Under The Sun Series

Good morning. It is great to be back in the ‘burgh rain and all. For some of you who don’t know, I was away for a few weeks for a sabbatical. It was a study time, and I was able to feel somewhat productive. I also had a time of rest. The better news is Debbie and I got to see our lovely granddaughter, Daniella. Isn’t she cute? It is good to be back. I will open with a question. How many of you have had the chance to see the new movie that is out called Jurassic World? A few of you. I was able to see it this past week. It is a pretty good movie and pretty much what you would expect. It has a lot of great special effects, but the plot is a little bit thin. I don’t think I am giving way too much of it. It takes place 22 years after the fiasco that happened at Jurassic Park. The good news is that the park ended up turning into a dinosaur theme park that was really doing well. The bad news is that, over time, people got bored with these dinosaurs and the sales started going down. So the engineers had to figure out how to create a new hybrid-type attraction, aka a dinosaur, that would bigger and better than the other ones. Unfortunately, as you might suspect, the dinosaur ended up eating a lot of people. As I thought about it, I thought this is a real commentary on our culture. When you think about it, we get bored very easily. Just like the people got bored of the standard dinosaurs out there, we get bored of life. So often we are constantly seeking something that would give us some new sense of satisfaction, some new sense of meaning only to come up short. Or, in the case of the dinosaurs, to possibly get eaten by the very thing that we think that we desire. I think that is the message really almost of the movie but also the message of the book that we are going to begin to look at, the book of Ecclesiastes.

First of all, the question is how many of you have ever read the book of Ecclesiastes? A few of you. For those of you who are not familiar with the book of Ecclesiastes, it is an Old Testament book that falls under the category of wisdom literature just like the book of Proverbs or Job. Wisdom literature refers to a number of things but at a minimum what it does is teach that the best choices in life, the good choices in life are really connected to Godly choices in life. That is why the book of Proverbs opens up by saying “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.” The key thing is the fear of the Lord. It makes sense that if you are going to make Godly choices, you should have a reverent fear of God and attempt to keep his commandments. This word wisdom is not really related to IQ or that sort of thing. Wisdom speaks of an orientation towards God and away from the world. When we think about this book Ecclesiastes, it is also considered wisdom literature not only because the author was very wise but really the wise advice that he gives us. The advice that basically says you should live a life underneath God, a life of submission to God, as opposed to simply life on this earth or life under the sun. If you are familiar with the book, you know that the author does a very good job of convincing us of the importance of that. So much so that he kind of gets very redundant. It is very perplexing. Sometimes it is hard to follow what is going on in Ecclesiastes because he seems to meander a lot. One thing you notice if you have read it, it is a very negative book. It comes across very negative. So negative that some people ask why would God want to even include the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible because isn’t the Bible supposed to be about hope and God’s love and God’s love expressed through Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins and that sort of thing. Ecclesiastes isn’t anything like that. It is kind of a hopeless sounding book. You can glean that from the first few lines where he says “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 the labor at which he toils under the sun?” You have to admit when you read that you say these have to be some of the most negative words in the entire Bible. If you have read through Ecclesiastes you know that things don’t get much better. The writer goes on and rants and raves about how all the things that he pursued turned out to be pretty much meaningless.