Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / July 19, 2015 | Route 66 - Ecclesiastes

Transcript

July 19, 2015 | Route 66 - Ecclesiastes · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you're visiting us today, we're on a road trip through the Bible.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: We call it Route 66, 66 books in the Bible, one book per message per Sunday, and we've come to the 21st book this morning.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's the book of Ecclesiastes.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: A little while ago, our band played Turn, Turn, Turn, written by Bob Dylan, performed by the birds in 1968.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that comes right out of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now I confess to you, beginning this message, that I am plagiarizing.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I am stealing the words of another preacher.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that preacher is the writer of Ecclesiastes, for it introduces him in verse 1, the words of the preacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: The word for preacher there in Hebrews, Kohelet, which basically means as someone who speaks to a congregation.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: That word was carried over in the New Testament as Ecclesia or an ecclesiastic.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, the book got the title Ecclesiastes from the Greek word.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: But the word has to do with a preacher or teacher.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm basically stealing his words today.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think that this on one hand can be seen as the most difficult book to interpret in the Bible, but also, as my wife says, it's the favorite book of the Bible for many people.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've put on the study sheet that you have in front of you, we've arrived at what appears to be a pothole on Route 66.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: The black sheep of the Bible, one scholar calls it.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: One thing's for sure, in many ways, it's the most relevant book of the Bible to many people today.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not long ago on Yahoo Answers, a website, a teenager wrote in, Why do I feel incomplete?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: I have everything.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: My parents are rich.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I have dozens of loyal, dedicated friends who follow my every order.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: I have love.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: I have the most recent phones.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have a flat screen in my room.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody goes, Whoa, I would like that.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I have everything I could want, but something is missing.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: I feel hollow.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's because of that sort of a feeling that one of my favorite two or three writers in the world, nonfiction writers, the sort of C.S.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis of America, Peter Kraft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, says this.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Whenever I teach the Bible as a whole, I always begin with Ecclesiastes.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: In another age, we could begin with God's beginning, Genesis.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: But in this age, the age of man, we must begin where our patient is.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: We must begin with Ecclesiastes.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is that this preacher, the preacher who wrote Ecclesiastes, the son of David or Solomon, is sort of the Rodney Dangerfield preachers.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't get any respect.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I can sympathize with him.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't always, as a pastor, get a lot of respect either.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was playing, joined a foresome for golf with some guys who I didn't know, non-Christians, asked me what I did.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I'm a pastor.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: They said, uh, I'm so sorry, one of them said.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Sex is really fun.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, I said, I'm not a priest, I'm a preacher, you know.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: But or the person who said at the back there, you know, Pastor, every one of your sermons is better than the next one.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, really?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or the person who said, you know, my husband's loved your sermons a lot more since he got dementia.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I'm uh it's not, but the thing is, a lot of pastors don't get respect.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: But this this preacher, uh, after all, is actually called a heretic, and he does at times seem to be backslidden because he seems so down on life, because the very first words out of his mouth in chapter 1, verse 2 make you think that you're sitting in a college classroom listening to a cynical college professor of philosophy who's calling life a cruel joke.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: He says in the words of the King James, Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the King James in the New American Standard Bible.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose my favorite translation is futility of futilities, all is futility.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: NIV sort of over-translates it a little, I think.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Meaningless, they say.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Meaningless, says the NIV, everything is meaningless that can be misleading.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: The preacher isn't going so far as to say life has no meaning.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: He's just calling life a cruel joke that you can't figure out.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's a real question.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: What does he mean by vanity?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: That can be confusing because when you and I think of vanity, we generally think of, you know, something that someone sits in front of when they're primping.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: We we think of uh Vanity Fair magazine, or we think of someone we know who's always taking selfies.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Their Facebook page is just full of selfies, right?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we go, there's vanity there.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, we think that's really not the kind of vanity we're reading about in Ecclesiastes, is it?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you're right, it isn't.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: There are two main meanings of vanity in a dictionary.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: The first is excessive pride in or admiration of one's own appearance or achievements, such as it flattered his vanity to think I was in love with him.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, synonyms include conceit, narcissism, self-love, self-admiration.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: No, but Ecclesiastes must be the second one.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: The quality of being worthless or futile or empty, the vanity of human desires, futility, pointlessness, like that Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was commanded, judged by Zeus.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: He always had to push a heavy stone for eternity up a cliff and let it roll back down again.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we we know that really is the correct meaning when we look at the Hebrew word for vanity in Ecclesiastes, used dozens of times, for the word is hebel.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: The word hebel means emptiness or breath.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's used for empty, like empty bubbles, or breath on a mirror, or or or smoke on the wind that you that that eludes you, that you can't grab hold of.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Naturally, you and I think of our favorite son, Carrie Livgren, and and one of his greatest songs, Dust in the Wind.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, uh, why don't we uh watch?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's helpful to watch this music video, not just so you can see some of the crazy hair or the fact it's one of the early rock videos, but because you need to feel the sort of feeling that the existentialist young people had 30, 40 years ago to understand the book of Ecclesiastes.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let's play that video now.
• 6:49
  unknown: All right.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can watch the rest of it on YouTube.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that awesome?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, Carrie, in case you didn't recognize him, is the one with the pretty blonde hair.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Love that hair back then.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: That was great.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Dust in the Wind, the frustration, the futility of life.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I've entitled this message When Life Makes No Sense.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it seems to me if that was gonna be your message, and you were a preacher, that you'd kind of preach it softly.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: But this guy's like uh, this preacher of Ecclesiastes is like a TV evangelist who won't change the subject three dozen times in one dozen chapters.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: He rings the bell again and says that life is futile.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: He yells it over and over, banging in the pulpit.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: He's banging the pulpit, by the way, when he says vanity of vanities or futility of futilities, because as you know, holy of holies to the ancient Israelis meant what?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: It meant the most holy of all holy places.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: King of kings means the kingliest of all kings who rules over other kings.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: So so futility of futilities means the most utter and total incomplete futility, you see.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what he's saying about life, real positive.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you were having, if you were throwing a convention, you know, a million shekel round table, and and you were gonna invite a speaker and somebody said, Let's invite Solomon, you'd say, I don't think so.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this guy is a cynic.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: He is so down on life.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: But that isn't the worst of it in this book.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's not only depressingly down on life, he's shockingly up or high on pleasure, not once or twice, but six times in this what scholars call the seams of the book.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: This preacher voices a philosophy of life that sounds suspiciously like hedonism, that philosophy which has swept the world that crowns pleasure as life's highest good.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: He says in 224, a man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 815, nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then I ask you, doesn't he sound like a college student?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, doesn't he sound like someone who says, listen, we only go around once in life, so grab a beer and a babe and a birth control and let's let's live it up.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: In case you haven't noticed, this is the reigning philosophy of life, both in advertising and on the media.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's no wonder that this book has always delighted the skeptic and shocked the devout.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's no wonder that in universities today, when they choose the Bible, choose in literature courses to study the Bible, which book do they always choose?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Answer, of course, they choose Ecclesiastes.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, this is our kind of book.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's got both cynicism and hedonism at the same time.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whoopee.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And on the other hand, many devout people, down through the years as they're driving on Route 66, swerve by this pothole, pass by this town.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Frankly, they say, this preacher doesn't sound like he's belongs in the pulpit at all.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so he honestly doesn't get invited to very many churches, certainly many church pulpits.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And down through the years, a number of Christians have felt that this book was not up to the level of the rest of Scripture, that it somehow was sub-Christian.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: That pretty much started strongly, I suppose, with Martin Luther, who hundreds of years ago decided that the book wasn't written in 950 BC by Solomon himself, but in 150 BC by some Jewish scribe who took a trip down to Egypt and sat in the library of Alexandria and copied down secular sort of non-religious sayings.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so Luther stuck his neck out and said, This book doesn't belong in the Bible.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And since he stuck his neck out, other people have followed him.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that one of the best known of all study Bibles, for example, one that I used to use, describes Ecclesiastes up there at the start as a book by a natural man, a man under the sun.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: There's no revelation here, no word of God on which we can build our lives.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I respect the editors of that study Bible.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was raised on that study Bible, but but I can't agree with their evaluation of Ecclesiastes for two reasons.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: The first one's practical.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I can't see why God would give valuable space, precious space in his book to the ramblings of a natural man.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Ramblings which you can get for free by turning on any daytime talk show on TV, or simply buying a beer for the next guy at the bar.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can get the ramblings of a natural man anywhere.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the other reason I don't think that Ecclesiastes would be the ramblings of a natural man is that God Himself tells us that these are his words, his thoughts.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not only, we conclude the book, he concludes the book in 12, 9 through 11.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not only was the teacher or preacher wise, we read, but what he wrote was upright and true.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: The words of the wise are like goads, that is, uh, spurs to move people on to God.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're collected sayings like firmly embedded nails or pegs given by one shepherd.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're learning here is that this book was given us by one shepherd, God himself.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the man who masters this book, the woman who understands this book, has a goad that will push her on to God and has pegs on which he can plant his feet firmly.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if that doesn't convince you, you need to look the neck the next couple verses, the conclusion by the writer.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now all has been heard.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the conclusion of my book, he says.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's clearly a reflection.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: So so here's the problem.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: If this book is a reliable message from God, how in the world do we solve the riddle of this book?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: A book which begins with life is futile and ends with fear God and keep his commands, and in the middle is full of eat, drink, and be merry.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, really?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it seems to me that the solution to this riddle of Ecclesiastes is to understand what the preacher means by his statement, life is futile or life is vain.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the important thing to realize, it seems to me, as you look at this word, is to realize he does not mean that life doesn't have meaning.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: He simply means it's it's futile to try and figure out that meaning.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Life is not meaningless, but life is frustrating and insane and crazy because it's it you just can't make sense of it.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can't grab hold of it.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's futile to try.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's like bubbles, and you grab hold of the bubble and it pops.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: You try to grab hold of the smoke and the wind, and you find you can't make sense of it.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a guy, the preacher of Ecclesiastes, he's trying to figure life out.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's a mystery.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: He knows there's a key to a mystery somewhere that God holds on to the key.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: He can't put his hand on that key, and to his frustration, God refuses to give him the key.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're a thoughtful person, then you've probably tried at times to make sense of the senselessness of your life or the things that you see around you.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you've realized that surely God's in control and God has the key in his hand.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: But you've realized as you struggle to figure it out that trying to make sense of crazy is gonna drive you insane, as a famous modern saying goes.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you do go insane trying to figure out why things are the way they are.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that seems to be the theme of the preacher's message.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: I put on your study sheet that the key verse is chapter 3, 10 and 11, immediately after the bird song here, immediately after to everything there is a time and a season God established.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: He says in 3, 10 and 11, I've seen the burden God has laid on men.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: What is the burden, preacher?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he's made everything beautiful in its time, yeah?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he's also said eternity in the hearts of men.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, did you realize that you have a bit of eternity in your heart?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yet he says they cannot fathom, they can't figure out what God has done from beginning to end.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: What he's saying here is that God's made you and me different from animals.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because God's implanted in the heart of man and woman a question.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: The question, why?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have a desire to know what life means, the craving to see the thing whole, the beginning, the end.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: We have eternity in our hearts.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we know that's true about ourselves, don't we?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: We know Thornton Wilder, the words he put in one of his characters in the play Our Town are exactly right.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: When he says, I don't care what they say.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone knows that something's eternal.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it ain't houses and it ain't earth and it ain't even stars.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the point.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: God's made us with eternity in our hearts, but having made it made us with eternity in our hearts, he says that he's made it also so that we can't figure out or fathom what he's done from beginning to end.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: We we we're like a person, you know, who comes home, you know, 10 minutes after house or some other TV drama has begun.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: We walk in, our spouse is watching it, but you miss the first 10 or 15 minutes, and you're there for 20, and all of a sudden your cell phone rings and you miss the last 10 or 15.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, try to, you can't, you just can't figure out the show.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: I bought a I like jigsaw puzzles.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: I bought a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle at a garage sale, take the thing home.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: It took me a week or two to get the thing together, and then I get close to the end and find out two dozen pieces are missing.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I mean, that's the way life is for us.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's something inside every one of us that wants to figure out life to put the puzzle together, and we sometimes feel like we're getting pretty close, but then we find there's too many of the pieces of the puzzle missing, and it frustrates us.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And for that reason, life is really completely futile.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in chapter 7, verse 14, he he puts it another way.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: He says, When times are good, be happy, but when times are bad, consider this.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: God's made the one as well as the other.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, a man can't discover anything about his future.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when times are good, I have life all figured out.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I can go before the microphone and tell you why we won the basketball game, or I can hold you a seminar when life is good and tell you why the church is growing.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: I can write a book and tell you why my marriage is, why marriage is greater, how to raise children, but you know what?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Then things are bad.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's when times are bad that I realize I don't have the answers.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when things go wrong, that's when I ask the question, why?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: And notice he says, that's exactly the way God's intended it and actually arranged it.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: He turns out our lights, he shuts off our water from time to time, so that when we think we've figured it out, we discover we don't have the answer at all.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, so that a so that a person can't discover anything about his future.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or again in chapter 8, verse 17, I saw all that God has done, said this brilliant Solomon.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And no one can comprehend what goes on under the sun, despite all his efforts to search it out.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Man can't discover its meaning.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't figure it out.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And to illustrate this as you go through the book, he comes up with, you know, some examples, and some of them are funny, and some of them are deadly serious, and some are a combination.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Take this one in chapter 6, 1 and 2.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: You could call it the futility of a great meal that you can't eat.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen another evil under the sun.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: He says, God gives a man wealth, possessions, and honor so that he lacks nothing his heart desires, but God doesn't enable him to enjoy them.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'll never forget that Thanksgiving when Melody and I took the kids.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: We went down to Dallas for Thanksgiving.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's been some years ago now.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And mom, Melody's mom, as usual, you know, put on an incredible spread.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was just phenomenal.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was, I didn't even come up for air till midway through Second Helpings, and I noticed that the guy sitting next to me, who had paid for it all, who's Melody's dad, that he wasn't eating.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Jim, what's wrong?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: How come you're not eating?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I can't.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: I just drinking water, my stomach can't handle it.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: It won't stay down.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Since this has been going this way for five, six, seven days.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we find out exactly one month later, it's not just a stomach problem, he has pancreatic cancer.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Two months after that, he's gone.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's, but you know, that's the futility of when you're young and all you can afford is taco tico, you'd love to have a good steak.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you finally get older and you accumulate enough money, you could actually eat at Ruth's Christ steakhouse, then either your teeth or your stomach can't handle it.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a craziness, there's a futility about that.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make sense.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand why God worked it that way.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or in chapter 9, verse 11, the futility of great talent and bad luck.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen something else under the sun, he says.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: The race isn't to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise, or wealth to the brilliant, or favor to the learned.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: But time and chance happened to them all.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Here we're talking about bout bad bounces and bad referee calls.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Here we we don't want to go to St.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Louis because they'll tell us about 1985 and how they would have won the World Series except for a fluky, flaky, crazy referee call.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And they're exactly right.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't need to go back to 1985.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: We can go to this last, we can go to this weekend because at the British Open, if you've watched any of this, this is one of the four golf majors.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: The winds are so high, they've gotten up to over 45 miles an hour, and the rain's so bad that we have a golfer watching his ball move on the green.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was 18 inches away from the hole at one point, and it ends up five feet away.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that the commentators are saying, you know, it's it's all time and chance.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter if you're the greatest golfer in the world.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: What matters is What is your tea time and how fast the winds blow when you get out there.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: That just doesn't seem fair to the people who are maybe the best golfers in the world.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the frustration and the craziness of life.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or in chapter 10, 5 through 7, the futility of great people, good people and bad leaders.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: You could call it good as citizens and rotten kings or presidents.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's an evil he says, I've seen under the sun.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Fools are put in many high positions, slaves on horseback, while princes go on foot like slaves.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what he means is that people who think like slaves, who have no more mental capacity than uneducated people, they're that foolish that they're the ones who are ruling over us.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the people who really have an intelligence, who are really princes, princes of people, those are the ones who are who are the citizens.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you know it's true.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know it's true sometimes in schools or churches or in society, of course, when you look at congressmen or presidents or the continent of Africa, where nearly every country in the last 20 or 30 years has gone downhill rather than up.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because somehow they have terrible rulers and you have loads of good people over there.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: But you have rulers that are stealing the money, and so every country goes downhill.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's frustrating.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you've if you haven't realized this, I mean, you read Romans 13 where you are told to submit to the governing authorities.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have to ask myself, why, if God tells me to submit to the governing authorities that He has established, does He establish so many governing authorities that are absolutely worthless?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, doesn't, if you're not wrestling with that occasionally, you're either not living or you're not thinking.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't seem right.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: It seems, life just seems sometimes unbelievably unfair.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't make sense.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you ask people in Charleston who are related to that wonderful preacher, those people who are at a prayer meeting, why God would allow them to be shot and killed.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's a frustration.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's an insanity, it's a craziness.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now the question is, I mean, what do you do about it?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh to um to take a French proverb and twist it a little, the famous French proverb is God made everything out of nothing, and but the nothing still shows through.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Biblically, you'd say it this way: God made everything out of chaos, but the chaos still shows through.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what do you do about the fact that life seems crazy and chaotic at times?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the preacher in this book tried some things.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: He says in chapters one and two, first of all, he looked at nature, but he found as he looked at nature that nature was beautiful, nature displayed the glory of God, but it didn't give the key to life.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was just around and around repetitive.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then he studied history, and he found that history could tell us what happened down through time, but it couldn't tell us why it happened.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: So he studied science, and he found that science could tell us how things happened, but again, couldn't tell him why it happened.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: So he studied the wisdom of the world, and he found that as he looked at all the philosophers of the world, they still couldn't pin down the question why they had no answers.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you found that to be true, I'm guessing.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: At times you've thought, if only I read the right book or went to the right seminar, or somehow the right convention, then I could get my hand on it.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: But you've read that book or gone to that convention and found out at the end you were no better off than you were before.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so this guy, the preacher, he says, Well, I decided finally, chapter two, just to devote myself to having a good time, to pleasure, because maybe that's the answer to life.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so he did.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: He had the money, so he bought whatever pleasures he wanted, no responsibility.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he he discovered in the end that it was like trying to grasp hold of wind.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: There was absolutely no answer there.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was just futility and emptiness.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the question is: when you've tried your hardest and you've done your best to figure out why things are the way they are, where do you go from there?
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the answer is you find out that you haven't even thought about the worst futility of all.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that's death.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is the greatest riddle and paradox of all.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: I thought in my heart, he says in the end of chapter two, the fate of the fool will overtake me also.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: What do I gain by being wise?
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: I said in my heart, this too is futility.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: For the wise man like the fool will not be long remembered.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: In days to come, both will be forgotten.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like the fool, the wise man too must die.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: The greatest futility of all is death.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: All of life is like a dead end.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes death keeps such sloppy appointment books.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: He takes a two-year-old little girl who's really just learning to say dad-dad, or a little boy who's just learned to ride his bike.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then at the other end, you have a you have a man or a woman who've pretty much gone into dementia so that all they can do is mutter dad-dad in hospice and they just linger on.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: I told you a few weeks ago, my mother, the last few years of her life, say, Jim, how come the Lord doesn't take me?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to go home.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Why, why does why is death that way?
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's absolutely frustrating.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most profound drawings, you know, done on this subject was done by an 18-year-old named Charles in England in 1892.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's the most famous uh you know, one of these uh optical illusions, the most famous one in the world of a of a woman sitting before a vanity and primping, and she's in the prime of life and she's beautiful, and as you look closely, you see all of the things she's putting on.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: But as you back off, you see that the whole thing is a skull, that death makes all of that silly and all of that meaningless.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, so so and then take the Christian one more, take the Christian businessman who spent all of his life building a business, and finally the thing turns, and finally the thing's climbing the mountain, finally the thing's getting better, and and all of a sudden, then death takes him.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so his son inherits it, and his son is a fool, and his son ruins the whole business within six months.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Ecclesiastes 2, 18 and 19 describes that.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: I hated my work I labored at under the sun, because I have to leave it to the man who comes after me.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: And who knows whether he'll be a wise man or a fool?
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yet he'll take over all my work that I labored at skillfully under the sun.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: This too is futile.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: And again, if you've never wrestled with this, you're either not thinking or you're not living.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you resolve this?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you do you do you give up?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Do you live it up?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Do you throw up?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this this writer, the writer of Ecclesiastes, wrestles with all of these things and comes to a most profound conclusion.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: He comes to faith and he comes to he comes to hold on to those three, to three pegs that he mentioned to us earlier at the end of the book in chapter 12, pegs which turned around and held him.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you see these pegs in the book.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: Peg number one, the most, you know, the first one was he learned that God is sovereign.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And since God is sovereign, he decided, well, at least somebody has the key.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: God has the key.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: And though he won't give me the key, I can trust in God.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because at least God's in control.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: So he decided, you know what?
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: I I I maybe I'm frustrated with all of my life, but but I can relax if I constantly remind myself that God has a plan.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Though he won't tell me what the plan is, God has a plan.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, the apostle Paul picks this up in Romans chapter 8, greatest chapter in the Bible, perhaps, in verse 18, where he says, quoting Ecclesiastes, the whole earth is subject to futility, to emptiness.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then 10 verses later he says, but we know that God works all things together for good, to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose, one of the great sovereignty verses in the Bible.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: So the first peg that you and I are given in this book that this preacher recommends to us in a world that's absolutely frustrating is the peg of God's sovereignty.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: God's made everything beautiful in his time, he's set eternity in our hearts.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, we can't fathom what he's done from beginning to end, but we can trust him.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: We can relax, we can rest in him because he is sovereign.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Peg number two, God is good.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: God is good.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now I know the cross, I put a picture of the cross here.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because in the whole Bible and the whole scheme of the Bible, that's the greatest good.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's how God proves his goodness and his love to us more than anything else.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: In this book in Ecclesiastes, he points out that God is good because everything we have in life comes from the hand of a good God, like James 1.17.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: It all comes from a good God, and therefore we need to appreciate it.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: We need to enjoy it.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I know life is frustrating.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a homemaker, you wake up in the morning and you wash the dishes and you wash the clothes and you wash the baby, and by nightfall they're all dirty again.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a physician, you give somebody medicine, but you know that next month you're gonna have to give them more medicine, and eventually they're gonna get sick and they're going to die.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a student, you complete today's assignment, but you know another assignment is coming tomorrow or next week, and around and around it goes.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: But but this preacher says, listen, all of that comes to you from the hand of a good God.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: And even though it seems to you frustrating and futile, you need to fill your cup to the brim and enjoy all of life.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you're a Christian, he would say to you and to me, and I know you're thinking about heaven, but don't live life as though all of the goodness and all of the joy is in the future.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, relax and God is sovereign, but rejoice in him as good, for he has given you every single day.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: I love there's a line in the book.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's better to be a dead dog.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or better to be a live dog than a dead lion.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: One of the great lines.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Memorize that verse.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can, you know, if you if you required kids to say a verse at the table like I was growing up, it's better to be a live dog than a dead dog.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what he means by that is that the lion, though he was the king of all the beasts, is now dead.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: He can't do a thing, he's in the ground.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: But the dog, though he may be a mangy cur, can at least wag his tail.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: Do you really believe at this moment that you're more privileged than the most famous, wealthiest, most powerful person who's ever lived, who's now in the grave?
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's what he's saying here.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: You are so privileged to live in this moment, to live in this day that no matter what your life is like, you should get up in the morning and say, God, thank you for another day in which to live.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: I take it as a gift from your hand.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna drink the cup to the brim.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna live life to the hilt because I know that you're a good God.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: You see, that philosophy, eat, drink, and be merry, did not initially come to us from Epicurus from a couple hundred years before Christ.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: No, it dates from a thousand BC from this book.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: We eat, drink, and be merry, because life comes to us from the hand of a good God who wants us to live with joy.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, finally, finally, God is just.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: God is sovereign so we can relax.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: God is good so we can rejoice.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: God is just so we should live responsibly, fear God, and keep his commandments.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: For this is the whole duty of man.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Judgment is coming, and therefore, because we know God is going to judge, we start off, and if you're not a Christian, he's assuming that these are God's people, you start in the wisdom literature with the fear of the Lord.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: That is by saying yes to God, yes, God.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you say, God, yes, Lord, I believe in your Son Jesus, whom you sent to earth.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, such goodness, such love for me.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you trust him, please, as your personal Savior.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Believe in him, and then you live your life responsibly, knowing, yes, there is a judgment day.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: That while you can't figure everything out, while he hasn't given you the key, since he's sovereign, you can relax and rest.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Since he's good, you can rejoice.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Since he's just, you're responsible.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's been some years ago when I was out playing golf at uh at Lake Shawnee golf course with the Pettit brothers, Paul and Todd, both of them good golfers.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: It felt strange to be out there playing without their dad, but he couldn't make it that day.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was in, said he was in too much pain.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: He had uh he had a kind of a cancer, they were checking it out in his bones.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so after we, after the uh the golf was over, I called him up to talk to him about the round and how much fun that we'd had and so forth, and we talked and we laughed about that for a while, and then I, the elephant in the room, came up.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: I asked him about his health.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: I said, How are you feeling?
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: How was your week?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: Ed, who was one of the most popular and successful uh high school principals in our um in our city, very popular guy, science school teacher here.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: Ed uh was always positive, but he was also very honest with me, and he said it was a hard week for me.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: I said, in what way?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Well, just this week they finally finished the last major test of my bone marrow, and they've told me that it's a malignant cancer and that they can't even do anything to cure it.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was the worst possible news that he or I could get, and I was just shocked into silence, and it was just quiet on the phone for a while.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I finally broke the silence by saying, I am so sorry.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: That news has to be so frustrating.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing with that, Ed?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: And his answer was so profound, I grabbed a pen and I wrote down it what he said word for word.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I'm doing okay, Jim, really.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he said, this life is but a vapor.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: And in the perspective of eternity, it's not very long.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: And none of us have very long, and we must enjoy the days that God has given us.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: He said again, you know, he said, this life is but a vapor.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: In the perspective of eternity, it's not very long.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: I can't help thinking of Billy Graham speaking at commencement at Wheaton College, who said, who confessed in front of the students at Wheaton, he said, you know, the greatest shock in my life is realizing the brevity of life, how short life is.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: In the perspective of eternity, life is not very long.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: None of us have very long, and we must enjoy the days God gives us.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: He did not live long after that, but I always pictured that when Ed went to heaven standing right behind Jesus Christ, the second person to greet him was the preacher of Ecclesiastes, who I picture jumped headlong into Ed's arms and said, Finally, I've been the Rodney Dangerfield of preachers.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has really appreciated me, but you understood me.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: You understood what I was saying, that life is short, life is brief, life is frustrating, but God has given us this life to be enjoyed.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I picture Jesus turning around and hugging him saying, Wow, you know, you you guys are right.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: Would that more of my people would understand this, that they wouldn't put off the joy until the future, they'd realize right now is the time to live life to the hilt that they could trust me because I'm sovereign, that they would they would rejoice because I'm good, live responsibly because I'm just story goes that Mrs.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Einstein was once asked if she understood her husband's theory of relativity.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: No, she said, I don't understand his theory of relativity, but I understand Professor Einstein.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really enough, isn't it?
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: We can't understand what God's doing in the world or what his plan is or why things happen exactly the way they happen, but we we understand God.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: He hasn't given us the key, but he's given us himself.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so we can trust what we cannot trace.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: We can walk where we cannot see, we can live life in such a way that even though we are so frustrated at this insane life at times, we can fling ourselves with a reckless abandon upon him and say, I do trust you, Lord.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: I trust you all the way, even though I don't understand things.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because you are the sunshine of my life.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for a book like this that touches us exactly where we are.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you for being the kind of a God who's so practical.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: No, you haven't shared with us the answers.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: But we we realize that you shared with us something far better.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: You've shared with us yourself, and you give us yourself to the full if we'll simply love and trust you.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, I pray for these dear people, so many of whom are going through such difficult times, such crazy, such insane, such senseless experiences, and ask that you would show them yourself in a new way this week.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.