Great. Well, once again, it’s really great to be with you this morning. We at the Tron Church pray for you guys regularly at Greenview.

You’re on our prayer news, so it’s good to put a bunch of faces to that name, Greenview Church. Good to be here. Please do, if you’ve got a Bible, open it up again to page 670, to that passage in the book of Ecclesiastes, which Lucy read for us earlier.

Now, this is a confronting book in many ways, an interesting book, and yeah, I hope it will confront us this morning, but it’s also a really encouraging book in a lot of ways. So we’re going to look at this this morning, and please do follow along as I go through. But I want to start with a question, a question which the teacher who’s writing this book asks in this passage.

He says, what do people gain from all their labours at which they toil under the sun? Now, maybe some of you have asked yourself a similar question. What’s the purpose of life? Where in life can I find lasting satisfaction? Why am I here? Why are any of us here? What’s the secret to happiness? What’s the point of it all? These sorts of existential questions have been asked by people as long as men have been thinking. There’s something deep in us which just craves for meaning, an inconsolable part of us which just longs for purpose.

And people through the ages have given many different responses to this question of life’s meaning. Aristotle concluded that the human function was well-performed rational activity. Nietzsche went for nihilism.

Douglas Adams said 42. But what is Ecclesiastes’ answer? Well, in one of many well-known but perhaps little understood lines from the book, the teacher says, meaningless, utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.

(2:04 – 8:59)

Maybe you’re surprised to find this sort of thing in the Bible. You wouldn’t be alone. Christians through the ages have struggled with this conclusion and indeed with much of what the teacher, the writer of this book, has to say.

Some people have even argued that this really shouldn’t be in our Bibles. These nihilistic conclusions don’t belong with the rest of the Bible’s message. Or maybe some others have suggested that it’s really just a sort of critique of atheism or secularism.

But I think that arguments like this really don’t hold up and ultimately they lead to conclusions which are just thin and dissatisfying because the book of Ecclesiastes is thoroughly biblical, consistent with all of the Bible’s teaching. We see in verse 1 that we’re reading the words of the teacher. And you don’t need to turn there just now, but at the end of the book we read these words of summary.

They say, not only was the teacher wise, but also he imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. The teacher searched to find just the right words and what he wrote was upright and true.

What the teacher writes is true. The Bible, the whole Bible speaks with one consistent message. And these words are part of that message.

He was a man of faith writing to other people of faith amongst God’s people. So he’s not writing to critique atheism so that the Christians can sit on their high horses and look down at the atheists. Because for one thing, there probably was no such thing as atheism at the time he was writing.

Everyone believed in one god or another. But rather he writes to challenge a superficial form of faith in God’s people. A faith which claims to offer maybe an end to struggle and difficulty here and now.

The sort of faith which says come to Jesus and see all of your problems melt away like snow in the heat of a Middle Eastern sun. Now some of you might have heard that sort of message before, but I reckon if you’ve been a Christian for more than maybe five minutes, you’ll know that it’s not true. You’ll know that actually your struggles don’t go away and often they seem to get worse.

And if you’re here and you’re not a Christian, let me tell you, Christianity will not solve all your problems overnight. But fear not, far from bringing us some sort of nihilistic message of doom, Ecclesiastes really unlocks for us a rich and liberating message. The teacher shows us throughout the book and in this passage how to find solid and lasting joy in a world that is frustrating and painful.

Not by avoiding it, not by pretending that that brokenness isn’t there, but by facing it head on. Ecclesiastes challenges, I think, our view of what Christianity is. Whether you’re a Christian here or not, I’m sure you’ve come here with ideas of what Christianity is.

You may become expecting to hear a particular type of message and I think what Ecclesiastes has to say to us might not be what you expected. The teacher calls us to face the realities of life in a broken world and he calls us to fear the ruler of life who promises a better world. So firstly I want to look at verses 1 to 11 where the teacher does call us to face the realities of life in a broken world.

And the first key to understanding the teacher and his outlook on life is to understand this word which in our translation this morning is translated meaningless. This word is almost like the teacher’s theme sentence or theme word for the book. It comes up 73 times, I think, you can check that later, 73 times in only 12 short chapters.

And in the original language it’s a Hebrew word, hebel. Other modern translations into English use words like vanity or futile. And these words capture a bit of the meaning of the words but they probably aren’t perfect words to use.

There probably actually isn’t a perfect word in English to capture the meaning of this word. But most closely this word literally translates to something like smoke or vapour. And I think actually smoke is quite a helpful idea for us to understand this word because if you think about smoke for a minute, it’s real, you can see it, but then in perhaps a matter of seconds or minutes it’s gone, just disappears.

We could replicate it, we could start a fire and get some more smoke but we can’t bring that other smoke back, it’s gone, never to be seen again. Or we could try and grasp at it to get a hold of it, we could try and bottle up but actually in doing so we probably only hasten its disappearance. And so this idea of smoke, hebel, is employed by the teacher as a metaphor for life on earth, under the sun as he calls it.

Because life is brief, ephemeral, we are transient beings. Our lives here on earth in the grand scheme of things are very short. But not only is smoke ephemeral, it’s evasive. So too with life, we just can’t quite grasp it all, we can’t get on top of it and make sense of everything.

And like smoke, the harder we try, the more it seems to evade us. The harder we try to understand it all, the more we’re frustrated at the fact that we just can’t. Just like smoke, life is brief and it’s baffling.

Now the preacher goes on to demonstrate these things to us through the poetry in verses 4 to 11. First he uses imagery from nature to make his point in verses 4 to 7. So he asks that question, what do people gain from all their labours at which they toil under the sun? Well he says, generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and then sets and then rises again, then sets again, then rises again.

The wind blows one way, then the other way, then another way, then it returns. The streams, they all keep flowing into the sea and yet the sea never fills up. The water evaporates, falls back into the streams and flows back into the sea and evaporates and on and on it goes.

And there’s nothing that we as humans can do to control this or to stop it. Relentlessly the earth carries on, nature’s course proceeds and we march to its tune. Every day the sun will rise.

(9:00 – 9:24)

We wake up and expect to see it in the morning, but it doesn’t necessarily expect to see us. Because one day creation carries on, but we’ll be gone. The earth and the natural world will roll on unimpeded, but by contrast we are fleeting, a tiny part in the whole of God’s creation.

(9:25 – 11:39)

And here’s the point, here’s the answer to the question that he asks in verse 3, what do people gain from all their labours at which they toil under the sun? Nothing, because the sun doesn’t gain anything as it rises and sets and rises and sets. The winds don’t gain anything as they go round and round. The rivers are constantly flowing into the sea and yet the sea gains nothing, it’s never filled up.

So the teacher is saying, these things which are far bigger than you, far older than you, if they don’t gain anything, why do you think you can? Why do you think you’ll come out of life better than the sun or the sea? It’s a big question. And what does it lead to? Well, look at verses 8 to 11 please and we’ll see how this plays out in the teacher’s view. The teacher says here that the cyclical repetitive reality leads to weariness.

All things are wearisome, more than one can see. Because there’s nothing in this world, nothing under the sun that can ultimately satisfy us. The eye can never see enough, the ear can never hear enough.

And that’s true, isn’t it? It’s true to our experience. Maybe you find a new TV show that you binge through but does it ultimately satisfy your eye’s appetite? When you find that new show, do you ever think, ah yes, my eyes have seen enough now, I don’t need any more. No, you either devour more and more of it until you get bored or you finish it and there’s none left.

Or maybe you’re a music lover, a new album or song comes out that you love so you listen to it over and over again but before long the next song comes out that you’re attracted to or you become sick of it because you’ve listened to it too much. Have you ever heard a song and thought, that’s it, I never need to listen to another piece of music because my ears have had their fill of hearing? Of course not. There’s nothing under the sun which is truly new and can break this cycle of repetition.

(11:40 – 12:19)

That’s the point of that famous line in verse 9, there’s nothing new under the sun. Yes, there are new inventions, new iterations of things, new technological advances, seemingly endless in fact but maybe that’s the point, that actually the innovation is seemingly endless such that every new invention is outdated so quickly and it does nothing to satisfy us in a lasting manner. Your new iPhone seems amazing until the day its successor is announced and it suddenly seems deficient and its value drops by what 300 pounds so you start to eye up the new model.

(12:20 – 13:11)

Five years time it’s as good as worthless both in cash value and to your insatiable appetite for novelty. So it fades out of memory, it’s simply a forgotten step in innovation somewhere on the journey to the present and this is true of everything. There is nothing under the sun which is new and stays new, nothing which is evergreen.

Everything new soon gets old and then it’s gone, forgotten. But the teacher says in verse 11 this does not just apply to iPhones, it applies to us because no one remembers the former generations. Even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.

(13:13 – 13:46)

Generations come and go and before long they slip out of memory. How many generations can you remember back in your family? Do you know your great-grandmother’s name? I know I don’t. If you do, do you know where they lived? Do you know what they did for work? Who their friends were? What made them laugh? This was the person who raised and shaped your grandparents in so many ways.

(13:48 – 14:02)

But now she’s gone, a distant memory. And the teacher wants us to front up to the fact that that will be us one day. We too will fade into the past and ultimately we’ll be forgotten.

(14:04 – 17:23)

These are the realities of life in a broken world. I’m sure you could recognise some of it, if not all of it, and this passage is forcing us not to hide from that, but to face it. So what are we to make of all of this? Is it actually all hopeless and empty? Should we just despair? Is life really just meaningless? Well, no.

Verses 12 to 15 hint to us of a better story by pointing us beyond these realities of life to the ruler of life. These verses call us to fear the ruler of life who promises a better world. The teacher now tells us more of his credentials and what he’s set out to do in his project and in his book that he is writing.

He’s been the king over Israel, reached the highest place, and he applied his mind to study and to explore by wisdom everything that is done. But notice in verse 13, everything that’s done where? This time not under the sun, but under heaven. So the teacher has not confined the object of his study to the finite.

He’s not an atheist or a secularist, as some might claim. In fact, he is a man of faith. He knows that there is more to consider which makes sense of the problems he’s wrestled with, which makes sense of life with all its pain.

He realises that if you want to explain and understand life on earth, you have to look beyond life on earth. And this makes sense, I think, doesn’t it? If life is so frustrating, repetitive, ungraspable, when we keep our focus on things that are merely temporary, we need to look beyond things which are merely temporary. If our focus is on things which don’t last, then obviously we’re not going to find lasting gain from these things.

In fact, the teacher’s point is that if we are coming to life asking, what can I gain? We’re asking the wrong question. Because what if life isn’t about gain? What if satisfaction in life isn’t found by asking what we can get out of it? What if life is not just limited to things in the natural world and things we can see all around us? What if life hasn’t come about out of nowhere and isn’t just headed nowhere, but actually there is a God who made it all, a God who is in control of it all, and a God who is directing it all to a purposeful end? That’s a very different picture. The teacher says here in verse 13, what a heavy burden God has laid on mankind.

(17:25 – 18:25)

I’ve seen all the things that are done under the sun. All of them are meaningless, a chasing after wind. What is crooked cannot be straightened.

What is lacking cannot be counted. The teacher recognises that the reason for this futility, the reason for the frustrations of life on earth is that God has subjected creation to futility. God who rules over creation has placed a heavy burden on mankind.

Again, perhaps this wasn’t the message you expected to hear this morning. This might not seem like a very good argument for Christianity, but this is what the Bible teaches. This is what happens in Genesis chapter 3. God places a curse on the world, which makes work painful, difficult, futile.

(18:27 – 18:49)

Well, why, you might ask, why would he do this? Why on earth would I want to worship a God who would do this? It’s perverse. It’s disgusting. Well, we can point the finger at God, but in reality, it’s not because God is perverse that the world is the way it is, but because we are.

(18:53 – 20:06)

Because God didn’t create things this way in the beginning. If you read those first two chapters of the Bible in Genesis, it’s a very different picture that we see there. Just like in this passage, you’ll see the sun and the waters and the land and everything else in God’s creation.

But in Genesis, instead of a picture of futility, it’s a picture of harmony. There’s purpose and there’s direction instead of frustration and weariness. That was how things were meant to be.

It was our rejection of God that brought this about. It was our perversity which ruptured that relationship between our creator and us. That’s the reality.

That’s the story that comes before the curse in Genesis chapter three, that story of Adam and Eve disobeying, rejecting God because they wanted to be like God themselves. And so God has subjected the world to futility. And as a result, we cannot, cannot find lasting satisfaction in the things the world has to offer.

(20:08 – 21:22)

What’s crooked can’t be straightened. What’s lacking can’t be counted. Later in the book, in chapter seven, the teacher asked a similar question asking, who can make straight what he has made crooked? And the answer, of course, is that nobody can except Him.

The answer cannot be found on earth. And so the answer has to come from heaven down to earth. And wonderfully, the message of the Bible is that God is doing this.

He is bringing this about because God has sent his son, Jesus, into the world to bring this about. Even in our rebellion against him, even with his wonderful creation subjected to such futility, still God loved us so much that he wouldn’t leave us in the mess that we’ve created. And so he came himself in the person of his son, the Lord Jesus, to straighten out what was crooked, to bring us hope.

(21:24 – 26:17)

And this restoration isn’t just a patch-up. It’s not a quick top-up that might go wrong again, no. Jesus said, I have come so that they might have life to the full.

Everything that is lacking in this world, as the teacher says, cannot even be counted. But Jesus came to fill that lack. He promises he is making all things new.

A new heavens and a new earth. Everything will be made as God intended it to be, better than it ever was before. But the way this comes about is through judgement.

The present world, all its inhabitants, past, present, and future, are passing away. Because God is bringing all things under his righteous judgement. The evil and the brokenness which causes our pain and our perplexity, it will be judged.

That will be how it is destroyed, is the only way it can happen. But the message of the Bible is that there is a way that we can be safe in that judgement, that we can come through that judgement, that we can share wonderfully in this new heavens and new earth. The answer is not under the sun, at least not under the sun which we look at in the sky.

But the answer is to humble ourselves under the rule of God’s Son, the Lord Jesus. The answer is not to be found in any strategy or any government policy or any scientific discovery. It can’t be found in anything at all that we do.

Because the answer is the person of the Lord Jesus. Because he came and took that judgement, which we deserve, upon himself. Because all of us, if we’re honest, are contributors to the mess we see around us, to the futility and the pain.

We’re not mere victims in this. All of us, every day, do things, think things, and say things harmful to others. Or we fail to do things, think things, and say things which are loving to others.

We fail to acknowledge God’s kindness to us. And so judgement is what we deserve. But Jesus’ death means we can have forgiveness for our sin, hope of this better world where we are made perfect.

Indeed, everything is made perfect. Because Jesus didn’t just die, but Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus ascended into heaven and is ruling from there.

And he promises a better world to all who will turn away from their sin and come to him for rest. He is bringing a new creation where pain is no more, where tears are no more, where struggle is no more, where dissatisfaction is no more, where grief is no more, where injustice is no more, where death is no more, because sin is no more. And so humanity will be able to live joyfully under the loving rule of the God who made us and sent his Son to remake us.

This is the future which God has promised to his people. And it is a future promise. Life here now on earth under the sun will still be brief.

(26:19 – 26:29)

It will still be in many ways baffling. There will still be bitterness. Because sin is not yet gone from our hearts or anyone else’s.

(26:32 – 27:04)

Jesus doesn’t offer us a quick fix to all our problems here and now. He said to his followers, in this world, you will have tribulation. But he didn’t stop there.

He said, take heart, for I have overcome the world. And because of that, we mustn’t miss the fact that there is also real beauty in this life for the believer. Yes, creation will continue to run in its cycles.

(27:05 – 29:01)

But when we recognise that we will never gain anything ultimately in these things under the sun, we can start to appreciate them for what they are as wonderful gifts of God. When we start to see life as gift and not gain, we start to see the beauty of life, all the fuller, even along with the brevity, the bitterness and that bafflement. We start to appreciate that though the sun gains nothing in its constant cycles of rising and setting, that there are few more beautiful things in this world than to watch the sun rising and setting as it paints technicolour washes over the sky. We begin to rejoice more in our work and the pleasure of making things, discovering things, doing things, even though ultimately none of them will be everlastingly new. None of them will solve our problems.

Yet we rejoice in the process. We are free to enjoy the arts. We take joy in the TV shows and the music that we love, even though their appeal is passing.

Because in them, we are no longer seeking our whole meaning. We’re no longer seeking gain in these things, but we are recognising them as what they are, good gifts from our good God. Friends, Ecclesiastes does have a really confronting message for all of us.

It really bursts the bubble of so much of what our society lives for. Pulls the rug from under the feet of our elevated expectations for what we might expect to get out of life, even as Christians. And maybe it forces us to question what we are really living for.

(29:04 – 32:04)

Are you living wholeheartedly for the Lord Jesus as the ruler of your life? Are you living and seeking satisfaction only in the things of this world? Or maybe you’re trying to live with a foot in both camps. It is a confronting message. But ultimately, it is a message which can provide us with great liberation and joy in the knowledge of our forgiveness, our peace with God, and that promise that He is bringing in His new creation, a world where there is no more pain, no more struggle, no more frustration, no more weariness.

And that joy is found in only one place, and it’s by facing up to the reality of life in this broken world. And it’s by trusting in the Lord Jesus, the ruler of life, who promises us a better world. Let’s respond in prayer.

Take a few moments in the quiet to respond yourself, and then I’ll pray. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are real with us, and that your word shows to us reality. It explains reality to us.

Father, we thank you that it can bring us comfort, even in the darkest pain. Thank you that you are with us in our struggles and our difficulties, that you are ruling over this world and in control of this world, and you are bringing it about to a purposeful end. And on that day, we will see and understand how all of our struggle and pain was part of that plan in a way which we cannot understand now.

So help us, Lord, to trust you. Help us to walk faithfully under your rule, to look always to our Saviour, the Lord Jesus, to be reminded of the comfort we have in life and in death, and that we are not our own, but we belong to Him. And we pray these things in his name.

Amen.

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