Intro
This summer at The Bridge, on and off depending on who the preacher is, we’re doing a little sermon series on the Old Testament book called Ecclesiastes. If you don’t know anything about this book, let me give you a taste of it from the opening verses: “Meaningless! Meaningless! Says the Teacher. Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” (1:2) If you think, ok, maybe that’s just a verse, I’m sure the whole book isn’t like that…well, it kind of is. Which is quite the swing from what we’ve focused on for the last 10 months, isn’t it? We’ve spent time with the book of Acts, which tells the story of the explosion of the early church and the preaching of the good news. The last couple of months have been on spiritual gifts and how every believer in Christ is empowered to serve him, build up the church, and make him known. Those are big, glorious ideas. And then, one week later: “everything is meaningless!” You have a gift? Meaningless! You found a purpose? Meaningless!
I mentioned how we were going to get into this book to a few men this past week, and one Bridge long-timer looked at me with a very concerned and slightly confused look on his face. Ecclesiastes? In the summer? He says to me, don’t we want people to come to church?
All right, so why this book, and why now? A few quick reasons. One is that I want to give you a diverse diet of nourishment from God’s word. If it’s all meat, or all vegetables, or all dairy, your overall health is going to pay. You’ll be nutritiously deficient. We’ve spent a lot of time in some pretty triumphant New Testament texts, but that’s not all that we have in the Scriptures. There’s this whole genre called wisdom literature in the Old Testament. Wisdom literature tends to be brutally realistic, practical, and down to earth. It’s rugged, hence the series title. It gets right to the core of the world as we find it and how we are to live well in the midst of the brokenness in a way that honors God. We need to be able to speak this language too. As a church, we need to be diversify our diet, and spending time in this book helps us do it.
It’s also a book that doesn’t have much of a logical structure or progression to it, making it more suited for one-off sermons. I know people are away in the summer quite a bit, myself included, so you don’t need to have heard the last four sermons to understand the present one.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, I believe Ecclesiastes is really relevant for the worldviews we encounter today. One scholar even says that it is “the most contemporary book in the Bible. Ecclesiastes is a satiric attack on an acquisitive, hedonistic, and materialistic society. It exposes the mad quest to find satisfaction in knowledge, wealth, pleasure, work, fame, and sex.” (Leland Ryker) And that’s why we’re undertaking this crazy project of preaching from Ecclesiastes.
Here are a couple of background notes before we get into the text: there’s no agreement on who wrote the thing. Some think King Solomon, most scholars doubt that. The name the author gives himself is “The Teacher”. In Hebrew, it’s “Qohelet” and in Greek that’s translated as “Ecclesiastes”. Some think the book was written in the tenth century BC, some think the third. In the end, when it comes to Ecclesiastes, it doesn’t make a huge difference in terms of interpretation and application. The key is to understand the wisdom of what Qohelet writes and then to track it through to Christ.
Today we’re spending time in Ecclesiastes 2, where The Teacher searches for meaning in life in all kinds of places. That’s what a lot of people today in the world do, right? They are desperate to find meaning, to find purpose, to figure out what life is supposed to be about. That’s why some of you are here this morning! You’re asking these exact questions. Here’s where the Teacher of Ecclesiastes looked for meaning, and what he found.
I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless. 2 “Laughter,” I said, “is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?” 3 I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly—my mind still guiding me with wisdom. I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives. 4 I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards.5 I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. 6 I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees. 7 I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. 8 I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem as well—the delights of a man’s heart. 9 I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me.In all this my wisdom stayed with me. 10 I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. 11 Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 2:1-11
1. The search in pleasure
The Teacher’s repeated refrain is that all of this is meaningless. For example, verse 11 says that everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun. Meaningless is a Hebrew word (hebel) that has to do with things being a vapor, a breath, a breeze. It is fleeting, it is empty, it is a mirage. It looks like something is there, but you wave your hand through it and it’s gone. He says it’s a chasing after the wind. The Hebrew term there is connected with shepherding. Imagine someone trying to herd wind, using a shepherd’s crook to try to gather wind and keep it all in one spot. He says nothing was gained: there was no ultimate profit or benefit. And the Teacher says this is true, this meaningless, profitless, herding of the wind, of all kinds of pleasures. He knows because he’s tried it all and has had almost unlimited access to pleasure.
He says it’s true of laughter. He says it’s madness! Now, it’s great to laugh. But to make it the goal of life to have fun, or to get laughs, is ultimately empty. Think about Chris Farley, who Adam Sandler said was the funniest guy of all time. If you’ve seen any Saturday Night Live sketches from the early ‘90s with Farley, he was hilarious. My favorite was where he plays a motivational speaker who lives in a van down by the river. He’s hired by a dad and tells the teenagers of the home that they’re going to amount to diddly squat. Just like him, he declares, they will live in a van down by the river, just before falling and breaking their coffee table into pieces. Chris Farley lived for laughter. He was also deeply insecure. He said that the most terrifying sound in the world was the silence after the laughter died down. He was afraid of losing weight because he thought it might make him less funny and take away one of his shticks. Chris Farley was ultimately found dead at the age 33 after overdosing on cocaine and morphine, hours after begging a prostitute not to leave him alone. The funniest guy of all time was at the same time miserable. Laughter can be a chasing after the wind.
The Teacher says it’s true of alcohol. Devoting yourself to wine and all the folly that comes from being intoxicated is ultimately empty. Beer commercials tend to glorify the use of alcohol. They don’t tend to include the clips of some college girl hugging a toilet at 3am or the alcoholic father who’s just been fired from his job. Anyone whose life has been touched by alcoholism can tell you that whatever buzz or release it provides in the moment is fleeting, a vapor that drives someone forward in a self-destructive pursuit of another drink. It’s so completely profitless.
He says it’s true of success. The Teacher undertook great projects, built houses, planted vineyards. If the Teacher was Solomon, foremost among those projects was the temple in Jerusalem. He made a name for himself and left his mark on the world. He was massively successful.
Caroline Wozniacki is a former women’s tennis player. At age 20, back in 2010, she became the number one ranked player in the world. She was one of the best and most recognizable women’s athletes in the world, making millions, scoring magazine covers. It was the culmination of all she had been working for. It was her whole life’s purpose. She told ESPN that the day after she became number one, she had an epiphany: nothing had really changed. “You reach the highest pinnacle and then realize that everything is the same,” she said. “It’s depressing. Life really just goes on.” (The article on ESPN where she was quoted has since been taken down) She’s sounding like Ecclesiastes! Meaningless!
The Teacher says it’s true about wealth and accumulation of possessions. This, too, he knew by experience. He had slaves and servants at his bidding. He had more herds and flocks than anyone before him. He amassed silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. Again, if this is Solomon, the Bible goes to great lengths to describe the extent of his wealth. This, of course, is what many people in the modern West have lived for. Whoever has the most toys wins, right? Get the second home, the boat, the private plane, advance in your career, become the CEO, get paid.
I’ve listened to the testimony of Lynsi Snyder, the granddaughter of the founder of In ‘N Out Burger. If you don’t know what In ‘N Out Burger is, I am so sorry for your loss. It is the greatest fast food burger in the world. Of all the profitless, chasing of the wind activities you could pursue, I would recommend driving down to the nearest location, which is a 6 hour drive from here in Keizer, Oregon. Get a 3 x 3 animal style. That’s all I’m going to say. Back to Lynsi Snyder. At age 28, she became the president of In ‘N Out Burger and the youngest female billionaire in the US. She had money and possessions that you and I could only dream of. And yet, by the time she was 32, she had been divorced three times and had hit rock bottom in her personal life. She was trying to fill a void through success, riches, and romantic love that proved simply elusive. It was a chasing after the wind. This is a bit too early in the sermon to say this, but Lynsi Snyder found what she was looking for in Christ. That’s reflected in the Bible verses that are on the bottom of the drink cups and burger boxes. Like I said, it’s the greatest fast food restaurant ever. Moving on!
The teacher alludes to two other sources of pleasure. He says he had male and female singers. Everywhere he walked on his expansive property, there was surround sound provided by the most talented and beautiful of musicians. Music is wonderful. We can lose ourselves in it. In my very subjective opinion, Explosions in the Sky plays some of the most beautiful music I’ve heard. I’ve seen them in concert. It was an incredible experience, but the next day, the dishes still needed to get done. There were still crying kids. Conflicts still had to be resolved. The pleasure provided by music is fleeting.
And it’s the same with sex. The Teacher says he had a harem. Obviously, there’s something quite culturally and historically conditioned about this. However, you can understand how for a man in the ancient world, this suited “the delights of a man’s heart”, as the Teacher says. In some ways, internet pornography mimics this. A wide variety of human objects to choose from, pledging to satisfy whatever sexual desire you might have on a given day. But most people who have dealt with pornography will tell you that it, too, is empty. It’s fleeting. Whatever satisfaction it provides is short-term, a chasing after the wind, that leaves you worse off after than you were before.
You can see why Ecclesiastes could be called the most contemporary book in the Bible, right? The Teacher names all these pursuits in life that closely resemble 21st century Western culture. He had it all. He says “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.” He lived as a hedonist, devoted to fleshly satisfaction. And from personal experience, this is what he found: “everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.” It all fell drastically short.
2. The search in wisdom
But he’s not done! He keeps going! Here’s where he searches next:
12 Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom, and also madness and folly. What more can the king’s successor do than what has already been done? 13 I saw that wisdom is better than folly, just as light is better than darkness. 14 The wise have eyes in their heads, while the fool walks in the darkness; but I came to realize that the same fate overtakes them both. 15 Then I said to myself, “The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise?” I said to myself, “This too is meaningless.” 16 For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered; the days have already come when both have been forgotten. Like the fool, the wise too must die!
Ecclesiastes 2:12-16
The Teacher anticipates this conclusion in chapter 1, where he says that he had increased in wisdom more than anyone who had ruled in Jerusalem before me, but that this wisdom, too, was a chasing after the wind. He says in 1:18, “for with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” And if the Teacher is King Solomon, he would know this firsthand. 2 Chronicles tells us that early on in his reign, Solomon had a dream where God invited him to ask for anything he wanted. Solomon recognized that his great need as a king would be for wisdom: “give me wisdom and knowledge, that I may lead this people, for who is able to govern this great people of yours?” (2 Chron. 1:10) God’s response was that because Solmon hadn’t asked for wealth or honor but instead for wisdom, he would give him all of those other things in unparalleled measure as well as granting him wisdom. Years later, rulers from as far away as Sheba completed the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to experience Solomon’s wisdom.
With that in mind, the Teacher doesn’t deny that it’s better, “under the sun”, to be wise than to be foolish. He says that wisdom enables you to see. You’re not groping around in the darkness, stumbling into things, stubbing your toe, knocking yourself unconscious because you can’t see a thing. Wisdom is like having eyesight. It’s like having a flashlight to shine in the darkness. You can avoid some of the traps and snares that foolish people fall into. A wise person, for example, can see how destructive and dangerous it can be to flirt with or build intimate relationships with people of the opposite sex outside of your marriage. Fools rush headlong into that behaviour and in the process destroy their marriage and the marriages of others. A wise person sees the snare and avoids it. That’s good.
But there are at least two reasons why the Teacher says, in the end, that wisdom still fits the category of meaninglessness. One is again from verse 18. With more knowledge, you get more grief. You might have a flashlight to shine in the darkness and eyes to see, but what if the dark room you’re in is filled with horrible creatures and dangerous weapons? The fool is oblivious to all of that, because ignorance is bliss. Think here about the movie The Matrix, if you’ve seen it. Neo blissfully lives in a computer simulation of the world, until he’s given a choice by Morpheus. Take the blue pill and stay ignorant or take the red pill and have his eyes opened to the reality of the world. He takes the red pill, which may be the right choice but also results in hours and hours and hours of trouble, and then, 20 years later, even more hours of strife that nobody was asking for. Wisdom increases grief and sorrow because you become more aware of the brokenness that exists.
The second reason he says wisdom is meaningless is because from his perspective, the wise and the foolish end up in the same place. They all end up in the grave. In terms of earthly destiny, Albert Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci suffer the same as Joe Blow down the street and you and me. No matter how wise and intelligent you are, you are human, you are a vapor, here today and gone tomorrow. The Teacher says that because of this common fate, even the legacy of the wise will soon pass away. Sure, you remember a few of the smarter people who have ever lived. But how many brilliant people, even those who have contributed immensely to our human knowledge and technological advancement, have you never even heard of? “Like the fool, the wise too must die!” In this way, a life spent pursuing knowledge and understanding- accumulating degrees and certifications, building up a massive library, and so on- is yet another vapor and chasing after the wind.
And he’s still not finished!
3. The search in work
17 So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. 18 I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. 19 And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless. 20 So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. 21 For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. 22 What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? 23 All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless.
Ecclesiastes 2:17-23
Here the Teacher turns his attention to work. He says people toil and labor. They pour themselves out in time and energy. This is the means for making their fortune, not to mention their legacy and status. This is yet one more place where Ecclesiastes names a fundamental element to life in modern Western society, where work often becomes someone’s identity. There are countless examples of people who have sacrificed relationships with spouses and kids for the sake of work. This is true even from a Christian perspective. I met someone recently whose parents were missionaries. For ten months a year, the children were placed in a boarding school without seeing their parents. For the two summer months they were reunited, the parents were advised not to show too much affection towards the kids. The reason was so that the inevitable departure in the fall wouldn’t be as painful as it would if the kids had grown attached to the parents. So many of us place so much of our life’s emphasis into our work at the expense of everything else in life.
The Teacher has done something like this and says that what comes of it is grief and pain. Pain physically, emotionally, relationally, and so on. He says that for all the work you put in, you yourself don’t get to enjoy it. Deuteronomy 28:30 says this is one of the curses of sin: “you will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit.” Someone who toils endlessly leaves it all to someone who hasn’t. Often times, that non-toiler then squanders it. Did you know that only 12% of family businesses remain viable in the third generation of the founder? Only 3% are viable into the fourth generation. There’s a Chinese saying in line with this that says “wealth does not survive three generations”. There are plenty of prominent examples of businesses that the first generation built, the second generation ran and expanded, and the third generation ruined. Grandchildren are the worst, am I right? In all of this, the Teacher concludes that work is ultimately meaningless, vaporous, a chasing after the wind.
Laughter, alcohol, success, fame, wealth, music, sex, wisdom, education, work, legacy, all meaningless. And maybe you’d say, well what about relationships? What about marriage and family and friends? I’m guessing the Teacher would have lumped those in too. Thinking about Solomon, he had 700 wives and countless children. He could have come up with some reason those pursuits, too, were a chasing after the wind. I have had close friends for a season, but then things changed, life situations altered, and I no longer see them. I am not in regular contact with any of the three guys who stood beside me at my wedding. Not because of a falling out, rather because of the distance of geography and time. You could hear him saying, you raise your kids, invest your money in their education, teach them everything you know, clean up their filth and feed them for decades, and then one day they leave and never return home to live with you again. The home is empty. What was the point? You could see how the Teacher might say all of this, too, is meaningless.
His point is not that these things cannot be good in their proper context. It is that, in his wisdom, as the Teacher zoomed out and took a big-picture view of life, he saw that all of the things that men and women toil after and work themselves into anxious knots over and try to find meaning in just…fall…short. They can’t fill the void. They are good in their own place, but they cannot possibly be the foundation for life. And some of you know this! You have felt this! You have thought this too! One of the things the last two years of the pandemic has done is revealed the faulty foundations that people had based their lives on. Suddenly, there was perspective. People began searching for something more than had been on offer to them.
Where did the Teacher land on this? His conclusion can feel somewhat underwhelming, though we’ll look at it in more detail in a few weeks. In 2:24 he concludes, “a person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.” It sounds like he resigns himself to the small things. Everything is meaningless, so simply be content in what life is and move on. There is wisdom in that, but is our hope limited to it?
4. The Reverse of the Curse
See, despite being inspired by the Spirit to write these words, the author of Ecclesiastes is limited in his vision. Biblically, he’s limited because he is pre-Jesus. He simply can’t see the full picture of life that is presented in the New Testament. However, he may also be limited because he chooses to limit his vision. There’s a phrase he repeats over and over again: “under the sun”. What this term means is that this is how life is, on earth, without any view of heaven. This is what the world looks like without bringing things into the frame of a transcendent God. This is how things are as we find it, apart from redemption. This is the world that is held in the bondage of sin and death. This is the world that is under the curse of sin. This is the world going all the way back to Genesis 3, where relationships became distorted between people and God, people and creation, people and other people. This is life under the sun.
But the New Testament says this will not always be the case. In 1 Corinthians 7:1, Paul writes that “this world in its present form is passing away.” 1 John 2:16 reads, “everything in the world- the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life- comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.” The world as the Teacher knew it is passing away. It’s time is limited. It has a shelf-life, an expiry date.
But something new is going to take its place. This was foreseen by the Old Testament prophets. Remember the meaningless toil of work? Remember how the fruit of work being passed on and squandered? Isaiah 65 says,
“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind…no longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. They will not labor in vain.”
Isaiah 65:17, 22-23
The New Testament looks forward to something similar. Revelation 21:5 has God saying “I am making everything new” and in Revelation 22:3, we read that in the new heavens and earth, “no longer will there be any curse.” The world under the sun as the Teacher knew it, and as we know it, will be undone. The curse will be reversed. Sin and death will be no more!
This world in its present form is passing away, and a new world will take its place. The curse of death and meaninglessness that has plagued creation since sin entered the world will be done away with. Labor will no longer be in vain. But the New Testament takes this one step further. It says that this future reality, the undoing of the curse that the Teacher of Ecclesiastes knows so well, has already broken into the present. You can already taste it. Mark summarizes the main message of Jesus’ teaching this way: “The time has come…the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15) The kingdom of God is God’s reign breaking into the present world of brokenness, the world under the curse of sin. Jesus says that this kingdom has come. It is present in him. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that if anyone is in Christ, the old has gone, the new has come. They are a new creation.
Eternity has broken into the present. Heaven has invaded the earth. The curse is being undone. It happened through Jesus. It happened particularly through his death and resurrection. Through his death, Jesus did away with the curse of sin by faithfully resisting every temptation. He was faithful to the end, breaking sin’s power. Through his resurrection, Jesus did away with the curse of death by breaking its power. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul speaks about the resurrection and says that death has lost its victory and its sting. He says “thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” We have victory over this bondage through faith in Christ. We may live in the same kind of world that Ecclesiastes speaks about. But we live with a hope that was not available to him. We live as people of the resurrection. We live by the Holy Spirit now poured out on the people of Jesus, as a down deposit of what will one day be true of all of us when we are raised like Christ. We live by His victory renewing us, healing us, pointing us to eternity.
And this, then, is what our task is: like Paul says in Colossians 3:2, to live with our eyes set on Christ, not on earthly things. Because, again, those things are passing away! This doesn’t mean that we don’t still work and enjoy pleasures in this life and build things and have families and purchase properties. However, all of this is now seen in its proper context, in light of eternity. Jesus tells us in Matthew 6: 25-34 not to worry or be anxious about the things of this world, like food and shelter and clothes. Those are obviously important. But Jesus says, seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all of these things will be added to you as well. So we no longer seek our identity or meaning or purpose in the things of this world, which in the final analysis are a vapor, a chasing after the wind. We devote ourselves to the Kingdom, we devote ourselves to loving the Lord and loving others, because that is what will last for eternity. Paul concludes his magnum opus on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:58 with these words: “therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”
Conclusion
C.S. Lewis had this great quote. He said, “we are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” Too many people think the totality of life is making mud pies in a slum when infinite joy is offered to us in Christ. Stop with the relentless pursuit of more meaningless mudpies! Stop devoting your lives to things that are empty and vaporous. Seek the Kingdom! Live for what is eternal. The world is passing away, the new is coming, the new already has broken in through Christ.
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