Ecclesiastes 12:1-5

The book of Ecclesiastes chapter 12, reading verses 1 through 5. Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say I have no pleasure in them, while the sun or the light or the moon or the stars be not darkened, nor the clouds return. turn after the rain. In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few. And those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low. He shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low. Also, when they shall be afraid of that which is high and fear shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail, because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets. It was a well-known comedian that talked about when he, in his younger years, he bought a $75 car. And he recounted one winter that his car began to go into a skid, and he said that he’d always been taught that when you go into a skid, you’re supposed to turn. turn into the skid so that you can correct the car and drive it and get it out of the skid. But he thought to himself in that moment of terror, that’s like leaning into a punch. So he decided not to do that, so he swung the wheel the other way, and with disastrous results, that was the end of his $75 car. When you turn into a skid, you turn into a skid, you, you turn into a skid. you can correct it when you turn away from it, it gets worse. Old age and death is something that everyone, it seems, wants to turn away from. No one wants to meditate on death, the grave and what comes after that. It’s avoided like the plague. However, to be realistic. in facing death, you need to look at it carefully. You must turn toward it in order to write yourself. Solomon realizes there’s a tendency for people to forget God. We talked about that in the past. They’d like to put him out of their minds and not think about that matter of old age and death and so forth. But he’s talked about, and we looked at this last week, remembering your creator in the days of your youth. What a responsibility we have to look to God and to use the better years of our life to serve him. Not wait and think, well, I’ll serve him when I get older, or when I reach the time when I can’t do all the things I want to do right now. That’s the wrong way of looking. at things. As an incentive here, to that end, Solomon causes us to look at old age. In the latter part of verse 5, talks about the mourner in the street and so forth. He talks about your death there. We’ll pick that up. Lord willing, in another study. But he talks about the declining sorrows and weakness that is associated. with the death that we face in this life. It’s a very sobering passage of Scripture. One day you’re going to meet God. You have an appointment you cannot ignore. You can’t cancel it. So as we reach old age is a time for reflection, I think. It’s a time to realize we’re about ready to meet God. And we should be able to meet God. be preparing for that occasion. Now you must reflect upon your advancing sorrows, he says here in verses one and two. Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth while the evil days come not. Where the years draw nigh when thou shalt say I have no pleasure in them. There are going to be days when you’re going to say there’s no pleasure to be gotten. and you see evil days here in the sense of troublous times coming in your life. The respectable man who was a Dutch pastor theologian related a visit that he had with a parishioner. His parishioner told him, he said, above my life, I said, above my life, I I could write the words no more. And he meant by that his family and friends were dead. His house, his hearing, his health were gone. He lived in an aged people’s home, and so his freedoms were restricted. He couldn’t walk very well anymore. And the memory of the, the ad was, slipping to make matters worse. So much that he had known was no more. And as he looked at it, he thought pretty soon I’m going to be no more too. These evil days cast a mental gloom over the end of your life. Real life is a darkening landscape. Now we might want the bright and beautiful days of sunshine that we’ve had in the past. You look at chapter 11, verses 7 and 8, we looked at it before. Truly the light is sweet and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes, behold the sun. But if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember that the days of darkness, for they shall be many, and all that cometh is vanity. The sunshine in your life is going to disappear. He’s using this in a figurative way. They’re not going to be those bright and glorious days that you had in your youth. It’s going to be difficult. You know, the light of the sun, the sun, the moon, and the stars, he says, are going to be dim, so to speak. He says the rain ceases only for the clouds to return and for it to rain again. One sorrow follows upon another. I don’t know about you, but it seems like as you get older, you fix one thing and then something else breaks down in your body. You know, it’s like a constant, it’s like an old car, you know. Things just start falling apart on you. So your heart grows heavier and heavier, and it seems like it’s an endless struggle to try to survive life and get through it. How are you going to be encouraged? in your old age, if this is the case, how are we going to handle this situation? Well, if you’re going to have a spiritual uplift, it’s certainly not going to come from something inside you. It’s going to come from something outside of you. It’s going to come from the Lord. And in old age, God can certainly produce in his people the beauty of his holiness. He can certainly produce in us graces. to help us in our old age and overcome advancing sorrows. My friend Gordon Ketty once told me that the weather in his native country of Scotland could be described like this. If you can see the hills, it’s going to rain. If you can’t see the hills, it’s raining already. And he said, that’s, that’s raining already. the way it is in Scotland. It’s gloomy, an overcast, all the time. And that’s the way Solomon seems to portray old age here for us. There are many rainy days. And if we’re not rooted in the Lord by living faith, it’s going to be very difficult to negotiate through all those things. There’s no sun to brighten the clouds and remove the clouds and burn them off. The only help we have is the son of righteousness to Lord Jesus Christ himself. That’s our encouragement. So you must reflect upon advancing sorrows. You must reflect upon your declining faculties. Boy, he paints a very dark picture here of old age and things falling apart and of the body as we look to the future. You’re keepers of the house. are going to fail. Your arms and your hands. As he says here in verse 3, the first part, and that in the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble. Now the house here, he’s speaking of, of course, is the body. We have a earthly house called this tabernacle in which we live, the body. lives inside this body. And he’s saying that there’s going to be a case where the hands tremble and you can’t hold things very well. You know, the hands that were used to work to feed and produce for the body, can’t do the things that they used to do. You can’t hold the tools you used to hold. You don’t have the strength you used to have. And you know, if you’ve ever watched. When you watch elderly people, sometimes they have trouble getting the spoon or the fork to their mouth because their hand is shaking so much, it makes it more difficult to eat. And you can appreciate this. Once, you know, you your hands and arms worked untiringly to provide for yourself. And you could do hard labor and work and so forth. But he’s saying those days eventually get to the point where you can’t do them anymore. That’s a sad situation. My dad used to tell me I don’t feel any older. I just can’t do the things I used to do. I think sometimes that’s the way it is. You just, your body can’t do it. Inside you can, you would like to do them, but your body can’t do them. But your body can’t do them anymore. So the trembling hand, the arm that can’t can’t do that hard manual labor that used to do. And so we see this happening to us. And then he says the strong men here no longer work like they used to. And the strong men shall bow themselves. The strong men here are your legs, your feet, and your thighs and so forth. They’re the strongest muscles you have in your whole body, or your leg muscles. Like muscular weightlifters, they have the power to bear you up, to carry you along, maybe use to run or walk for miles without a problem. That’s no longer the case. Can’t do that anymore. They bend under the weight of your body. Where once you used to be able to be carried along by your legs, now they’re getting feeble, and they can’t hold you up like they used to. And you’ve got to sit down more often. That’s a difficult thing. And then the cane comes along, and you have to use the cane. Or even worse, you have to get the walker out and use the walker because you need support, because your legs cannot hold up very well. Zacharii 8 forces. Old Men and W. women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, every man with his staff and his hand because of old age. You know, he needs the support of some type of cane or staff to hold him up. Boy, those legs that used to enable you to lift heavy burdens, you know, you could bend those legs and lift things up. He’s not going to be able to do that anymore. And those days, those days, are gone. Then he says the grinders are going to cease. Now, you might wonder what in the world is he talking about, but he’s talking about your teeth. He’s talking about that which chews and crushes the food and grinds it up so that you can get nourishment from it and eat it. Your teeth often succumb to decay and gum disease, and eventually they may be lost. or they have to be pulled and there are a few left. I remember the famous Baptist minister, Charles Haddon Spurgeon once, had a terrible fall when he was older in France. And when he fell down some steps, he broke off several of his front teeth right at the gum line. He said, it was painless dentistry, is what he called it. They were gum. on an instant. Solomon’s point here is the time will come, and your teeth are few. The grinding work ceases, and every meal can be a real drudgery. And you have to choose maybe softer foods to eat, or you’ve got to cut your meat up real small, or even if you’re eating an apple, you gotta get it all cut. You can’t bite into an apple, as you used to do, and eat it as you once enjoyed doing it. And then he says, those that look out your windows. verse three, the fourth part. Here he says, those that look out of the windows be darkened. Now, it doesn’t take too much imagination to realize he’s talking about your eyes. The windows are your eyes and lids of your eyes or the shades, so to speak, go down over the windows. He said, eventually everything becomes a little, dim. It’s darkened. Of course, there are rare instances of those that may reach older age and still have pretty good eyesight. Moses is 120 years old when he went up on the mountain to view the promised land. He could see the promised land. I don’t know how he was able to do it, but evidently his eyesight was still good. Ordinarily, though, the site decays in older people. We get cataracts. glaucoma, optic nerve damage, you can’t see up close, you know, everything starts to go. And it’s a difficult situation that we run into. Now, today we have surgery for cataracts and they can clean up your eye and you can, you know, it’s like almost getting like a second sight. But back in the day, here that Solomon’s writing, you get cataracts that got to the point where you, your eyes became very dim and you just couldn’t see anymore. In the ability like aged Isaac, you couldn’t tell the difference between his sons by looking at them, because he just couldn’t see well. And your general vision becomes less and less, and therefore there’s less and less pleasure and greeting. or things of that nature that you might engage in. And then he says here in verse four, the doors stay shut because the grinding is low. Oh man. He says the doors shall be shut in the streets when the sound of grinding is low. Some have referred this as when you get older, you just don’t want to go out so much anymore. You want to stay at home. home. Although when we read in Job about Leviathan that huge monster, he talks about a dinosaur-like creature that he’s saying he mentions in Job 41 talks about the doors of your face and who can open the doors of this monster’s face and see those terrible teeth that are behind it. So he may be just talking about the doors of the doors of this monster’s face and see those terrible teeth that are of your faith here. I don’t know of your face. I’m not sure which one, how we should interpret this exactly. But we know that as you get older, you sort of tend to want to stay home more. And then, of course, the other issue is the speech goes. The voice that was once strong fades, maybe to a whisper. for the loss of teeth affects your speech and the ability to speak clearly and you may you may lisp as you get older. The loss of the ability to speak properly or well deprived you of your social joys. You can’t meet with people and talk with them like you used to talk so that even speaking becomes a chore. It’s depressing as we go along. here. You rise up at the voice of the bird here in verse four, the second part. He says when the, he shall rise up at the voice of the bird. What does this mean? Well, you don’t sleep so good. You know, you’re light sleeper. Little things wake you up easily. and so the idea is as you get older, the least thing can disturb and awaken you. You have a habit of waking up early. Maybe like at the crack of dawn when the clock crows or something, you’re, you wake up early and you just can’t sleep. So you don’t sleep well. You’re not able to get the rest you once could. Your daughters of music are brought low. He says in the latter part here, verse four, all the daughters of music shall be brought low. This has to do with your hearing. Daughters of music. Hearing, hear the ears affect your ability to listen to music. To hear, you know, a symphony or something. type of music played and enjoy that. It’s just not something you’re able to do anymore. The hearing becomes impaired. Someone, if you can’t tell the difference between a beautiful voice and Kermit the frog anymore, well, you know, it takes all the pleasure out of listening, doesn’t it? You become like old Barzilli that we read about tonight. They told King David he could no longer enjoy concerts and music. You know, take Chimham instead. Don’t take me. I don’t know if that was one of his sons. It seems like it might be. Take one of my sons who can enjoy it. I’m just too old. I can’t hear it anymore. I can’t even taste my food anymore. Do that. You’re fearful of heights in the streets. Verse five, he says. Also, when they shall be a afraid of that which is high and fear shall be in the way. When you get aged, you lose your sure-footedness. You’re not as stable as you used to be. The situation makes for climbing up and down like a ladder or even a flight of stairs, something that could be dangerous for you. It could easily fall. There are those who now have like alert buttons that they wear in case they fall. They can push that button and get some help because you can’t get up. I had an elderly lady in the church. Some of you remember maybe Mrs. Viorle who had a fall in her home, was laying there for hours. It’s a good thing her son came by every day to check up on her to see how she was doing. He finds her laying on the floor. She just couldn’t get up. And that’s what happens. We get older, we lose that ability to handle things as we used to in the stables that. The stables that we used to have. You can’t even get up on a stepstool, maybe to get something out of the cabinet in the kitchen or something. Because you might fall easily from it. There’s the fear of being in the way. Maybe walking out on the streets, maybe you’ll fall, maybe you’ll trip. Maybe there’s something you miss the curb or something like that. There’s danger from kids on bikes and cars and all kinds of things out there in the street. So the great outdoor world holds dangers that once you didn’t even think about. But now you’ve got to think, if somebody bumps into me, what’s going to happen? I’m going to go over. fall down or what’s going to happen to me. It’s not like it was when you were younger. And then he says, your almond tree, talks about your almond tree here in verse 5 as well. And the almond tree shall flourish. Now, the blossoming of the almond tree refers to the hair, turning gray and then white. The almond trees blossoms are beautiful, but they’re only on there for a short time and they fall off very quickly within a few days. So you can have beautiful head of hair. You know, you may be brunette or blonde or black-haired or red-haired or something like that. But the day’s going to come when you’re going to lose that coloring. When I was at the gym, I, the older gym I used to go to, there was a beautician. It worked there. And I asked her, it’s a house business, because it was a really slow time. And, you know, people were having a hard time making ends meet. And she said, well, we’re doing, she said, I’m doing good. She said, one thing you can always count on, and that is the elderly women coming in to get their hair dyed. They’re going to come in no matter what. So they, you know, keep their hair coloring. They don’t want to lose it. And so that kept her going. The white hair of age marks a fleeting passing of your life, your almond tree. And then you’re like a grasshopper. He says here in the latter part here, the third part here of verse five, and the grasshopper shall be a burden and desire. Shall fail. Now he’s pointing to an aged grasshopper maybe late toward the fall. And it conjures up the image here of this tired old grasshopper, a survivor of the summer, summer crawling along your doorstep because his joints no longer work the way they used to work. He used to have, be able to spring. It had spring in his step, so to speak, he could hop all over to. place. Not anymore. And so what happens is the joints stiffen up. We lose the free movement of our legs and our muscles too wasted maybe to help us. So we’re like that grasshopper sort of just dragging ourselves along in our old age. Every movement of your body is a chore. It’s a struggle. to get out of a chair. Have you ever seen the elderly people trying to get out of a chair? And, you know, they can’t, they can’t seem to get up. It’s hard. You know, it’s hard to do. We used to be able to just pop right up. Those days disappear on you. Even walking to the bathroom can be a chore. People have arthritis and stiffen joints and calcium deposits and the bones and sort of bind and the movement is not fluid and you lose that. It’s very difficult. And he says here, your desire shall fail. Your general appetite for life, whether it be food, pleasure, sexual relations, you lose that. Is there anything in the entire spectrum of your experience could be included here in your desire failing? No vitamins. No drugs can restore you. There’s no fountain of youth to get you back to where you were. All that’s gone. Science is not going to discover some fountain used to restore you what you’ve lost. Even when you have operations on your knees or on your eyes, that only delays the inevitable. And so it’s very difficult. And the next thing he talks about, and the last part of verse 5 is death and we’ll save that for next week. Death. That’s the next thing that’s coming. Now, that’s a pretty gloomy, depressing list of what’s going to have, but it’s pretty realistic. Solomon is not one to pull punches. He tells you this is the way it’s going to be. You have to get used to it. That comedian’s $75. card was absolutely demolished because he turned, tried to turn out of the skid instead of turning into the skid first in order to get out of the skid. And it was a complete disaster. We have to look at these things in order to face death. Solomon says turn to this, look at it carefully, see what’s going to happen, and realize you need to be prepared to die. Old age is something we have to face. You can’t turn away from it. It’s common. It’s inevitable. The sorrows and declining faculties of advancing years are evil days. They’re troublesome. They’re troublesome. They’re difficult. The one factor, the key factor, is one of the reasons here that you have to serve God while you’re young, as we studied last week. Because there’s going to be a day coming, you may not be able to serve God like you used to. Maybe you’ll have to be a prayer warrior. in your own bedroom somewhere. And that might be all you can do. Maybe you can write some letters or something. But you’re not going to be able to do the things you do now. And so he says you better use your youth wisely. Now is the time to meditate, to pray, to properly worship God, to study the word of God. Because you’ve got to take care of your spiritual health now so that your spirit. health will carry you through your old age. Remember when we studied last week that Paul says his outward man is decaying. But his inward man is renewed day by day. And that’s the way it has to be for us as Christians. When your earthly house becomes run down and you become physically incapacitated, what’s left? What’s the only thing you’ve got left? is your spiritual state. And this is why growing in grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ is so essential. Let me put it this way. Since old age is full of evil days, lay up as many Christian graces as you can to sweeten those days. Because that’s really our only hope. And so I hope that as difficult as this passage is the Lord. at it’s realistic and we say yes it’s time to serve the Lord now because day is going to come and I’m not going to be able to do what I do now whatever your hand find it to do do with all my might because the day is coming when you’re not going to be able to do it so may we reflect on that and realize that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us but his strength may be spiritual strength that he gives us not always necessarily the physical strength that we would like to have, but he’ll give us the spiritual strength to carry us through the difficult hours and days. Let’s close.