A Word to the Wise (Part 1 of 2)

The Preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes writes, I've seen all the things that are done under the sun.

All of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. That sentiment leaves us wondering, has anything changed, and how do we make sense of our time on earth? We'll explore the answers today on Truth for Life as Alistair Begg begins a fast-paced overview of the book of Ecclesiastes. We're going to read from the Bible in the Old Testament in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes chapter 1, and it reads as follows, the words of the teacher, son of David king in Jerusalem. Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher, utterly meaningless, everything is meaningless. What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north, round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.

To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, Look, there is something new. It was here already, long ago. It was here before our time. There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.

I the teacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men!

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

What is lacking cannot be counted. I thought to myself, Look, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me. I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge. Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly. But I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind, for with much wisdom comes much sorrow.

The more knowledge, the more grief. Thanks be to God for his Word. Father, as we study the Bible together, we need your help desperately, a futile exercise simply to listen to a man talking. But we believe that when your Word is preached, that your voice is heard in a way that is promised to us in the Bible and that we don't fully understand, but we know when it happens. We ask that it may happen now, for the glory of Christ and for our good, and for Jesus' sake.

Amen. In reflecting on it, I think that a number of things have been in the back of my mind that have pointed me in this direction, all of which have taken place out with the country. I came back from speaking at the Southwest Bible Festival and was returning to the small private hotel where they had made provision for me. Earlier in the day, I had made the acquaintance of the proprietor and his wife, a nice man from Lancashire called Mark and his wife by the name of Ruth. When I got back quite late in the evening, I discovered when I walked into the entranceway that in the parlor, immediately on my right-hand side, which was the bar with a few extra tables, Mark and Ruth were there with a small coterie of people. And so I went in to sit with them and to say hello and to be friendly. And when I sat down, Ruth said to me, How did the talk go? So I said, Well, I think it went fairly well.

There were a few people still awake when I finished, which is usually a pretty good sign. She said, Well, what did you talk about? I started to tell her the outline of what I'd been saying, and suddenly one of two ladies sitting immediately to my right behind a big floral decoration, the lady right in the middle of what I'm saying, launches out and says, Myth and Dogma. Just like that.

Myth and Dogma. So I looked around the flowers and I said, Is that your name? She said, No, my name is Angela, but what you're saying is absolute rubbish. This is the first time I ever met this lady in my life. So I said, Well, you want to talk about it?

Yes. She said, I'm studying philosophy. I said, That's interesting.

Who are you studying? She said, Well, I'm just studying generally. I said, Well, which philosophers have you found most helpful? Well, she couldn't actually think of a single philosopher at this point, which in fairness to her was largely due to the fact that she'd consumed a fair quantity of alcohol before I showed up, and it was still in process.

She and her sidekick Avril, both of them dressed in navy blue and looking fairly prosperous and through the woods from the small private hotel. Well I said, Did you find Nietzsche particularly helpful? No, she said, No. I said, How about Sartre?

She said, Well, he's good, but not a lot. I said, Well, what about a twentieth-century philosopher, the best that Britain could produce? Bertrand Russell.

Did you enjoy Russell? And what about his answer? Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair may the soul's habitation be built. Angela, is that what you're telling me you built your life on? Well, then she started to say things a little more forcibly to me, and when all was said and done, I went to bed about one-fifteen in the morning. They stayed downstairs. But I could still hear them talking when I drifted into unconsciousness in my room directly above the bar around 2.05 a.m. By that time, Angela had promised to come to the talk on the Sunday evening, but when I looked for her, apparently she'd been in bed since early Sunday morning, all the way through Sunday, trying to recover from the events of the previous night.

Ruth, however, did come along. So that was the first thing. I was struck by the fact that here, in all of this protestation of philosophy, the words of the preacher ring out, for with much wisdom comes much sorrow. The more knowledge, the more grief. The second event took place on Tuesday when, in a small village in Shropshire, I went out for a stumble. And as I went down the road—I used to call it a run, then I chased it to a jog, now I call it a stumble—so I went out for a stumble and stumbled upon a church and a graveyard. I went into the graveyard, as is my want, so that I could check out the tombstones. And as I walked amongst the tombstones all by myself, I noted that some had been there since the seventeenth century.

Some were large, and some were small, and some had worn away, but I went through them all looking for names and looking for quotations. I found myself stopping at a small plate in the grass. I was drawn to it because of some freshly cut flowers.

And as I looked at the flowers nestled in with the flowers, that was a small porcelain bear. And as I looked down, it was ten years since the death of this fourteen-year-old boy, and apparently members of his family had been there in the last few days or the last few hours memorializing his passing and reflecting on all that life might have been had they enjoyed him through the ages of fourteen all the way through twenty-four. I found myself reflecting on the words of Ecclesiastes, It's better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting, because death is the destiny of everybody, and the people who are still alive should take that to heart. The third signpost came on the same day, but in the evening, when in my responsibilities now to speak to a group of some ninety evangelical ministers, we were pondering how it would be possible for each of these men to better be involved in reaching out to their community and also to equipping their people to do the same. And in the course of a question-and-answer session, I found myself saying, You know, gentlemen, you will never have an evangelistic church unless you yourself are an evangelistic pastor. You will never have an evangelistic outreach in congregation unless you have an evangelistic reaching out pastoral team.

You will never find that the congregation is able to engage people in conversation, to move them towards a consideration of who Christ is and why he came, unless those who are in leadership are making that a way of life. And as I heard myself saying that, I was challenged by it. I found myself saying, Well, how well are you doing yourself?

Smarty pants. It's easy for you to say this to a group of men and then run out of the country, but what are you doing? And I said to myself, I wonder if it might not be possible to encourage the congregation along these lines of saying to a friend or to a neighbor, expressly in the next three months, why don't you come and join us for worship on Sunday morning?

We'd love to have you come. We're going through an old book together called Ecclesiastes, and I think you'll find that it is very apropos where life is being lived. But what you have here in Ecclesiastes is a solid dose of reality—a solid dose of reality. In fact, Eliot, on one occasion, remarked that humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Men and women really can't do with reality very much. That's why the constant interference in our lives is an introduction to fantasy, to mirage, to that which is out and beyond us. If only we could get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do, then perhaps over there and beyond this little thoroughfare we can find the answers. Now the teacher, as he introduces himself here in verse 1, is Son of David and King in Jerusalem. Although he doesn't actually say, I am Solomon, Solomon best fits the description, I think you will agree. And his approach is to wrestle with the enigmas of life. He is himself involved with the questions that he's raising. He's not like some distanced university professor who is simply firing out various notions and then standing back and watching as the members of his class get embroiled in the discussion. Rather, this individual is involved in the very questions that he raises. As someone has put it, he has built an observation tower, and he has built it at ground level.

He is right down where people are living their lives. And one of the things that will become apparent as we try and do a chapter a time, at least a chapter a time, is that this book understands us. We often think, I wonder if I'll understand this book. And of course, our quest is to do so. But what we discover is that this book turns its searchlight on our lives, and suddenly as we read it, we say, it would appear that the author of this book knows me.

Maybe you'll find that out even this morning. So you will notice in verse 2 that he begins with his conclusion. Begins with his conclusion.

In Jewish writing, it was customary to put the most important point up front. And so that's what he does. He says, I want you to know, first of all, that everything is absolutely meaningless. Meaningless. You say, well, that's not a very pleasant thought. No, it's not a particularly pleasant thought, but remember, Elliot, humankind doesn't do well with reality. Do not adjust your life.

The problem is reality. Meaningless, he says. Now he puts his conclusion up front in much the same way as the old Colombo shows used to operate. You remember the fellow with the raincoat?

I think that's him. And those programs, I think if I recall correctly, always began by allowing the viewer to see who did it. So you didn't have to wait to the end to find out who did it.

You as the viewer knew who did it. And then the whole program was about following Colombo as he puts the clues together to finally reach the conclusion that we already know. So the program begins with the conclusion, and then everything else works towards it. That's exactly how Ecclesiastes works. Now, there are certain phrases that are absolutely crucial. None more so than the little phrase here in verse 3, under the sun. It comes some thirty times.

Some thirty times. And what the writer is saying is this. My perspective largely in this survey is taken not from the vantage point of an infinite personal creator God who has established a link with his creation, but is established from the framework of secular thinking, or is bounded only by the framework of our lives, from birth to death, if you like. And he says, what I did was I set out to examine the course of life from birth to death, and I'm forced to conclude that if you simply stay in that box, if you stay within those nine dots, then I think I can adequately convince you that the conclusion must inevitably be that, as Hemingway put it, life is a dirty trick, a short journey from nothingness to nothingness. A few months ago now, in attending the Cleveland Clinic, we engaged in conversation concerning a mutual friend who had been a physician at the clinic. The reason we spoke of him was because of the mutual friendship but also because he was coming back to the clinic to give a talk on alternative medicine, to give a talk on the healing power and properties of prayer. And as we observed that it was interesting that this scientific rationalist should somehow or another have come to this conclusion, the physician volunteered to me this.

He said, When I entered science and began to pursue medicine, I did so because it appeared within that framework to give sensible and cohesive answers to life's questions. Now he says, I know that it doesn't. It doesn't answer the huge questions of life. Now I admired his honesty, but beyond that he had nothing to say.

What do you say to your friend when they tell you that? I don't have answers to the big questions. Well let's follow the line and move through it as quickly as we can. Do the facts of life, as presented here by the preacher man, do the facts of life bear out his thesis—namely, that life is meaningless. Well look at what he points out. First of all, he says in verse 3, here is a fact of life. It's marked by drudgery. What has man gained from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? It's frankly boring, he says.

That's the inference. Life is all about punching in and punching out. You punch in, you punch out. You stamp your card, you stamp it out.

Stamp it in, you stamp it out. It's Monday now, it's Tuesday now, it's Wednesday now, it's Thursday now, until finally you punch out for the last time. And whether you are an engine driver, whether you are a young executive, whether you are a schoolteacher, whether you're involved in the janitorial staff of a school—it doesn't matter what it is, whether you're a mother at home, whatever it may be—the fact of the matter is that life is possessed by an inherent monotony. McCartney, in a song penned soon after the Beatles had broken up, writes in this way, Every day she takes her morning bag, she wets her hair. She ties a towel around her as she's heading for the bedroom chair. It's just another day.

Slipping into stockings, stepping into shoes, dipping in the pocket of a raincoat. And at the office where the papers grow, she takes a break. She pours a cup of coffee, and she tries so hard just to stay awake. It's just another day. And for many people, if we're honest enough to face the amazing finitude of it all, we are like premature residents in a sad, sorry scene in a retirement home—individuals who are awakened at the same time every morning when the light is turned on, who are dressed, who are wheeled down the hallway to sit in a lounge and to stare at a point on the wall till finally the afternoon shadows fall and they are wheeled back again to be undressed, to be placed in bed all over again, and to wait for the light going on the following morning. And many of our lives are actually possessed of that same kind of monotonous feel, if we're honest. Now, management understands this, work-study people understand this, and scientific journals are clear on it. Quoting from one, it says this, "…by and large people seldom enjoy their work, nor do they enjoy traveling to and from it. Most jobs are repetitive, require very little personal initiative, and for the most part people are incapable of fulfilling anything like their full potential through them.

People go to work that they do not enjoy, and spend a considerable proportion of their working hours getting to work and then home. It thus looms large in a life that is not very pleasant at the outset." We say, yes, but if we could get up and beyond that, you know, then it would all be different.

No, I don't think so. In 1969, we have a man on the moon. One small step for a man, one giant step for mankind. But by 1980, Dr. Louis Thomas, writing in the Harvard magazine, says, you can walk on the moon if you like, but there's nothing to do there except look at the earth.

And when you've seen one earth, totally meaningless. You're gonna punch in and punch out? Simply go through this, do your best to make sense of it, and then finally die? I met a man who sang the blues.

I asked him for some happy news. It's a fact of life. Secondly, verse 4, life is marked by transience. When I went through that graveyard, the numbers fell out the way they always do. They averaged out to around three score years and ten. There were a couple of ninety-ones, an eighty-four, there was a fourteen, a twenty, and so on.

I did the math in my head, which is always dangerous, as you know, but I'm pretty sure that it would come out right around three score years and ten. The frailty of our lives this morning is not in question. I walked on grass familiar to me in Scotland. And as I walked down beaten paths, not cart paths put in with concrete and black stuff, but just paths that had been eroded by many, many travelers, I was confronted by the fact that I walked these paths when I was three years old, and before me, people walked it, and before them, people walked it. And what of the pebbles on the seashore that I picked up and let pass through my hands?

These have been around for so long. That is Alistair Begg with a solid and somber dose of reality from the book of Ecclesiastes. You're listening to Truth for Life. It is true that life can feel meaningless if we only consider life from birth to death. That's why we love to teach the gospel, the good news, to people all around the world. It's a message of hope for those who feel hopeless. If you'd like to understand the gospel more clearly, we've posted a short, helpful video on our website that explains Jesus' life, his death, and his resurrection. Find out how the gospel makes your life and death meaningful.

You can watch the video by searching truthforlife.org slash the story. The Bible teaching you here on this program is brought to you each day because of the generosity of listeners just like you. You've probably heard me mention our truth partners. Truth partners are those who support Truth for Life each month, both prayerfully and financially. I mention it because truth partners are essential to this listener-funded ministry. Without their faithful giving, this program wouldn't be possible. You can become one of our truth partners by giving us a call at 888-588-7884, or you can go online to truthforlife.org slash truthpartner. When you do, you'll be invited to request both of the books we recommend each month, all for no additional donation.

It's our way of saying thanks for your partnership with us. The book we've selected for you today is a perfect supplement to our current study. It's titled Living Life Backward, How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End. The author of Ecclesiastes was a person just like you and me. He asked the same questions about life that we ask today, like what does all of this mean?

What's the point? And it's these kinds of questions that the book Living Life Backward explores in depth. When you read it, you'll be encouraged to think about what the answers mean for you, how to align your priorities.

You might even find that as you make adjustments in the way you go about your day, there is an increased sense of both joy and peace. Request your copy of Living Life Backward when you become a truth partner. You can also request the book with a one-time donation to the Ministry of Truth for Life. Go to truthforlife.org slash donate. Or if you'd rather mail your donation along with your request, write to Truth for Life at P.O.

Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening today. At some point, most of us have wondered, is there life after death? Join us tomorrow as we'll explore an equally essential question, is there life before death? Today is Independence Day here in the United States, and on behalf of our entire team at Truth for Life, we hope you and your family have the opportunity to celebrate together and to enjoy the holiday. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the learning is for heaven.