Day 334: Ecclesiastes 7-9 | Read The Bible In A Year | Bible Commentary with Dr. Manny Arango

Welcome to the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. We are walking through the entire Bible in a year. You can go to the description or thebaldapartment.com to download a reading plan and join the journey. (upbeat music) - Family, welcome to day 334 here on the Bible department. I'm excited to dive into Ecclesiastes chapters 7, 8, and 9 today. It's gonna be good. - If you've already done the reading, then you're probably aware, like it's kinda depressing. (laughs) Like, ah, God, hey, like it's a little, it's a little, it's a little heavy. Okay, but my goal is to not only make sense of it, but make light of it because the goal of the book is not to depress you. The book of Ecclesiastes is not a proponent of nihilism, okay? It's not trying to get you to the place of despair, okay? And if you need a Google, nihilism, you can. N-I-H-I-L-I-S-M, nihilism. It'll be a good thing for you to look up at that word to your vocabulary, okay? So Ecclesiastes is not coming from a nihilistic worldview. It's coming from a wisdom worldview. And so we're gonna dive into just one more angle of what it means to be a wise person.

Solomon is gonna ask in chapter eight, verse one, I'm gonna say who is like the wise, okay? In the NRSV, I'm gonna read that for you. In the NRSV, it says it like this, okay? Who is like the wise man? Which is not just who is like the wise, but kinda like what a wise people like would be kind of more of like a less poetic or maybe plain way to say it. What a wise people like. And so the point of the book of Ecclesiastes is to shed light on what kind of attributes do wise people have? What kind of a person is a wise person? It's a reflection on wisdom. So it's not to lead you to the place of despair and that nothing matters or meaninglessness. It's actually designed to get you to come to some conclusions about life. And hopefully we're gonna get there today. We got today and a moral left for our study of Ecclesiastes and then that's it, okay? So all right, if you've not done the reading, then how about you stop this video, pause the audio, go get the reading done, all right? If you've done the reading, then let's dive in. I'm gonna give you a context clue, maybe even two. And then I'm gonna give you some nerdy nuggets as many as I can in the time allotted to me for the days episode.

And then I'm gonna leave off with the Thomas Truth and I'm really excited about Thomas Truth for the day. So let me give two little bits of blues clues of context, okay? The first is actually just a verse that I think unlocks everything and definitely unlocks today's reading. And that's gonna be Ecclesiastes chapter three verse 11. Ecclesiastes chapter three verse 11. It says this, I'll put chapter three 11 in context actually. You know, chapter three starts with there's a time for everything and a season for every activity under the sun, a time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, a brute, a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to tear down, a time to build up, a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance, a time to scatter stones, a time to gather them, okay? Just like, hey, there's a time for everything. If there's a theme that I would say is consistent through all the wisdom literature, it is this exploration of time, okay? An exploration of, you know, what is it a time for? That's why over and over and over again in song of songs, there's a, hey, don't arouse love before it's time, don't awaken love before it's time, okay? There's this survey or study of what's the right time and really what's the right timing. I think a lot of times wisdom is not about what,

but about when a lot of times, you know, even here at Arma or the garden or many ring of ministries, we always say, hey, that's not a matter of, of, of whether we're going to do it, but when we're going to do it, okay? When's the right time to do that? There's a right time for everything, okay? So there's this exploration of time and then we get down to verse 11, it says this. He, okay, that's Yahweh, okay, that's God. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I wanna focus in on that phrase. He has also set eternity in the human heart, eternity in the human heart. We're gonna have to understand just that little phrase going to focus a lot on death. Once we get to Ecclesiastes chapter 7, the author's going to start saying things like this, a good name is better than fine perfume. That part, I can rock with that. And then in the day of death, better than the day of birth, whoa, hold up, hold the tape. The day of death, better than the day of birth, let's keep going. It is better to go to a house of mourning in a house of feasting for death is the destiny of everyone. The living should take this to heart. Frustration is better than laughter because the sad face is good for the heart. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure. And I mean, it's not going to stop. Like, I mean, all over the today's reading, we're just going to explore death. I'll read you another passage. Ecclesiastes chapter 9, I'll just start reading in verse 1, okay? Like, if this doesn't just kind of set the tone for just somber and maybe even just like kind of sad, then maybe not reading this right. But we got to put this in light of Ecclesiastes chapter 3, which we're going to do in just a second. Chapter 9, I'll start reading

in verse 1. So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God's hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them. All share a common destiny, okay? Everybody share the common destiny. Fools and people that are wise, all share a common destiny. What's that destiny? The righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not, okay? The secular, the religious, everybody, every single person, as it is with the good, so with the sinful, as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun. The same destiny overtakes all. Now, what destiny awaits all of us? Like, what is the one that we have in common? You guessed it, we're all going to die. The hearts of people more over are full of evil, and there is madness in their hearts. While they live, and afterwards, they join the dead, okay? They join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope. Even a live dog is better off than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. They have no further reward, and even their name has forgotten. So, we're going to get to chapter nine, and I mean, we're just going to talk about death a lot. Like, hey, what advantages the wise person have over the foolish person? None. You know, wives, they both die right now. Or they're going to die, they're eventually going to die. Okay, so what in the world's going on? And if you don't have this interpretive key, it's going to be sad to read Ecclesiastes. I kind of touched on this yesterday briefly, but we get this phrase over and over and over again, under the sun, under the sun, under the sun. So, Ecclesiastes chapter three verse 11 says, "Hey, God has placed eternity, not in our bones, not in our life, not in our bodies, but in our hearts, that there is this desire for eternity, that there's this desire that one day we are going to live beyond the sun, okay? And if you don't know that Ecclesiastes is speaking from the perspective of a human reflecting on the human experience outside of the light of eternity, then you're going to read a lot of the seven just kind of be depressed, like just kind of be sad. But what the author's actually saying is that there's eternity in our hearts, and that should cause us to not just live for what's under the sun. So, what makes a person wise is knowing I'm not actually living wisely for what happens in these 80 or 90 or 40 or 20 or 10 or 100 or 120 years here under the sun. I'm living my life based on something that's going to happen beyond the sun because God's placed eternity in my heart. Without the understanding that eternity's been placed in our heart,

it's going to be hard to hear all the talk about death over and over and over and over and over and over, okay? So, family, the weight is over. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos, is out now and available everywhere books are sold literally today. I walked into grab this book at a physical Barnes and Noble or you can go to a books a million or Amazon or anywhere books are sold and grab a copy. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective, if you understand that the beauty of scripture is actually knowing it in context, then you'll love this book and if there's any chaos in your personal life, I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this book is going to be a New York Times bestseller. I really do. I think we wrote a good one. I think you should get a copy today. All right. Back to the episode. All right. Last little piece of context that we're going to need, you know, most of Ecclesiastes is prose, but then we breaking a poetry here and there. And so we've talked about Hebrew parallelism before that in Hebrew poetry, it's not the words that rhyme, right? It's not hickory, dickory, doc. The mouse went up the clock, okay? Doc and clock rhyme in English poetry, but in Hebrew poetry is not the words that rhyme. It's the ideas that rhyme, okay? So what we're going to get, we can start in chapter seven, verse one says a good name is better than fine perfume, okay? So a good name is better than fine perfume. Then the next line is going to parallel what's above it, okay? So a good name is better than fine perfume and the day of the dead, okay? Better than the day of birth.

So a good name is going to then be paralleled with the day of the dead, okay? A good name and the day of the dead are both positives. What are the negatives? Fine perfume and the day of birth. Okay, fine perfume and the day of birth. All right, so let's break down why, okay? This is our first nerdy negative of the day. A good name is something that is internal. It's based on character. Fine perfume is something that is external. It has to be added to you from the outside, but a good name is what just comes up from the inside of a person, okay? So what the author saying is what comes out of you from the inside is better than what you could put on you from the outside, okay? Internal integrity, better than external accountability, or even external integrity, okay? We want, there's got to be something on the inside of us that produces like a good name, okay? That's character. All right, now what's up with the day of the dead, the better than the day of birth, okay? The death of the dead is better because it teaches you something about life, okay? That although eternity is in our hearts, our life here on this planet is not eternal. And so what happens at the day of death, reflection, at the day of death we have to reflect. On the day of life, we actually, there's something external to us that's providing us with joy and real joy doesn't come from external things happening. Real joy comes from internal reflection. And when I reflect on the fact that, hey, my son is only going to be a little kid for four or five years max, and then he's going to be a big kid. And then he's going to be a preteen, okay?

That's, it's the time restraint that actually forces me to be intentional and to not waste the time. You know, a lot of people will end up saying, man, I miss when my kid was four and they miss it in the present because they missed it while it was happening, okay? And so it is an understanding of time that helps you to actually appreciate everything that's happening. It's funny, I began to Google this, one of my favorite movies is The Queen's Gambit. It's a chess movie, really, really, really good movie. And so I began to find out that chess without the time constraint is actually like a totally different game than chess with time, okay? You move a little clock, okay? But that clock changes the dynamic of the game and eternity versus death change the dynamic of how you live your life. Of course, it's easy to win at life if you have forever to win. You could also win at chess if you have forever to win. But when you know, no, I have, you know, I have 12 years before my son, you know, is um, before his values are set in place and really he's for now. So I've got eight years left to instill certain values every drive of school matters. I don't have forever. There's certain lessons that I won't be able to get into his brain at 30. I've got to get them into his heart at 10, at eight, at six. Okay. There are certain things that I'm a stickler about right now. You know, when my son complains, like literally yesterday in the car, I had to teach him gratitude, what the word gratitude means, what it means to be grateful. We're coming up on Thanksgiving and he had already eaten some ice cream. He asked my wife if he could have, I don't know some cookies. My wife said, no, we started crying. I said, Hey, I need you to be grateful for the ice kit that you just had. And my son from the backseat goes, dead out. What's grateful? You know, you didn't know what that word means. And I have to teach him grateful now at four. If I'm trying, if I try to teach him that at 25, well, at that point, he's an entitled brat. So there time, time. So the reason that there's just this big emphasis on death is because it is the finite reality of life that helps you to take advantage of

every moment of every day. If you know you have forever, then what would cause you to act with urgency? What would cause you to act with intentionality? Nothing. Okay, people who date for like five, six, seven, eight years, I'm just kind of like, you date it with no purpose, no intentionality. You just out here just having a blast is having fun. But when you date with a purpose, when you say, yeah, no, I in nine months, in 12 months, I need to figure out whether or not this person is for me and am I for them? Well, now, man, every date has an intention. Every conversation has a purpose. There's something that I'm trying to figure out. We're not just shooting the breeze, not just chilling. Okay, we're about our business. And it's death that does that. That's the gift of death. Knowing I'm going to die actually makes me go, yeah, you know, I could chill today or I could be about my business today. And you want to know what should like kick that into gear, realizing I'm going to die. I'm going to die. Like, and what do I want people to say in my funeral? Oh, like, what do I want my tombstone to say? What do I want? What do I want to leave in my children and tell my children? A lot of times people find this morbid, but I'll straight up ask, Hey, imagine your last day on earth. Can't imagine you're 120 years old. You're in your bed. Everybody's gathered around your children are there. Your grandchildren are there. Your spouse, you know, all the closest people to you. And and they know you're going to die. You know, you're going to die. Everybody knows this the last day. And you get to kind of bless your children, bless your grandchildren. You know, you got to get to give them some last words. And then they all get to say something about you. What do you want those people to say about you? You want them to say that you were generous and you were kind. You want them to say that you were stingy. You want them to say, what do you want them to say? And imagine they took a truth serum. So they had to be honest. Okay, what do you want those people to say? Well, guess what? You were you answering that question. Now helps you to move towards that as a goal. If death wasn't a reality, we wouldn't even be able to do that as a thought exercise. So the reason that, you know, Solomon is saying, Hey, it's better to go to the house of mourning the house of feasting for death is a destiny of everyone. The living should take this to heart. Okay, is because at some point, you're going to have to live with death in mind. You should. And anybody who's just kind of like, I don't want to think about that or that sad or that's depressing. Or that's

a Debbie down or it's like, got it. You lack wisdom. You lack wisdom. Wise people plan for their death. Period. Wise people have an understanding. I don't have forever. And what it really does is it punches procrastination in the face. How dare you procrastinate when you're going to die? You know, it's like, and the reality is that I've had the distinct honor of preaching or facilitating a couple of funerals. You know, I've officiated weddings, and then, you know, officiated funerals. Man, it's not hard to get people to get to get saved at a funeral. Man, I always have people surrender their lives to Jesus, making decision for Christ at a funeral. Because someone's in a casket. It's pretty easy to like remind people of how short and how delicate life is when somebody's laying in a casket. Not a lot of people give their life to the Lord at a wedding. Not a lot of people surrender their life to the Lord at a wedding. So think about that. Think about how many people surrender their life to the Lord, to be Jesus at a funeral versus at a wedding. And then let's read this again. It is better to go to the house of mourning than the house of feasting. It's better to go to a funeral than a wedding. Why? Because it is actually the funeral that causes people to reflect on their life and their decisions and repent and choose Jesus. Not when they go to a wedding. Not when they're at the housewarming party. It's not new life that causes you to reflect on life. It's the end of life that causes you to reflect online. One of my favorite books is Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And one of the habits of highly effective people

is start with the end in mind. And if I could give any advice to you today, and I think this advice comes straight out of Ecclesiastes, it would be to start or rather maybe live your life with the end in mind. What do you want people to say about you when you die? What do you want your last day on this planet to be like? And then work backwards. You know, me and my family we moved to Houston a year ago to plant a church. And I put January 25th, 2026 on the calendar and said, "Yeah, we're gonna launch a church on this date." And then I just started working backwards. Okay, in order to launch a church, you know, at that date, what are all the things that are gonna have to be true? Then you just work backwards. And with any project or with any task, you know you're supposed to work backwards. But then with life, you just live forward. No, no, no, no, no, work backwards. The reason I started a church at 38 years old is because in my mind, 65 is a great age to retire. And I know that I don't wanna be a senior pastor for more than 25, 26, 27 years. So my goal right now, I'm gonna put in 27 years. And then at 65, I'm out, yo. I got a doctorate so that I could teach a college, teach, you know, be a professor. So I'm gonna give it a good run for 27 years. I worked backwards.

So the reason I didn't start a church at 28 or 32 is because I thought about, okay, not when do I wanna die, but what do I want my life to be like when I die? Then what do I wanna do up until retirement? And then what do I wanna do? Like at some point, you're gonna have to really reflect on death if you're gonna be wise. And then ultimately, I'm gonna leave you with this. This is our timeless truth for the day. Chapter eight, verse one. Who is like the wise? Who knows the explanation of things? A person's wisdom brightens their face and changes his heart appearance. So Solomon's like, now, who's really wise? I'll tell you who's wise. The person who's wise is who can look death in the face and not be sad, can look death in the face and what? Their face can be bright. The face can be full of joy. The person who can like think about death, plan out their life and then like have a big old smile on their face. If you can think about death and get happy, that doesn't make you suicidal. That makes you wise. If you can think about, hey, this is how I want my life to end. This is the book I'm writing. This is the narrative that I'm creating with my life. And the author's saying, we know that like,

you can read this in despair about how unfair life is and how random life is and how much chance there is to life. You could read all about that in your face be downcast or you could read all that, hear all that and add brightness to your face. And if you can read about how unfair life is and how hard it is and how difficult it is and how much chance and luck there is in life and how the wicked and the wise person have the same end which is to die and not let your face be downcast but actually like add a pep to your step, that makes you wise. And if you can't do that, then there's a lack of wisdom there. And that's the wisdom test. That is Solomon's wisdom test. How much sad, somber, depressing content can you consume and it not make you sad or depressed or somber? But it makes you excited because now you have a wise perspective. It's brightened your face. So I want to ask you a question. Has Ecclesiastes brightened your face? If Ecclesiastes kind of puts you in a funk, then you're not wise yet. But if Ecclesiastes has brightened your face, then guess what? We're on the path of wisdom. And that's not just true for Solomon or anybody that lived during the time of the Bible. That's true for you.

That's true for me. It's a Thomas truth. Tomorrow we got day 335. And we're gonna wrap it all up. We're gonna talk about the number one lesson that we should be getting out of reading this book. It's gonna be great. Can't wait to see you right here. Love you guys. Proud of you. Especially if you're on the street. See you tomorrow. Peace! Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. If this episode was helpful, how about you leave a comment, share with a friend, and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. To learn more about the show, head to thebobaldapartment.com. We'll see you right back here tomorrow.