Preaching the Gospel from Ecclesiastes

All of us at one point or another in our lives will wrestle with ultimate questions, things like where do we come from, where are we going.

And for most of us, leaving those questions unanswered can be unsettling. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg takes us to Ecclesiastes chapter 12 to provide a backdrop for how we can answer those questions, find contentment, and ultimately share the gospel. Where did we come from? Who are we?

Where are we going? Questions that are in the minds of men and women with relative frequency when they either lie in their beds, or fly in turbulence on a plane, or view the arrival of tiny children, or watch the encroachments of Alzheimer's take a loved one into that strange place. My brief in these three mornings is to think about preaching the gospel, but the challenge of preaching the gospel always is the challenge of bringing the divine content of the message into the human context in which that message is to be delivered. We have God's Word to us by way of revelation, we have the immediate environment and world in which we live, and then we have the challenge, the privilege, the opportunity, the responsibility to try somehow or another to bridge those two islands and to make contact with those who are our listeners. And what I want to suggest to you this morning is that we might use three questions as a means of unpacking what is essentially the message of the preacher or the professor here in the book of Ecclesiastes. So first of all, we think in terms of the very question of origins—the question of origins. Origins, if you like, and the issue of personal identity.

Einstein, whom I've been thinking a lot about recently, because I'm reading a book on Gandhi, and Gandhi was impressed with Einstein, apparently. Einstein says in his credo, Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay without knowing the whys and the wherefores. It's a nice thing to have on the front of a t-shirt, don't you think?

You could put on the back, Have a nice day. In contrast, the teacher here says, No, that's not the case at all. The teacher says, You're not the product of some kind of chance evolutionary process.

You're not a collection of molecules held in suspension. You have actually been created in God's image, and you've been created in God's image with an innate understanding of eternity. And you have that, for example, in verse 11 of chapter 3, where he says, He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from the beginning to the end. So that you have this great duality, this amazing paradox in man by means of God's creative purpose. And for your homework, you can read the whole of Ecclesiastes, and you will find that this truth concerning the origin of man is reinforced. For example, 11, 5, As you do not know the path of the wind or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things. Which ties in with our reading from Psalm 139.

You have been fashioned intricately, says the psalmist, in the womb of your mother. You're not a random chance event. You don't exist as a result of time plus matter plus chance. There is a reason why so many in the contemporary generation look, feel, and act as lost as they do. Because they're lost. Because they have had dismantled for them any notion of the creative handiwork of God. So they do not know where they come from. contemporary generation has no picture on the front of the box.

Just random pieces, and no means of putting them back together again. Now, the approach of the preacher here is the approach of Paul, interestingly, when he addresses the highbrow people in Athens. He starts off, The God who made the world and everything in it. That's his opening line.

Well, I know he does an introduction, I see you're a religious people, you have nice statues and everything else. But as soon as he's done that and told them that the God who made the universe doesn't live in temples built with hands, and he's not in need of any one of you, in fact, you are in need of him, he has now established an entirely different view of the world from that was represented by the philosophers there in Athens. And that is what the Bible does.

A man cannot know. There is ultimately no intellectual road to God. That's why apologetics can only unsettle the worldview of those with whom we talk. It cannot lead a person to Christ.

Only God does that. It may chip away at their view, it may undermine their convictions, it may do all kinds of things to establish it, but if that was the case, only people who could follow the rational argument of apologetics would be able ever to come to faith in Jesus Christ. And if you think about that, some of you are so daft you could never follow the arguments, and you wouldn't even be a Christian today, were it not for the fact that you understand I know not why God's wondrous grace to me has been made known, or why, unworthy as I am, he bought me for his own. But I do know whom I have believed. And at the very core of that conviction is the fundamental biblical answer to this question. Where do I come from? The fact is that this life that we live originated in God, made in his image before there was time, before there was anything, there was God, is a life which is also unsatisfactory. And that's why in the early chapters of Ecclesiastes, the professor takes us down all the dead-end streets, and I'll leave you to go down them—the road of intellect, the pathway of pleasure, the dead-end street of materialism. They're all there.

There is nothing new under the sun. If I'm not a moral being made in the image of God, to whom I am accountable, then who am I? Am I my genes? Am I what I wear?

Am I just my genetic code? If I'm not a moral being made in the image of God, to whom I am accountable, then who am I? Now, when we're thinking in terms of preaching the gospel from Ecclesiastes, this is the kind of thing that we can be doing. And we can speak with a measure of conviction and hope-kindness concerning origins. Secondly, we can speak also with equal conviction concerning the transience of life. We don't have to work very hard to do this, because if the person with whom we're speaking, with whom we're sharing this good news, is honest at all, then they know that change and decay is represented in them.

All they need for this is a mirror and an honest friend. Kes'om knew. What are we? What are we? Well, what are we?

You see, he addresses this here, doesn't he? Nothing confronts us as our creatureliness more than the watch on our wrists. Does anyone really know? Augustine said, What is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not. Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its suns away.

Our lives are faster than a weaver's shuttle. They're like a breath in the morning air, and they're gone. And the writer makes this clear, and he says, You better pay attention to the God who made you before the days of trouble come. And then, in masterful poetry, he works his way through this. And I guess you've all heard sermons on this, and it can be quite tedious working your way through this picture of decay, verse 3 and on, when the keepers of the house tremble, and usually people take ages working through this, trying to impress you with things. So I'll try not to do that at all. Essentially what he's doing here is he's bringing to the mind of the reader the dawning realization that the aisles of the drugstore that we have so far managed to avoid are now beckoning us.

That's what he's saying. I used to be able to say, I'll never wear that stuff. I used to. But the house of my life is making sounds in the night. The house of my life is thwarting me in the day.

I understand what he's doing here in his dental analysis describing inadequate occlusion. The grinders are starting to cease. Your wife says, Well, why don't you have something a little milkier or a little softer or just a little… You know, what do you think I am, a hundred and ten, for goodness sake? No, but you will be if you keep going, fearful of heights. I could stand up here and jump off years ago. I wouldn't jump off here for a hundred and fifty dollars today. I used to be able to just open the car door and fall in, because I wanted to.

Now I open the car door and fall in, because I have to. That's what he's saying. Now, what is the writer doing here? He's establishing points of contact with his readers. Actually, the description here is quite remarkable, and it leads eventually to the fact that man is going to his eternal home. And when I ask the question, Where have I come from?, I want to know. And when I ask the question, What am I?, I need to know. And finally, when I ask the question, Where am I going?, I need to know. And so do our friends and neighbors, if they are to make sense of their human existence. Origins, the middle, the end.

What does he do? Well, he speaks concerning the reality of death. He says, Our lives are fragile, they're like earthenware. Our lives are transient, they're like the broken wheel at the well. There's a last time for every familiar journey. We can say honestly, without any sense of overreaching to people when we talk with them, when we share the gospel with them, there will be a time when you reverse your car out of your garage, and you will never drive it back in again. There will be a time when you put your key in the lock for the last time. There will be a time when you kiss your kids or your mom or your spouse goodbye, and you will never kiss them again. You may bank on that. It's the great taboo, the only remaining taboo, the only thing that America is unprepared to be absolutely provocative about is death.

You can talk about absolutely everything. But the great cover-up of American society is this cover-up. It's not my place to criticize American funerals, but they're no good. The only decent funerals I've attended and participated in, with minor exceptions, have been conducted in the Amish country.

For there, they know what they're doing. They dig the grave. They throw the dirt on. The family themselves take shovels and shovel the dirt on top of the coffin.

The average American funeral is of viewing. Now there'll be videos there of Uncle Billy when he was, you know, a quarterback for Notre Dame and everything. He's lying there looking better than he ever looked in the last forty years of his life, wearing spectacles that no one's ever seen. And everybody walks past and says banal things about him. And eventually they put him up on a plinth and try and drive out of the graveyard fast before any unsuspecting little great-grandchild says, But what did they do with him now, Uncle Bill?

What did they do now? Oh, don't worry, honey, he's going to be fine. That won't do, will it? Remember your Creator. Before the days of trouble come and you find no health and enjoyment in them. And remember this, that death is the destiny of every man, therefore the living must take it to heart. It is better, he says in chapter 7, to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting, because death is our destiny.

And he doesn't stop there. This is not Hinduism. He's not suggesting that you can go down and then you'll be back, hopefully in a better form.

I just came from India. Last week I was there in these great, huge Hindu temples, watching as people, nice young couples came and held on to the feet of the monkey god, or held on to the feet of the elephant god, or went into the shrine of Krishna. And what do they hope for? They hope for another chance, and another chance, and another chance. Christianity says, here's the deal.

You have one final appointment to face. After death comes judgment. We don't need to say that in a way that shouts, as it were, from up on high. We can say it in the way that he says it here. Kidner puts it masterfully, he says, death has not yet reached out to us.

Let it rattle its chains at us and stir us into action. We can say to people, therefore, we shouldn't succumb to complacency. Nothing goes unnoticed. Nothing goes unassessed. Not even the things we disguise from ourselves. But also this means that nothing is ultimately futile, that the God who has made us cares enough to intervene in this way.

So nothing can be pointless or need be pointless. And so he says, well, let me give you the end of it. Fear God. Fear God. Again, Kidner, a call that puts us in our place, and all other fears and hopes and admirations in their place.

Fear God. They say, well, that's a kind of Old Testament thing. It is an Old Testament thing.

It's a New Testament thing as well. Do you remember what Jesus said? I tell you, friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body. Be afraid of him who can cast your soul down into hell.

And on that occasion, Luke says that a vast crowd had gathered when Jesus said that—soldiers, traitors, lovers, friends, criminals, all working the crowd, pickpockets, like in Oliver, and all the people are there, and this Nazarene figure is speaking. I tell you, don't be afraid of those who kill the body—if you want to be afraid of someone, be afraid of him who has your eternal destiny in his hands. Do you ever wonder if in the crowd there were the criminals that ended up on either side of Jesus? That somehow or another, in the midst of his day, that man just heard the phrase, Don't be afraid of the person who kills you, be afraid of what happens after that.

Because it is interesting, isn't it, that when they are hanging on either side of Jesus on the cross, the one says to his friend who is verbally abusing Jesus—do you remember what he says? Don't you fear God. Don't you fear God?

We are up here getting what we deserve, but this man has done nothing wrong. And then suddenly, and somehow, wonderfully and mysteriously, the penny drops for him. And he speaks to Jesus and receives that wonderful reply. Now, we must stop, but when we speak in these terms, we need to understand that the fear that is represented here is a fear which arises from the discovery of God's love for us in our sin and in our weakness.

When I realize that this God who made me knows me thoroughly, means to destroy everything that is sinful in me, and yet he does so because he loves me with an intensely faithful love, that fear is a fear which is only known to God's children. Now, it's at this point, which is where we stop, that we would then, if we had the opportunity to go for coffee with the person that we had been either dialoguing with or who had been listening in on our talk, it's at this point that we would then tell our friends the gospel. Because we haven't yet told them the gospel, have we? We haven't done the gospel. We say, Well, it's all gospel.

Yes it is. And even when we have pointed out the dangers of neglecting the gospel or the benefits of accepting the gospel, we still haven't told them the gospel—what God did for us in Christ, in order to save us from sin, from the devil, and from death. That another true and obedient human being has come on our behalf and has lived for us the kind of life we should live but can't, and that he has paid fully the penalty we deserve for the life we do live but shouldn't. And into our brokenness and into our alienation has come one in whom the answer to our alienation is found. It's interesting, when you go down this line—and with us I will close—that there are so many avenues of opportunity. If you went to see Avatar, you know that it is a quite remarkable piece of work.

Cameron knew what he was doing, there's no question of that. There you have the story of Pandora, a holy tree, where tribal memories and ancestral wisdom are there for the asking. If you're in need of a little—it's a bit like driving a Prius—you know, you've got a tail, and you can plug your tail into the power source, and it'll keep you going for another little while. And I was amazed, having seen people coming out and going, That is fantastic!

I really love that idea! What, you mean having a tail and plugging it into the tree? Or what do you love about it? No, they said, I love the idea that we're free from all this trauma and all this hatred and all this animosity, and that there is a place somewhere where you can live in tranquility and in beauty, and I love the idea of that tree, and what a fantastic garden, and free from all of that horrible, dreadful, ravaging, big creatures and things that are crushing everybody to bits. They said, Well, I'm glad you feel that way, and I understand your longing. Have you ever read the Bible? No, you're crazy, what do I read the Bible for? It's a stupid old book like that. Well, you know, there's a bit in the Bible that actually starts off with a really beautiful garden and a tree.

It does. Yeah, oh, it's good, it's good, you might like it. And you know what? It addresses the desire for a better place, and it actually explains all the disablement and the disgruntlement of life. And we might say to our friends—and I think I can understand the sense of depression that some have expressed in coming back out into this ugly world in which we live, away from that beautiful garden—and then we might say to them, Did you ever read mere Christianity?

And they'll say, Probably no. And then you'll say, This is what C.S. Lewis said, If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy, that doesn't prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy, but only to arouse, to suggest the real thing. I must make it the main object of life, to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.

Let us then press on to that other country and help others to do the same. Maybe this will be helpful in thinking about dealing with the Gospel from Ecclesiastes. All of us can identify with the lack of soul-deep satisfaction that comes from this world. But as believers, we can use that as common ground for sharing the Gospel with others. That's the challenge from today's message on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Maybe today's program has left you wondering if you were made for another world, as C.S.

Lewis suggested. If that's the case, we want to invite you to visit truthforlife.org slash thestory. What you'll find there is a helpful video presentation that explains God's plan for salvation. Now if you listen to Truth for Life regularly, you know we spend a lot of time selecting books that we believe will help you grow in your faith. This is the final day we're offering a book titled Our Ancient Foe. The subtitle is Satan's History, Activity, and Ultimate Demise. This is a helpful book that exposes the ways in which Satan uses his tricks and his weapons against us. And then this book points us to God's superior might and his victorious plan of redemption. You can request your copy of the book Our Ancient Foe when you make a generous one-time donation to Truth for Life today.

It's quick and easy to give online when you visit truthforlife.org slash donate. If you were in prison, would you spend most of your time thinking about how to get free? If we're honest, that's probably where most of us would land, but that's not what the apostle Paul did. Find out tomorrow why he chose to preach the gospel instead. I'm Bob Lapine, the Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.