Meaningless

Welcome

Good morning everyone, and to anyone joining us online good morning to you and welcome! Today we are starting a new sermon series on the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is a bit of a strange book in the Bible. It’s one of those books of the Bible, like Lamentations, that after you read it you think, “Well, that was not exactly fun.” And because of this, we have a tendency to avoid it. We like to read uplifting passages of scripture, not depressing ones, so we neglect some parts of the Bible. But, the same God who inspired the Psalms and the Gospels inspired the book of Ecclesiastes which means that just like those other books, we should spend time reading and reflecting on Ecclesiastes. As we begin then, let’s read chapter 1 of Ecclesiastes together, pray over it, and then dive into our discussion on it.

Ecclesiastes 1:1–18 (NIV)

1 The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem: 2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” 3 What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? 4 Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. 7 All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. 8 All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. 9 What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. 11 No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. 12 I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 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. 15 What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted. 16 I said to myself, “Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” 17 Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. 18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.

Prayer

Overview

Ecclesiastes opens with an introduction, although it is a bit vague. We are told that Ecclesiastes is written by the “Teacher” who is a son of David and king in Jerusalem. The Hebrew word Qohelet is what is translated as teacher, and it means “one who gathers people.” While there is some speculation on who the teacher is, most scholars believe it lines up best with Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba. Solomon was given the kingdom of Israel after the death of David and when Solomon was young he had a unique encounter with God. God came to Solomon in a dream and told him that anything he asked God for would be given to him. Solomon was young and inexperienced and made a good request, he asked for wisdom so that he could rule the nation well. Solomon must have had a decent amount of wisdom because he wrote 3 out of the 4 wisdom books in the Bible, Proverbs, Songs of Songs, and Ecclesiastes.

However, Solomon didn’t always remain this shining start of hope and always make the right decisions. He became greedy and power hungry. He broke the kingly commands we find in Deuteronomy 17 and was more concerned about accumulating possessions and women. He had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines and would even go towards the false gods that these women followed if they were from another country. Solomon ended up in a state in his life where he did not deny himself anything he wanted. Because of this, he ruined his kingdom and God told him the kingdom would be divided during his son’s reign.

Once we know these things about Ecclesiastes, I believe we can better place the timing of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes reveals an older, repentant Solomon who is looking back on his life and the mistakes that he has made. One scholar says, “Ecclesiastes appears to be the kind of book a person would write near the close of life, reflecting on life’s experiences and the lessons learned.” While we can’t know that for certain, that it definitely the tone that the book takes. One description of the book of Ecclesiastes that I came across paints a good picture of how we might view the book. The author of one commentary says that...

“Ecclesiastes sounds like a crazed man downtown. He smells like he hasn’t bathed, looks like it too, and as we pass by he won’t stop glaring at us and beckoning to us that our lives are built on illusions, and that we are all going to die.”

This book gets a bit of a bad reputation because of how depressing it can be, but throughout the book we are pointed to important truths that we really need to grasp and deal with. We need to understand death because all of us are going to die at some point or another. And typically, we only talk about death when it happens to someone close to us. It’s almost like taking a test with zero preparation for the test. Experiencing death in life is a struggle, which is why we shouldn’t shy away from talking about it. Of all people, Christians should be prepared to do what others cannot do, and that is to face death head on and acknowledge that there is no way to deny it, no way to escape it, and as a result, we need to find a way to approach it. It’s important that we do this because there are times when death does not make sense to us. People die that have no business dying. They are good people who die in an accident of some kind. People who get diagnosed with an illness that will take their life. And if we haven’t thought or talked about death in these ways, they can be even more difficult to go through.

As an example of how to look at Ecclesiastes, let’s go back to grade school and one of the lessons I am almost sure we all had at some point. At some point in grade school, when you were learning how to spell different words your teach likely told you about the I before E rule, right? This is supposed to be a rule that helps you when you’re spelling some words. If you were taking a test on how to spell BELIEVE you could mumble to yourself, “I before E.” For a lot of words this rule helps, right? But it isn’t always that easy is it. There are exceptions to the rule aren’t there? The rule then quickly becomes I before E, except after C, and sometimes Y, and in words that sound like a such as neighbor and weigh. As you learn more and more words you quickly realize that rule doesn’t apply to every word, that there are exceptions to the rule. Ecclesiastes is the book of the bible that aims to address these exceptions in our lives.

You see, we can read Proverbs 13:21 which says...

Proverbs 13:21 NIV

21 Trouble pursues the sinner, but the righteous are rewarded with good things.

That’s the rule that we’re told in proverbs, but if you’re a Christian you likely have realized that this doesn’t always apply. We often see people who are far from God who have wealth and good health just like we see good, God fearing people with cancer diagnosis with nothing to their name. Ecclesiastes helps us in these situations, it provides wisdom for us when the formulas in Proverbs don’t seem to line up with our life.

Ecclesiastes 7:15 NIV

15 In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these: the righteous perishing in their righteousness, and the wicked living long in their wickedness.

The Teacher points out the truth that we have all seen in our lives. We all have seen good, righteous people die far to young or in bad circumstances while evil people continue to live on. The Teacher knows the frustration of this, but admits that this is one of those things that happens in life. We even see Jesus point out exceptions to the rule in John 9 when they come across a man born blind.

John 9:1–3 NIV

1 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

The disciples were basing their assumptions on this blind man off of that rule, that if you are a good person then nothing bad happens to you. But Jesus reveals that isn’t the case, that life doesn’t always follow a formula. This is one of the key things that we learn from this book. Life is unpredictable, bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, but in all of it, God is in control.

Ecclesiastes 1

Chapter 1 serves a bit as an introduction to the book. The teacher prepares us right from the start for what he is going to talk about. One way we look at essays can be used to look at this chapter, the who, what, and why questions. So who is the teacher mentioning throughout the chapter? Everyone. He lumps everyone together and talks about how people all work for what they gain under the sun. He mentions too that everyone will be forgotten by the next generations. Eventually we all die and fade away out of the minds of loved ones and family. So he’s talking about everyone. What is he talking about? Everything is meaningless. That sounds joyful doesn’t it? And finally, why is everything meaningless? Because the gain that we seek does not exist under the sun. The desire that we seek cannot be found under the sun, it cannot be found in all of the things that we work so hard in. The phrase “under the sun” is used a lot throughout the book, about 30 times. It means that Solomon is looking at the question of meaning from an earthly perspective. If this world is all there is, if there is no God, no afterlife, no final judgement, then everything is absolutely meaningless.

What happens though, is that we begin to think that the things “under the sun” are what will satisfy us in life. Everyone here at some point has thought “If I could just get _____, I would be happy, I would be content.” We tell ourselves if we just had a new job, if we could get our dream house, a relationship, a certain car, travel and see certain places, or who knows what else, we tell ourselves that we would be content. But all of us know at some level that that is false. Verse 8 tells us that the eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. As long as we continue to look to these things under the sun to make us content, we will always want more. We will always view our lives as lacking something that we need. This pattern falls into what Solomon would call a chasing after the wind. We can try to chase the wind all we want, but are you ever going to catch it? Will you ever grasp the wind in your hand and think, “Now I am satisfied.”? No, because that is impossible! You can’t grab the wind just like you can’t catch smoke. Which, the Hebrew word for meaningless, hevel, means vapor. So much of what we pursue in life is vapor. It’s here one day and gone the next. You can work 40 years at the same company and when you retire they will throw you a party, they might give you a gift, but the next day someone else is going to walk into your office and replace you. The sun will rise and life will continue on.

For most of us, there was a time when we would beg God in prayer for things that we now have and take for granted. There was a time when you begged God for a spouse, but now it’s hard for you to show love even to them. Maybe you begged God for a house, for a certain amount in your bank account, and you told yourself “If I just had this ONE thing, I would be content.” But now that you have those things, you take them for granted, you don’t thank God for them, and you have your eyes set on something new that you think will satisfy. We live in a culture that has more money, more entertainment, more recreation, and more stuff than any other generation. And yet, it remains a miserable world full of heartache and depression for many of us.

Ecclesiastes does give kind of a bleak outlook on life, but God has a purpose for this book. God wants us to see how these things under the sun that we pursue are meaningless. He wants us to develop a hunger for something greater than a good job, money, or a nice house. He wants us to hunger and push us towards faith and contentment in God. Now, Solomon does include at the end of the book what his main point is. We could flip to it in chapter 12 this morning and feel better about what he is trying to tell us about everything being meaningless. But the approach of the book intentionally requires us to enter discomfort. As a reader, we have to start off hearing about all of this meaningless stuff and work through twelve chapters of tension, poetry, proverbs, unanswered questions, and unsettling speech, before arriving at the point that Solomon want to make. Because of this, we have to be willing to take a look at things that we do not like. We have to be willing to walk through the uncomfortable brokenness of life. Learning to read Ecclesiastes is an exercise in and of itself, but it trains us to wait on God in the midst of the unanswered questions and unpleasantness that we have in our real life. Ecclesiastes trains us to wait on God in the midst of the uncomfortable.

So that is how I want us to end this morning. We’re not going to jump ahead and read Solomon’s main point. Instead, I want us to think and reflect on our lives. Ask yourself this question...”What am I pursuing under the sun in order to find meaning and purpose in life?” What earthly, material thing are your thoughts captivated by? Think about those things, then ask yourself, “What is the purpose of those things 200 years from now?” The house that you desperately want will probably be a shack in 200 years or will have been turned to ash. The job you want probably doesn’t even exist anymore. The money you worked so hard for is worth a fraction of what it once was worth and you can’t even use it if you wanted to.

When we realize what we are looking towards that is meaningless, God is faithful and will point us to what really contains meaning in this life.

Prayer