Sermon Tone Analysis

WHY DO I EXIST?

Various Scriptures

 

We start this series today on the seven wonders of man--the seven big questions that everybody on the planet asks.

And with war going on as it is today, with everything going on in the world, people often ask themselves the question that I am going to deal with here this morning: Why do I exist?

What in the world am I doing here?

What is the purpose of my life?

As one philosopher said, “I think, therefore I am.”

I am not sure I understand all of that.

But I think, and you think, and if you will think with me this morning, I guess we will exist for a few minutes together.

The question is: Am I just a product of random selection as Darwin would have us to believe and other evolutionists would have us to believe?

Are we just here because we happen to be the ones who survived the battle of the fittest, or is there something more?

Am I here living and breathing for a reason?

Is there a higher purpose for my life than what I have found so far, or could it really be true that life is a gift from a loving God who created me?

When you think about existence and what it all means, there are really only two ways of dealing with this.

There are only two possibilities for determining what our existence is all about.

That is human reasoning.

We either read the philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, and others who are writing even in our day, or we come up with the idea that human reasoning really doesn’t work and we depend on the divine revelation.

As Christians, we depend on what the Bible says and divine revelation, and you have to somewhere along the line make a choice personally.

Am I going to trust human reasoning--what some human being said to work this thing out, or am I--and it takes faith, it really takes faith--am I going to put my faith in what the Bible says about man’s purpose and his existence here on this Earth?

Am I going to trust Him for what He says about why I am here?

Now I want to go to the book of Ecclesiastes and talk about Solomon for a few minutes.

When Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, except for in a few places, he was all messed up.

He really was.

Solomon was probably the richest man that ever lived on the face of the Earth.

The Bible tells us that gold and silver were so plentiful in Jerusalem in Solomon’s day that they were like stones.

Bill Gates today would be a pauper compared to Solomon.

Solomon was probably the wealthiest man who ever lived.

Solomon had about 700 wives and 300 concubines.

That means 1,000 women hanging up their pantyhose in his bathroom everyday.

Along with all the women from all the different parts of the Middle East that he had married in his day, they brought in all of their different gods and all of their different religious beliefs and all of their different systems of worship; and Solomon came to the point in the end of his days where he was just totally messed up.

He walked away essentially from his close personal relationship with God.

Even though in Ecclesiastes he does finally come to the right conclusion that the whole duty of man is to obey God and keep His commandments…he finally comes to the right conclusion, but he is a mess.

Thirty-three times in the book of Ecclesiastes Solomon says life is meaningless.

If you read the Bible sometimes the way I do--you just have to laugh.

This guy was a mess!

Here was a guy who had all the blessings of God.

He was the wisest man on the planet.

He began to think about his existence and why he was here and tried to evaluate it by human reasoning.

With human reasoning (or life under the sun, as he called it) he came to the conclusion that everything that he had seen in his life, except God, was absolutely meaningless.

Let me just throw a few of them up here.

He says in Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Meaningless, meaningless says the teacher.

Utterly meaningless.

Everything is meaningless.”

“I have seen all the things that are done under the sun.

All of them are meaningless.

A chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:14).

And then this last one he is just so depressed, he is so down, he is so messed up, he says: “I praised the dead who are already dead.

More than the living who are still alive.

Yet better than both is he who has never existed” (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3, NKJ).

This guy is a nut, isn’t he?

I mean, he is!

You talk about the need for Valium.

This guy needs Valium!

He needs anything he could get.

Prozac.

He needed whatever.

Maybe a few stiff drinks.

I don’t know what he needed--something to pull him out of this.

He was a mess.

Thirty-three times!

Look at just a few of the things that he says are meaningless.

In Chapter 2, verse 1, he says, “I thought in my heart ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure...’”

He said, I will find out if pleasure is a good reason for existence, which is what most Americans live for.

And he said, “…I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good, but that also proved to be meaningless.”

Talk about a guy given over to pleasure.

This guy just gave himself to every kind of pleasure that you could imagine.

He came to the conclusion, it’s meaningless.

Look at verse 11.

He said, “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done…” He said, all of the labor, all of the work that I’ve done.

He built palaces and he built the temple for God, and he did so many things.

“When I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

He says in chapter 4, verse 4, “…I saw that all the labor and all the achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor.”

He said that.

Do you know what he is talking about here?

He says, “This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

He says that man’s just trying to keep up with the neighbor next door who just put a garage on his house and now we’ve got to have a garage.

Or get a new dress.

It’s called the market- driven economy.

That’s what we have.

And he said, I’ve found out about that.

And he said I studied that, and that’s meaningless.

Chapter 5, verse 10, “Whoever loves money, never has money enough.

Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.”

But we all think that way, don’t we? I’ve often thought, If I just had a little more money.

How many have ever thought that before?

Be honest.

He said our wealth is never enough.

And yet we are, as Americans, the richest nation on earth.

“This too,” he said, “is meaningless.”

All the money you can make and Solomon was a multi-, multi-billionaire…he said it’s meaningless.

And in Chapter 9, in verse 9, I could just keep going on.

Sometime you ought to read through this book and see what a mess he came to.

He was a man who had a close relationship with God at one time and began to follow other ways in his life and it ruined him.

He finally comes to this conclusion and this is funny when I read it.

He says, verse 9 of chapter 9, “Enjoy life with your wife whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days.”

Talk about a need for Valium, Prozac.

This guy just needs to go to sleep for a while or something.

“Enjoy life with your wife whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless”…I am just trying to get you to get the idea that this guy is a nut.

He came to the conclusion, after giving himself to wealth, after giving himself to pleasure, after giving himself to human achievement, after seeing what the market-driven economy is like, and all that he knew, and everything that there was…he said it’s all meaningless.

I’ve got a few quotes that I want to give you.