Sunday message · Vanity: Ecclesiastes series
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Message Summary
In the third message of the Vanity: Ecclesiastes series, Jeff Varughese calls the book a king’s memoir of how a naive king became a wise one. Though the king can sound cynical, Jeff hears a man who had everything, still felt unfulfilled at times, and wants to spare readers heartbreak. In Ecclesiastes 7:20–22 he finds a problem we all share: we are bad judges.
Verse 20 says no one on earth is always good and never sins, and verse 22 adds that we know how often we ourselves have cursed others; Jeff hears the king humbly including himself. We misjudge even ourselves, he says. He cringes at hearing his own voice played back, and most of us bristle at criticism because it confronts us with a view we cannot control. If we misread ourselves, how often must we misread others?
Seeing only in part, we fill in the blanks with assumptions and gossip about people instead of talking to them. Judging, Jeff says, alienates people and damages relationships, misrepresents God and turns people away from him, and costs us the chance to help, since we cannot sincerely pray for someone while judging them. We judge because we like control and think we know others’ motives, as if we were God. Yet all have sinned and fall short of God’s standard (Romans 3:23), king and commoner alike. Maybe, Jeff suggests, we were never created to judge.
Luke 5 shows another way. When Jesus eats at the home of Levi, a tax collector seen as a traitor who extorted his own people, the Pharisees complain that he eats with scum. Jesus replies that healthy people don’t need a doctor; sick people do. “Scum needs to be thrown away, but sickness needs to be healed,” Jeff says. Jesus was not afraid to get blood on his hands, and Isaiah 53 says that by his wounds we are healed. The Pharisees judged with limited understanding, while Jesus, who knows all things, turned a con artist into a disciple who later wrote the Gospel of Matthew.
God could have judged us harshly, but he wants to be invited into our lives so the great physician can heal us. We love each other because he first loved us (1 John 4:19); we were created to love, not to judge. In John 8, Jesus tells the accusers of a woman caught in adultery that whoever has never sinned should throw the first stone. When they slip away, the only one without sin offers her new life instead of condemnation, a love that gives freedom from sin, not freedom to sin. Maturity, Jeff says, is a growing awareness of both our sin and God’s grace.
Jeff closes by saying God loved us first so that we can love others, and “love is the antidote to judgment.” When judgment wells up toward someone, followers of God can ask for power to love that person. To anyone unsure what they believe, he says God is not judging them; whatever their baggage, God offers his limitless love.
