Life with or without God

Life with or without God

Ecclesiastes 1:13-14

I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! 14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

‌The only way we can approach Ecclesiastes is to read this book acknowledging the contrast between 2 very different outlooks on life, one acknowledges God and the other does not. One draws close to God the other is far away. The one that acknowledges God pursues a relationship with Him where they rely on Him and Him alone. The one who acknowledges God lives from His provision. When we rely on God then we experience not only His provision but His joy and Harmony.

‌On the other hand the one who fails to acknowledge God and draw close to Him do not honor Him, and they are as scripture declares living under the sun, on earth and under heaven. This means they are relying on worldly things and this existence is filled with pain, toil, disillusionment and sadness.

‌These 2 contrasting ways of life reflect the experiences of Adam and Eve before and after the fall. Originally, creation was good, and man and woman felt no shame. But after Adam and Eve’s rebellion, life was filled with pain and toil, murder, evil, drunkenness, shame, and curses, and worldwide confusion. The world that God created, which He called good became evil and destructive.

‌Ecclesiastes emphasizes the chasm or separation between what God intended for us and what we actually experience as a result of sin. We cannot escape this fallen world, sin abounds around us and this world will not get any better but the Bible declares that it will become worse. We face a daily choice of acknowledging God and experiencing Him in His glory or going it alone, living life our way.

‌The Book of Ecclesiastes is one of the most unusual and perhaps most difficult to understand books of the Bible. These words of the Preacher show us the futility and foolishness of a life lived without an eternal perspective. The question in Ecclesiastes isn’t about the existence of God; the author is no atheist, He believes in God. The question is whether or not God matters. And that is the question I want to ask you today, “does God matter?”

‌In the search for this answer, the Preacher in Ecclesiastes searched the depths of human experience, including despair. He thoroughly examined the emptiness and futility of life lived without eternity before coming to the conclusion of the necessity of eternity and that humanity needs to not only be sure but be very sure if life ended today as we know it what will eternity be like for us, where would eternity be. Scripture declares that there are 2 places where we will end up either Heaven or Hell.

We have heard it time and time again that we cannot take anything with us and when it comes to life or death than nothing material that we have really matters. “We face the appalling inference that nothing has meaning, nothing matters under the sun. when we realize that indeed nothing else matters then having a relationship with God It is then that we can hear, as the good news which it is, that everything matters – for the word of God declares that God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.’ “that ought to make us think about our everyday motive for life.

‌The question now presents itself; there are only 2 ways to live life. 1. with God or 2. Without Him. Can you cope with life without having any idea where you are going? You don’t have all the answers to life. Your view of life doesn’t give you any hope of achieving very much. Nature will not answer your questions. History baffles your attempts to understand it. You don’t like to think about your own death; yet it is the most certain fact about your existence. One day we will all face death” where you spend eternity will be weather you live your life with or without God.

The Preacher begins his sermon with his first conclusion (though not his ultimate conclusion). Looking at life all around, he judges it to be vanity – nothing, useless, meaningless. “A wisp of vapor, a puff of wind, a mere breath – nothing you could get your hands on; the nearest thing to zero. “It is an absolutely accurate statement of life when it is lived under certain conditions; but it is not true as a statement of what life must necessarily be

‌(Author George Orwell) “Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

‌Using the language from the world of business, the Preacher asked a worthy question. He knew that life was filled with labor– but what is it worth? What does it profit? Jesus expressed a similar thought in

Mark 8:36: For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

‌our passage of scripture in Ecclesiastes speaks about how man toils under the sun: The idea isn’t having to do with the weather. The idea is “in this world that we can see; the material world.” It is life considered without an eternal perspective. “If our view of life goes no further than ‘under the sun’, or just what we see and achieve here on earth than all our endeavors will have an undertone of misery.” ‌God’s heaven and eternity are not in view here, only the day and night skies. This is another way of saying, “under the sun.” All man’s work, accomplishment, and searching for wisdom seems to amount to nothing.

If the answers to the seeming emptiness of life could be found by wisdom, the preacher Solomon was the one to find them. Solomon’s great wisdom was a gift of God. When God offered him whatever he pleased, he asked for wisdom, especially the wisdom to lead the people of God. Therefore, God made Solomon so wise that he wrote thousands of proverbs, and he was considered to be wiser than all the men of his day. This is the wisdom of those who guide us to a better life in the here-and-now; how to live a healthier, happier, more prosperous life. This wisdom certainly has value, and many lives would be better for following it. Yet if it excludes a true appreciation of eternity and our responsibilities in the world to come, this wisdom has no true answer to the meaninglessness of life. It only shows us how to live our meaningless lives better.

Did we ever consider that the seeming futility of life comes from God; He has given it to man. God has deliberately built a system where life seems meaningless and empty without the understanding of a living, active God to whom we must give account. It may seem cruel of God to devise such a system, but it is actually evidence of His great love and mercy. He built within us the desire and need for that which brings meaning and fulfillment to life. All of life in itself and what we see and experience should draw us close to God. If we are experiencing trials, we turn to God for help. If we are experiencing blessings we turn to God with praise.

Augustine wrote, the Creator made a God-shaped space in each of us, which can only be filled with Him. This desire is found not only in us as people, but also in creation itself. God also subjected creation to this futility until He one day brings the promised fulfillment.

‌(Romans 8:20).For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope

‌At the same time, this is a burdensome and hard task. It isn’t always easy to find the right answers because our pride, self-reliance, and self-love work against finding them. ‘under the sun’ thinking is so frustrating. It is frustrating because there are twists (what is crooked) and gaps (what is lacking) in all thinking. No matter how the one who lives under the sun ponders it, he cannot straighten out life without depending on a God who is in control and as everything under control.”

‌This approach is natural for anyone who looks for the answers under the sun, apart from an eternal perspective. They look inward for wisdom and answers, instead of to the God who rules eternity. The more the Preacher understood life under the sun, the greater his despair. The more he learned, the more he realized what he didn’t know. The more he knew, the more he knew life’s sorrows.

‌You see Solomon tried all things, and found them vanity or useless. He found that searching for knowledge was tiring, not only to the flesh, but also to the mind. The more he saw the works that were done under the sun, the more he saw their vanity or uselessness; often made him mad in his spirit. He could neither find satisfaction for himself, nor did he see the things of the world do any good to others. Solomon discovered even the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom only brought to the surface man’s wickedness and misery; so that the more he knew, the more he saw and this caused him to mourn. Let us learn to hate and fear sin, the cause of all this vanity and misery; and instead value Christ; to seek rest in the knowledge, love, and service of the Savior.

In the end all the knowledge and things we acquire will not be worth one thing if we have lost the purpose of our lives, why we were created and if we had lost our hope of eternity gaining what God has prepared for us. We can carry on through life doing things on our own and believing what we want to believe but in the end it will come down to my relationship and your relationship with God, not what we have gained in this world in material things or even knowledge but what treasures we have laid aside in Heaven.

Here are some things to remember as we make our choice, for the choice is ours to make. I cannot make yours and you cannot make mine:

‌1. We are a fragile mixture of the dust of the earth and the life that God has breathed into us. Before the foundations of the earth were laid he knew us. He formed us with His very hands. He knitted us together in our mother’s womb. He knows us personally, He knows our name.

‌Gen: 2:7 “then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”

‌Gen. 3:19 “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.””

‌Eccl. 12:7 “and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.”

One day we will all have to face death and eternity. One day we will all have to face God. Will He say “well done my faithful servant or depart from Me I never knew you.

‌2. We were created to be morally upright but we have proclivity, as fallen creatures, to be trapped in unhealthy patterns.

‌Gen. 1:26-31 “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. and there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

‌Gen. 3:16-18 “To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.”

God has given us our own free will to choose what we will do with life and where we will spend eternity. Sure we may still make bad choices after accepting Jesus but the difference now is our past has been erased and we also have an advocate who is ever interceding on our behalf, this doesn’t mean we have a license to sin but that we can live a sin free life when we ask for forgiveness.

‌3. Our hearts were created to worship and serve God but tend toward being dominated by selfish habits as a result of our separation from Him. We are full of sin and unable to live a life pleasing to God without the acceptance of His great salvation plan and the washing away of our sins by the precious blood of Jesus.

‌4. People ensure each other in sin just as Adam and Eve aided each other’s sin in the garden.

‌Gen.3:6“The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.””

‌lets be reminded today that your sin is your sin; the path that you choose will be your path. Let’s especially be reminded that we are not to aid or go along with others who sin or who are a part of it and especially we are not to overlook it. Everything that’s against the word of God today is overlooked; we have become accustom to sin and have watered it down. People even Christians think they can do and say as they please today and they believe it’s okay, God overlooks it somehow. It’s a common thing to find a person who says they are Christians but have nothing but bad to say about the church and the people who attend.

‌5. The earth’s systems, designed by God to cooperate with people for their benefit, are now out of balance.

‌Gen. 3:17-19 “And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The world that God created as good has become infested with sin but in the midst of this sinful world the Spirit of God is calling a chosen people out to bring glory to God the one who created everything and set it all in motion. There is nothing in this world that could ever come close to satisfying humanity because we were created to worship God. we have a freewill and a choice to either serve God or reject God, it’s not good enough to say that you believe in Him but you must accept Him into your heart and life, you must be born again.

‌Ecclesiastes is the account of a man who looked inside himself and honestly recorded what he found there. Ecclesiastes does not detail Solomon’s spiritual apostasy. But it is possible that his disillusionment with pleasure and knowledge eventually caused him to hate life and worship other gods. The kingdom of this great king came to nothing because he abandoned the God who gave him what he possessed. In the end we are called to acknowledge our innermost thoughts, good and bad, to God, who will free us from the vanity of life without Him. We have two choices to live life without God and suffer eternal damnation or to serve God and reap the benefits not only of life eternal but life an abundant life here today and every day of our lives.

I’m gonna tell you not because I am a pastor but because I am a child of God that serving Jesus and living this life for Him is the absolutely best life you can live. Sure you will have trials, sure you will have trouble, sure you will have sickness but you are not without hope like the rest of the world but you will have someone to walk with you every step of the way and whatever situation you find yourself in, with Jesus by your side you will come out a winner for the victory for you was won on Calvary. Why not choose Jesus, taste and see that the Lord is good and I’m sure that if you will try Him and place your whole life in His hands, you will not regret it, you will then enjoy the peace that only comes from knowing God in a personal way.

SONG: I found the peace

Oh what good would it be.