Exploring My Strange Bible - Ecclesiastes Part 1 - Hevel

Episode Date: August 28, 2017

In this first episode we unpack the introduction to the book of Ecclesiastes and touch upon the issues of authorship. Mostly we'll camp out on the core the metaphor the teachers uses to talk about all of life. It's the Hebrew word “hevel” which means vapor or smoke. You won't be able to see my hand-carved Danish tobacco pipe, but you'll hear all about it. It's a powerful image to talk about the fleeting nature and unpredictability of all of life.

Tim Mackey, Jr. utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 10 years worth of lectures and sermons where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith. And I hope this can be helpful for you too. I also help start this thing called The Bible Project. We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology. You can find those resources at thebibleproject.com. With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week. All right, this is the first of a new three-part series on the book of Ecclesiastes. It's one of the more odd and unique books of the Old Testament.

It contains all kinds of fascinating and even scandalous ideas that you won't find elsewhere in the Old Testament. These were three teachings that I did as a teaching pastor at Door of Hope Church. that I did as a teaching pastor at Door of Hope Church. And this first message is just going to unpack one of the most important metaphors and words in the book itself. The Hebrew word is hevel, which means vapor or smoke. And you'll discover what that means in the teaching that follows. But just for one visual thing that happens in the message that you won't see because you're listening on the podcast, is that at one point I pull out my new employee gift that I received when I came on the pastoral staff at Door of Hope, which was a hand-carved old Danish pipe and a bag of really high-end English smoking tobacco. a bag of really high-end English smoking tobacco.

And that is what I light and smoke on stage during the message while I was giving the teaching. And if you're wondering why I do that, well, you just have to listen and you'll discover. But anyway, welcome to part one of an exploration on Ecclesiastes. So let's dive in. We are starting a new series here tonight, yes? In what book of the Bible? Ecclesiastes. So I invite you to open your Bibles with me to the book of Ecclesiastes. It's kind of in the middle-ish. If you need your table of contents, no shame in that. Did you know there's a table of contents in your Bible? In every Bible you've ever opened, there's a table of contents. No shame in using that thing. Man, I'm telling you, especially when you're looking for a book that's only like eight pages long, like Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes chapter 1, verse 1. The words of the teacher,

son of David, king in Jerusalem. Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless. What do people gain from all of their labors at which they toil gain from all of their labors at which they toil under the sun. What did you learn at church tonight? So what? Okay, so that's interesting. What on earth is this book doing in the Bible? This isn't what I expect to find when I open up the Bible. That might be the response of many of us that we've had to Ecclesiastes in the past or that you're having right now. And some of you are wondering what on earth are we going to do for the next month and a half, right, through this book? Because you've got it right there. If you want to know what the book's about, you just read the two key phrases that will occur over 40 times throughout the rest of the book, and that is meaningless and life under

the sun. So I think that'll suffice. Amen, right? Let me pray. So, wow, what is going on here? Why is this book in the Bible, and why are we going to spend a month and a half exploring it together? And the fact is, is that this is one of the most beautiful, profound, and dark books in all of the scriptures. Many books in the Bible have a positive function of teaching us things that we couldn't know anywhere else, revealing us God's character, God's heart for the world, what he's up to, and so on. The book of Ecclesiastes is not positive. It actually has a negative role in the Bible. The book of Ecclesiastes is essentially trying to deconstruct everything that you thought you knew about life and the world and to reduce you to your knees by the end. So that the good

news can in fact become good news. Because often the good news about Jesus comes to us as people who are actually quite content with life, or at least we think we are. Or at least we think that true contentment and fulfillment in this side of the new creation and Jesus' return, we think it's actually maybe quite possible. And we actually spend most of our waking hours trying to pursue deep levels of happiness and fulfillment and contentment. And the book of Ecclesiastes is just going to throw a big wet blanket on your life for the next month and a half.

Why are we doing this? We're exploring this negative book of the Bible. There's lots of different reasons why. I'm going to focus on one tonight. Josh will focus on another one next week. This book of the Bible is aiming at a very common mindset, a pattern of thinking that's very, very prevalent. It was prevalent in the author's day. It's prevalent in our day. And I call this pattern of thinking the myth of religious fulfillment. And it's the idea that it's very prevalent, especially in religious communities. It's the idea that, you know, I get religion in whatever form.

In this case, we're a community of Jesus, so Jesus religion or whatever. So I follow God. I follow Jesus. I do the God thing for a reason. We may not even be very explicit about it, but the driving motive behind it is I do this religious God-Jesus thing so that my life is enhanced as a result of it. It's like yoga or Pilates or something. You don't do it unless you think you're going to get something out of it, right? It's like yoga or Pilates or something.

You don't do it unless you think you're going to get something out of it. And so I believe that my life will be enhanced. And it's a mindset that essentially says God's role in my life is to make things go better so that my life gets better, so that maybe I don't have as many problems, so that maybe I can become a better, happier kind of person and so on, and I can live a happier life and be good and that things will go well. It's the myth of religious fulfillment.

I invite God into my life so that my life will go better. Now, there's a whole bunch of us in the room who are like, yeah, so good that like the person sitting next to me is hearing that right now. Or like it's so good for so many people in the room to hear. Let's peel back the layers quick here. I'm going to do it gently.

Book of Ecclesiastes will peel back the layers and not so gentle of a way, right? So of how we think and how we actually kind of deceive ourselves. So you know that you have great expectations about what God is going to do in your life. Usually we don't think about them. We just assume God is up to something in our lives, or at least we hope that he is. But we're very aware of what God is not doing, what we expected in our lives,

when life gets very hard, when things get difficult. So you know what your expectations are when your expectations are lying in pieces in front of you on the floor. That's kind of how life goes in general. I don't know if this will seem powerful to you, but it was a powerful experience, at least for me. I'm going to reach back to 1999. Anybody? Anybody? A very important movie. I realize I keep thinking of illustrations

that are movies that I don't like. So I should probably think of a new kind of illustration, but this was the best one I could think of. So 1999, a very important trilogy released and started. 1999, anybody? Trilogy? Yeah, the second trilogy of Star Wars, which was perhaps the greatest flop in American cinematic history, right? I was raised on the original Star Wars trilogy. I had like the action figures and the Millennium Falcon and the Cloud City thing, you know, and I listened to cassettes when I was a kid, and I would just play it over and over and over again when I was a little kid, and so on. So the original trilogy had just epic status in my mind. It formed my imaginative universe as I was growing up as a kid. I had no idea. I had huge expectations when

I walked into the movie theater in 1999, right? Because I was like, this is going to be as epic as the original trilogy. And I was sorely disappointed, right? So Jar Jar Binks, who was thinking? You know what I'm saying? Like the most ridiculous, blasphemous character to introduce into that story. But anyway, so, and the whole trilogy felt that way. Each movie I saw, I was like, you're kidding me. People, I just paid money to see that. What a waste of time. So that's how I felt. So here's what's funny, is I didn't realize the expectations I had going into that movie

theater until my expectations were dashed to pieces sitting on the floor in front. You know what I'm saying? And this is how life is. We like to think that we are kind of wise and have control over expectations, but reality is we all come to life with all kinds of expectations that we don't even know are there until reality takes a very different turn. It's true in life, it's true with movies, and it's absolutely true in our spiritual journey as well. We have all kinds of default modes in our thinking. The myth of religious self-fulfillment. And it's not just that some people think this way. I think it's that

all of us move towards this kind of thinking at multiple points throughout our lives. Why is God in my life? Why am I doing this Jesus thing in the first place? Well, I hope to get something out of it. And I know that I'm hoping to get something out of it when I'm not getting anything out of it. You know what I'm saying? It becomes very clear to me that, yeah, my life's not getting better. And I'm like, why did I invite Jesus into my life in the first place? And my life is actually getting worse. And my prayers aren't being answered the way I thought they would, or they're not. Do my prayers make any difference at all? What is prayer in the first place? And many of us are there right now, and many of us have been there or are going to be there. Places in life where it actually becomes very difficult to believe in God, period, or to believe

that God is good, and that he cares about me, or that he's involved in my life or in the world in any significant way. And so many people, they come to conclusions, they tried the Jesus thing, whatever, didn't work for me. They ditch belief in God, they ditch their faith. Those are possible conclusions. But Ecclesiastes is going to open up another possible conclusion that we can draw when God is doing in my life exactly what I never expected or never wanted, or he doesn't seem to be doing anything in my life, and what on earth is happening. The book of Ecclesiastes is going to raise the possibility of what if God is not the problem? What if my expectations are the problem? What I thought I was signing up for

was actually some version of the myth of religious fulfillment. I'm going to invite God into my life to enhance my life, to make it better, to solve my problems so that things, I'll be a happier, more successful person or something like that. And again, we think, no, of course,

I would never think like that. But think the times of great disappointment, when it wasn't just a movie that flopped, when it's like your life that's a flop. And if among our first responses is to get angry at God, to blame God, what's happening there? What's happening is hardship has a way of exposing our core beliefs and our core commitments and values.

And what's being exposed there is that, well, I guess I thought the deal was I'd do the Jesus thing and then God makes my life better. And my life's not getting better. What's the disconnect? Maybe it's my expectations that need to be altered. And one of the things that the book of Ecclesiastes is aiming at is these grave distortions and misconceptions that we have about what we should expect out of life and what we should expect out of God's involvement in my life.

And any time you're reconfiguring your core beliefs about God or the world or whatever, that's just a painful experience. And that's why reading the book of Ecclesiastes is going to be a painful experience for many of us. Some of us are going to be deeply disturbed that a book like this is in the Bible. Others of us are going to experience the book of Ecclesiastes as like a breath of fresh air. You're like, finally, somebody's talking about this. So we're calling the series The Divine Disconnect because it's sort of like, well, I have these ideas about

what it means for God to be involved in the world and in my life, and then I have like reality that seems to point in a whole other set of directions. How do those two go together? The book of Ecclesiastes is exploring our struggle. It humanizes the struggle of what it means to live life here under the sun, as he calls it. So this is a very important book. It became real to me at an important season in my own journey of following Jesus. And our prayer is that it could play that kind of role in the life of our church as well. Ecclesiastes, let's go back to the beginning. Ecclesiastes chapter 1, verse 1. The words of the teacher, the son of David, the king in Jerusalem. Actually, if you read the book, you will find that the author of the book of Ecclesiastes is anonymous. In other words, nowhere in the book of Ecclesiastes or anywhere in the whole Bible does,

here I am, dear reader, I'm Solomon, or I'm so-and-so, and here I am writing the book of Ecclesiastes to you. Actually, you don't read that anywhere in the book. And look even closer here. Look at the first sentence again. The words of the teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. Who's talking to you in the first sentence of the book? The teacher? No. Do you see that? Somebody else is introducing the teacher to you. Whoever the author of the book is, it's not the teacher. The main voice in the book is the voice of this teacher. Some of your translations have the preacher. The Hebrew word is kohelet. It just means one who gathers, one who speaks in a gathering. So preacher, teacher, whatever. What am I doing right now? Preaching, teaching? I have no idea. So I'm just talking. one who speaks in a gathering. So preacher, teacher, whatever. What

am I doing right now? Preaching, teaching? I have no idea. So I'm just talking. Someone who speaks in a gathering. Most of the book is the voice of this teacher, but at the beginning, it is not the teacher speaking to us. Put your thumb here, turn to the last pages of the book, just a couple of pages forward. Chapter 12, verse 8. Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. Everything is meaningless. It ends as it begins. Now, not only was the teacher wise, but he also imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. Who's talking to us right there? It's anonymous. The book is anonymous. So I think of the book of Ecclesiastes as like sitting with your grandpa on the front porch. He's smoking his pipe and he's,

you know, waxing eloquent about life on planet earth or something like that. He wants to tell you a story, right? Your grandchild's sitting there on the front porch with grandpa. He wants to tell you a story of this great teacher from the ancient past, the wisest man in all of the world, and he set out on this journey like a thought experiment. What if you kind of factor God out of the equation? What if these 70 years that we have here under the sun is all you got and then death? Is life worth living? Is there anything of significance or value, of ultimate purpose in the meaning of life? If you factor God out of the equation and you just, I got 70 years, this is all I got.

That's the great thought experiment of the teacher. And grandpa's going to tell you this tale of this experiment, this explorer, the teacher. And grandpa's going to introduce the teacher to you, and then at the end, grandpa's going to have some concluding words to make sure you don't misunderstand what the teacher was trying to say. So the author of the book of Ecclesiastes is, go back to chapter one, the speaker of the voice, or the teacher, is introduced to us as someone who's a son of David, king in Jerusalem, and that's why we all said Solomon. So traditionally, this figure in the book,

the teacher figure, the voice that we hear, has been associated with King Solomon. So traditionally, this figure in the book, the teacher figure, the voice that we hear, has been associated with King Solomon. Now, here's what's interesting. Go down to verse 16 of chapter 1. We'll get into the message of the book in a second, but I like history and background and stuff like this. Is this all right with you? Good. Okay. Look at verse 16 of chapter 1. The teacher now is saying, now I said to myself, look, I have increased in wisdom more than anybody who has ruled over Jerusalem before me. And he's going to go on to say this about three more times. I was more wise. I was more wealthy, more powerful than all who were in Jerusalem before me. Now, this is real Bible trivia, but if you know the story of the Old Testament kings,

how many kings were there in Jerusalem before Solomon? One. And who's that? His dad. David made Jerusalem the capital of the Israelite nation that David brought together, the 12 tribes and formed them all as a nation. So it seems kind of strange for him to say over everybody in Jerusalem before me, namely my dad. That's kind of weird.

So there's two basic views here on who the teacher is. One is that it's historically Solomon. These are memories and teachings preserved from King Solomon. That's one view that's been very common throughout history. Another view is there are many examples of this kind of writing in ancient Near East. It's called royal fictional autobiography. So this is someone hundreds and hundreds of years later, afterwards, writes a thought experiment, essentially. It would be someone like 500 years from now wanting to write reflections on politics and culture in 21st

century America, writing it as if they were Barack Obama. They're not trying to trick anybody because Barack Obama's been dead for 500 years. Everybody sees what's happening here. And the ride presents themselves as a Barack Obama-like figure. There are many examples of this among Israel's neighbors and so on. And so some people think that's what's happening here, because if Solomon wrote it, why doesn't it just say his name? It's almost elusive and never quite saying his name. And so I think

this is actually clever. Whether Solomon wrote it or not, what's happening is you're invited to see life as if you're a Solomon-like figure. One of the most powerful, influential, wise kings, if anybody can speak to the question of the meaning of life here under the sun, who's the most qualified person in the biblical imagination, is this guy, is Solomon. If anyone had a crack at making your 70 years the most awesome thing you could possibly imagine, it's this guy. He made gold as common as stones, we're told, in his kingdom. This guy has a chance, the ultimate weekend warrior, right? Except every day is a weekend for this guy, right? And so we're going to explore life as if we are in the shoes of this Solomon-like figure. And so we're brought to the main theme

right here in the first sentences of chapter two. And what's the basic conclusion, apparently, in verse two about the meaning of life? That it has none, apparently, right? So in the New International Version, it has meaningless. Others of you have translations that say vanity, vanity. So that might be the English Standard Version or the King James, the New American Translation. So vanity is kind of historically in English translations, the word that's been used. This is the core word. This word right here gets repeated 40 times throughout these 12 chapters. This isn't key. If you want to understand the book of Ecclesiastes, you have to get what's going on with this word.

Everything revolves around what the teacher means by this word. So vanity is what many of your translations have. And that's an okay translation, except in modern American English, vanity is something you sit down at to put on makeup. Or we think of vanity as self-obsession. And neither of those is what the teacher means. Meaningless is pretty good, except meaningless would lead you to think that the teacher has looked at everything in life and then is now making a conclusion there is no meaning whatsoever.

And that's not, you look at the use of the word in the book, and that's not what he means. The word that's going to be used 40 times over in these 12 chapters, it's the Hebrew word, I'll teach it to you here, hevel. So hevel is brilliant. I told you this book is beautiful and brilliant all at once. It's a metaphor. Literally, it means smoke or vapor. And what he's going to do is he's going to run everything through this grid. He's going to do all these little thought experiments and I saw like a guy who was really wealthy and then he died alone and poor. That's Hevel, he'll say. I saw a righteous man and he was really good and everybody loved him, but then all his kids died and horrible things happened to him. That's Hevel. He's going to do all these thought experiments about how screwed

up life is here under the sun, and he's constantly, constantly going to call it Hevel, Hevel, Hevel, over and over and over again. Now, I think to capture this is so brilliant what he's doing, it's the metaphor. We actually need to somehow play with fire and smoke to get what he's doing. So lucky for me, I live in Portland, which is the land of where young men try to act like their grandpas. And Josh Nail has invited me to become a pastor here at Door of Hope a year ago, actually. He said one of the benefits he told me was that I would get my own pipe. And so he gave me this old hand-carved Danish pipe.

I've been really enjoying it. And then I've been surprised to learn how many young men like to smoke pipes like their grandpas. So do you mind, real quick here, because I need to create some smoke. It's there, but then it just takes about five seconds. So that's the first meaning that the teacher is going to attach to this word hevel. It's here and then it's gone. It's fleeting. So look, for example, in chapter 11. He says, those who live many years should rejoice in all of them. Hey, as long as you're alive, yet they should remember that the days of darkness will be many. And he doesn't mean just death. He also means the days where your body begins to really fail that precede death. He

talked about that in chapter 12. All that comes, your short life, is Hevel. Now this is a problem that happens. It goes out, right? So that's a pretty natural meaning that you would attach to Hevel. It's close here, and then it's gone. But that's not the main way that the teacher uses this concept of Hevel.

This other one is quite sophisticated, and that's how he uses it the most time. And it's this one right here to mean enigma or paradox. Like in chapter 8, he says, here's something that's hevel. He says, good people get what the wicked deserve, and wicked people get what good people deserve. What's that? That's hevel. That's what that is, right? Now, what does he mean? He doesn't mean that's temporary, because no, what he's saying is that's how it is here. It's not fleeting. This kind of thing happens all the time. What does he

mean? I didn't anticipate this. Is smoke a thing, but yet when I try to grab it, it's like it's not a thing. It's there, but it's not there. Is smoke real? Totally, there it is. We're all looking at it. But then the moment I try and make sense of it, to do something, to grasp at it, it's gone. This is the teacher's view of how we experience life here under the sun. Everything is Heffel. Everything. The moment you think you have life figured out, you don't. In fact, how you know

you don't have life figured out is by the fact that you do think you have it figured out. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's how you know. So we all have this concept of, like, justice, for example. So this kind of thing shouldn't happen. Wicked people shouldn't get what good people deserve. Good people, that shouldn't happen, but it does. So we have this concept of justice. If you do one thing, you ought to get a certain result. Do the right thing, you ought to get what you deserve. Do the bad thing, you ought to get what you deserve. Are we all on the same page? That's how the world ought to work. Does it work like that? Sometimes it works like that. Does it always work like that? No. That's Hevel. Why? Why doesn't it work the way it's supposed to? I mean, if we

have a sense that it ought to work a certain way, why doesn't it work like that? And because our sense of justice is rooted in God's justice, that God is the one who is the ground of what is right and wrong, well, what does that mean about God? That sometimes justice takes place, but sometimes justice doesn't take place. Why? What is that? That's hevel. It's hevel. Now, this is very important. Look at verse 2. He's saying, everything's hevel, hevel, hevel. I can't grab at it. So he says in verse 3, what do people gain from all of their labors at which they're toiling where? Under the sun, which is his second key idea here in the whole book.

This gets repeated 30 times throughout the whole book. The main idea of the book of Ecclesiastes is life is hevel under the sun. And under the sun is his thought experiment. What if you factor God out of the equation? What if these 70 years is all that I have, and I'm just trying to make sense of the meaning of life from what I can see, hear, smell, taste, touch. Five senses. And that's all I got. Seven years, just, and let's give this thing a go. What do we have of lasting, meaningful value here? And he's going to say, you get some things that are pretty good.

You can have a great, like, meal, and that's fun. You know, you can meet a spouse. That's pretty great. You know, you can have meaningful work and enjoy that, but most likely some seriously heavy things are going to happen to you in your life. And that just throws the whole system off in his mind. He's just like, if that's all we got, then it's life under the sun. Now, what he's going to do is because we're coming at this like thousands of years later, post-Jesus, and we're like, yeah, but that's not the whole picture. And he's going to wait on that. He knows that that's not the whole picture.

He knows that. He's going to wait till chapter 12 to give that to you, though. You have to sit through the thought experiment. What if the 70 years is all you got? Under the sun is evil. It's sometimes good. It's sometimes bad. You don't know. You don't know. And you can't predict. And so a big part of this is what he's aiming at is what I call the myth of religious fulfillment. And this is really brilliant, I think, what's happening here. There are three wisdom books. They're called the wisdom books of the Old Testament.

Ecclesiastes is one of them. What are the other two? Proverbs and Job. Now, here's what's interesting about the book of Proverbs. Let's actually just read a section right here to get a sample of it. Famous passage from Proverbs. It says, trust in the Lord with all your heart and don't lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight. Don't be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones. Does this sound like a good deal? Great deal. You know what I'm saying? Like, healthy body, strong bones. Who needs vitamin D? You know what I'm saying? Like, just, you know, fear the Lord, and apparently you'll have strong bones. So that's great.

So Proverbs is full of this. It's full of this idea that if I do the right thing, fear the Lord, honor the Lord, if the myth of religious fulfillment has biblical grounding anywhere, there you go, right there, trust in the Lord, straight paths, healthy body, strong bones. Who could say no? You know, here's what's tricky, is that the book of Proverbs is a book of Proverbs. It's not a book of promises, is the book of Proverbs. And what has happened throughout Jewish and Christian history is that the book of Proverbs is taken as a book of promises. Proverbs, by their very nature, are saying, here's how life tends to work out most of the time. If you go through life, your upstanding integrity, super great work ethic, you're a hard worker, you cultivate healthy

relationships, character, and virtue, is life likely to go a little better for you than if you're just a persistent liar, a cheat, you steal, and you burn relational bridges everywhere you go? Who's likely to have generally a more content, happy life? The first person. But is that always the case? This is my favorite one. Proverbs 13. 9. The light of the righteous rejoices, but the lamp of the wicked will be snuffed out. It's like those who honor and fear the Lord. You have a light in your house, and it's awesome because you can see, and everything's clear. But if you don't honor the Lord, and you do evil, it's like your lamp will get snuffed out. Proverbs 24, 20. The evil man has no future hope, and the lamp of your lamp will get snuffed out. Proverbs 24, 20, the evil man has no future hope,

and the lamp of the wicked will be snuffed out. Now, is that how life can go here under the sun? These Proverbs? Does this happen? Totally. This totally happens. Does it happen all the time? The book of Job comes along and says,

how often is the lamp of the wicked put out, really? So does there calamity really ever come? I mean, I guess I've seen that sometimes, but I don't see it all of the time. Ecclesiastes, he says, I've seen a righteous man who perishes despite his righteousness and a wicked man who has a long life

despite his wickedness. It's heffal. It doesn't make any sense. It seems like justice is real. We all know it. We all try to live by it, but we mostly fail at it, and we don't see it at work. All of this Hevel. Now, here's what's happening here. If you have a superficial view of what the Bible is, if you just think the Bible is like golden tablets, like dropped out of heaven or something, and it's just like all commands about how you should live, then this is going to bother you because you'll be like, there's a contradiction in the Bible. But that's not what, especially, that's not what the Old Testament books are. The three wisdom books of the Old Testament, I think of as three ancient Israelite sages going into a bar to have a drink and to talk about how life works. And the book of Proverbs

starts the conversation by saying, this is what I've seen. I see people do this. They honor God. They shun evil. They fear the Lord. Life will tend to go a lot better. And Ecclesiastes, you're going to read. The teacher says many places that's totally true, but it's not true all the time. And that bothers him to death. It bothers him. And so he's going to highlight those examples. All three of the wisdom books to give you a holistic understanding of what it means to be a human being and to be in relationship to this God who's working out his purposes here in the world, but whose purposes I don't always understand. One of my favorite Old Testament scholars, he puts it this way. He says, the most challenging difference between the wisdom books

arises when one author, like the teacher in Ecclesiastes, when he doubts or questions the validity of basic affirmations in other parts of the Bible. But this is precisely the purpose of these books in the collection of Scripture. They compel us to an honest faith that's willing to acknowledge the presence of doubts that we cannot dismiss and questions that we can't always fully answer given our human

limitations. Some of you are deeply bothered right now. Some of you, this is a breath of fresh air. When the teacher says life is hevel, it's an enigma. It's like I can see it, but I can't grasp at it. Does that rule out the possibility that life has any meaning at all? In other words, when he says it's hevel, is he saying there is no meaning whatsoever? Is that what he's saying? That's not what he's saying. He's just saying, I sure can't figure it out. There may be a meaning, I just can't grasp what it is. And here we come down to it, is that very often the myth of religious self-fulfillment paints a very black and white world. I do the religion thing, and God's going to do his thing, which is straight paths, healthy bones, like that's how it works to enhance my life.

But then we come across life experiences that just break all of that down, and this doesn't seem to work. And then it exposes our core assumptions about God. Well, God must not be real, or he must not be good, or he must not love or care for me. And the book of Ecclesiastes creates this middle space that says, what if I just have the wrong set of expectations altogether. What if God's promise to me under the sun, by which he means in this broken world compromised by evil, compromised by sin, what if God's promise to me is actually not to solve all of my problems? What if that was never his promise to me? What if his promise to me was actually not that my life may go better and that all of my dreams may come true.

What if his promise to me that's later revealed in the cross is that God actually enters into the hevel of human existence and takes it into himself on the cross? And what if you and I are left in a position of great humility, where even though I may not be able to grasp at what the meaning of life is, am I going to presume to say, therefore, life has no meaning because I can't figure out what it is? That's the punch in the gut of Ecclesiastes. Just because I can't see the sense or the meaning doesn't mean that there's no sense. That's a wrestling match that we have with hardship and difficulty in our lives. We've done three verses. Holy cow. What he's going to do is he's going to relentlessly show the small, fleeting, fragile position that we are in as human creatures living in a broken,

compromised world. Verse 3, what do people gain from all their labors at which they toil here under the sun? I mean, generations come and generations go, but the earth, I mean, it's just here. You know what I'm saying? Like, I was just thinking about this. Like, think of all of the fashion trends Mount Tabor has seen come and gone.

You know what I'm saying? So everything, you know, like knickers and, like, high socks on men or something, but also bell bottoms and, you know, also smoking pipes. Like, multiple iterations of smoking pipes, right? So here we are, like, creating culture and working. It's so important what we're doing and relationships. Everything is at stake here. And Mount Tabor is just like, what? You know, it's just there. It was there a long time before. It's going to be we're doing in relationships. Everything is at stake here. And Mount Tabor is just like, what?

It's just there. It was there a long time before. It's going to be there a long time after. The sun rises. The sun sets. It hurries back to where it rises. The wind, it blows to the south and then turns to the north. And it goes around and around and around, always returning on its course.

Or think about the streams, how they flow into the sea. But the sea is never full. Isn't that weird? So when I fill up my bathtub, it gets full. But the Columbia River is a mile wide, with 1,200 miles of water behind it, pushing thousands of cubic feet into the ocean every single second, but the ocean doesn't raise. That's weird.

It's weird, he says. That's weird. To the place where the streams came from, they just returned there again. Ah, it's all so wearisome. More than one can, all this activity, but nothing ever changes. It's just like, what do we think we're doing here? Like, we think we're all self-important and so on, what's happening in my life and my story, and then, but it's like Mount Tabor and the Columbia River, and you know, who am I really?

The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. I can listen to my favorite album of 2012, and the moment it's over, what do I want to do again? Well, won't that ever be enough? I don't know. It's sort of, I think the same thing about like pizza. I'm never tired of eating pizza. Like what is that? It just never, the moment I'm full, and like the moment the hunger like comes back again, I want another one. You know what I'm saying? Like what's going on? It's all, it's just constant. We're really, everything's really quite predictable here, but nothing ever changes. What has been will be again. And what has been done will be done again. I mean, there's nothing new here under the sun. Is there anything of which someone can say, look, here is something new? I was thinking about this. So we could maybe inject

and say, yeah, the iPhone, that's pretty new. This was a guy named Marshall McLuhan. This was his theory about technology in general. All technology does is take our bodies and just create new, more fancy extensions of them. So all iPhone is is a fancy extension of our ear and our mouth and our to-do list. That's basically it.

We can talk to each other more efficiently in theory, except we're also multitasking at the same time. And it helps us do things better. But humans have been talking and listening and trying to do things forever. So it's not really new. It's just a new way of doing the old thing. Is there anything of which someone can say, look, this is new? No, no. It was here already a long time ago. It was here before our time. Nobody remembers the former generations. Even those yet to come won't be remembered by those who follow them. Who knows their great, great, great grandpa's full name? I, the teacher, was king over Israel and Jerusalem. I applied my mind to study and explore by wisdom,

and here he means by my five senses, just scoping out life, everything that's here done under the heavens. Oh, what a heavy burden God has laid on mankind. I've seen the things that are done here under the sun. It's all heavil. It's like chasing wind. You ever tried that and succeeded?

No, you haven't. What is crooked can't be straightened. What is lacking cannot be counted. It's a little proverb here. We all have a sense that something is deeply, deeply wrong with the world and with ourselves. But we can't seem to fix it. Some people are aware of the problem. Some people aren't. Some people are in the middle, but we can't seem to fix it. We can throw money on it, throw government, education at the human condition, but we all

have this awareness. It's crooked, and we can't make it straight. I said to myself, so look, I've increased in wisdom more than anybody who's ruled over Jerusalem before me. I've experienced wisdom and knowledge. I've applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, but also madness and fall. He's going to run the whole spectrum of human experience. And I learned this too. It's chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow.

The more knowledge you have, the more sorry you are that you have all that knowledge. So here I have this podium in front of me. And my alternative, my like other life would have been as like a scientist or a physicist or something. Though I'm horrible at math, so I could never do that. But anyhow, so you have like this podium here in front of me. And so, you know, you get into the realm of like physics, particle physics, and you learn that actually this, what appears to us is very solid and will almost hit Josh in the face last week. And so when it kind of went up like that, and so it's very hard, but actually you learn that it's composed of molecules that are themselves composed of little

things called atoms that are themselves composed of little components, right? The nucleus and the proton. And actually what an atom is, mostly, is empty space. Because what it means is that in reality, this podium is more not here than it is here. And then you're like, I liked life better before I knew particle physics. And every single human endeavor, whether it's justice or beauty or music,

you can take everything and you run it down to the core and it's all so complex and heffal. And that's the human condition. We all know something's horribly wrong, but none of us seem to know how to do anything about it. And life is hard. And it's hard to follow God

in these circumstances, in these conditions. It's especially hard if you're under the illusion that God's role in your life is to make your, like, a golden path to your dreams. You know what I mean?

You're just setting yourself up for disappointment. You need to deconstruct your expectations. As I said, Ecclesiastes performs a negative role in the Bible, and you can still see it. He's just going to come chapter after chapter until he's going to shine a very bright light in the last paragraph of the book. Chapter 12, verse 9. The author of the book, Grandpa, sitting on his porch. He says, Not only was the teacher wise, he also imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs, like you read in the book here.

The teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true. Ecclesiastes has its handle on a very experience that we all resonate with here at Life Under the Sun. If this is all there is, this is a really sad place. And that's right, and that's true to come to that conclusion. He says, He's essentially saying these books of wisdom in the Bible, they're like a stick with nails on the end that a shepherd uses to prod sheep or oxen in the direction they want them

to go. And I think a shepherd there is a metaphorical reference to God. So God has inspired and given these wisdom books, all three of them, three guys, they all have different perspective, to give us the holistic view on human experience. And the book of Ecclesiastes is going to hurt because it's going to poke you. And it's going to expose areas where you've bought into the myth of religious fulfillment. It's going to expose ways where I have a distorted view of myself or God. And it's going to hurt when that stuff gets exposed inside of me. But this exposure is taking place at the hands of a good shepherd who's trying to prod us in a direction that leads to life, which is what he says.

He says, Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. You can read endless books on people deconstructing everything, and of the making of many such books, there is no end. And in fact, you'll wear your body in the process of reading them. So here, everything's been heard. The conclusion of the matter, fear God, keep his commandments. This is the duty of all mankind, for God will bring every deed into judgment, every hidden thing, whether it's good or evil. This isn't whiplash at the end of the book here. Essentially,

what he's doing, and Joshua will unpack this, he's pulling back the curtain and saying, but this in fact isn't all that there is. These 70 years aren't all that we have. And in fact, every decision that we make does matter, but it matters in ways that I may not be able to see. I actually may not ever have a handle on why certain hardships enter my life. I may never grasp why it is that things don't make sense in my life and why that happened to me. But does that mean that there is no meaning? And the teacher, grandpa sitting on the porch, says, no, no. But it's important that we disabuse ourselves of these distorted ways of thinking about God that

set us up for a fall. So I realized that was like total firehose right there and so we're going to explore all of this again from lots of different angles in the book but I think this is such a relevant word for us to hear especially in a city and in a culture where dude it's like these 70 years man that's all you got that's all you got. That's all you got. And even as Christians, we can get into that mindset as well, and it sets us up for a fall. And ultimately, what the religious fulfillment, what it does is it reverses the gospel. So the gospel is telling me that God has this story of what he's working out to redeem the world, and he's calling me to come play a bit role in his story that had its climax in the cross

and the resurrection of Jesus. And the myth of religious fulfillment actually reverses it. It says, well, actually, it's about me inviting God into my story to make my story work out pretty well. And then when that doesn't happen, I get angry and I blame God. And it's like, well, which way do you want it? So I don't know how this speaks a word to you. I don't know And it's like, well, which way do you want it? So I don't know how this speaks a word to you. I don't know if it's like a goad to you or if it encourages you down a path that you're already on. But ultimately, what I think, I'll end with these words of a guy named Robert Short. This is what Ecclesiastes can do for us in a journey of following Jesus. He says, Ecclesiastes is essentially a kind of negative theologian.

He's asking questions that can be answered only by a future revelation of God. And clearing the road for this revelation, he smashes any and all false hopes to pieces. Ecclesiastes is the Bible's night before Christmas. Ecclesiastes is human self-sufficiency stretched to its absolute limit and found sadly wanting. And if that's where Ecclesiastes leaves us, that's where the bread and the cup that we're about to take as we enter into worship, that's where the songs that we're about to sing, they become Christmas, the coming of Christ to us, which can only be good news until I have found my own myths and self-sufficiency sadly wanting. It's the bad news before the good news, and I believe it's God's word to us.

All right, I hope that was helpful for you, or at least stimulating. And maybe you might want to take up smoking old Danish pipes for yourself. Anyhow, thanks for listening to Strange Bible Podcast. We're going to explore the rest of the themes and ecclesiastes in the next two teachings. Bye.