It's the question that's been asked by everyone who's ever lived since the beginning of time. Why am I here? Today, on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah begins a study in the Old Testament book intended to answer that question: Ecclesiastes. If you've ever been looking for life's purpose, listen as David begins his series, Searching for Heaven on Earth.
with today's message, the futility of life.
Well, today we're going to begin a study of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. You may have to look in your index to find it, because it's not one we read about and talk about a lot.
Some people just pass over the book thinking that it doesn't have anything to offer us today. When they do that, they lose the blessing of Solomon's teaching. We're going to get a chance to live inside of the memos of Solomon as he investigates life. life as if there were no God. He tries to find meaning in so many different things, only to discuss those things out loud in his book, and then to say, Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
Emptiness, emptiness, all is emptiness. In the first chapter, he sort of outlines and gives us illustrations of his search for meaning. And uh I hope that you will join us. uh today as we begin The Futility of Life from Ecclesiastes 1:1 through 11. I have in my hands the beautiful study guide for this series.
You can get the study guide and the CD package for the whole book study through Turning Point by going to davidjeremiah.org. We're ready to receive your request and help fulfill that in your life so that you have all this material in your hands. You know what? We have a new series today, but we continue with the same resource because. The month of January is not quite over.
We have just a couple of more days to tell you about the special book that has been available throughout this month. What God promises you is a brand new book from Turning Points Never Been Offered Before. It's not found in any bookstore. It is available only through Turning Point, and it is beautifully designed, a wonderful presentation of some of the great promises of God that are meant to encourage and strengthen and fortify your life. Seven truths that will change the way you live.
That's the substance of the book, and it's yours for the asking when you send your gift to Turning Point today. Thank you for your generosity. We are grateful for your investment in the gospel through the ministry of Turning Point around the world. Let's begin. Learning about the futility of life from searching for heaven on earth.
The book of Ecclesiastes. A statistical survey of 7,948 students at 48 different colleges was conducted by social scientists from John Hopkins University. Their preliminary report was part of a two-year study sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. were asked what they considered very important to them now. And these college students, 16% of them checked making a lot of money.
But surprisingly, 75% of them said that their first goal was to find meaning and purpose. in their life. In his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, secular. Psychiatrist Carl Jung was a wrote these penetrating words. He said, About a third of my cases.
are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness in their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis. of our time. It is the absence of meaning and purpose. In the lives of so many people today, and especially in the lives of young people.
That is causing so much substance abuse and promiscuity and suicide among the younger set.
Someone gave me this note. that was written by a young person before they took their own life. This is a college student. To anyone in the world who cares, who am I? Why am I living?
Life has become stupid and purposeless. Nothing makes sense to me anymore. The questions I had when I came to college are still unanswered, and now I am convinced there aren't any answers. There can only be pain and guilt and despair here in this world. My fear of death and the unknown is far less terrifying to me than the prospect of unbearable frustration, futility, and hopelessness.
of continued existence. That is a sad, sad statement.
Someone who has come to believe. that death and early Death. is better. Then what life? Can't afford them.
Well, we're embarking on a study. That is going to plunge us right smack in the middle of these questions about meaning for life. I have never asked you to do this before, but I'm going to ask you to make it your purpose. not to miss one single message in this series. You see, Solomon doesn't publish all of his final answers to these questions until he gets to the end of the book.
Now, I'm not going to wait to the end to resolve these questions as best I can. But what I want you to know is only as we hear and understand the entire argument of this book will it serve us completely. I promise you if you do that. When we close the Bible for the last time on the book of Ecclesiastes, you will have a better sense of why you are here and what you are supposed to do than you've ever had before.
So the book of Ecclesiastes. is the record of a man's search for true meaning in life. It stands unique among all of the Bible books in that it is philosophically presenting a man's quest for meaning. This man is eminently qualified to conduct this investigation. I don't know how much you know about Solomon, but let me just give you a few little thoughts that you can remember.
Basically, he wrote three books. In the early part of his life, he wrote the book of romance we call Song of Solomon. At the noontime of his life, he wrote the book of rules, which we call Proverbs. And in the twilight of his life, he wrote the book Ecclesiastes, the book of regrets. And we're going to study that third book.
You see, Solomon was at the end of his life when he wrote this book, and he's looking back over his life and making some observations. You see, Solomon was in a very unusual position to make this investigative study. Interestingly enough, if you study the history of the period of time when he reigned, It was a 40-year period of no war.
Solomon didn't have to give himself to the military and to the preparation of war. He reigned in peace.
So all of the time that he could have been spending defending his nation from those around, he gave to investigating the meaning of life. He had all the time that he needed.
Furthermore, he had all the money that he needed. There wasn't any investigation that he couldn't afford. He was the wealthiest man who ever walked on planet Earth. And if you look over in your Bibles to the last part of the first chapter, You will notice that he was one of the men. In the Bible, who had more wisdom than anyone else.
Notice verse 16. I commune with my heart, saying, Look, I have attained greatness and I have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge.
Solomon was the smartest man, the wisest man who ever lived. If you're ever going to listen to somebody give a message on the meaning of life, at least let it be somebody who's smart. And Solomon was wise. He was the wisest man who ever lived. And the Bible says nobody had ever been that wise before him, and nobody would ever be that wise or smart after him.
I don't know what his IQ was, but it was off the chart. and he set himself to discover what the meaning of life really was.
Now, we begin with a bit of an understanding about this book. The book is called Ecclesiastes, which kind of means the gathering. In the verse that introduces Solomon, he's called the preacher. In the Old Testament language, that's koleth. He is a searcher, if you will.
He's the guy who's searching for answers. He's doing an investigation, he's doing a study, he's gathering information. And Solomon is going to look over life and see. What is behind the actions of all of the people? What makes them tick?
what they do to try to find meaning in life. Unlike many books, Solomon begins his book by giving us his conclusion. You know, my wife does this all the time. She gets a book and she gets into about two chapters, and we're on a plane someplace, and I know she hasn't had time to read the book, and she's reading the last chapter. I don't understand how you could do that.
But she does, and she still reads the rest of the book. She finds great joy in finding out where it's going and then tracing it from the end back. I don't know how she does it, but that's what she does. And Solomon does that here. He starts at the beginning and he gives us his answer.
And it's right here at the beginning. He says, Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What a depressing thought. The word vanity is used in this book 38 times. And it is not what you think it is.
This is not vanity. Like you normally think of it today. This is not what happens to some people when they look in the mirror and they become vain. I read about a woman who went to her pastor and said, I must confess to you, pastor, that I am suffering from a terrible sin. I suffer from the sin of vanity.
Every morning before I leave, I admire myself in the mirror for a half an hour. The preacher said, My dear lady, It is not the sin of vanity you are suffering from, it's the sin of imagination. Thank you. Yeah. I wish I could be that quick, don't you?
The vanity in the book of Ecclesiastes is not the pride of face. The word vanity here means Emptiness. means futility. means without meaning. It's a word sometimes referred to as a vapor which disappears.
What Solomon is saying at the front end of his investigation is. After my conclusions and after my investigations, after my survey, what I have discovered is that life under the sun. does not work. He puts this truth in the strongest possible language. He says, Vanity of vanities.
The Hebrews had a way of writing, and when they doubled a word, it was like, this is really intense. This is not just emptiness. This is really serious emptiness. This is serious. Vanity.
So he asks the question at the top of this chapter: what is there of profit? For all that a man does. And the word prophet here is a word which means what is left over. And what Solomon is saying must be understood clearly, and I want you to listen carefully. Because if you don't get this, you will misunderstand the rest of the whole book.
You will fall into the trap that many have fallen into as they read this book, and you will say, Well, this contradicts everything else that's in the Bible. This book doesn't even belong in the Bible. How did it get in the Bible? This book is a very true representation of one man's search for meaning. Watch this now.
as if there were no God in the picture. And the way he conveys this is with a little phrase that's found 29 times in the book of Ecclesiastes. It's the phrase, under. The sun.
Solomon, looking back now over his life, is going to tell us. what life is all about under the sun. If he includes what's over the sun, he includes God. But he doesn't include God in the investigation. He tells us what he observed about life.
under the sun. And may I tell you that that's where most people are when they're trying to figure out what life is all about. God is not a part of the question, He's not a part of the equation.
Solomon's going to take us down some roads that will help us realize without having to go through the agony of the journey. What happens when we reason through life without God? He begins in the first three verses, verses 4 through 7, with a little litany on the futility of life. It's quite interesting. Four things he teaches us.
First of all, the futility of the course of life, verse 4. He says one generation passes away. And another generation comes. But the earth abides forever. forever.
It's almost as if Solomon has the newspaper open and he's reading the record of the births on one hand and the obituaries on the other. And he is saying, life is just the same. One generation comes and another generation goes. One man is born and another man dies. Life goes from the beginning to the end and it just keeps repeating itself.
The earth never changes, but man is transient and he just keeps passing one after another. Nature is permanent. Says Solomon, but life is transient. And he touches on something that seems to be in his mind throughout this whole study, and that is the subject of death. It's something we never talk about.
You know, if you say, please come to church this Sunday morning, I am going to teach on death. Nobody would come. But Solomon, you have to understand, is at the end of his life. And this is in his mind. And he reasons about the course of life, and he says there's some futility in it.
I read this quote from A book written by Rabbi Harold Kushner. And he tells in this book a story about one day when a man came to see him for counseling. And Rabbi Kushner said, after we talk for a few moments about common things, he got into why he had come to see his rabbi. And he told him this story. He said two weeks ago for the first time in my life I went to the funeral of a man my own age.
I didn't know him well, but we had worked together and talked to each other from time to time, and we had kids about the same age. He died suddenly over the weekend, and a bunch of us who worked with him decided to go to the funeral. And each of us was thinking as we went, It could just as easily have been me. That was two weeks ago, he said. They have already replaced him at the office.
I hear his wife is moving out of state to live with her parents. Two weeks ago, he was working 50 feet away from me, and now it's as if he never existed. It's like a rock falling into the pool of water. and then the water is the same as it was before, but the rock isn't there anymore. Rabbi, I've hardly slept at all since this happened.
I just can't stop thinking that it could have happened to me. And a few days later, I would be forgotten as if I never lived. Shouldn't a man's life be more than that?
Now unfortunately The answer the rabbi gave him wasn't a very good one. But isn't that the question so many are asking today? Isn't there more to life than just getting up, going to work, coming home, reading the newspaper, go to bed, get up, go to work, do the whole thing over and over again, week after week, until you finally get too old and then you die?
Solomon is saying, if I look at life without God in the picture, it just seems so futile. The course of life just turning over and over, but there's no meaning in it. He goes on to show us how even nature teaches us this lesson. He goes from the course of life to the circle of the sun. Notice verse 5: the sun also rises, and the sun goes down.
and it hastens to the place where it arose. Just as modern astronomers in their everyday speech talk about the sun rising and the sun setting.
So, Solomon uses that same description, and he says that the sun rises in the east. And he actually says, it pants. That's the word it's using. It pants its way across. The horizon And It sets in the West.
And then while we are sleeping, it pants around the dark side of the earth, and there it is again in the morning. It's endless. It repeats itself again and again. Every day since the creation of the world, the sun has done exactly the same thing, Solomon says. And then he adds to it the circuit of the winds in verse 6.
He says, the wind goes toward the south and turns toward the north. The winds swirl around continually. and they come again in its circuit. This is truly a remarkable statement for an Old Testament book. Because this is long before the modern discovery of the world's great wind circuits and the global circulation of the atmosphere.
There's no way that could have been known as we know it today. They didn't have satellite coverage on the weather show where you can actually see the winds as they swirl around in circles and observe what Solomon wrote. He wrote this long before people even knew about this. And it he used as an illustration. of how the world is just mechanically going on.
and man seems so much apart. of it all. And then he uses the cycle of water. Notice verse 7: All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.
Now if you've studied science, you know that he's discussing the hydrologic cycle. And he's telling us that that's just like the wind, and it's just like the sun, and it's just like the generations of life. He is saying that things just continue to be the same, that they don't change, that there's a mechanical monotony to the way the world functions. There's a futility to life if you observe it. without God in the picture.
Have you ever had those thoughts? Even those of us who are Christians, if we for a moment allow ourselves to get caught up in the morose thinking of a world where we feel so insignificant, if we're not careful, we begin to wonder: what does it matter? Why am I here? Until you remember God. He moves from the futility of life and he begins to talk about the frustration of life in verses 8 through 11.
He says, first of all, in verse 8, nothing is fulfilling. Listen, all things are full of labor. Man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Life was boring.
Now, some of you say, no, my life isn't boring. He's reasoning about life without God. And it speaks to the restlessness that we have in our hearts as men and women. I couldn't help but think as I studied this and began to understand it better. That here is the basis for the entire entertainment industry in the world in which we live.
A person who doesn't have God in his life and is trying to find meaning in life just goes from one thing to the next trying to find something that will fill the emptiness in his life. That's what Solomon is saying. Nothing is fulfilling. And in the 17th chapter of Acts and in verse 21, this is what the Bible says about the people who lived in Athens. See if it doesn't register with you.
For the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing. They were all into novelty. Whatever you can do that nobody's ever done, whatever is remarkable, you do it. And anybody's got anything new to say? I remember hearing Jay Vern McGee years ago used to say all the time: if it's new, it's not true, and if it's true, it's not new.
I don't know whether he got that from the Bible or not. I haven't been able to find that verse in my Bible.
Solomon is saying there's no real sense of satisfaction in whatever we do. I could tell you, this is true for even us as Christians. You buy a new computer. And it's good for about two weeks until you read about another one that just came out that's got some more bells and whistles than the one you got. Everybody's looking at each other.
Most of the wives are looking at the husbands, I need to tell you that. You buy a new television, a flat screen. A plasma, and you put it up on your wall, and somebody's got a different one, it's better, and it's got greater resolution, and all of a sudden, the one you got isn't really that good. Isn't that the way it works? If we got a small house, we want a bigger one.
If we got a nice car, we want a nicer one. We're always hungry. And unsatisfied. And as much as we do not, as believers, focus on the things that are above. we fall into that trap.
But a person who doesn't have God, that's all he's got. Nothing is fulfilling. And then Solomon ends his little discussion here with the fact that nothing is fresh. He says in verses 9 through 11, that which has been, is what will be. And that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which it may be said, see, this is new? It has already been in ancient times before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come by those who will come after. What did he say? There is nothing new under the sun.
You say, Pastor, that just doesn't resonate with me. There's so many new things. You've already just mentioned a bunch of them. I mean, every day somebody's turning out something new. Wait a minute.
Nothing new is being created. Almighty God created it all in the beginning. God created the heavens and the earth and everything that is in them. And when we think we're so smart and we invent something, we just take what God has created and we rearrange it so that it meets a need that we have. Thomas Edison once said, That His inventions were only bringing out the secrets of nature and applying them for the happiness of mankind.
We don't create anything new. The only one who creates is God, and He can still create. He's over the sun, He's not under the sun. Rudyard Kipling expressed the sentiments of Solomon in a poem that he wrote. He said, The craft that we call modern and the crimes that we call new.
John Bunyan had them typed and filed in 1682. Yeah. There's not anything new. We think everything is so new, but it's really not. It's been done before in a different way by somebody in the past, and whatever we do now will be done in the future.
If you look at life, Without God. Nothing satisfies. Nothing's new. There's futility in the world. And you know what?
I have talked to people. more than a few. who express in modern terms everything Solomon has written in the first few verses of this book. Yeah, I know far too many folks that are going through that right now. They've worked hard.
They've thought they were pursuing reality for their lives only to discover. That what they thought was real wasn't real and didn't satisfy. Because you see, you can't have satisfaction and joy without God. Take God out of the equation, and what you have is futility, vanity. All is vanity.
Solomon is going to help us understand that in ways you cannot imagine. He is an incredible teacher, and this book is filled with truth for all of us. And even some of the sensitive subjects we don't like to talk about, Solomon's not afraid to talk about them, and we'll talk about them in this series. Tomorrow is part two of the futility of life as we conclude the month of January together tomorrow. Thank you for being with us for this first month of teaching.
I hope you're off to a good start in 2026. And be sure to join us tomorrow for part two of The Futility of Life. on the book of Ecclesiastes. For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's series Searching for Heaven on Earth, please visit our website where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly Turning Points magazine and our daily email devotional.
Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org slash radio. That's davidjeremiah.org slash radio. Or call us at 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David's new book, What God Promises You, Seven Truths That Will Change the Way You Live. It's yours for a gift of any amount.
You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard, New International, and New King James Versions, available in your choice of attractive and durable cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website, davidjeremiah.org/slash radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series Searching for Heaven on Earth on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.
