Ecclesiastes 8:10-13

In the world of electrical, chemical, and mechanical things, cause and effect is usually very easily seen because the effect of a cause generally occurs very quickly. Results happen fast. If you make a mistake when you are dealing with electricity and you allow yourself to become the ground for an electrical current, you know in a hurry when the current goes to the ground through you, you get the jolt. You know right away you made a mistake.

There is a problem, because God has mercifully arranged His spiritual and moral laws in such a way that they proceed toward their effect at a much slower manner, which allows time for changes to take place within us as we learn to use them. If death resulted immediately from sin, God’s whole purpose would have ended in the Garden of Eden. That is all she wrote. As soon as Eve touched the fruit and picked whatever it was off the tree, that was it. But that is not the way moral and spiritual law works.

Like I said, God has arranged it so that the effect takes place much more slowly than it does in the area of electrical, mechanical, and chemical things. But the same merciful slowness God built into these laws also allows the sinner to ignore sin’s effect and allows him to continue on his deluded path right into destruction. That is what these verses are about in Ecclesiastes 8.

We are being warned by Solomon about this principle. That is, the principle of cause and effect is working regardless of whether the effect takes place quickly or slowly. It is there and it is working and the effect will follow. Not necessary right on the heels of the sin, but it will nonetheless follow. People misunderstand delay in judgment and that is what Solomon is talking about here: when God delays judgment. The effect of this misunderstanding is what Solomon is talking about here. People allow their misunderstanding to think somehow or another that God does not care, that God has gone way off, that somehow or another they have gotten away with sin.

Ecclesiastes 8:11-13

Let us go back to Ecclesiastes 8, because we see here a principle that is at work in human nature, and we have got to be aware of this. Thinking about what Jeremiah said—the people love to have it so—Solomon says in verse 11, by reflecting on his observations, watching people, thinking about himself, watching events occur in his land:

Just because the penalty does not occur immediately does not mean it is not going to come. Be aware! Adam and Eve set aside the teaching of God because they became convinced that the penalty—death—would not occur. When they sinned and death did not occur immediately, they were even more convinced. But death did occur and other evil things happened in their lives that did not have to happen.

We have got to understand that it is part of the way God operates, that He gives us time to learn lessons; that He give us time to come to a better knowledge of Him; that He give us time to understand cause and effect. If God reacted immediately when we sinned, it would be all over the very first time. There would be no building of character; there would be no learning by experience; there would be no growth in wisdom; there would be no understanding of human nature.

Do not be deceived because the penalty does not seem to fall quickly.

Ecclesiastes 8:11

When one begins to deeply analyze what sin does, the wonder is not that God occasionally executes justice as He did with Nadab and Abihu, but rather why He allows us to continue to live. Human nature is really tricky. I have given a series of sermons on how it deceives us.

Do you see what that is saying? Human nature is so tricky that it can deceive even one who is converted to begin to take the grace of God for granted. Human nature has the tendency to pull the human being further and further into sin. If God does not execute His wrath and His justice immediately against a person and instead gives him grace, He gives that person an opportunity to continue to live longer in order that grace may be able to work in his life, and that he be led to repentance instead. "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?"

Ecclesiastes 8:11

Now God is merciful, there is no doubt about that at all, but there is an end to God's mercy. God gives us plenty of time to repent but all too often as we find in Ecclesiastes 8:11, men take advantage of that to do more evil. We do not want to get into that kind of thinking, but you see there is lodged in the back of our mind the idea that somehow or another we can get away with it, that this little thing is not going to matter all that much.

But you know what? That kind of thinking, though we may never actually do the sin, has a bad result. It lures us into idleness, because rather than conquering we instead have a tendency then to do little or nothing and to just drift.

Ecclesiastes 8:11

All too often (and I think you'll agree to this), we hem and haw; we procrastinate about doing or not doing things that we clearly understand God has shown us (that we must change). But this attitude of procrastination or hemming and hawing or putting things off tends to prove Solomon's statement in Ecclesiastes 8:11 where he says, "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil."