What the Hevel

If you have your Bible and you want to open it to the book of Ecclesiastes, then certainly feel free to do that. But if you would remain standing for the reading of God's word, okay? And by the way, if you would, just look to your left and your right. If there is an open seat, it would really help us if you would kind of fill those seats. That way people that show up 30, 45 minutes late, they will have a place to sit. So here we go. Here we go. Ecclesiastes chapter one, verse one. You listen as I read the first 11 verses. The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, all is vanity. What does a man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation comes and a generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, the sun goes down and it hastens to the place where it's risen from. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north, around and around goes the wind and on its circuits, the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full. So the place where the streams flow

to there they flow again. All things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be. And what has been done is what will be done and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, see, this is new? It's already been in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Ecclesiastes is one of the most confusing books in the entire Bible. I know some of you might say, well, pastor, the whole Bible feels confusing to me and that is okay because what we try to do each week in here is break it down to make it really simple. But the book of Ecclesiastes is especially confusing even for more experienced Bible readers. And that is in part because it's got a lot of strange verses in it, like this one, Ecclesiastes 7.16. Be not overly righteous and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you wear yourselves out? In other words, back it down Bible banger. You're getting into this wisdom and Bible study thing

a little bit too much. How about this one, Ecclesiastes 10.19. Wine makes life happy and money is the answer for everything. And all God's people said, what? Plus we find in Ecclesiastes just some really odd random advice like Ecclesiastes 9.8. Wear fine clothes with a splash of cologne. Granted, I know some single guys who could really benefit from that verse, but is that important enough to include in your Bible? Here, one more Ecclesiastes 4.11, my favorite. If two lie together, they keep warm. How can one keep warm alone? The writer is saying that it's always better to travel with a friend because that way if it gets cold, you'll have somebody to spoon with. Y'all, if nothing else in this series, I'm praying I never have to apply that verse. My friend, Pastor Tony Merida says that Ecclesiastes doesn't sound like the kind of Bible book that you would hear read on positive, encouraging Caleb. It feels like it was written on a Monday morning by somebody who hadn't had their coffee yet. And yet, and yet, this is a book that gets at the core questions of life. I know a lot of people who feel like Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is the Bible book where they feel the most seen. In this book, you're gonna see a man wrestle

with unanswered questions. You're gonna see him wrestle with disappointments in his life, frustrations over why things have not turned out the way that he thought they were going to, the way they were supposed to. And this writer is going to show no tolerance for simplistic pat answers that people give to those kinds of questions. Even religious versions of those questions, of those answers, he's just gonna brush them aside. Earlier this year, I read through the book of Ecclesiastes several times, and I thought it so perfectly captured some of the struggles that I was having as a middle-aged man, some of the questions I found myself asking that I knew I wanted to take you through it. So maybe think of this as my midlife crisis series. Although, can we say I'm still middle-aged? I mean, if I'm in the middle, I'm gonna go ahead and say it, that I'm gonna live till I'm 106, which doesn't feel quite right. So I know I'm not a young adult, at least I'll say that. Okay, first, let's ask this question. Who is the author of Ecclesiastes? Well, verse one says, the words of the preacher, the son of David the king in. Jerusalem, both Christian and Jewish interpreters have traditionally understood this to be Solomon. Solomon was, of course, the son of David.

He was the king of Jerusalem. And what the author is going to disclose about his life in this book certainly fits Solomon to a T. But some say this was a book written about Solomon, not by Solomon. Personally, I think Solomon himself wrote it. But the most important thing to understand, hear this, is that there are two different voices in the book of Ecclesiastes. There's two voices. One is the voice of this preacher whose observations make up the majority of the book. The author muses, the preacher muses about the absurdity of life. Honestly, he's a little bit like a standup comic. He looks at life square on and says, have you ever noticed how crazy all this is? And he makes these little off-the-cuff comments that poke fun at the absurdity of life. What's the deal with peanuts on airplanes? That kind of stuff. The other voice is that of a narrator who introduces the preacher at the beginning, and then he steps off stage. And then he's gonna step back on stage at key moments, especially in the conclusion, to help us make sense of what we've just heard the preacher say. In fact, think of it like a stage play where the preacher stands off to one side,

wrestling aloud with the hardest questions of life. And then at key moments, the narrator on the other side steps forward, not to argue with him, but to help us interpret what we're hearing from him, saying things like, now, does that make sense? Or if what he says is true, that raises this question. This was actually a very common literary device back then called Akkadian biography, where the author recounted a story from the perspective of one character, and then from time to time would step out a character to interpret the story. This was kind of how they did stage plays. Sometimes it was a one-man show, and he's playing different characters. Verse two introduces the theme of the book. All is vanity. This word vanity is gonna appear 38 different times throughout the book. Now, vanity is the word that I am using because it is the word that the ESV, ESV translation of the Bible, which is the translation I'm using, that's the way it translates this word. But it's actually a very hard word to translate from Hebrew. In Hebrew, it is the word hevel, and it literally means vapor or smoke. Some translations render this word meaningless or futile,

and scholars say it means a little bit of all those, means vanity, it means futile, it means meaningless, but it's not fully captured by any of them. Probably the best way to grasp the meaning, they say, is to consider the word picture itself, smoke or vapor. Think of a cloud. You know how when you were a kid, the clouds looked like these gigantic, comfy pillows that you could just bounce around on or curl up in? I remember as a kid on my first airplane flight, I think I was about eight years old, I remember how disappointed I was when we passed through the clouds and you could see that there's really nothing substantive to even the fullest looking clouds. You pass right through them like they're not even there. In fact, how many of you have ever skydived before? Raise your hand. Is that the past tense of that word, skydove, skydiving? I don't know. I promised each of my kids that when they turn 18, if they want to go skydiving, I will take them. My most recent, some of you saw me post about this, was Raya, this is the look of sheer delight on her face, and this is the look of delight on my face when we were both safely back on the ground. That is mainly because my wife said if I heard our daughter skydiving, if I died skydiving, she would resurrect me and kill me again if we heard this.

So I was relieved, but the best part of skydiving, I think, is when you get to pass through a small cloud. They look so solid and so substantive from the outside, but when you go through them, you realize there is nothing in them to grasp. They're real. You can see them, you can feel them. They provide rain, they provide shade, but they have no substance for you to rest on. They're transient. There's nothing to grasp. They're elusive, they're heavil. That is what every pleasure and every pursuit on earth becomes when you try to build your life on them, Solomon says. One scholar says the best translation of hevil is absurd. Life has a quality for all of us. Whether we are Christians or not, that makes it feel absurd sometimes. By the way, it's very important to note that this book, Ecclesiastes, comes right after the book of Proverbs in your Bible, and that placement is intentional. You see, both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are part of what we call the wisdom literature of the Bible, which is basically a section of books that contain reflections about what life is and how it works. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes sit on. on opposite sides of a divine tension.

You see, Proverbs lays out for us these principles and says, if you live these ways, here's generally how your life is gonna go. For example, Proverbs 3, 9, and 10. Honor God with the first fruits of your wealth. In other words, tithe. Put God first in your finances. If you do, your barns will overflow with plenty and your vats will burst with new wine. Or this one. Some of you have heard this one, Proverbs 22, 6. Train up a child in the way that he should go. Even when he is old then, he will not depart from it. Now, question. Are those true? Yes, generally they are true, but are they ironclad guarantees? No, you see, some of us have done exactly what Proverbs said in one of these verses, and the opposite happened. Some of you worked hard and you tithed, but then the market crashed. Or you ran your business with integrity, but it still failed. Or you raised your children to know the Lord. You were faithful in church. You were a good example to them, yet one of them, or maybe several of them, still walked away. I remember Crawford Lorenz, who was Pastor Brian's dad,

stood right here in this stage and said, raise your kids and you can spoil your grandkids. Spoil your kids and you'll have to raise your grandkids. Now, that's wisdom. That's wisdom, and it's generally true. But I know faithful parents who did everything they could and one or more of their children still chose the wrong path. That does not mean those parents failed, nor does it mean that the book of Proverbs is not true. This book, after all, is called Proverbs, not promises. Proverbs shows us, it shows us how God laid out his world to work, and it generally does work that way. But see, we also now live in a world under the curse of sin, a world that is now subject to futility. By the way, the reason I'm quoting that is that's the way Paul in Romans 8, 20 describes the world we live in now. The world, Paul says, that is under the curse of sin, he describes that world as subject to futility. And get this, the word that he uses for futility is the word hevel, at least it's the Greek version of that word. Life under the sun is broken. Wisdom is still wisdom, and wisdom still works, but there's definitely a glitch in the system. Haven't you experienced that? Some of you have, I know you have. And you haven't really known

that you could talk about it in church, right? You're like, I feel like this is part of the dirty secret nobody's supposed to talk about, and it harshes everybody's vibe, so we just don't talk about these things. So I'm gonna talk about it for you, okay? You did everything the right way, and something still fell apart. One of my worst college jobs, and I had some bad ones, but one of my worst college jobs was standing outside a department store at the Crabtree Valley Mall trying to get people to sign up for credit cards. Yep, I was that guy, okay? I actually did pretty well, and for the first couple of weeks, I was the top performer. I mean, how could you say no to this guy? Honestly, right? How could you say no to that guy? My boss even gave me a bonus, called me in for a couple of weeks, gave me a bonus. But then, another week after that, he calls a little meeting and tells all of us, all of us credit card pushers, that he wants us to start slipping in this really expensive insurance program, getting people to sign up for it without explaining it. He said, look, just tell them the initial, here, here, here, and here,

and most people won't ask any questions. It was a really bad program, and it cost money. I was like, I don't feel like I can do that, because that doesn't feel right. So on each of the applications, I would explain the insurance program as honestly as I could, and of course, almost everybody declined it, as they should have. My boss calls me in, and he says, hey, you're still our top performer, but none of your customers are buying the insurance program, and when I tell him the truth about why, he fired me on the spot. End of story. I was jobless over the rest of the break, and I thought, whoa, wait a minute. Isn't Proverbs supposed to apply here? Doesn't it say that the one who honors God will prosper? And yes, I know, ultimately, it will prove true in my life, especially from the perspective of eternity, but see, in this broken world, righteousness does not always pay off immediately. Some of you have experienced that on a much deeper level than simply losing a part-time job. Even after you did the right thing, you lost a marriage, or a business, or your livelihood, or you got kicked out of a school, or you lost access to your kids, or you've tried to honor God in your dating life,

but you still haven't gotten married, even though you've watched several friends who didn't do it right, and they got married, and it's all felt absurd, and you look at it, and you say, what the hell? That's where I got the title of this message, right? Is that okay to say? I feel like that's biblical. I feel like that's biblical. In verse three, the narrator, the narrator asks the controlling question for the whole. Book, what does a man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? Life under the sun means life on earth now. Watch this, life not taking into account eternity. That would be life above the sun. He's talking about life under the curse of sin, life this side of Eden, a life characterized by Hevel. He asked what gain is there to be had here under the sun? And here's the key. He is going to seek to answer that question in Ecclesiastes using only criteria from under the sun. In other words, life without factoring in God or eternity. How can somebody find meaning? How can they find, how can they gain permanence, meaning, satisfaction in this life under the sun? And then the preacher is gonna set his sights on the most common answers we give to that question and disabuse us of them.

Following the lead of Tim Keller, let me identify three of the most common answers people under the sun give to how to find meaning in life. I'm gonna give them to you from the first couple of chapters. And then I'm gonna show you how the preacher disabuses us of those, okay? Stock answer number one to how we find meaning under the sun is leave a legacy. In other words, I can make my life matter by leaving something behind. The academic name for this mentality is humanism. And it's the idea that if you leave something significant for other humans that outlast you and people talk about you when you're gone, about how you cannot be replaced, well, then your life will have meaning. By the way, this is what you always hear brought up at funerals when people talk about how the deceased person enriched everybody's life, they made the world a better place, they're gonna be missed, and therefore they did not live in vain, their lives had meaning. But here's what the author of Ecclesiastes' response to that is. Again, he's speaking from the perspective of as if this world under the sun, here's all there is. Embrace yourselves, this is brutal. In the middle of the funeral, he stands up in the back

as everybody says all these nice things, why this person's life matters. And he says, the truth is, yeah, there's really no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after. In other words, within a generation or two, very few people, if any, will remember that you even existed. Let me prove it. How many people here right now could name the first names of all of your great-grandparents? I'm talking about your mom and dad's grandparents. First names, all eight of them, there'll be eight of them. Can you give me all eight names, anybody? Okay, maybe, a few. Could you name one of their parents? Could you tell me the first name of any of your grandparents' grandparents? And maybe there's somebody in here who could do that, but I promise you, you could not go much farther back than that, right? But the point is, it doesn't take long for a person to be forgotten, even by their own family. If you've been around this church for a while, you know that Greer family legend, my one great, great, great, great, great, great, great uncle was Davy Crockett. But that's the only family member I know

that goes back several generations, and that's only because Disney produced a TV series that has no semblance to his actual life. For most of us, what we've done will be really quickly forgotten, even if it was great. I was in London a few years ago, and I wanted to see where the famous Charles Spurgeon had preached back near the beginning of the 20th century. Now, if you don't know, Charles Spurgeon was maybe the most famous preacher in the world at the time. His church, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, was the largest church in the world. So I did some research, and I figured out that the site of the church was right near where I was staying. So I asked my taxi cab driver, who literally seemed to know everything there was to know about the city of London. He'd never heard of Charles Spurgeon. I was like, am I just saying it in a weird American accent? So I tried to get my best British accent, say Charles Spurgeon. He had no idea who I was talking about or what I was talking about. Eventually, I figured out where it was, and there is a small shell that remains of that once great church, and most of the people who live in the area, two doors down from that church,

have no idea who Spurgeon was or what it was. The only way people are actually going to remember you in 50 years is if you leave millions of dollars to your alma mater. And if you do that, they're gonna put up a little plaque with your name on it so that a bunch of students can walk by and never even glance at it. And eventually, they'll tear that building down, and they'll put up a new building in its place, and your name is not gonna transfer. In 500 years, it is safe to say, nobody is gonna remember you or me. You say, well, what if I become president of the United States? Okay, what decade was Millard Fillmore president in? What accomplishments did he make that contributed to US history? I mean, if you even knew Millard Fillmore was a president, you're like, is he trying to trick us right now? Yeah. The point is everything fades. The preacher says it, verse four, a generation goes and a generation comes. The earth remains forever. Scientists say that organic life leaves virtually no trace on earth. If the conditions are just right, maybe you'll leave a fossil, but you're gonna have to be buried

in a sudden cataclysmic flood in order for that to happen, so that's got some downsides. The point is life under the sun is transient. It's temporary, it's passing. If you're trying to gain meaning by leaving a legacy on earth, it's not gonna work. It's like trying to grasp the wind, it's all heavile. By the way, this is often the realization that fuels a midlife crisis. In midlife, your health and your beauty and your strength that you thought was gonna last forever start to fade, and you realize that this is not gonna last forever. In fact, I love what the actress Joan Collins always said. She said, being beautiful in life is like being born rich, and then slowly watching yourself become poor over the rest of your life. Beauty fades, and so in midlife, some people try to start doing something to hang on to that. If you're a guy, you pump yourself full of peptides and buy a really hot sports car and unbutton your shirt down to your navel and gross everybody out. Some ladies will nip and tuck and inject and start flirting with their tennis instructor. But the simple truth is that youthful beauty is not something we can hang on to. Like I love what my wife always says, as you age, you can look older or you can look weird.

You gotta choose, okay? After that happens, we'll see then a lot of us start looking to what we're building in our career, thinking that's gonna be my mark. That's my glory, that's my legacy, that's my permanency and my glory. But by midlife, many of you start to realize that all those youthful dreams you had about changing the world and leaving a permanent mark on the world, they're not really gonna happen. Even if they do, eventually they'll be forgotten. I mean, Steve Jobs made about as big a mark on the world as you can make, right? Steve Jobs very famously said right before he died, he said, can it be that everything that we've accomplished as a human race, everything I've accomplished, is just gonna be erased in the death of our son? I mean, one day we know physics declares that the sun is going to burn out and he's like, literally at that point, it's all gone. Everything in the human race, it's like it never even existed. Leaving a legacy is our first response to this question of how to find meaning. And the author of Ecclesiastes says, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Let me give you a second answer that we give. Now warning, this one's a little nerdy, so I'm gonna cover it quickly.

And if this feels like it's over your head, just give me like four minutes and I'll come back to the language of normal people, okay? Existentialism. Existentialism says, meaning does not exist, we must therefore create our own. Existentialism is a worldview that says that because life is a cosmic accident, it's inherently meaningless. Thus, it is up to you and me to create our own meaning. That was literally how some of our most famous existentialists and nihilist philosophers, people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche, that's how they said it. When you embrace that there is no God, when you embrace that God is dead, there's no design, no plan, then you are now free to concoct your own meaning. Or Albert Camus, or it looks like Albert Camus, who said that because we are the result of blind force and chance, get this, he said, it is literally insane. It is a kind of insanity to think that life could have meaning. He said, but, but, but, it's a useful and happy insanity and we should all participate in it. Either that or commit suicide, he said, both are valid options. Existentialism is essentially what popular atheists like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins say.

They say, yeah, developing a sacrificial love for others or pursuing meaning doesn't make a lot of sense in a survival of the fittest based evolutionary model, but they are useful fictions that evolution has programmed into us and they feel good when we do them, so we should embrace them. The problem with that, of course, is that it is intellectually self-defeating. I mean, if we're just the product of blind force and chance, why should we demand that life have any meaning? Why should we expect it to? And why should we care about things like justice? Justice is just a preference. It's a useful tool for propagating our species, but there's no such thing as actual justice because in order for there to be actual justice, there has to be a justice definer to say something is not as it ought to be. supposes that you know what it ought to be. It's like C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity, a man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of what a straight line is. The book of Ecclesiastes is filled with ought language. It's the whole premise of the book of Ecclesiastes. The world ought not be like this. The innocent ought not suffer. Many of you have said those same things. Even if you don't believe in God, you're like, that's not right.

That ought not be that way. But the moment you say the word ought or ought not, you are presupposing that you got some idea in your head of what ought to be. Existentialism and nihilism are intellectually self-defeating. If life under the sun is all there is, there is no meaning. By the way, many atheists come to a point where they realize that. In fact, most of the atheists that I see become Christians, this is usually part of their story. Most of them don't go from no God to resurrection of Jesus. Most of them pass through something like this. For example, last spring, I read the autobiographical account of a guy named Charles Murray. If you don't know Charles Murray is one of America's best known social scientists, one of the best known public intellectuals. He's an MIT guy. For decades, Charles Murray wrote and spoke as an agnostic, but he recently became a Christian. And he said that one of the things that moved him toward belief in God was that when he and his wife had their first child, his wife said to him, I seem to love my daughter far more than your theory of evolution requires. A lot of atheists have traveled a similar journey. They recognize in the love they feel for a child or in their longing for meaning

something that atheistic materialism cannot account for. Okay? All right, that's the end of the really, you know, heady philosophical stuff, right? Number three, hedonism. Hedonism is the idea that you should stop searching for meaning and just enjoy life. Now, some of you are like, oh, you just talked about a big word, existentialism, and now you're using another one, hedonism. Fine, okay? The urban way of saying this is treat yourself. Hedonism means you're gonna live a treat yourself life. When I was a teenager, there was a movie that came out called Crimes and Misdemeanors that was a social commentary on modern life. And one of the main characters said at the very end of the movie, all the meaning that you can hope for in this life is just to enjoy the pleasures of the day. Enjoy creativity, write a poem, hug a child, take a ride in a boat in the lake, enjoy your family and work. That's all you can do. Enjoy your life. It's all there is. The preacher in Ecclesiastes says that the problem with hedonism is that fleshly pleasures never satisfy. And in chapter two, at least if they're gonna try

to be the substance of your life, and in chapter two, the preacher puts forward himself as exhibit A. Check out chapter two, verse one. Look at this. I said in my heart, come now, I will test you with pleasure. Enjoy yourself. See, treat yourself is what he said. Jump down to verse 10. And whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure. No pleasure. According to the book of First Kings, everything in Solomon's house was made of gold. Like silver, bronze, those are trash, gold. He was smart. He was well-read. His kingdom was prosperous. His power was unchallenged. He ate great food every night, and every night he had a thousand different sexual options. In addition to all this, he wrote New York Times bestselling books on multiple subjects. He was one of the most popular songwriters of his day. Furthermore, he not only built an incredible house for himself that would have showed up on MTV Cribs if they had that show back then, but he also made one of the most impressive temples to God

the world had ever seen. The man accomplished just about everything we would want to accomplish. Then verse 11, I considered all that my hands had done and all the toil I had expended in doing, and behold, you can see it coming. All of it was heavil, like striving after the wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. He said, I thought I'd feel complete if I accomplished everything I set out to accomplish, and if I treated myself to every pleasure and had power at my fingertips, but I didn't feel complete when I got there. In fact, I'm reminded here of what somebody I would consider the opposite of Solomon said, the hip hop star, Drake, in an interview. In fact, I was like, I got to write that down. He said, there was a point where I felt like I needed to keep the company of a different woman every night. I was trying to fill a void, but in those moments after sex, I'd know it wasn't working. Those quiet moments are the realest moments a man will ever have in his life. The next day, I'd convince myself to do it again, but during that time, I knew it wasn't working. You guys know I could quote a bazillion rich or famous people who would say the exact same thing. In fact, I have quoted them to you before, Jim Carrey, Tom Brady, Katy Perry, Matt Dillon,

tons of others. This realization leaves you with an especially despairing kind of pain. It's a hopeless kind of pain. British Christian philosopher G.K. Chesterton said it, watch this, meaningless does not come from being weary of pain. Meaningless comes from being weary of pleasure. In other words, you've traveled this long and winding road all the way to the destination, only to find out the land that it promised to you didn't really exist. Recently in my own life, I've been wrestling with a couple of deep-seated, no other way to describe this than deep-seated idols in my life. Lies that I have believed since I was a teenager. I believe if I could just obtain these things, that life would be so perfect, life would be complete. By the way, some of them are legitimate. Goals I've set, professional goals, financial milestones I've tried to reach, things I want to see in my family. And like everybody, there's other things that I've struggled with desiring that are overtly sinful. There's some sinful pleasure about which I've thought, I bet you that kind of sinful pleasure, I bet you that yields a joy and a thrill in life like nothing else can. And I've had to preach to myself this message of Ecclesiastes, those things are a mirage, they are heavel, they're clouds you try to grasp that turn out to be meaningless vapor. When you get to them, you're just going to fall straight through them, they're not what you thought they were. In fact, for sinful pleasures, it's worse than vapor. For example, if you believe this lie about something like adultery, Solomon says in Proverbs 5, this is one of the verses my parents had me

memorized when I was a kid. Proverbs 5, Solomon says, yeah, adultery looks so inviting, oh, it is so promising, it looks so fulfilling, but once you get there, not only are you going to find out it's not everything you thought it was, you're also, chapter 5, verse 5, find out that her steps take hold of hell and her feet lead down to the grave. Yeah, adultery yields a temporary euphoria, sure, but it ends in emptiness and disaster. Friend, hear me, your enemy's primary tactic is to hold up empty clouds and say, pursue this, happiness is there. But then you give your life away to pursue that thing only to find out when you get to that cloud that it was empty, there was no substance, it was like trying to grasp the wind, it was hell. Listen, the author of Ecclesiastes is not against pleasure. In fact, he's the opposite of that. One of the great ironies of the book of Ecclesiastes, he is very pro-pleasure. Multiple times throughout this book, this preacher is going to say, money is good, love and sex are good, good wine is good, health is good, power is good, these are gifts of God to enjoy. Even the simplest things, he says. Simple things like a great meal or a walk through the woods or the fragrance of a splash of cologne. Those are gifts that God gives you to delight you. But the only way you can actually enjoy them is to not look at them as the substance of life. If they become the primary place that you seek meaning or happiness, if they become the substance of your life, you're going to find them empty, like grasping at the wind. You're going to find out that they're full of heavel. You see, look at what the narrator says at the end of chapter 2.

Watch this. The narrator steps in and he says, for to the person who is pleasing in God's sight, God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy. You see, God is a God who filled this world with goodness and gifts. He is the source of joy. And when you live to please God, you can actually start to enjoy these because you can receive them for what they are, a gift, an expression of God's goodness, but not as the substance of your life. God is the substance of your life, not that thing. They're not the thing that you're trying to gain or hold on to. And when one of those things gets withheld from you for some reason or taken away, you won't despair because, again, they're not the substance of your life. See, if things like pleasures and accomplishments become the point, if they become the foundation of your life, you're going to find them only to be hevel, but if God and eternity are the foundation of your life, you'll actually start to receive those things for what they are, gifts, temporary gifts, yes, but gifts, and you'll start to enjoy them. And when they're not there, you'll be able to endure that too. After reading Ecclesiastes several times this last year, I came up with this word picture that summarizes how I think the narrator wants us to see life. Now, it's my own word picture, so if that doesn't make sense, don't blame Solomon, blame me. But I think it's accurate based on what the writer is trying to tell us. I want you to imagine life for a minute. Imagine life as if life were living on a beach before a vast and uncontrollable ocean. Okay, just a thought experiment, but you can't leave. This is the only place you... You can be.

On some days, that ocean provides enjoyable, pleasant waves, perfect weather. And on other days, it gives you big, unpleasant, angry hurricane waves. You can't change what the ocean does. You can't even predict it. That ocean is too vast, too wild, and too uncontrollable for you to predict it or control it. All you can do is enjoy the good waves when they come. And on the days when bad waves come at you, well, you just gotta endure that, knowing that the unpleasant waves are just a part of life under the curse, but they don't last forever. That's what the preacher says life basically is. And if that's true, watch this. You might as well enjoy the good waves whenever you receive them, because whatever you don't enjoy on that day to the full, you lose. You cannot bottle up the good waves and save them for a later time. They're only for that day. And when you're in a season of unpleasant waves, you can't avoid them. Nobody can live a life that avoids all of them. So you just pray for strength to endure them and realize they don't last forever either. Henry Nouwen said it way more beautifully than I'm trying to say it.

Let me walk you through this quote slowly, because it is deep and it is beautiful. A meaningful life, he says, watch this. A meaningful life is a slow discovery of the mortality of all that is created so that we can appreciate its beauty without clinging to it as if it were a lasting possession. That is, you start to realize that everything passes, everything fades, everything dies. Our lives, he says, are a school in the art of dying. I do not mean this in a morbid way. Like Henry sure sounds morbid. No, he says on the contrary. When you see life constantly relativized by death, you can enjoy it for what it is, a free gift. The pictures, the letters, the books of the past reveal life to us as a constant saying of farewell to beautiful places, good people, and wonderful experiences. This week, we dropped off my third daughter at college for her freshman year. And I'm telling you guys, every time it feels like a death. And it was time for her to go off to her orientation to nursing program. She hops out of the car and she bounds off into the hall. And I called out to her because I was so afraid and I called out to her because I just wanted her to come back. In fact, I kind of know what they mean when they say in moments like that, your life starts flashing before your eyes,

because all I could think about were all those nights and all those days of her being in the house, wishing that I had enjoyed them more while they lasted. And it's good and right that she goes to college and that she moves on. I cannot, and I should not want to hold onto her forever. She's not my gain in life, but she was a gift. But I can receive each chapter of life, including that one as a gift from God, a gift I cannot hold onto forever, at least under the sun, but a genuine gift of God to be enjoyed to the fullest. In fact, it always reminds me of the wise words of that great saint of the church, St. Andrew of Bernard. By that, I mean, Andy Bernard of The Office, who in a final episode of The Office, that I wish there was a way to know you were living in the good old days before they pass you by. So you're always thinking the good old days. That's what we're trying to gain. That's the author's point. We're trying to gain these good old days. And that's where life is gonna be complete. And then you get to the end of it and you realize there was no change that brought you what you were looking for, that every single season was the good old days. It was there for you to enjoy it. And there was nothing ahead of you that was gonna give you what you're looking for because what you were looking for was not found in that,

it was found in God. And when you get that, you can start to enjoy your life as you should enjoy it, even though it's passing and temporary. David Gibson, whose book on Ecclesiastes I found really helpful, says this. By the way, this is very simple, the wording of it, but this is so deep. Some of you are gonna think about this for the next month. Hedonism says, eat, drink, and be merry, for this is all we have. The preacher of Ecclesiastes says, no, eat, drink, and be merry, for this is what we have. You understand the difference? The first one treats pleasure like it's the substance of life. Party it up, because this is all we got. A lot of them says, no, no, no. Pleasure's not all we have. It's not the whole substance of our lives. The substance of our lives is God and eternity, but these are good gifts, good gifts. of God that he gives us right now to be enjoyed to the full. So eat and drink and be merry because this is what you have. So enjoy every hug. Enjoy every moment with that kid. Enjoy every night with your spouse. Enjoy every cool autumn day.

Enjoy every football game. Enjoy every spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A. Enjoy all of them to the fullest because they're gifts of God to be enjoyed. But don't turn them into gods. Don't turn them into your substance because if you do, they're gonna break your heart when they turn out to be heavile, when you're gonna fall into them, you're gonna fall right through them. There's something you cannot control, predict or hang on to. Let me conclude our first week in Ecclesiastes with two takeaways that I want you to carry with you throughout the study of this book. I'm gonna call these the laws of the heavile, okay? Two laws, I'm gonna introduce them to you and we'll circle around them the rest of the series. Law of the heavile number one, law of the heavile number one is embrace life above the sun as the only satisfying answer for life under the sun. And by life above the sun, I mean life with God. The writer of Ecclesiastes is describing life in a world under the curse of sin, a life divorced from God. Life after Genesis three, after man has sinned, life east of Eden, which is why by the way I love this, Tim Keller says, Ecclesiastes should go at the beginning of the Bible because it raises all the questions that the rest of scripture answers.

Ecclesiastes is life in the Genesis three world, life under the curse of sin. And see that sets us up for the good news of Ecclesiastes. Into the futility of this cursed world, step the author of life himself. And on a cross, the only one who actually was fully fulfilled the only one who was not temporary, the only one who had life in himself and whose presence was the fullness of joy and at whose right hand are pleasures forevermore. On a cross, he absorbed the heart of the curse, ultimate futility, death itself went into him. The only perfect person who would ever walk on earth took our futility, the curse for our sin into himself. And he carried it into the cold, dark, meaningless grave. And then he walked out three days later, breaking the power of the curse and guaranteeing that life and labor in him will not end in futility. You see, Hevel says, it all ends here. The resurrection says, no, it doesn't. Hevel says, this is all there is. The resurrection says, there is more. Hevel says, nothing matters. Paul, the apostle Paul stands on the other side of an empty tomb. And he says, no, everything matters. Be steadfast, therefore immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor on the Lord is not in vain. And that is for one reason, Paul says,

and that reason is the resurrection. The resurrection changes everything. The resurrection ends ultimate futility. Y'all, Ecclesiastes is an incredible book because it answers the world's greatest dilemma better than any other philosophy does. And it does that first by exposing the emptiness of all the other answers that our society gives to that dilemma. You say, well, I have meaning because I'll leave a legacy. Ecclesiastes says, yeah, but you make little difference and eventually you'll be forgotten. Existentialism says, well, I'll create my own meaning. And Ecclesiastes says, well, can any meaning you create for yourself survive your own death? Don't be an idiot. Hedonism says, well, then I'll stop asking this question and just enjoy life. And Ecclesiastes says, well, you'll find that's like striving after the wind. The preacher shows us that every path under the sun ends at the same dismal place, the grave, meaningless death. And then he shows us, by the way, he shows us that not because he's cynical. He shows that because he's clearing away every false hope until we are ready to hear that the only hope comes from above the sun. Hope only comes from Jesus. Law of the heaven number two.

And again, I'm just gonna introduce this one. Build your life on eternal things. Again, I'm only touch on this now. You see, if all this is true, you need to ask yourself what you're really living for. So many of you are pouring your life into things under the sun, things that don't matter. You're not an atheist, no. But you're living as if life under the sun is really what counts. You're trying to make a big impact. You're trying to make the world a better place. You're trying to leave a name and a legacy for yourself. And maybe you are wealthy enough to get your name on a building at your alma mater. Congratulations. But a lot of you are giving away your life's work to things that won't eternally matter. Your investment dies here. When I was a kid, I've told you, my dad taught me this phrase. he said I should live by. The phrase is only two things in life, son, are gonna last forever. Only two things will last forever, truly, and that's the souls of men and the word of God. So make sure you build your life around those. Only two things in life last forever, the word of God and the souls of men. Don't give your energy and don't give your money and your time to things under the sun,

second and third homes, building a palace for yourself on earth. Nothing wrong with those, but don't make them the substance of your life. Get your name on a plaque somewhere, creating a life of ease for yourself. Build your life on eternal things. Things are gonna last forever. Only two things in life last forever, truly, and that is the word of God and the souls of people. I am not saying your secular work doesn't matter. In fact, Ecclesiastes is gonna say it does matter because you can do it to glorify God and bless others around you in his name. Y'all, there's so much more in this book, but that's a good place for us to stop today because these are the principles right here. These are the principles that I want you to carry with you throughout this book. I'm gonna leave these two up here. I'm gonna let you think about them for a moment. I'm gonna let the Holy Spirit, just let him show you where you're having trouble getting your mind and your heart in conformity to one of these. But first, can I do this? Let me ask you to bow your heads. Let me ask you to bow your heads for just a moment so I can ask you a question. I just wonder who here might say,

pastor, you've been describing me this whole morning. I'm the person who's been living for themselves and life under the sun, but this weekend I am recognizing that Jesus is the only answer and I'm ready to give my life to him. If that's you, would you just raise your hand? I'm not gonna embarrass you. I think that's an important thing for you to acknowledge. Okay, good. Whether I can see you or not, just raise your hand. You put it down. Listen, if you have never received Christ and given your life to him, it would sound like this. You can pray this with me right now. You pray this from your heart. Jesus, I give my life to you. I recognize you are my Lord. I believe you died on a cross to save me and forgive me. I receive that gift of salvation right now. Say that from your heart. I receive that gift of salvation right now. Listen, if you prayed that with me, every head's bowed. I want you just to really quietly take a peek up here and I'm gonna put the word ready, R-E-A-D-Y. I want you to text the word ready in just a minute to 33933. That'll let us start a conversation with you.

It'd be a good first step to take, okay? Otherwise, Summit, let me leave you to reflect on these two laws. Just give a moment for the Holy Spirit to show you where for your life may not be in conformity to this perspective that Ecclesiastes is trying to get you to adopt. You take a moment and then our worship teams will come at all of our campuses and they'll lead us to stand and worship the God who entered the heaven.