibility of giving you God’s Word, a task that we will face severe judgment for if we are derelict in our duties?
The Fearful God
“*Guard your steps when you go to the house of God.*” (Eccl 5:1a)
Throughout Ecclesiastes thus far, the Preacher has not given us a single command. He has reported what he has observed, what he has done, and what he thinks is better and what is evil. Here, at verse 1 of chapter 5, he gives us his first exhortation in the entire book. And it is one that, if we are honest, strikes us as odd. Why are we told that we must “guard our steps” as we approach the house of God? Is God dangerous? Do you need to be careful as you come to church?
In what situations in life do you need to “watch your steps”? We may use that phrase metaphorically to simply mean: *be careful.* If you are about to be investigated by a powerful board or committee and your job hangs in the balance, your boss might tell you before hand: *tread carefully.* Meaning: *there is a lot on the line so be really careful with what you say and what you do.*
Or we could think of literally watching where we put our feet. Picture yourself walking along the spine of a mountain ridge. The path is very narrow, there are no guardrails, and there is a strong breeze. On either side of the footpath there are steep cliffs shooting downwards for hundreds of feet, you are up dizzyingly high. You would watch your feet carefully. One misstep, and you’re gone forever.
Is this how Solomon wants us to approach God?
In a sense, yes.
The Old Testament Temple was a majestic and awe-inspiring structure. It dwarfed the worshipper in its size, it awed the onlookers with its grandeur and beauty, and it solemnized the people with its sacral rituals. Everything about the Temple communicated: You are on sacred ground, tread carefully. Have you ever walked into a cathedral or a church that has led you to realize: this is not an ordinary place. A quiet hush comes over you, a sense of awe. Any place of worship, from its architecture to its aesthetic, from its music to its teaching, can either work in harmony with the truth, or in discord with it. It can either underline the reality of what God is actually like, or distract from that reality. It can either communicate: God, you are here to serve me or God, I am here to worship You!
And Solomon knows that we live in a God-belittling world, so that even the most vaulted and exquisite of sites of worship—the Temple—can eventually become commonplace and profane. This is what led Jesus’ contemporaries to turn the courtyard of the temple into a merchant’s square. This is what led the people of Israel to offer mindless sacrifices, while their hearts were elsewhere. And this is what leads church-going people today to walk into church and treat the worship service like an entertaining diversion or uplifting pep-talk or boring slog to be endured. In all scenarios, the presence and power of God has been totally ignored. Life exists only the plane of the horizontal—human to human: I need to make sacrifices so that I don’t have a guilty conscience, I need to go to church so that others think well of me, I hope the service is exciting or practical or funny and certainly not too long. What is missing? God.
We may get to a point where we, along with the fool, functionally are saying in our hearts: there is no God. What do you think of the story of Nadab and Abihu, or Ananias and Saphira? These two pairs of worshippers, one from the Old, and one from the New Testament, lived at a turning point in redemptive history, at a moment when God was bringing something new. Nadab and Abihu lived right as the tabernacle was erected, when God for the first time could be worshipped at a specific location on earth. Ananias and Saphira lived right as the New Testament church was created, the first time where the new tabernacle of the people of God was formed on earth. And in both instances, God strikes these worshippers dead. Why? Nadab and Abihu casually offer sacrifices that God did not permit—they didn’t listen very well. Ananias and Saphira, used their verbal skills to paint a lie like it was the truth in their offering to the church. They offered a sacrifice of fools. They thought that God was there to serve their ends, that they were the ones really driving the ship, and God was just along for the ride to bolster their image, if He was even there at all. And God immediately strikes them all dead and does so at these critical junctures in history to demonstrate: He is not a God to be trifled with.
God is not a figment of our imagination that flexes and bends to our whims. If we rely on what we imagine God to be like, our gut feelings, what seems plausible to us, *more* than what God has clearly spoken, then we are in grave danger. Why did the Preacher include this in his book? Because we tend to inflate ourselves and diminish God. We assume we know everything, we can have anything, and we will live forever. And if God exists, then He is there like our personal genie to assist us. We grab God by the ears like He is a kitten, when in reality He is a hungry lion. The Preacher is writing this book to remind us: “God is the one you must fear.” (Eccl 5:7)
What we need is a divine recalibration of God’s transcendence!
“We must not think of God as highest in an ascending order of beings, starting with the single cell and going on up from the fish to the bird to the animal to man to angel to cherub to God. This would be to grant God eminence, even pre-eminence, but that is not enough; we must grant Him transcendence in the fullest meaning of that word.
Forever God stands apart, in light unapproachable. He is as high above an archangel as
above a caterpillar, for the gulf that separates the archangel from the caterpillar is but
finite, while the gulf between God and the archangel is infinite. The caterpillar and the
archangel, though far removed from each other in the scale of created things, are nevertheless one in that they are alike created. They both belong in the category of that which-is-not-God and are separated from God by infinitude itself.” (A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy)
How shall polluted mortals dare
to sing thy glory or thy grace?
Beneath thy feet we lie afar,
and see but shadows of thy face.
Who can behold the blazing light?
Who can approach consuming flame?
None but thy wisdom knows thy might,
none but thy word can speak thy name.
- Isaac Watts, The Incomprehensibility of God
It isn’t until you see God in His soaring transcendence, until you see that He must be feared, that He is a hurricane, a typhoon of incomparable power and unthinkable might…that His immanence, His nearness will be astonishing to you. The God whom makes every hydrogen bomb and every assault rifle and tank as impotent and pathetic as children’s toys, the God who makes the soaring Himalayas look like ant hills and the vast depths of the Mariana trench look like cracks in the sidewalk, the God who makes every human genius look an infant, who makes every impressive display of human strength and ingenuity look as lasting as vapor in the wind, and the God who has created all of the *seemingly* infinitely vast cosmos all to display how much bigger He is than all of it…the God who dwells in unapproachable light…took on flesh. The fearful God you must carefully draw near to…has drawn near to you in Jesus Christ, has come to you in the vileness of your sins. The holy, righteous, all-powerful Judge of the Earth has come to villains like us deserving death…and has offered them life, has offered them forgiveness, has offered them His very heart.
