The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

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1 All Is Vanity, Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 (September 25, 2016) The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. 3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? 4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. 7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. 8 All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, See, this is new? It has been already in the ages before us. 11 There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after. PRAY We are starting a new series today in the book of Ecclesiastes. Typically, I don t give a lot of introduction when we begin a new series, I don t go into background and theme and authorship, but I feel we have to do a little of that with this book. Ecclesiastes is unlike any other book in the Bible. It s a part of the genre of Scripture we call wisdom literature, of which there are five books Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. Whereas some of the books of the Bible are a narrative, and they seek to tell a story, like most of the Old Testament books and the gospels in the New Testaments, and where others are letters of instruction to churches and pastors, like Paul s and Peter s and John s letters in the New Testament, wisdom literature is different. When you read Paul, for example Galatians or 1 Corinthians, you might not understand at first glance what Paul is saying, because you don t understand terms like justification or propitiation or you don t understand the historical context behind what was going on in Corinth in the first century. But once you learn the terms and you do some study, Paul is pretty clear. It takes work, but you don t spend your whole life pondering, What does Paul mean by justification by faith? No, you figure can figure it out fairly quickly. Wisdom literature is just the opposite. There are few, if any difficult, terms, and there s not much historical context to learn. So you can understand what the actual words are saying quickly, but figuring out the point behind the words and, in particular, finding out how to fit all the different wisdom in these five books together, that s hard J.D. Shaw 1

2 So, for example, Proverbs 26:4-5: Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. 5 Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. You read that and you say, What?? That s a contradiction! No, it s not. There is a time when you must answer a fool, and there is a time when you must ignore a fool. How can you know the difference? Wisdom! Which you can only get from years and years and years of meditating on all the Scriptures, especially wisdom literature, and which you will never perfect in this life. Some people call the gospel of John is the milk of the Bible that s what you give to new, baby Christians. Paul is the meat of the Bible that s what you give to growing, maturing Christians, so they can understand the great truths of the faith. But wisdom literature, and especially Ecclesiastes, is the hard candy of the Bible the Jolly Ranchers of the Bible. You can t just swallow it like milk (you ll choke), and you can t just bite into it like meat (or you ll end up spending $2000 at the dentist on a crown). You ve got to put it in your mouth and just keep turning it over and over and over and over until it begins to dissolve and you see what the author is talking about. And to top it all off, Ecclesiastes is different from the other four books of wisdom because the author sounds so cynical and jaded and burned out. In fact, a lot of people even wonder, Should Ecclesiastes even be in the Bible? because it has such an unspiritual tone to it. The author says, All is vanity! In the NIV, it reads, Everything is meaningless! See, Christians aren't supposed to say things like that, right? Good Christians don t go there. People think good Christians are supposed to be sentimental. You know what sentimentalism is? It is the excessive and unreasonable expression of feelings of tenderness, sweetness, or nostalgia. For example, I saw a video last week on the internet of a puppy. The owner poured some food in the puppy s bowl, but before the puppy began to eat, the owner said, Let s pray. And the puppy got down on the floor, with his paws out, and the owner bowed his head and asked God to bless the food, and the puppy sat perfectly still throughout the prayer, and when the owner said, Amen the puppy jumped up and ate his Kibbles and Bits. That s textbook sentimentalism. Some of you love stuff like that, and say, Oh, the puppy is so cute! And it s true the puppy is adorable. That s the one thing you cannot accuse the author of Ecclesiastes of. If that s how you think religion should always be, you might struggle with Ecclesiastes. Conversely, if you roll your eyes at stuff like that, you may have found in the author of Ecclesiastes a kindred spirit. He s called the Preacher in verse 1, and man is he some kind of preacher. I think it s actually King Solomon. But the reason he is a great preacher is because he comes after his audience. He doesn t work on your emotions like so many preachers do, with tales of fire and brimstone, turn or burn, trying to scare you into Christianity. No. He comes after your intellect, and says, Think! Be realistic! Open your eyes! 2016 J.D. Shaw 2

3 Now, what is it the Preacher wants us to see here at the beginning of Ecclesiastes? He wants us to know the nature of life under the sun. That phrase is used twice in our text for today and twenty-nine times in all in this twelve-chapter book, and whenever a phrase is that prominent within a text you know it s one of the keys to unlocking its meaning. When the Preacher uses the phrase under the sun, he means a life lived here on earth without reference to God. As if God did not exist. You re just doing your thing, making it the best you can with this life you have, but God isn t a part of the equation. It s not that you are necessarily a professing atheist. No, the Preacher says that outwardly you might claim there is a God (certainly everyone did in his day). But you live, practically, as if he didn t exist. That s life under the sun. Two points about that kind of life: first, the problem of life under the sun (it s futile). Second, the hope for life under the sun. First, the problem of life under the sun (it s futile). Let s read verse 2 again: Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. The Hebrew word used five times in verse 2 (it s the word hebel) and translated here as vanity may be the most difficult single word to translate in the whole Bible. In other places, it s translated as mist, or vapor, or breath. But one place where this word is used (and it is probably the most famous use of it in the Bible apart from Ecclesiastes) is Proverbs 31:30: Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain [there it is], but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. Now, in what sense is beauty vain? Beauty is vain in the sense that it is fleeting. You can t hold on to it. I think it was Coco Chanel, the fashion designer, who said, Nothing makes you look older than trying hard to look young. It can t be done your physical beauty, in other words, will leave you, and there is no stopping it. You can t hold on to beauty, because beauty is vanity. So when the Preacher says, Everything is vanity, all is vanity, he s saying that nothing in this physical world, nothing under the sun, can be possessed. You can t hold on to it. Not really, not ultimately. Nothing under the sun can be controlled. Nothing under the sun that you create, that has your name on it, can endure. That s the point of verses 4-7: A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. 7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. According to the Preacher, your life under the sun is like a sandcastle you build at the beach. Now, I ve never been much of a sandcastle builder I never got beyond using cups and the tools in the $1.99 basket of beach toys you buy every year when you go to the coast. But everyone knows that no matter how ornate and beautiful your sandcastle 2016 J.D. Shaw 3

4 is, it s not going to last. You build it too close to the water, the next high tide and it s gone. Even if you carefully construct one way back on the beach by the condos, it won t last past the next hard rain. And even if you could somehow bond the sand together so that it could survive a hard rain, sooner or later a hurricane is going to blow through and wipe everything out. That s all our lives under the sun are sandcastles on the beach. Some are nicer than others, some have a lot more work invested into them, but sooner rather than later they are all coming down. If there is no God, if there is no afterlife, if there is no eternity if this life is all there is your life can only be a sandcastle. Therefore, the Preacher says, if you can t build anything that lasts out of the vanity that is life on earth, then how in the world can you expect to have any hope? How in the world can you have meaning for your life? Every single human being desperately needs hope in their lives. You show me someone who feels like they have a purpose in their lives, and I ll show you someone who has energy to face the day. I ll show you someone who gets stuff done. I ll show you someone who can be motivated to endure any trial. Even if their hope in life is silly, even if what they are hoping for is evil, still if it s strong enough they ll drive right through just about anything. But, conversely, show me someone who doesn t have any hope, who doesn't think life has any meaning, and I ll show you substance abuse waiting to happen. I ll show you clinical depression waiting to happen. I ll show you heartbreak waiting to happen. Victor Frankl was a psychiatrist working in Vienna when the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, and six years later he was placed in Auschwitz. He survived, and after the war he wrote a great book called Man s Search for Meaning. And in it he recounted that the first prisoners who died were the ones who had no hope. It didn t matter how healthy they were if you had no hope you could not survive. We all need hope to live, but here s the Preacher s point: nothing you build your life on or out of under the sun is going to last. You can t build a life on earth, because the world is a vanity, the world is a mist, a vapor, it s like a young woman s beauty, you can t hold on to it, and sooner or later whatever you construct for yourself in this life to try and build hope, to try and build meaning for yourself, this world will bring crashing down around your ears. Under the sun, everything is meaningless. Everything, in other words, is futility! You may think, J.D., I have meaning in my life. I ve got my career. I m serving the people around me. I m making the world a better place to live. I can do lots of good and find meaning and purpose in my life without God or an afterlife. I ve got my family. I don t need God to love and cherish them. You know what the Preacher s response to that would be? He would say, Give me a break. Sure you can find a kind of meaning and a kind of hope under the sun, for a 2016 J.D. Shaw 4

5 time you can sort of trick yourself into thinking you have purpose, but only if you don t think. Only if you refuse to think and consider the very questions the Preacher gives you in Ecclesiastes. If you struggle with anxiety and depression, and you go on Amazon or, better yet, to Square Books (shop local), and find a self-help book so you can learn how to deal with stress and relax and enjoy life, you know what those books will tell you? Something like this: You need to take one afternoon each week, one day each month, and one week each year, and don t think. Just breathe, just relax. Hug a child, mix a drink, pet a cat. Go for a walk on the beach, or in the woods, whichever you prefer. Get away from work, get away from whatever is stressing you out, and don t think. Or they ll say, Don t think about the negative things in your life. They really aren t that bad. Most of the stuff you re worried about won t even happen. Don t let the bad determine how you view yourself. Focus instead on the positive. But you know what they will never say? They ll never say: Well, if you want to find peace on earth, you need to find out what the meaning of life is! Why are you here? What is man s purpose? What is the ultimate source of hope in the universe? They ll never tell you to do that. Why? Because they don t think there is any meaning in life. There is no reason for hope. They believe, because our culture believes, that we are only the accidental collocation of atoms, the chance product of millions of years of evolution. You re only here because you won the cosmic crap shoot, and there is no purpose to it. It was all an accident. And when you die (and one day you will), you ll rot. Then, one hundred years after you die no one will remember you or know anything about you or cared that you lived. My great-great grandparents, all sixteen of them, died over one hundred years ago, and I know a few facts about two or three of them, and nothing at all about the rest. Do you really think your great-great-grandchildren will remember more about you? Do you really think they will care? And even if you re exceptionally smart, ambitious, and hard working, and you re elected President of the United States, or you discover a cure for cancer, in five hundred years no one will remember you. Finally, if life on earth is all there is, then one day a few billion years from now our sun will burn out, and all life on earth will be destroyed, and every trace that the entire human race even existed will be obliterated. Here s what the Preacher is saying: if you are determined to live without reference to God, then you must believe that your origin on this planet under the sun is meaningless, and your destiny under the sun is meaningless. And if your origin and your destiny is meaningless, have the guts to admit your life is meaningless. Our world tells us that sometimes you feel like your life has hope and meaning, but that s only because 2016 J.D. Shaw 5

6 evolution has wired your brain to feel that way in order to help pass your genes on to the next generation. You can only feel like there s meaning in life if you refuse to think: if you refuse to think about your career and your possessions and realize that one day it will all be taken away from you (and that relatively soon), and if you refuse to look at your family, your kids whom you love, and realize they will one day, like you, be worm food, one day they will die and rot, and there s nothing you can do about it. There is no meaning under the sun. Those self-help books you get at Square Books will never tell you to think, because thinking about what our culture tells us about life on earth does not help anxiety and depression. Verse 3: What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? The Preacher says, Nothing nothing at all. That s the problem. Boy, was that a grim first point or what? But it needed to be grim, because life under the sun is grim. But under the sun is not the whole story. Second, the hope for life under the sun. All the commentators point out that the first time hebel, the big word we ve been studying this morning, shows up in the Bible is in Genesis 4, where it appears as a proper noun. Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD. 2 And again, she bore his brother Abel [hebel]. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground. 3 In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, 4 and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, 5 but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. Genesis 4:1-5a. They both gave offerings to God. Abel s was accepted by God, but Cain s was not. It led to the first murder in human history. And theologians have debated for literally thousands of years why that s so. There s nothing in Genesis 4 to indicate any reason in the gifts or in the conduct of Cain and Abel why one s gift was accepted and the other wasn't. Unless the hint is in their names. Abel s name literally means breath, wind, vanity. Cain s, though, means possession. We can t be dogmatic about this, but maybe the reason God accepted Abel s gift instead of Cain s is this: Abel knew his life apart from God was nothing. He knew it was vanity, he knew it had no meaning, unless it came to him as a gift from God. Cain thought his life was his own, Cain thought he really possessed his life, he thought he really could build a life of meaning for himself apart from God. The human heart hates to admit that life is a gift from God. We all naturally are inclined to think that our lives are our own and we can do with them whatever we want and still find meaning and purpose. But this is what the Preacher wants you to know, both the Preacher in Ecclesiastes and the preacher here today (me): that kind of thinking is utter foolishness. Either there is a God, then of course your life is a gift. Or there is no God, 2016 J.D. Shaw 6

7 then your life can t mean anything. There is no hope. But don t you see: there is no in between! So the Preacher pleads with you to think, and see life for what it is: a gift from God! Then you can enjoy your life without trying to possess it, control it. Then you can be really, truly, happy, because you will have hope. You know he loves you, he s in control, and he will take care of you. We ll talk about this more in the next weeks, but that s the point of Ecclesiastes the Preacher comes after your intellect, forces you to think, so that you can see your situation for what it really is and then find joy. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, 25 for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? Ecclesiastes 2: There is a God in heaven. And you all know this. I doubt if many of you are selfconscious atheists here today, but I know some do attend. Even you know that God exists. I m not saying that you consciously know God exists and you re just lying about your atheism. But no one can escape his presence in his or her life. We are all Godhaunted. Earlier this year in the Washington Post a professing atheist talked about how frustrated she was that in her life she couldn t shake the presence of God. She believed intellectually that God was a figment of her imagination, yet she keeps finding herself living in reference to him. At one point she wrote: If asked whether I believe in God, I would answer with a quick and emphatic no. But [then] I will send a word up to a proverbial heaven if I m on a turbulent flight, or silently ask that someone make sure my little niece and nephew stay safe. There is a God in heaven, there is a God over the sun, and in Jesus Christ this God broke through the heavens. And you know what he did? He came down to offer his life as a gift for you. We have all selfishly and pridefully, in a thousand different ways, lived our lives as if they were our own, as if they weren t gifts from God. We have sinned. But if you will turn to Jesus, if you will begin to listen to him and trust him, you ll find your reason for life. Life will not be futile anymore. It will be useful. You ll find hope. You ll find meaning. How? Because God promises that if you live your life as an offering to Him through Jesus Christ, then it s no longer true that nothing matters. No, everything matters! Everything means everything, right now counts forever. If you live your life as a gift from God, then nothing you do will ever be forgotten. Jesus says that even if you give a cup of cold water to someone for His sake it will be remembered in eternity. So, for example, Tim Keller says if you are the parent of little kids, you will regularly find yourself doing the same monotonous things over and over again. Changing diapers, 2016 J.D. Shaw 7

8 putting to bed, giving baths, reading the same ten page little children s book over and over again. You will wonder if there s any point to it. But there are only two ways to really think about that. You can think about it in terms of life under the sun only, and you ll have to say, This child is just the chance pattern of matter that is a result of a chance collision of molecules. This child eventually will die and rot, hopefully after I ve died and rotted. No one will remember it and nothing this child ever does and nothing I ever do will come to anything. Or else, This child is in the image of God. This child is an immortal soul. This child, if he or she, turns to the Lord, he or she and I will sit around the throne three billion years from now laughing and loving and in each other s arms and casting our crowns before him, lost in wonder, love, and praise. The Preacher wants you to think! Think about everything you do, because if life is a gift from God, everything you do matters. Even changing a diaper matters, if you know your life is a gift, and you offer it back to God the way Jesus offered his life for you. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Matthew 16:25. Do you see? Are you thinking about everything you do, as if it will all reverberate in eternity? Are you living with hope? One final application: Christians, Ecclesiastes is a wonderful antidote to self-absorption. If you think it s up to you to create meaning and give yourself hope to live your life, of course you re going to be incredibly, desperately self-absorbed. Of course you ll get sucked into your own problems and your needs and you won t be there for anyone else. If you want some lasting fruit from today s sermon, then go home and do a searching and fearless inventory of your life (that s Celebrate Recovery, twelve-step language; we are about to launch Celebrate Recovery at our church). Get a sheet of paper, and put two columns on it. In one column, put the stuff that won t matter to you or anyone three billion years from now. It will be filled with the things we do not because we want to do them or need to do them but because we are terrified of what other people think of us if we don t, or things we do just because of appearance s sake, and not because we enjoy them, or things we do out of anger, jealousy, or of fear for the future. Really look at everything you spend your time, money, and thought on, and ask, Why am I doing this? But in the other column, put the things in your life that will matter three billion years from now when you are worshipping around the throne of Jesus. Things like serving others, working at things you love to do and that fit you, and it will often involve good food and conversation with friends and laughing and playing with your kids. The Preacher says life is too short and too precious to live without reason. So do the inventory, and then pray that God would give you the grace to focus on the first column and forget about the other. But above all, the Preacher just wants you to think about the life God has given you, because it does count, it does matter. When we ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we ve no less days to sing God s praise than when we ve first begun. Live your life with an eye on that day. PRAY 2016 J.D. Shaw 8