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, the king the prophet Isaiah served under, became king at the age of sixteen. Uzziah feared God and relied on him, and once he became king he won a great victory in the war against the Philistines and gained the strength to build great cities as well. When God lifted Uzziah up, the nations paid tribute to Uzziah, who now held great power, and his name spread abroad even to the entrance of Egypt. Having received God’s grace, he came to be honored in the world.

Because life does not go the way we want, those who try to exalt themselves cannot help having empty hearts that are never filled, while those who believe in God’s almighty power and fear him are content, and so they can enjoy peace and rest. Even when we entrust every burden to Jesus Christ and work hard, difficult circumstances do not change in the slightest until the time comes. That is why patience is needed, and why absolute faith in God is needed. What believers of faith must do is believe that God will surely help and keep growing until the time comes. God sees the believers who strive to keep their faith, and he will surely work on their behalf.

King Uzziah built the gates and towers of Jerusalem to make the nation secure, and he encouraged farming and herding so that the people could live abundant lives. Because God was always with him in his plans, he was able to defend the nation without difficulty, and the people were able to serve God well. But when Uzziah became so famous that there was no nation that did not know his name, he slowly began to change for the worse and was seized by the proud thought that all of this was his own doing.

Once he gave himself the credit for his own ability and wisdom, the heart that had promised to thank God for his grace and be faithful to him was gone. Betraying God or growing proud does not happen in a single moment. We change our priorities very slowly, without even noticing it ourselves. So we must understand that by the time we regret, as Solomon did, that we have lived our lives wrongly, a great deal of time has already passed. Because Uzziah thought his own wisdom and strategy were outstanding, he could forsake God easily, and the great wealth and power he could see, together with people’s praise, ended up covering his eyes and ears.

Like Adam, who disobeyed God’s word, people do not stop sinning until the very last moment, when they are cursed by God and fall into death. Like a child who rebels until the parent picks up the rod, they refuse to repent to the end. Even those who thanked God at first, once they are bound by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, are not afraid of the sin of building a tower of Babel.

When the heart that once thanked God disappears and a person boasts of having succeeded because they are wise and discerning, that is a great sin and evidence that they have become Satan’s servant. You must never forget that when this life, which is like a sojourner’s, comes to an end, every single person without exception will meet the life after death. It is through faith in Christ that people are divided between heaven and hell. So of course we should live diligently in this world, but we must be with Christ, the Lord of heaven.

Once he grew proud, Uzziah did something he would never have done in his right mind. He stubbornly insisted that he would offer the sacrifice that only priests could perform, and he went into the temple to burn incense on the altar of incense. When Azariah the priest heard the news, he went to the temple with eighty priests to stop the king, who was about to sin against God. Azariah the priest tried to stop King Uzziah, telling him that burning incense to Yahweh was not the king’s work but the work of the consecrated priests, but the king would not listen.

Azariah pleaded with him earnestly, warning that if the king burned incense, it would be a sin against the law, so it would hide God’s glory and he would be severely rebuked by God, but Uzziah would not listen. That Uzziah would not listen even to the priest’s earnest counsel is evidence that Satan had already taken his heart, and evidence that he despised the priest because he did not fear God. Uzziah had to listen to the priest’s counsel, because God had established by law that he would accept only the sacrifices the priests offered. People cannot change at will the law that God has set. That is why we must not take it lightly. Thinking of himself as a king with great power, Uzziah grew furious at the priest who stood in his way.

The king who had obeyed the priest’s words while he served God well turned on the priest in anger and treated him with contempt once his heart changed. But there was something Uzziah overlooked. A priest does not listen to people; he is a servant who obeys God’s will without condition, so even a king must not treat him carelessly. When Uzziah insisted on offering the sacrifice as he pleased despite the priest’s pleading, God in his wrath brought on him the curse of leprosy breaking out on his forehead.

Breaking God’s law is death itself. That is why we must never do it. The priest did not stop the king to protect his own authority. He stopped him forcefully because he knew how terrible the consequences are when God’s law is broken, but Uzziah, whose heart had already changed, would not listen. Uzziah should have turned back when the priest pleaded earnestly and tried to stop him. He was the king of Israel, but he was also a servant of God. Uzziah trusted in nothing but his status as king and defied God’s will, and the judgment he received was a punishment too heavy to bear.

Because Uzziah had no intention of obeying God’s word, everything the priest said sounded to him like contempt, and he raged as if the priest had dared to challenge the king. Until then God had loved Uzziah, and so God had made the nation rich and strong and given him the blessing of long life. But Uzziah forgot to be thankful for God’s love and grew proud, and in the end he stood in the place of ruin. If he had not forgotten his first love, he would have been remembered as a king who worshiped God, loved his people deeply, and received the blessing of long life. Even if the priest’s words differed from what he thought, had he simply obeyed first because it was the law God had set, he would not have received such a terrible judgment.

He himself must have known that when he relied on God completely, he not only won great victories but also rode that momentum to conquer many nations. Why, then, did he throw that love away and grow proud? It is simply heartbreaking. We see that most people, once God’s grace has increased their possessions and raised their position so that they live in comfort, stop relying on God.

When times are hard, people vow that if only they receive an answer, they will be faithful until death, but as soon as the problem is solved, they abandon God and turn back to the world. Uzziah clearly knew that God had answered him, but because the object of his attention had changed, he no longer had any intention of sharing the glory with God.

Because he thought that the recognition of the people of the world raised his worth, he poured out all of God’s grace for the pride of life. We must learn to understand the heart of God, who calls the name of a believer who has changed like this and grieves to lose the faithfulness that believer had shown until then. For God, who had protected Uzziah until he was recognized as king, had made him grow through many plans and accomplishments.

If you regard everything you receive from God throughout your life as a debt, you will naturally become poor in spirit, and then you can never become proud. Those who are poor in spirit believe that God is the owner of life, so they know that without God, not only the wealth they now have but even their very lives mean nothing. King Uzziah, who like the poor in spirit had received God’s love and attention, defied God’s word, was struck with leprosy, and lived shut away in a separate house until the day he died.

Shut away in a separate palace until his death, he could not enjoy a king’s authority, and he ended in a pitiful state, unable even to enter the royal tomb. I hope you will never forget how foolish and how frightening pride is. For the moment a person stops trusting God and grows proud, they set out on the road to ruin. This event shows that God blesses those who trust and rely on him to the end, but he surely puts to shame the proud who throw away God’s love and grace.

God, who had given Uzziah the authority of a king and an abundant life, took away everything he had been enjoying once Uzziah grew proud. Look at his life. Then you see that God did not decide from the beginning to cast him off; it was Uzziah’s own choice that damaged his relationship with God. I hope you will never forget that those who do not forget the grace they have received and give thanks for it remain God’s people to the end.

The king and the priest clearly have different work. It is wrong for a king to refuse a priest’s counsel, but it is also a sin to take 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. Breaking that law and insisting on performing a sacrifice that only priests may perform is an act of contempt for God.

When believers change for the worse spiritually, too, the first things that appear are pride and complaining. And because they have grown proud, they not only judge the church, pastors, and their brothers and sisters in faith, but the good words and deeds they once had change as well. In Jeremiah 5, Yahweh said that if he could find even one person in morally corrupt Jerusalem who seeks truth, he would pardon its people. But the people were so corrupt that they were not grieved even when they were stricken. They made their faces harder than a rock and refused to return, and so no one repented.

When people come under Satan’s influence, the bright face that once showed grace and love becomes as expressionless as plaster, and they close their hearts. Such behavior never helps either themselves or anyone else. God loves those who are bright and kind and who give thanks in everything. When believers, who should hear the Word the pastor preaches and live as Christians, want to hear only what they wish to hear and do not obey the Word, that in itself is an act of contempt for God.

People open and close their hearts according to their own feelings and needs, but if we do not forget the grace God has given us until now and believe in his love, the wise thing is not to judge but to obey. We must be patient, believing that God, who has loved us until now, will work. If Uzziah had kept his first faith as it was, he would have enjoyed the blessings God gave him until the day he died. But his pride built a wall between him and God, so he died without enjoying a single one of the blessings he had received in abundance.

How did Uzziah, shut away in the separate house, think about his situation? Did he complain to God, asking how God could take away his throne and make him a leper just because, thinking that he too could burn incense to God, he had briefly refused to listen to the priest? Or did he regret the past, wondering why he had not listened when the priest tried to stop him? What do you think was in his heart? From the way he acted, he seems never once to have imagined that he would be driven from the throne.

If God had kept his life safe in battle until then, he should have known that God could take that life back whenever God wished. If God had let him enjoy respect, peace, and abundance, he should have known that God could take all of it away, yet he foolishly betrayed God.

I have spoken at such length about Uzziah because of what Solomon says in verse 2: that 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, but an alien eats it, and that this is vanity and an evil disease. He said that if a king cannot enjoy the best blessings a king can enjoy and others enjoy them in his place, that too is vanity. When someone with much wealth, wisdom, and knowledge dies without enjoying true satisfaction, their labor turns out in the end to be vanity of vanities.

So to receive eternal life by making use of a life in which we do not know what trouble we will meet or when we will die, we must be born again. We must be born again, just as Jesus told Nicodemus that unless one is born of water and the Spirit, one cannot enter the kingdom of God. Water is a symbol of being washed clean of sin, so through receiving baptism we confess that we have been born again as children of God. The Holy Spirit makes us realize the merit of Jesus Christ’s atoning work, helps us to repent, and is at work so that we can become people of heaven.

We live in a world where others can freely use the wealth we worked hard to gather, while we ourselves cannot use it. So believers must keep away from sin as the Holy Spirit has taught them, live by the Word, and prepare to become people of heaven. The world learns about life through knowledge, but the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, tells believers that they must go to the kingdom of God by faith. That is why they must not let their hearts be captured by vain things.

The Bible gives us an answer this clear. So you who have been born again of water and the Spirit must know the deep meaning of life and must not spend your time in vanity of vanities. If, even after Jesus has explained it in such detail, a person still does not live rightly, that is evidence that they do not believe God, and they will have to bear the responsibility themselves.

Because Uzziah made the foolish choice of forsaking and betraying God, he could not enjoy wealth and glory, and he ended up with leprosy, shut away in a separate chamber. When he looked back on his life in that chamber, how stunned must he have been? Burning incense was obviously the priests’ work, and he should have thought himself pitiful for having insisted, with who knows what in mind, on doing it himself. But since Uzziah was never forgiven to the end, it seems he gnashed his teeth and resented God.

However much wealth and power in the world a person may have, if their heart is not at peace, as Uzziah’s was not, everything is vanity. Uzziah could have enjoyed all the peace and rest he wanted, but the suffering he went through was his own choice, so he must bear the responsibility for it himself.

Being born into this world is itself suffering. Just as there is suffering even after good things, and surely good things even after suffering, no one knows what they will meet while they live. Look at Job 3. Life was so hard for Job that he cursed the day of his birth and cried out how much better it would have been if he had been stillborn.

Job said that the place where babies who were never born go is where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, a peaceful place where the prisoners are at ease together and do not hear the voice of the taskmaster, a place where the small and the great are together and there is neither servant nor master. He said that in the world there is high and low, much and little, but death is fair to everyone, and once we have shed the body there is neither servant nor master, neither small nor great. In the end, it sounds as if the suffering human beings endure ends only in death. But though life in the flesh may end, the soul’s destination is determined by the law God has set, so those who leave this world without receiving Christ will receive a judgment more painful than life itself. It may sound cruel, but this is the law God has set, so we must obey it.

So the person who lives this life by faith for the sake of the life after death is the wise person God desires. You must preach the gospel so that people’s souls do not go to hell.

Ecclesiastes 6:7

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

Solomon said that all the labor of man is, in the end, an effort to satisfy his own mouth, and yet the appetite can never be filled. Among the things human beings can never fill no matter how hard they try are, along with the appetite for food, the craving for possessions and sexual desire. If we let our hearts be captured by such worldly things, we will end up living failed lives.

People live to eat. They live to eat more, and better, and to have more than others, but in the end the greed of people who are never content gives birth to sin, and sin brings death, so their lives end in failure. The world takes other people’s lives over what to eat and drink, and some choose the road to destruction for themselves. Even believers fail to hope for the eternal kingdom because they want to take hold of the good things of the world, and they are not afraid to sin. But Romans 14:17 says that the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Look into the quarrels in the church, and every one of them is a problem caused by the sins of people who cannot let go of their greed for power and money. But what matters in the kingdom of God is the spiritual righteousness, peace, and joy that you must keep. So you must first be born again.

Satan is working hard to make people focus on the world. As the Bible foretold, Satan is changing people’s thinking so that they will not meet the Lord when he returns, yet they do not realize it and give in to the temptation. Satan gives them 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 because of human nature, which loves the world, they fail to overcome sin. But the reason people live is to make use of this fleeting life to enter the eternal kingdom. So even if the things of the world seem to threaten their lives, in the end they are vanity, like chasing after wind.

If we who have received Christ live by faith, we can bear the nine fruits of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control, without great effort. So your living a life of faith in the Holy Spirit is a very important matter, one that decides your life after death.

People say that a life with many possessions is a successful life, but if they overlook the fact that there is a spiritual world, they will suffer great pain after death that they never imagined. Just as gold and stone look the same color in a pitch-dark place without light, a life lived for the flesh has no merit and no meaning. The rewards of those who sacrificed themselves for the eternal kingdom will shine when they enter heaven. So I hope you will live lives of faithfulness to God.