All Those Lonely People (Part 1 of 2)

Is life meaningful or is it meaningless? That's the question Alistair Begg is exploring today on Truth for Life. The teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes identified a sense of futility that can plague people whether they're rich or poor, lazy or driven.

So how do we find real and lasting purpose? Alistair is teaching a message titled, All Those Lonely People. Some of you may just have arrived this morning, and you are falling into this series in Ecclesiastes, which we're conducting at around sixty thousand feet, moving a chapter at a time through the book as best we can.

And we are confronted here by the wisdom of the preacher or the teacher or the professor—all of these equally valid translations of quaheleth, which is literally translated Ecclesiastes. Or, if you like, we are listening to the wisdom of the individual we may describe as the pundit, somebody who brings profound thoughts to bear upon the issues of life as they confront them. And this individual, we've been discovering, is conducting a search. He's ransacking the world to try and solve the riddle of life. He's conducting an experiment, if you like. He is exercising his wisdom largely within the framework of secular thinking. Every so often he punches, as it were, beyond the clouds that are under the sun and goes out into a realm where he is able to bring divine wisdom to bear on earthly analysis.

This groping for meaning, which essentially it is, is not, as we've been discovering, being conducted in a laboratory or in a library, but rather it is being conducted in the university of life. He's walking down streets not dissimilar to the streets of Cleveland. He's stopping, as it were, at the street corners and conversing with men and women.

This individual would have got a lot of his material from sitting in the variety of coffee shops and cafes, which are now part and parcel of life on the American high street. And the issues of life that he addresses, he sometimes overstates in order that he might bring them graphically to the face and recollection of his readers. There's an energy to what he's doing, which conveys just how serious he really is. And at the heart of it all, he's really asking this. Can there be any real and lasting purpose if dust is our destiny?

Is life meaningful, or is life meaningless? Now, that seems to me to be a very contemporary—and it will always be contemporary—search. It's not difficult to find men and women who in their heart of hearts are trying to unscramble this issue, trying, as it were, to deal with the great equations of life and make sure that the left-hand side balances out the right. And so, as we move through these chapters, we are confronted by his insights. They're not the easiest of chapters. I think you would agree to try and analyze and set down in an orderly fashion. Wisdom literature isn't easy to tackle.

And I think I've been making that clear in the first three studies. I actually was greatly encouraged when I first studied this book and read in a commentary this particular sentence. The commentator said, The book—referring to Ecclesiastes—defies any logical analysis, and therefore no outline of contents is presented. So he basically says, I don't know what to do with this.

I can't make chapters out of it or paragraphs out of it, so I just made nothing out of it at all. A bit like the Puritan preacher who had preached a big, big, big long sermon in the morning, and at one point he'd been heard by his congregation to say, and now twenty-seventhly. And when he came back in the evening, he said, My sermon this morning had so many points that I want you to know my sermon this evening is going to be pointless. And there is a sense in which, in trying to gather thoughts, we may, in grasping it, miss it. However, we have to do something, and we have to give some kind of structure to it in order that we might attach our thinking. And if you look at chapter 4—and you can do this as your homework—you can go away and say, If I had to teach this to a group of individuals, if I had to say something sensible about this, what are the kind of things that would stand out to me? What are the words that I would write down on a sheet of paper as I began to study? And I think that you would find that when you looked at verse 1, you would immediately find the little phrase jumping out at you, They have no comforter.

Why? Well, because it's repeated. And repetition is always for emphasis. And so immediately we're on to something.

Immediately we have an idea of where we're going. As you read on and you get down into verse 7, you see the description of meaninglessness again. And this individual in verse 8, a man who was all alone, he had neither son nor brother. So you say, Well, there's no comforter, and here in verse 7 there's no companion. And you get further on into it, and you see at the end this foolish king and the upstart youth and the transition of power and popularity, and you say to yourself, There doesn't seem to be any continuity here at all. No comforter, no companion, no continuity. And you begin to build this little verbal collage, and as you stand back from it, you say, There is a word that seems to come to mind here, and it is the word aloneness, or it is the word loneliness.

And there seems to be, hanging all of this material together, an experience that is common to men and women. When Paul describes the experience of the Ephesians in his second chapter and in verse 12, he reminds the Ephesians that before they discovered who God is in Christ, they were without hope and without God in the world. And that, incidentally, is one of the great classic statements which describes the ebb and flow of humanity today in Greater Cleveland.

Cars coming and going, driving north and south and east and west, people going about their business in the thoroughfares of life. And what is it that describes them? Well, actually, whether they identify it or not, they are without God, and they are without hope in the world. And the sense of angst that they may feel, the sense of dissonance that they experience, the disengagement with their friends and neighbors, the sense of disengagement in their own souls is all traced to this one pivotal and foundational reality. Now, in chapter 4, he describes this condition essentially from four angles. And I want to address them, but very briefly. Because I don't want to dwell this morning on the condition—I feel like I've done that enough in the opening studies—but I want to dwell a little longer on the solution. And I'll give you my headings.

They may not strike you as particularly helpful, but at least I can be honest in sharing them with you. When I read verses 1–3, I wrote down on the page, You're better off dead. Verses 1–3, I summarized as, You're better off dead. Now, if you look at it, you can see why I wrote that down.

Because that is what he's saying. Consider the bitter facts of life, he says. Look at all the oppression that takes place under the sun. And he's writing three thousand years ago, approximately. And he's describing what Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, says, that man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn. And we turn and we look back down the corridor of history, and what do we discover?

We discover that the observation here in these opening verses is absolutely accurate. I have seen the oppression of men, and they have no comforter, and power is on the side of the oppressors. Whether it is racial in the southern states of America in the twentieth century, whether it is racial in the apartheid of South Africa also in the twentieth century, or whether it is racial and ethnic as in the Nazi regime of the twentieth century, or whether it is racial and ethnic as in the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia also in the twentieth century, so we could go on. This individual makes a very good point. Power is on the side of the oppressor, and the oppressed have no comforter, and no one seems to step in for them. And, he says, that seems to me to be absolutely terrible.

It is a miserable business. I just introduced my youngest sister to the film Life is Beautiful, the Italian movie with the English subtitles, by Benigni, or featuring Benigni, who won an Oscar for it, I think—the fellow who walked across the backs of the seats when he was picking up his Oscar. A wonderful film. If you haven't seen it, you can safely go out and rent it and watch it with your grandmother.

It will cause you no upset at all. Incidentally, if you cannot watch a movie with your grandmother, you shouldn't be watching the movie in the first place. And it is a classic statement of the oppression of the Holocaust. In mentioning Cambodia—and I'm on a little movie thing at the moment—but in mentioning Cambodia, no film that I have ever seen has ever had such an impact on me.

I could hardly tolerate myself when I finished watching it. And I'm talking now of The Killing Fields. It's an old movie.

It's the story of the Khmer Rouge, Dith Prahn, the journalist, trying to extricate himself from The Killing Fields, escaping into Thailand, and the vivid pictures there of these dreadful fields as he begins to stumble and bumble around, and he's standing on skulls and he's standing on skeletons as he trashes through the water. And there's nothing sadder in the Hall of Ecclesiastes than the wistful glance here of the writer when he looks wistfully at the dead and the unborn. And he says to himself, I declare that the dead who'd already died are happier than the living who are still alive. You're better off dead. In fact, he said, I can only take it up one further notch. You're better if you've never even been born, he says.

That's how bad it is. Teenagers figure that out. They say it at some point along the journey to their parents, don't they? Slam the bedroom door and they say, I didn't ask to be born. And Johnny Carson's famous reply is, And if you'd asked, I would have said no. Expressing the great pain that is involved in that struggle and the awareness of life's finitude. In a film that I don't really like, with music that I really enjoy, Out of Africa, Countess von Blixen in one scene stands at the grave of her friend Dennis, who's been tragically killed in a plane crash. And in a soliloquy, she says, essentially under her breath, smart lad, to slip the times away from fields where glory doesn't stay.

She says, He's better off gone. This is a miserable existence. Verses 1–3, you're better off dead.

Verses 4–6, I wrote down just three words. Envy, poverty, anxiety. Envy, poverty, anxiety. And once again, there is an overstatement here—vigorously stating something for effect. Look at what he says, I saw all labor and all achievement they spring from man's envy of his neighbor. The motivation, he says, that makes the world go round is the desire to outshine the next fellow.

The girl on the plane with the folder and the lamp top is driven in part to make sure that she outshines the person in Territory West, or at least that she is not outshone by the girl who is in Territory West, she being in Territory Center. And the wheel of life is driven by a competitive spirit. And the point that he's making is this, that when we are moved and stimulated simply by keeping up with the Joneses, it will prove an insufficient motive, and it will provide no ultimate satisfaction. If you go to work to keep up with the Joneses, then the Joneses will always be one step ahead of you.

If not that Mr. and Mrs. Jones, there will be another Mr. and Mrs. Jones. And if that is our motivation, then our reach will always exceed our grasp. And so he says it's absolutely futile.

The opposite is extreme. Poverty in verse 5, the fool folds his hands and ruins himself, he says, that is equally useless. Look at this lazy individual, idleness, eating away not only what he has but also what he is, eroding his self-control, his grasp of reality, his capacity for care, and in the end even his self-respect. Incidentally and in passing, the juxtaposition between verse 4 and 5 is the source of many a disagreement in suburban households all across America.

Verse 4 describes the father, verse 5 describes the son. The father is completely driven, going, going, going, going, going. He says to his son, Why can't you be like me? How long are you gonna sit around growing your hair and listening to that dumb rock music? How long do I have to put up with it before you finally step up and realize, smell the coffee, find out what life is all about?

And the boy closes the bedroom door and says, You can keep it. I'm not interested in being like you. I don't want to be like you. I don't like the fact that you're gone all the time. I don't like the fact of what you're doing to my mother. I don't like your impact in the home here.

I don't like the fact that apparently we're driven by some envious, jealous, acquisitive, spurious notion. And I know I look to you like I don't care about anything, but if you ever came and talked with me, Dad, you'd find out I care about a lot, and I care about a lot of people, and I care about a lot of the oppression that apparently you don't care about and your business interests in South America don't care about, otherwise those people would be making a reasonable wage. And then the father, he slams the door. Not only do I have a lazy son, but I have a communist for a son. The whole thing is going haywire on me.

What am I going to do? What do you mean these people should be thankful for seventy-three cents an hour? If we didn't go down and give them seventy-three cents, they would have no money. And the son says, It's clear we're going to have to go down two different roads, Dad. You're living envy. I'm facing poverty. And both of us are going to be wracked by anxiety. The anxiousness of the acquisitive grasp. The anxiousness of the Where's it coming from? question.

And so, in a moment of insight, look at what he says. Better one handful with tranquility Than two handfuls with toil And chasing after the wind. In other words, better to have modest earnings And a restful mind Than to make large gains With the accompanying anxiety. Better modest earnings And a peaceful heart Than huge gains and an anxious soul. You say, Well, this is an argument for doing poorly, is it?

No! It's an argument about motivation. It's a comment on the notion of contentment.

You ask the average suburban housewife if she is happier today with the however many-car garage, searching everywhere in her purse for opener one, opener two, opener three, opener for the opener, for the gadget, to get to the gadget, to ring the bell, to find the keys, to press the button, to do the code, whatever it is. Ask her if she's happier now with all of this than she was when she and her husband, in the fledgling days, carried cardboard boxes up the stairs into their two-room apartment and laid the rug on the floor that her mother-in-law had given her, which she thought was one of the ugliest rugs she'd ever seen in her life. But now she looks back and says, That was a beautiful rug.

Oh, yes, it was. And her husband says, That's a flat-out lie. You hated that rug.

You bugged me. Go to work! Go to work!

Go to work! Get me a decent rug! Get me a decent rug! And for the last twenty-five years, basically, I have been going crazy to get the rug, to get the silverware, to get the thing, to get the that, and now you tell me, Oh, I loved it back in the two-room apartment. And you see again how marriages begin to fall apart, how the aggravation and the expectations begin to tip in on one another. But the fact is that wives do long for the good old days, when there was time to relax, when there was time to enjoy, and they would give anything to go back there, in contrast to the dissatisfied restlessness which is their experience. The dissatisfied restlessness.

Now, loved ones, hear me correctly. There are peculiar temptations in the land of the free and the home of the brave in this realm, and we have to handle them. You buy an ice-cream cone in other parts of the world.

You can walk down the street with it in safety. Now, you could argue that that is because they don't give you enough ice cream. You could also argue that is because they gave you a sensible amount of ice cream.

Everything's perspective. But do you know how many times I have dropped ice cream out of an ice-cream cone in the street? Do you know what that does to a Scotsman's instincts when all of that money falls on the ground?

And do you know why it fell? Because I really only wanted one scoop with tranquility. I didn't want two scoops with anxiety. That's a paradigm of where this place is. This is our home.

This is our place. Proud of it, sensitized to it, anxious about it. Envy, poverty, anxiety. To live life without hope, without God, well, it's pointless and it's exhausting.

It's like running on a giant hamster wheel, getting nowhere fast. We're listening to Truth for Life. Alistair Begg concludes this message on Ecclesiastes 4 tomorrow. At the end of your life, will you look back on it with pleasure or with concern?

Will you feel like you found true contentment in life? We're exploring this topic in our study of the book of Ecclesiastes. And to go along with Alistair's teaching, we encourage you to request your copy of the book Living Life Backward, How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End. The book explains how the writer of Ecclesiastes reflected on his own life and the wisdom he drew from his reflection. As he remembered the ways he had tried to find happiness apart from God, he realized that life is only meaningful when lived with eternity in mind.

Living Life Backward will guide you to focus on eternity as well. We're only offering Living Life Backward a few more days, so request your copy when you give a donation to support the teaching you hear on Truth for Life. You can tap on the image you see on your mobile app or visit truthforlife.org slash donate. You can also call us to make a donation and request the book. The number is 888-588-7884. And if you'd prefer to mail your donation along with your request for the book Living Life Backward, write to us at Truth for Life, P.O. Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio.

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Again, it's free to use and free to download. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. Today's message focused on the dissatisfied restlessness that is part of the human experience. Maybe it left you feeling a bit unsettled. If so, be sure to join us tomorrow for the conclusion of today's message. We'll discover why as Christians we don't have to feel anxious or alienated or alone. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.