People Who Cannot Even Enjoy the Grace They Have Received

1There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is heavy on men: 2a man to whom God gives riches, wealth, and honor, so that he lacks nothing for his soul of all that he desires, yet God gives him no power to eat of it, but an alien eats it. This is vanity, and it is an evil disease. 3If a man fathers a hundred children, and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not filled with good, and moreover he has no burial; I say, that a stillborn child is better than he: 4for it comes in vanity, and departs in darkness, and its name is covered with darkness. 5Moreover it has not seen the sun nor known it. This has rest rather than the other. 6Yes, though he live a thousand years twice told, and yet fails to enjoy good, don’t all go to one place? 7All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled. 8For what advantage has the wise more than the fool? What has the poor man, that knows how to walk before the living? 9Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind. 10Whatever has been, its name was given long ago; and it is known what man is; neither can he contend with him who is mightier than he. 11For there are many words that create vanity. What does that profit man? 12For who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he spends like a shadow? For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?

Uzziah, whom the prophet Isaiah served, became king at sixteen. He feared God and relied on him, and once on the throne he won great victories over the Philistines and gained the strength to build mighty fortifications. As God raised him up, the nations paid tribute to this powerful king, and his name spread as far as the border of Egypt. Having received God’s grace, he was exalted in the world.

Because life does not go as we wish, those who try to exalt themselves cannot help but carry an empty heart that is never filled. Those who believe in God’s almighty power and fear him, however, are content, and so they enjoy peace and rest. Though we entrust every burden to Jesus Christ and work hard, our difficult circumstances will not change in the least until the appointed time. That is why we need patience, and why we need absolute faith in God. What God’s faithful people must do is believe that God will surely help them and keep growing until that time comes. God sees those who strive to hold fast to their faith, and he will not fail to act on their behalf.

King Uzziah built the gates and towers of Jerusalem and made the nation strong, and he encouraged farming and herding so that his people lived in plenty. Because God was always with him in his plans, he could defend the nation without difficulty, and the people could serve God well. But when Uzziah became so famous that no nation did not know his name, he slowly went astray and was gripped by the proud thought that all this was his own doing.

Once he credited himself with his own ability and wisdom, the heart that had vowed to thank God for his grace and stay loyal vanished. Betraying God or growing proud does not happen in a moment. Our priorities shift very slowly, without our noticing, so we must understand that by the time we regret, as Solomon did, having lived wrongly, a great deal of time has already gone by. Because Uzziah thought his own wisdom and strategy superior, he could abandon God with ease, and the great wealth and power before his eyes, along with people’s praise, blinded his eyes and stopped his ears.

Like Adam, who defied God’s word, people do not stop sinning until the very last moment, when they fall under God’s curse into death. Like a child who keeps defying until the parent picks up the rod, they refuse to repent to the end. Those who gave thanks to God at first are no exception: once bound by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, they are not afraid of the sin of building the tower of Babel.

To lose the gratitude we once had toward God and boast that we succeeded because we are wise and discerning is a great sin, and a sign that we have become Satan’s servants. What we must never forget is that when this life of sojourning ends, every last person will face the life after death. Since faith in Christ is what divides heaven from hell, we should of course work hard here on earth, but we must walk with Christ, the Lord of heaven.

Once he grew proud, Uzziah did what he would never have done in his right mind. He insisted on offering the sacrifice that only priests could perform, and went into the temple to burn incense on the altar of incense. When Azariah the priest heard of it, he went into the temple with eighty priests to stop the king from sinning against God. Azariah told King Uzziah that burning incense to Yahweh was not the king’s work but the work of the consecrated priests, yet the king would not listen.

The priest pleaded earnestly with him: if the king burned incense, it would be a sin against the law, and because of that sin he would obscure God’s glory and be severely rebuked by God. Still Uzziah refused. A king who will not heed a priest’s earnest counsel shows that his heart has already been stolen by Satan, and that, no longer fearing God, he despises the priest. Uzziah was bound to obey the priest’s counsel because God had established by law that he would accept only the sacrifices offered by priests. The law God has laid down is not something people may change at will, so we must not take it lightly. Thinking himself a king of great power, Uzziah grew furious with the priest who stood in his way.

While he served God well, the king had obeyed the priest; once his heart changed, he turned on him in anger and treated him with contempt. But Uzziah overlooked something: a priest does not take orders from men but obeys God’s will without condition, and so even a king must not treat a priest lightly. When Uzziah insisted on offering the sacrifice as he pleased despite the priest’s protests, God in his wrath struck him with leprosy on his forehead.

To break God’s law is death itself, so it must never be done. The priest did not restrain the king to protect his own authority. He resisted him so strongly because he knew what terrible things happen when God’s law is broken, but Uzziah, whose heart had already turned, refused to hear him. Uzziah should have turned back when the priest pleaded with him and held him back. He was king of Israel, but he was also God’s servant. The judgment that fell on Uzziah, who trusted in his royal status alone and defied God’s will, was a punishment almost too heavy to bear.

Having no intention of obeying God’s word, Uzziah heard everything the priest said as contempt for himself, and raged as though the priest had dared to challenge the king. God had loved Uzziah, and out of that love he had made his nation strong and given him the blessing of long life all those years. But Uzziah forgot to be grateful for God’s love, grew proud, and in the end came to the place of ruin. Had he not forgotten his first love, he would have been remembered as a king who worshiped God, loved his people deeply, and was blessed with long life. Even if the priest’s words differed from his own thinking, had he simply obeyed, since this was the law God had set, he would have been spared so terrible a judgment.

He must have known himself that when he relied wholly on God he won great victories, and that, riding on that momentum, he conquered many nations. Why, then, did he cast that love aside and grow proud? It is heartbreaking. We see that most people, once God’s grace has increased their possessions and raised their position and they live in comfort, stop relying on God.

In hard times people vow that if only their prayer is answered they will be faithful unto death, but as soon as the problem is solved they abandon God and turn back to the world. Uzziah knew perfectly well that God had answered him, but because the object of his attention had changed, he no longer had any thought of sharing glory with God.

Because he thought the world’s recognition raised his worth, he poured out all of God’s grace for the sake of the pride of life. We must learn to understand the heart of God, who calls by name the one of his people who has changed like this and grieves over the faithfulness that person once showed. For the God who protected Uzziah until he was established as king had made him grow through many plans and achievements.

If, as you go through life, you regard all that you have received from God as a debt, your heart will naturally become poor in spirit, and you can never grow proud. The poor in spirit believe that God is the Lord of life, so they know that without God not only the wealth they now have but even life itself means nothing. King Uzziah, who had received God’s love and care as the poor in spirit do, defied God’s word, was struck with leprosy, and lived shut away in a separate house until the day he died.

Confined to a separate house until his death, he could no longer exercise a king’s authority and could not even be laid in the kings’ tomb, a pitiful end. I hope you will never forget how foolish and fearful a thing pride is, for the moment we stop trusting God and grow proud, we are on the road to ruin. What this episode teaches us is that God blesses those who believe and rely on him to the end, but he will surely put to shame the proud who throw away his love and grace.

God, who had given Uzziah royal authority and a life of plenty, took away everything he enjoyed when he became proud. Look at his life and it is clear that God had not resolved from the beginning to cast him off; it was Uzziah’s own choice that damaged his relationship with God. May you never forget that those who remember the grace they have received and give thanks remain God’s people to the end.

The king and the priest clearly have different work to do. It was wrong for the king to ignore the priest’s counsel, but it is also a sin to treat lightly the work of the priests God has appointed. Out of the twelve tribes God set apart the tribe of Levi to take charge of the sacrifices, and he gave the law of sacrifice so that the people’s sins could be forgiven. To break that law and insist on performing a sacrifice that only the priests may offer is to despise God.

When God’s people go sour spiritually, pride and complaint are the first things to appear. Then, because they have grown proud, they not only sit in judgment on the church, its pastors, and their brothers and sisters in Christ, but their once-gracious words and deeds also change. In Jeremiah 5, Yahweh says that if he can find even one person in morally corrupt Jerusalem who seeks the truth, he will pardon the city. But the people were so corrupt that they felt no pain when struck, made their faces harder than rock, and refused to return, so not one repented.

Under Satan’s influence, people turn faces that once shone with grace and love into plaster masks that show nothing, and they close their hearts. This does no good, either to them or to anyone else. God loves those who are cheerful, kind, and thankful in all things. If those who ought to hear the word their pastor preaches and live as Christians want to hear only what pleases them and do not obey the word, that in itself is contempt for God.

People open and close their hearts according to their feelings and needs, but if we remember the grace God has given us until now and trust his love, the wise thing is to obey rather than judge. We must trust that the God who has loved us until now will act, and wait patiently. Had Uzziah kept the faith he started with, God’s blessings were his to enjoy until his death. But his pride built a wall between him and God, and he died without tasting any of the abundant blessing poured out on him.

What did Uzziah make of all this, shut away in that separate house? Did he rail against God, asking how God could take his throne and make him a leper just because he had briefly ignored the priest, thinking he too could burn incense to God? Or did he regret the past and wonder why he had not listened when the priest held him back? What do you think was in his heart? Judging by his actions, it seems he never once imagined he could be driven from the throne.

If God had kept him alive through war after war, Uzziah should have known that God could take that life back whenever he willed. If God had made him enjoy honor, peace, and abundance, he ought to have known that God could take it all away. Yet he foolishly betrayed God.

I have spoken at such length about Uzziah because of what Solomon says in verse 2: there is a man to whom God gives riches, wealth, and honor, so that he lacks nothing for his soul of all that he desires, yet God gives him no power to eat of it, and an alien eats it instead; this too is vanity, an evil disease. If a king is denied the highest blessings a king can have, and others take pleasure in them in his place, that too, he says, is vanity. When we see someone rich in wealth, wisdom, and knowledge die without ever knowing true satisfaction, all their labor turns out to be vanity of vanities.

To use a life like this, in which we never know what trouble we will meet or when we will die, to gain eternal life, we must be born again. As Jesus told Nicodemus that unless one is born of water and the Spirit, one cannot enter the Kingdom of God, so we must be born again. Because water is a sign that our sins have been washed clean, baptism is our confession that we have been born again as God’s children. The Holy Spirit makes us understand the atoning work of Jesus Christ, helps us repent, and works in us so that we may become citizens of heaven.

We live in a world where the wealth we have worked hard to gather may be spent freely by others rather than by ourselves. So we must keep away from sin as the Holy Spirit teaches us, live by the word, and prepare to become citizens of heaven. The world learns about life through knowledge, but the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, tells us that we must go to the Kingdom of God by faith. Our hearts, then, must not be given to things that are vanity.

Because Scripture gives such a clear answer, those who have been born again of water and the Spirit must grasp the deep meaning of life and not spend their time in vanity of vanities. If, after Jesus has explained it so carefully, someone still fails to live rightly, it shows that they do not believe in God, and they will have to bear that responsibility themselves.

Because Uzziah made the foolish choice to abandon and betray God, he could not enjoy his wealth and glory but was struck with leprosy and shut away in a separate room. Imagine how stunned he was as he looked back on his life from that room! Burning incense was plainly the priests’ work; what was he thinking when he insisted on doing it himself? He ought to have been ashamed of his own folly. But since Uzziah was never forgiven to the end, it seems he ground his teeth and resented God.

However much of the world’s wealth and power we may hold, if our hearts have no peace, as Uzziah’s had none, it is all vanity. Uzziah could have enjoyed all the peace and rest he wanted; his suffering was his own choice, and the responsibility was his to bear.

Being born into this world is itself hardship. As hardship follows good times, and good times surely follow hardship, no one knows what they will meet while they live. In Job 3, life was so hard that Job cursed the day of his birth and cried out how much better it would have been had he been stillborn.

Job says that the place where unborn infants go is where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, where the prisoners are at ease together and do not hear the voice of the taskmaster, a peaceful place where the small and the great are there together and there is neither servant nor master. In this world there is high and low, much and little, but death is fair to all; once the body is laid aside, there is no servant or master, no small or great. It sounds, in the end, as if the hardships people suffer end only in death. Physical life does end, but the soul’s destination is fixed by the law God has set, and those who leave this world without receiving Christ will face a judgment more painful than life itself. Harsh as that may sound, it is the law God has established, and we must submit to it.

So the wise person God seeks is the one who lives this life by faith with the life to come in view. We must preach the gospel so that no one’s soul goes to hell.

Ecclesiastes 6:7

7All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.

All of people’s labor, Solomon says, is in the end an effort to satisfy their own mouths, yet the human appetite is never filled. Among the things people can never satisfy however hard they try are, besides appetite, the craving for possessions and sexual desire; and if we give our hearts to such worldly things, we will end up living a failed life.

People live to eat. They live to eat more and better than others and to have more, but in the end the greed of those who are never content gives birth to sin, and sin brings death, so their lives end in failure. The world kills over what it eats and drinks, or chooses the way of destruction for itself. Even God’s people, reaching for the good things of this world, fail to hope for the eternal Kingdom and are not afraid to sin. But Romans 14:17 tells us that the Kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Behind every quarrel in a church lies people’s sin, their failure to let go of greed for power and money. But what counts in the Kingdom of God is the spiritual righteousness, peace, and joy that we are to keep, and for that we must first be born again.

Satan is hard at work to fix people’s attention on the world. As Scripture foretold, he is changing people’s thinking so that they will not meet the Lord when he returns, yet they do not realize it and accept his temptations. He fills them with the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life so that they cannot hope for the eternal Kingdom, and human nature, which loves the world, leaves them unable to overcome sin. But the reason we live is to use this fleeting life to enter the eternal Kingdom. So even if the affairs of this world seem to threaten our lives, in the end they are vanity, a chasing after wind.

If those who have received Christ live by faith, they can bear the ninefold fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, without great striving. So living a life of faith in the Holy Spirit is, for you, a matter of the greatest weight: it decides what awaits you after death.

People call a life of many possessions a success, but if they overlook the existence of the spiritual world, after death they will suffer great torment they never imagined. Just as gold and stone look the same color in pitch darkness, a life lived for the flesh has no merit and no meaning. The reward of those who have given themselves for the eternal Kingdom will shine when they enter heaven, so I hope you will live a life of faithfulness to God.