Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Ecclesiastes 4

Sermon text today is from Ecclesiastes chapter 4. I’ll read 1 to 13. I know the outline only covers 1 to 12, but 13 fits the same thing that we’ll be talking about today: the importance of Christian community. And when Sam called me to ask about Drake being baptized today, I thought, well, this is—I told him it’s great. It’d be a great sermon illustration, you know. The songs today obviously are about the love of God for us and then the love of God for each other, and particularly in the context of families.

This text from Ecclesiastes kind of comes to a culmination in verse 12, the first section of chapter 4, with the three-cord, three-stranded cord not being easily broken. And so throughout church history, of course, the idea of the two here described is often thought of in terms of marriage, and the third is a child coming into that marriage, strengthening the family and being better than just without children.

Now, I think that Ecclesiastes applies to much more than just the family, this particular section of it. And in any event, it certainly is appropriate. I know a lot of you are visiting today because of the baptism of Drake, and it’s wonderful how all these things work together in the context of the text that God has selected beforehand and the general topic, which is setting our love on others. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Ecclesiastes 4, and I’ll read through verse 13:

Then I returned and considered all the oppression that is done under the sun, and look, the tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter. On the side of their oppressors there is power, but they have no comforter. Therefore, I praise the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still alive. Yet better than both is he who has never existed, he who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

Again, I saw that for all toil and every skillful work, a man is envied by his neighbor. This also is vanity and grasping for the wind. The fool folds his hands and consumes his own flesh. Better a handful with quietness in both hands full together with toil and grasping for the wind.

Then I returned and I saw vanity under the sun. There is one alone without companion. He has neither son nor brother, yet there is no end to all his labors, nor is his eye satisfied with riches. But he never asks, “For whom do I toil and deprive myself of good?” This also is vanity and a grave misfortune.

Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up again. If two lie down together, they’ll keep warm. But how can one be warm alone? Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand them. And a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.

Better a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who will be admonished no more.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this text. We thank you for your love being set upon us in eternity past before time came into being. We thank you, Lord God, that you foreknew us, that you loved us. Help us, Father, to be proper image-bearers of you—for loving, setting our love upon others the way you set your love upon us.

Help us, Lord God, to understand Ecclesiastes and the many reasons that are given for us here to live in community. We thank you for the wonderful gift of Christian community, and not just families but Christian community in general. Help us, Lord God, to be grateful and thankful for that gift as we hear your word today. And may your Spirit move us to work in terms of that gift, extending it out to others. In Jesus’ name we ask it, and for the sake of his kingdom, which is a community. Amen.

Please be seated.

The original title for my sermon was “Setting Your Love on Your Spouse.” You know, it’s Sunday before Valentine’s Day, and so it seemed like a good thing to do. We began this series on distinctives of our church and the implications for life. And we began with the golden chain, so to speak, in Romans 8, where whom he foreknew he predestinated to be conformed to the image of his Son. And then those whom he predestinated he called, he justified, and he glorified. And all that begins—the sovereignty of God is not some abstract cold Reformed doctrine. Its origin is in the love of God in eternity for his people. And so it has great significance for our lives because we’re image-bearers of his. And as God set his love upon us, I thought well, it’d be good to have a sermon about husbands loving your wives, setting your love upon them. And wives, you know, and clearly in the Song of Songs and other places, the wife loves her husband. She’s supposed to set her love on her husband.

And so after people get married, this doesn’t stop. I believe that the setting of our love on each other that brings us to marriage should continue on in marriage—a conscious act of the will and volition, the way God loved us ahead of time and then moved in terms of that love. A lot of times we try to gin up actions without setting the love on our spouse or partner. And so I think that’s really what I wanted to say today in terms of married couples: just, you know, the scriptures command us, exhort us, give us the image of God’s love for us. We’re to set our love on our spouses.

And you know, once you get to know your spouse, pretty soon that love becomes like God’s love. It’s not contingent upon God’s love for us. It’s not contingent upon qualities of the other person, right? So God’s election is not conditioned on us. We talked about the first head of doctrine from the Canons of Dort, and article nine of election says this:

This election that is of God for his people is not based on foreseen faith, the obedience of faith, holiness, or any other good quality or disposition as a cause or condition in man required for being chosen. But men are chosen to faith, the obedience of faith, holiness, and so on. Election, therefore, is the fountain of every saving good, from which flow faith, holiness, and other saving gifts, and finally, eternal life itself as its fruit and effects.

This the Apostle teaches when he says he chose us not as we were, but that we should be holy and blameless before him.

The Armenians were teaching that God’s election of us was based upon a condition of our choosing for him or whatever it is. And of course, all those things that we do are surely his gift to us. And Romans, as well as other texts in scripture, tell us that behind all of this—now, they say election is the fountain. Well, if we talk about election and predestination, really the foundational element behind that is not election. It’s love. It’s the love of God. So foreknowledge clearly means in Romans 8—for love of God is the foundation for what he does for us.

I wanted to read some quotes here about statements, translations, and other statements about this text: “whom he foreknew.”

Charles Hodge says that foreknowledge refers to the fixing of the mind upon. Haldane, whose commentary on Romans has been responsible for more than one reformation in modern times, says that it—that “for” means he looked favorably on and marked out for blessing those whom he foreknew. Garvey says before loved or acknowledged. And that’s what we would say: for loved, acknowledged, or before loved. So those whom God before loved he loved before those he predestinated.

Godet, in his commentary, says this: “Those on whom his eyes fixed from all eternity with love. Now he’s a little long, but those on whom his eyes fixed from all eternity with love, whom he eternally contemplated and discerned as his—that’s a very nice way to put God’s foreknowledge. Pius says to love or to care for. Schaeffer says to fix the eye upon with the additional notion of a benignant and kindly feeling toward the object. And William says, “For those on whom he set his heart beforehand.” So God set his heart upon his people in love. And that’s the basis then for the sovereignty of God in salvation. It’s the basis for our lives. Quite important. If we lose that doctrine, we’ve moved into heresy. That’s what the church said at the Canons of Dort.

Arminianism, which I know produces prevalent doctrine amongst Bible-believing Christians these days, is simply wrong and clearly so based on the scriptures. And it’s wrong tragically so because it posits a God who sort of is dependent and who isn’t eternally loving us, but rather his love is conditioned on us. And I don’t think—I think there’s a relationship between that movement in theology to a decline of marriage because if your love is, if God’s love is set upon us based on some condition of ours, and we’re image-bearers of him in marriage, for instance, then our love is set upon our spouse based on some condition of them.

And as we know after we get married, anybody’s been married very long, you know, after a while, you know, those conditions weren’t really quite accurate, and there’s a lot of other things going on in your spouse’s life that aren’t so cool. And so then we walk away from it. In our modern culture, the rise of divorce is seen with the rise of Arminianism. I believe that to be the case.

God in his foreknowledge sets his love on us. And there’s a particular Hebrew word, *hasak*. And this is used 12 times in the Old Testament, and I want to talk about this a little bit before we get to Ecclesiastes 4.

The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament—excellent resource—says this about *hasak*:

It emphasizes that which attaches to something or someone. In the case of emotions, to which the biblical usage is limited, it is that love which is already bound to its object. It should be distinguished from love, desire, or wish, or desire to take pleasure in.

So they’re distinguishing it from, you know, an act of desire or love based on conditions. It means a setting of our love upon someone else. It goes on to say this:

It’s a deep inward attachment in a positive sense. And this is descriptive of God’s love of Israel. In Deuteronomy 10:15, God was bound to them on his own volition love, and not because of anything good or desirable in them. It is to God’s attachment love that Hezekiah attributed his deliverance. And this is the love that will not let go. If a man has such an attachment toward God, he’ll be delivered.

So summary statement is that this word we’re going to talk about means to set your love upon something, not based really on a condition of it, but rather to set your love upon it—to, you know, to make a self-conscious effort and decision to love something or to love somebody else.

Now, there’s a couple of strange places this word is used. We’ll get to the more normal ones in a minute, but in your outlines, in Exodus 27 and chapter 38, we have a description of how the temple was built. And we read this in verse 17:

The pillars round about the court shall be filleted with silver. Their hooks shall be of silver.

And same thing in Exodus 38. And Exodus 38:28. There were these columns to support various elements of the temple. And these columns were filleted with hooks or rings that were silver. The columns are wood. And so the idea is that these things are set upon this wood, okay? So that’s how this same Hebrew word is used. Even though it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with setting your love upon something, you were to set these hooks upon these columns.

And notice that these hooks were functional, right? You’re taking that column and making it functionally better than it was. And you’re beautifying that column as well, okay? So to set these fillets upon these columns—three of the 12 places where this word is used—means to beautify it and make it utilitarian, in a utilitarian sense, more useful. Remember that. We’ll get to that.

In 1 Kings 9:19, Solomon desired, we’re told, to build the temple in Jerusalem. So Solomon desires to build a temple. And again in 2 Chronicles 8:6, “cities of the horsemen and all that Solomon desired to build in Jerusalem and in Lebanon.” So Solomon set his heart to build the house of God. That’s the idea.

So five references of the 12 references of this particular word that refers to God’s foreknowledge in a verse we’ll look at in just a minute—his for-love of Israel—are actually have to do with the temple, and it has to do with improving in beauty and utilitarianness, setting upon a column something to make it better. And it has to do with Solomon setting his heart upon this task of building a temple for God.

Now, so now in your outlines, we’re at Roman numeral I: the setting of God’s love on others. And this is seen in three different places where this word is used.

In Deuteronomy 7:7, I’m sorry—in the providence of God, I taught this chapter 7 this morning in our Deuteronomy Sunday school class to the young people. We read in verse 7:

The Lord did not set his love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples.

So chapter 7 of Deuteronomy is in the context of the first commandment, requiring loyalty to God—no other gods or powers above me, you’re more preeminent in your life than me. And when he calls them to that commandment, he reminds them of his foreknowledge, his for-love for them, based not upon any condition of theirs. He didn’t set his love upon them because of conditions of theirs. It’s just because he set his love upon them. And so this word, to set your love upon, is related to this idea that we talked about last week—foreknowledge.

And it goes on in verse 8 to say:

But because the Lord loves you.

So the Lord didn’t set his love upon you because of a condition of you, but because the Lord loves you and because he was going to be faithful to your fathers.

So, see, it’s a sovereign, unconditional sort of thing. It’s not based on a condition of the creature. It produces changes—like that column is changed and beautified. It changes us, but it’s not based upon the changes that God will see.

Again, in Isaiah 38, Isaiah is talking about—you know, he’s this is the chapter where he’s been told he’s going to die. He gets deathly ill. God restores him back after his prayer. And Isaiah says in verse 17:

Behold, for peace I had great bitterness.

I’m not sure what that means, but you know, I think it means he was setting his own peace and well-being above that of God’s. And this produces bitterness. But in any event, he goes on to say:

Thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption.

So it is the foreknowledge, the love of God placed upon Hezekiah sovereignly and unconditionally, that’s the basis for God saving Hezekiah in Isaiah 38.

And again in Deuteronomy 10 verse 15 and 16:

The Lord delighted only in your fathers to love them, and he chose their descendants after them, you above all peoples, as it is this day. Therefore circumcise the foreskin of your heart.

So the Lord set his love upon your fathers and then chose you. And as a result of this love, love him back, love him in response.

So God’s unconditional love can be described at this Hebrew word, *hasak*, which means to set love upon something—not as a result of something conditioned in the thing you’re setting your love on, but rather sovereignly by God.

Now, this same word is used in Psalm 91:14 in terms of us setting our love on God.

In Psalm 91:14, we read:

Because he has set his love upon me, therefore I will deliver him. I will set him on high because he has known my name. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him. I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him and honor him with long life. I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.

So God says that his deliverance of us here is described as deliverance of those who have set their love—in response to God setting his love on them—they set their love upon him. So we are called positively to image God. He has set his love upon us. And we are called then to exercise our volition to set our love on God. So you say, “Well, I don’t love God that much.” Well, you’re supposed to set your love upon him the way you do your spouse, your children, your friends, et cetera. So we’re called to set our love upon God.

And then third, this same Hebrew term is used of setting our love on other people.

In Genesis 34:8, we have Shechem. Shechem loves Dinah. And we read, Shechem’s father says:

The soul of my son Shechem longs for your daughter.

And this word “longs” is not—it doesn’t—it’s a different word than the normal word for “have desire unto.” It’s his word. He has set his love upon her. Shechem has set his heart to love Dinah. He set his love upon her. Same word: God’s loving us, our setting our love upon him. And then the same Hebrew word is given for us to set our love on other people, and specifically here, a spouse or potential spouse.

Again, in Deuteronomy 21:11, in the case laws:

When you see a captive among the captives, a beautiful woman, and you have a desire under her—

doesn’t mean you’re lusting after her. That’s not—it could say that, use a different Hebrew word if it wanted to say that. It doesn’t.

—if you set your heart upon her, if you set your love upon one of these captives.

Okay? So the marriage relationship is described here in terms of setting your love upon your spouse—the same way God sets his love upon us, the same way we’re supposed to set our love upon God, the same way that Solomon set his love and heart to do this task to build the house of God, the temple. So this is the common theme with this Hebrew word.

And this is all I’m calling you to do today in terms of married couples: renew your vows. It means to set your love afresh upon your spouse. Difficult times happen. God calls you to set your love. Don’t think, “Well, my love’s run out. I don’t feel loving any.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You—it’s an act of yours to set your love upon your spouse.

Now we go to Ecclesiastes 4 and we talk about motivations for doing this. Why should I do it? Well, you know, God says that we’re supposed to be image-bearers, and that should be enough. But that’s okay. It gives us a whole chapter here, many verses, about why we should set our love upon others.

And so now we’re moving out. Ecclesiastes 4 can be seen in terms of marriage. It can be seen in terms of children, but it can also be seen in terms of friendship. Ultimately, of course, the three-fold, three-stranded cord is God, the Trinity. And the Trinity has community. God says that he exists in this in the setting of his love upon each other—the Father upon the Son, and the Spirit, the Spirit upon the Father and the Son, the Son upon the Father and the Spirit. They all set their love on each other, and they have then this three-fold aspect to them that’s mirrored in marriage, but it’s also mirrored in friendship and it’s mirrored in community, in a broader church community, for instance. The plurality of setting our love on others and having that kind of love flowing produces strength in community.

Well, first, the chapter begins with having disadvantages of not seeking community. So isolation and oppression is described in verses 1 to 8. Or verses 1:3 rather, serves some negative results. So he begins to talk about oppression, and he’s talked about this earlier in the book, but now he says, look, the tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter. On the side of their oppressors there is power, but they have no comforter. He repeats it twice for us. He wants us to understand that what he’s talking about here will build up to this crescendo of the three. He’ll move from how, you know, one isn’t that great, two is better, three is best.

And in fact, he’s going to tell us here that it’s almost better to have zero than one in this particular condition. He describes what he’s talking about is isolation when suffering injustice comes upon people and how horrible a fact that is. He says it’s so bad to suffer injustice and oppression individually. He says it’d be better for that guy to die. And in fact, he says something which most people think is scandalous:

Yet better than both is he who has never existed, who has not seen the work that is done under the sun.

Now what’s he talking about? Is this an evidence of Solomon’s unregenerate state when he wrote the book? I don’t think so. We have, for instance, discussions of Job. Job, who is described over and over again in the book, many times in the first two chapters, as righteous, perfect, a perfect sort of a guy. Job and Jacob have that quality. Job is sort of a perfect sort of a guy, and he curses the day he was born. Why? What did Job have in common with this person who’s suffering oppression?

Well, what he had in common was very great pain and suffering, and he had in common isolation. The one who is cursing, you know, better for him not to have been born, is the one who is suffering in isolation. And Job, you know, curses the day he was born because his wife has forsaken him, given him bad advice, his children are dead, his friends are accusing him. He is isolated. He is all alone in the midst of great suffering. And that’s common. It links up with what we have in Ecclesiastes.

In Jeremiah 20, when Jeremiah suffers great isolation on account of the faith and oppression, Jeremiah wishes he’d never been born. And so we got great, godly men sort of imaging this same statement that we’re told here.

Elijah seems like, you know, when he is off by himself, you know, they’re coming after him. He’s had great achievement in going against the foreign gods, but then he runs away and he wants to die, just wants to end his whole life. And he gets strengthened with the knowledge that there are more than him out there. He feels totally alone and isolated.

So when people get totally isolated in a condition of great suffering and oppression, they feel just this way. It’d be better if I’d never been born. You see? And in a way, that’s true. Now, it’s hyperbole, right? I mean, the scriptures use hyperbole, exaggeration for effect. We know that’s not ultimately true because God is sovereign. But what the—but we don’t want to remove the sting of that statement. We want to remember that one of the most important reasons for setting our love on other people, on others, and having friends, wives, whatever it is, is because if oppression and suffering come to us and we’re in isolation, it is almost as if it’d be better if we’d never been born. It’s that big a deal.

So Ecclesiastes is giving us very strong reasons to seek for and live in Christian community. By the way, this is a topic that is very important for our culture. You know, I remember one of the earliest songs, you know, that I remember, is the songs of silence—the sound of silence rather—Simon and Garfunkel, and it talked about the modern alienation. Well, that’s not gotten better. That’s gotten worse in the last 40 years, if anything.

Now, you listen, I was listening to music as I prepared my final notes last night. And song after song after song—if you take them away from being love songs and think in terms of them of being songs in isolation, from community, and wanting community—you’ll see that the dominant theme today is a loss of community, alienation. “I walk alone,” Green Day. No matter who it is, there’s this struggle out there. And on the other hand, there’s songs that affirm that we’ll walk with each other. “I’ll Stand by You,” for instance, that affirm community.

Well, so this is a very important truth. Deny the Trinitarian God who sets his love upon each other, the three persons of the Trinity. Remove away love from a setting of our love upon each other, and wait for emotional things to happen, and then have a culture that breaks down in terms of community, and you’ve got great suffering and you got an increase in suicide, etcetera, etcetera.

So big disadvantage: suffering and isolation. Secondly, isolation removes satisfaction from our labors.

Now, you know, just prior to these verses, the end of chapter 3—the last verse of chapter 3 was:

So I perceive that nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his heritage. Who can bring him to see what will happen after him?

So, you know, at the end of chapter 3, he says, “It’s a great thing to work and labor and enjoy the fruit of your labor.” And this should be understood in context of that. Here’s what he says again:

I saw that for all toil and every scroll of work, a man is envied by his neighbor.

What he says here is that it’s all too often in a culture and community—to be like America—where work and labor is seen as competition, rivalry, breaking down of community instead of for the sake of community. He’ll move to the end of these couple of verses here to say that work is only good and profitable if it’s in community and done for somebody other than yourself. But no, we tend—our sinful tendency is to labor in competition with other people and have rivalry.

The fool holds his hands, consumes his own flesh. Isolation doesn’t good. He’s consuming his own flesh. He’s a fool.

Better a handful with quietness than both hands full together with toil and grasping for the wind.

So whether we’re awful or whether we’re a Type-A personality, if we’re doing it for ourselves, not in context of community, bad things are going on.

And then he gets quite clear about it:

I returned and I saw vanity under the sun. There is one alone without a second, without a companion. He has neither son nor brother. So see, clearly, this is not a sermon, this is not a text related just to marriage. It has to do with community—sons, brothers, friends.

He has neither son or brother. Yet there is no end to all his labors, nor is his eye satisfied with riches. And he never asks, “For whom do I toil and deprive myself of good?” This is vanity and a grave misfortune.

See, we think today that what we’re supposed to do for work is get stuff for ourselves and have self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction. And again, you know, when we sing, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” that’s because you’re not laboring like God labors. You’re not setting your love upon other people. You’re not—the purpose of your work is not community. It’s not someone else to share your labor with, to share the fruit of your rewards with.

Now, God says the fruit of your reward is a great thing. Enjoy it. But he says here very explicitly to enjoy it in community. It is horrible to have suffering in isolation. And it’s horrible to labor in isolation, to labor for yourself, you see, because then there’s no satisfaction. You work your head off. But if you don’t work in the context of community and for desire to bless other people, then you’ve completely got it wrong.

He says that’s not what I was talking about at the end of chapter 3. He says you want to labor specifically for the purpose of assisting others. So there’s no satisfaction in labor unless we set our love on others the way God set his love on us, okay?

So then the next part of Ecclesiastes 4, he moves to the triple advantage of community. So he says it’s really bad to be in isolation for a couple of reasons. And now I’m going to tell you how good it is to be in community.

Verse 9:

Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor.

So now they have satisfaction in labor. Now it’s a good reward because they’re sharing it with each other. So he affirms here the positive what he said negatively. It’s bad to labor for yourself. It’s bad to labor in isolation. It’s good to set your love upon others, to be two at least, or a three or a four or a five, in community, and then labor for that particular purpose.

You know, it’s amazing to me. At the middle of Proverbs, you probably some of you have heard me talk about this before, but you know, in the first in the middle of Proverbs are the sayings of the wise—30 sayings, three groups of 10. The first group of 10 are all about the fourth commandment and specifically laboring six days. It’s all about work. The second group of 10 is about building a family, and the third is about ruling in the state. That’s the way it works: vocation, family, state.

And the vocation section, the bookends of that whole thing have to do with the poor and being gracious and kind to the poor. In Proverbs, the center of proverbial wisdom, according to Proverbs, is that our labor is not for ourselves. It’s for the purpose of blessing others. And it’s the same thing that Solomon tells us here. Our labor, our work is only satisfying. The only good reward comes if we’re laboring in the context of having set our love upon others, if we’re laboring, working as a way of expressing love.

So vocation as a way to express love to others—not as a means of accumulating individual wealth. Working for others is good. Working for ourselves in isolation is vapor. Working for others has a great reward to it. Here it says so the point of laboring is to share the fruit of our labor, to enjoy it, but to enjoy it in the context of community.

So bad to be in isolation and suffering. Bad to be in isolation in terms of your work. There’s no satisfaction to it. On the other hand, great reward if you set your love on others and have relationship, and your work is defined as that.

Now, men, ask yourself: you live in America. You live in an increasingly secular economy that sees competition as the big deal—with your other rivals in the workplace, fostering the thing that Solomon said is no good. And you work where you know everybody wants to get what they can get for themselves, right? And that is just plain wrong. That sort of work doesn’t bring satisfaction or reward.

Hopefully you get your mind straight tomorrow morning when you go off to work and you realize you’re laboring for others. You’re serving other people in the marketplace. You’re enjoying the fruit of your labor with others. It’s not for individual reward. You’re to set your love upon other people.

Secondly, another great benefit is support and inevitable difficulties. Verses 10 to 12A.

For if they fall—or there’s a couple of things here: one is encouragement and depression.

Two are better. They have great reward. If they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and he has no one to help him.

So here he’s saying that there’s another reason labor is satisfying and has great reward. And secondly, if you do fall, if bad things happen to you, if you live in community, you’ll have help getting back up. And I’ve labeled this encouragement and depression. I mean, it means the metaphor is simply falling down, somebody helping you up. But the idea is that when you go down, somebody who is your friend will pick you up.

Years ago, you all know that I was prodigal for a number of years in my teen and early adult years, before I returned—God drew me back to him in faithfulness. And during that time, I had a relationship with a girl. She ended up killing herself. I ended up living with her parents for a year in Minnesota. And I was exceedingly depressed, particularly because I had just become kind of really recommitted to Christ after her death and gotten serious about the faith. And I just felt so guilty for not witnessing to her what I knew from my childhood.

And so I had tremendous depression. And I stayed with this judge and his wife and their family—it was her parents. Very kind of them. And I just didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. I mean, I would just sleep and sleep and sleep. You know how depression is.

There was a musician in this small town who knew that I had worked at the band in Southern California. And the guy came over to the house, you know, maybe 10, 11, maybe sometimes noon, whenever he got up, I don’t know. He would, at some point in his morning, he’d come to the house. Every day, he would pull me out of bed. He’d take me to his house. We—I thought about this the other night because “Rip This Joint” by the Rolling Stones was playing on my music at home. And that was a song he’d play for me every morning. You know, it starts with a couple of rim shots—pop, pop, pop. And you know, it’s kind of a lively, “Let’s rip this joint. Let’s get going.” And we do that. That’s how my day started.

I was in depression. My friend had set his love upon me, for whatever reason, pulled me out of bed, took me to his house, got me going again with some snappy music. That’s what this is talking about. You know, we’re to pull each other up when the other gets down. And so this is a great reward of living in community because, you know, everybody suffers difficulties or inevitable problems or depression. And when we live in community, then the other person brings us back, brings us back to what we should be doing.

That man and his wife, by the way, and they had a child as well, you know, I don’t know if their commitment to Christ began before I got there or not, but when I left there, I got letters back where them and all their friends in the music community in Marshall had become Christians. And it was a great teaching to me at the beginning of my recommitment to Christ of God’s sovereignty.

Here I was doing stuff I shouldn’t do back there. I was still doing things I shouldn’t do. And still the Lord God in his grace and mercy worked through my simple statements that Jesus is savior and the Bible is the word of God and to affect revival. And so I don’t know what it was in this man why he, you know, wanted to do this, but he did, and it was a great help to me. And that’s what this text is talking about: when one falls down then the other one will pull them up. Great advantage to living in community, setting our love on others.

Secondly, protection in difficult circumstances.

Again, if two lie down together, they’ll keep warm. How can one be warm alone?

So, you know, I’m not sure what this means. I put difficult circumstances. Coldness is what I was thinking of, but maybe I thought about this the last couple of days after I did the outline. And maybe what this is talking about is rest. Hey, you lie down to rest together. And to rest in the context of community is better than to rest alone, okay?

So earlier in Ecclesiastes, he’d said that ones that are isolated don’t have any rest. They have struggle and trial. They don’t have rest. But here, one of the advantages of setting your love upon others is this great rest that we have. People will be warm together.

And then third, defense against enemies.

Verse 12a: Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand them.

So, you know, we’ve got two are better for work, labor, setting your—you know, you have a reward and satisfaction. You know, two are better in case you get down, depressed, or have difficult circumstances. Two are better for your rest. At the end of your labors, you’re resting in community is good. That’s what we’re all doing right here, sort of laying down together, right? We’re reclining at the Lord’s table together in community. And so it’s good. You know, there’s warmth, there’s heat, there’s life, you know, death is cold, life is warm. And so life is encouraged in the context of Christian community. And when we’re isolated, we get cold—cold-hearted and cold toward others.

So here we have a defense against enemies. So now people may actually try to attack us. And we have a defense against those enemies if there’s two of us or more. And so various advantages of setting our love on others is given here—living in community—and great disadvantages if we fail to set our love on others.

Now, this attack, the great adversary we have, you know, is not a person. It’s the devil. It’s our adversary, and he tries to accuse us and he tries to bring us down. So we’re kind of back to spiritual depression.

One of the things I thought about when I first decided to preach this sermon several weeks ago or a month or so ago was to talk about my experience in my marriage a little bit without embarrassing my wife—in the providence of God, she is sick today, so she’s home, so I can say whatever I want till she listens to the sermon.

I don’t know about you, but we’ve been married a long time. And if you’ve been married a long time, you might have seen the same thing. Maybe you guys are always doing good. It’s not the way it is in our home. Christine and I, you know, tend to, you know, not do good sometimes, sin sometimes. And I’ve often thought how interesting it is that God in his providence—when one of us isn’t doing good and is depressed or doing sinful things, the other one is feeling great and is doing well, and that person can pull up the one that’s depressed.

And then so I’ll kind of get out of my, you know, doldrums or whatever it is, and then she’ll tend to go down and okay, I get it. I’m supposed to pull her up now. No, it’s kind of like, you know, a crankshaft. You got this thing going up and down, up and down—two pistons, I guess, creating the power of the engine. And you know, two people can do this with each other. And at least in our marriage, that’s the way it’s sort of worked.

There’s strength relative to our adversary who would like to keep us down and depressed all the time because we’re living in community. We’re setting our love upon each other. And by setting our love upon each other, we’re trying our best to keep each other out of sinful depression or whatever it is. And so there are all these great advantages given to us to live in community.

And then finally, the great advantage is strength.

Right? The three-fold cord is not quickly broken.

So here we have Drake, you know, being born and now it’s a three-fold chord, you know, in that family. And so it adds strength. And we got Drake, that strong dragon-like name. That’s very appropriate, isn’t it, of what this verse is telling us, at least at one level.

There’s a movie called “About a Boy,” which I don’t necessarily recommend, but Brian Godawa really liked the movie. And it is good in this sense: Jeffrey Meyers also mentions it by the way in his brand new commentary on Ecclesiastes called “Ecclesiastes Through New Eyes.” A Table in the Mist. Isn’t that a nice title for Ecclesiastes? A Table in the Mist. Yeah, I like that.

Well, anyway, he mentions the same movie. It’s called “About a Boy,” I think is the name of it. And the point of that movie is to affirm children as necessary to keep a marriage strong and vital and growing. So a boy kind of brings together two people and enhances the strength of that family.

And so that was a really excellent movie in our day and age. Now it’s all secular and you know all that sort of stuff, but at least they’re throwing a sop to the idea of family and the importance of children as being strength to a relationship of two.

So two, you know, is good, but it isn’t really quite enough. Three makes you really a strong unit. And so families are, you know, strong units in the providence of God. But remember, it’s talked about brothers and sons. So it’s not just about marriage here. It’s talking about relationships. It’s talking about gifts of community.

And so we have this, you know, a single man or woman. The implication is a person living in isolation can be broken. Can be broken. And to avoid being broken, we’re to set our love upon others, receive the love that they’re setting upon us, live in community, and as a result, we won’t have all those disadvantages and we’ll have all the great advantages of life in community.

Martin Luther summed up this chapter in this way. He said the meaning is it’s better to be in association with others and to enjoy things in common than to be a solitary miser who only cares about himself and grabs things for himself alone. In society there is mutual help, common work, common solace.

So you know, from one sense, this is salvation. You know, if you think about it, the immediate effect of the sin of Adam and Eve—and some people actually think this was the sin—we know the scriptures say eating the thing they were forbidden to eat was the sin. But the immediate thing that happens is, of course, the breakdown of that community. First, husband and wife are separated. Adam blames the wife. The wife blames the serpent. And everything’s alienated—couples from one another, man from the creatures that he’s to exercise proper stewardship and dominion over. Relationships break with sin.

And so it flies up from there, right? And then what we see is two brothers, and one brother is killing the other. So it extends to brother relationships, and then the problems and the breakdown of sin affects the whole world essentially. And so now we have worlds in which war is regular and common of different stripes and varieties. So the effect of the curse is isolation and relationship breakdown.

And what Jesus does in suffering for us alone is he brings us back to community. Remember, on the cross, in John’s gospel, he tells John and his mother—you know, that they have relationship now—and there’s a little picture there, a nugget, the nucleus of the church. He’s restoring relationships. Why would he do that on the cross? Because it’s essential to his whole task, his whole ministry is to suffer in isolation, right? He suffers, you know, being down in the Garden of Gethsemane, and all his friends fall asleep. He suffers throughout his whole ministry. His work and his labor is not enjoyed by the people he’s serving. They despise him for it. And then on the cross, he is absolutely and utterly forsaken. He’s alone up there.

Jesus suffers this isolation, the solitary, in us so that we don’t have to. So that we can be brought back to community. So that we can, again, in the providence of God, [be] newly born in Christ, set our love on each other again, the way that God sets his love from eternity upon us. We’re restored back in the image of God.

He created them: male and female created he them. The image of God, Genesis tells us, is community. Now, as Trinitarians, we know this, right? That’s because God exists in community, and he’s that three-fold cord. And so it’s not good for men to be in isolation. All faiths that have a monistic God at the top instead of a Trinitarian God tend toward isolation. They tend toward the breakdown of community and alienation.

So God tells us that we are specifically to choose to set our love and our hearts upon one another. That’s the point. Bad things happen in isolation. Good things happen in community. What’s our response to God setting his love upon us? Well, to set our love upon him and then to set our love upon image-bearers that he has given us as well.

I mentioned verse 13. I’ll just mention it in passing. Before a poor and wise youth—rather, better is a poor and wise youth and an old and foolish king who will be admonished no more. See, now, again, the curses of lack of community are returned to here at the end. So the things kind of echo, starts off with the bad stuff, ends with the bad stuff. And the bad thing is to rule without counsel. Well, in order to have counsel, you got to have relationship and community. So better, you know, a wise, you know, young king who was poor—we know the difficulties of that, a poor person becoming powerful, sinful temptations happen—but he’s better than an older man rather who will no longer hear counsel, who’s not living in community in terms of his reign and what he does.

So God calls us to community. He calls us to set his—our love upon other people. You know, in the context of the church, statistics say that if a person has not found relationship within the first year of being at a church, they’ll leave. They might like a lot of things about it—the song, the sermon, the setting, whatever it is. They might like the people that are there. But if they can’t hook up with some kind of good, solid relationship within a year, they leave.

And in a way, they probably should, because if nobody’s reached out to them—now I know they have responsibilities too—but if that church has not reached out, if nobody has set their love upon them, then what kind of church is that? What kind of church do we have? Are we a church that likes our own little natural friendships? Are we a church that self-consciously tries to set our love on others? Are we living in isolation, natural community, or are we living in God’s community?

See, God is egalitarian about this in a proper way. We hate the word egalitarian, right? It’s all that fairness stuff. See, this is an egalitarian community. Jesus is bringing about the household of God. And the church is an egalitarian community. We’re to set our love on the other people in the context of this church. That’s what we’re supposed to do.

We’re going to have next Sunday we’re beginning these hub and spoke fellowship times in various homes around Oregon City. And in a sense, that’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to get you together with people that you wouldn’t normally see in the context of this church—not just your friends anymore, other people at church. Get to know them, fellowship with them, that you can set your love upon them.

You see, today, as you walk around the church taking communion, moving to the agape, whatever it is, look around at people. Set your love upon people the way God set his love upon you. Commit to live in community, and commit to assist those who have a difficult time in that.

The whole of our religion, the way we’re supposed to live our lives as Christians, is summarized by James as this: “Pure religion is to visit the widows and the fatherless in their distress.” It’s to have that eye out for people who are isolated, you know, as a result of things that have happened, and to bring them into community.

You know, in Psalms, it says that he brings the isolated, the singles, into a household. And he says specifically that household is one that is like a well-tended garden. In Psalm 68:6, “God sets the solitary in families. He brings out those who are bound into prosperity, but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.”

So a dry land, a desert, is characteristic of isolation. The Garden of Eden, and a restoration to humanity, is a restoration to community. God takes the solitary and sets them in families. He takes widows and the fatherless, divorces. He takes older people that, you know, some of their friends are dying, they don’t have good community anymore. He takes people that have their particular challenges for living in friendships and isolation, and he places them all here.

But is here really a well-watered garden, or is it still a dry land for some? You see, this is what we have to ask ourselves.

So what we want to do in relation to what Ecclesiastes says—and you know, this is the beauty of the Reformed faith—is that everything starts with the setting of love sovereignly by God on us. And we then are called to set our love on others. Now, what does it mean? Well, we’re back to that temple imagery. We see a dry, you know, wooden column. We set our love upon that person, and we set our love upon them in a way that brings them to beauty, right? Silver bands, and makes them functionally better, utilitarian. So the filleting is not just a throwaway couple of verses that God decided to put this same word on in terms of setting love. It’s kind of the image, the symbol, that should stay in our minds as we leave today’s text.

Positive advantages and disadvantages: hopefully you know that you should live in community. Hopefully these verses have reinforced that to you. But what do you do about it? You set your love on people, on people that have difficulty. You set your love upon them. Now, some people won’t receive that love. They’re the rebellious. They continue to live in that dry land. But God has called us to be image-bearers of the sovereign—Reformed instruction of who God is: a loving God in all eternity. And that’s the core of the Christian life—setting our love upon other people in a way that both beautifies them and also brings benefit to their lives.

I have a quote here from John Murray at the bottom of your outline:

Those whom he set his love upon, he actively blessed. God’s love is not passive emotion. It’s active volition, and it moves determinatively to nothing less than the highest goal conceivable for his adopted children: conformity to the image of the only begotten Son. God’s love begins a series of actions of his that bring his people to glorification.

When we set our love on other people, it doesn’t mean think nice, warm thoughts about them. It means start with that—decide to love people—but then it means be active in that love the same way God is active in his love, bringing to pass beautification, glorification, both in the utilitarian value of the person to the extended community in the world and also simply in their intrinsic relationship to God and to others.

This is what Jesus Christ was doing on the cross. This is what Jesus Christ was doing in the Garden of Gethsemane in his isolation. This is what Jesus Christ was doing in his work, all too often unappreciated by those he labored in the context of. Jesus took upon himself the curses of isolation that Ecclesiastes 4 describes, that we may come to the end of that text, being the strong three-stranded community or band that is not easily broken.

Jesus suffered in his body on the cross that he might gift us with community. Our job is to highly value that gift of his, to look at it as what it is—a tremendous blessing from him, without which, really, our lives are in some cases not hardly worth living for anymore.

Jesus suffered in isolation that we might not, that we might indeed be his image-bearers by setting our love, our affections certainly, but also our volitional actions to the well-being of those in our world.

Couples, as you move toward Valentine’s Day today, don’t wait till the 14th. Begin today. You know, maybe your love’s grown cold. Maybe you’re kind of not thinking about this much. Set your love upon your wife. Wives, set your love upon your husbands. Not an emotional attachment that ends there, but rather an emotional bond that brings to maturity the well-being of the other person, that moves in terms of that here in community.

You know, may we set our love upon each other and live out the sort of life that God has called us to do. Next Sunday, you get to practically apply this verse. You get to lure in a room—four or house four or five or six other families or individual people, singles—and you get to set your love on those people for that afternoon and begin to build relationship in community. This is all the great blessing of God to us, ministered through the work of Jesus.

Let’s thank him for it. Father, we do thank you for Christian community. We thank you for coming together today to hear your admonition to set our love on others and to see the great value in that as well as the great danger in not doing that. As we come forward, Father, may we each commit to set our love on other people today. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.