Ecclesiastes 5:6 KJV
Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin;
neither say thou before the angel, that it was an error: wherefore should God
be angry at thy voice, and destroy the work of thine hands?
The majority of the world would think that living for heaven is laboring
for the wind. They would see it as fruitless and wasteful to live for "pie
in the sky" rewards. The Lord Jesus and the Old Testament preacher both
disagree.
This preacher
expressly declared the obvious; regardless of what a man might gain on the
earth, he can't take it with him when he dies. The one who has gained much in
this world and the one who has gained nothing are equals in death. They may be
laid to rest in different boxes but neither cares.
Lost men know this
to be true as well as do the saved. We just have different answers for the
situation. The lost man will give one of two responses:
He will console
himself in making a name for himself
Oftentimes he will
attempt to do something great. He will try to get his name written in history.
Other times he will have something built in his name. Though he is gone, he
reasons, his name is not in that it exists on some structure.
He will content
himself that his name lives on through his children
The preacher saw
this to be a vanity because we can never know what our children will do with
what we leave behind. Many a wealthy man has had his fortune squandered by
children whose character or qualities were not as developed as their
benefactor.
The Christian
response[1] is to labor not for riches and fame and
reward on the earth but to lay up for themselves treasures in heaven.
So the difference
between the Christian and the worldly is essentially a disagreement of what it
means to be "laboring for the wind."
- The worldly believe their eyes and view heaven, which they can't
see, as wind
- The Christian believes God and views the world, which he has observed
as temporary, as the wind
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