Under The Sun Series

So thinking again about the opening of Ecclesiastes, the teacher is believed to be King Solomon because he had the time, money, and power to pretty much pursue any avenue of life where he thought that he might be able to find some pleasure or satisfaction only to always come up short. I suspect some of you might have gone to the Rolling Stones concert last night. Did he sing ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’? Solomon was singing it 3,000 years earlier. He was the one man in history who had the opportunity to pursue everything for satisfaction, again always coming up short. He had a long life and he might have written Proverbs at the beginning of his life and then Song of Songs which he wrote probably midlife and then they believe that he wrote Ecclesiastes towards the end of his life as a very aged and very old man that was really regretting how he squandered his life on wine, women, songs, possessions, and all that kind of stuff. Ecclesiastes is definitely a negative-sounding book, but that is because Solomon’s life took a very negative spin at the end of his life. The question that I ask and some of you ask is what do you do with a book like this? This is a strange book. You could do like some people do or even some pastors do and just say let’s skip over this one. We don’t need to look at this one. We don’t need to look at the difficult passages. That is a temptation. It is a temptation for me. Or we could take the approach, if we really believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, and say let’s try to figure out why God chose to include such a strange book into the 66 books of the Bible. And really ask ourselves what relevance would that type of book have for today? As I did a little bit of study and read different commentaries what came to me is that most people think Ecclesiastes is one of the most relevant books in the entire Bible. It speaks to a culture that pretty much has turned its collective back on God. That is what the book does. You may or may not agree, but there are a lot of people and pastors and leaders and politicians and even President Obama who would suggest that we are in what is called a post-Christian America. Which basically means, among other things, we can no longer assume that most of the people we meet have some affiliation with Christianity. It is just not true anymore. There was a recent poll by the Gallup agency that basically found out that “The percentage of Americans who identify with some form of a Christian religion has been dropping in recent decades and now stands at 77%. In 1948, the percentage of Christians was 91%.” Another poll found that 15% of Americans now claim no religious affiliation at all, nearly double the percentage in 1990. What it says is that we can no longer assume that people believe in God, which means we can longer assume that they believe in things like the virgin birth and that God created the heavens and the earth. They no longer believe in things like sin. They no longer believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In fact, those don’t mean anything to a good percentage of the world because they were never exposed to it. They were never brought up into it. Not only has culture turned its back on God, it has really rejected anybody’s claim that there is any sort of absolute truth out there. They have rejected that. There is really no truth. Truth is only defined by the person and it becomes a relative thing to the person. It is often tied to happiness. The common message that we hear throughout culture is your truth is your truth, my truth is my truth, and all that matters is that we are happy. Isn’t that what we hear? All that matters is that we are happy. Everybody’s truth is relative. The problem is that if the culture does not believe in God and does not believe in any sort of absolute truth or any sort of absolute meaning out there, then the culture is going to seek meaning from all sorts of sources on this planet. Seek it out through drugs or alcohol or pornography or entertainment or sports and all these sorts of things out there. Again only to come up short. Finding that these things have no lasting sense of meaning. As Christians, we know that trying to find meaning apart from God is really a fruitless endeavor. We know that life has absolutely no meaning apart from God. That is the message of Christianity and really that is the message of the book of Ecclesiastes. There is no meaning apart from God. When the teacher makes the statement “’Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly Meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’ What does man gain from all of his labor at which he toils under the sun?” it is not just words coming from a man who is sour on life or upset because he wasn’t able to achieve what he wanted to achieve. No. What you are hearing is a man who had first-hand experience with pursuing just about every opportunity in life that could offer any sort of satisfaction only to come up short. Only to come to the conclusion that it is all meaningless. As he will say later in the book “a chasing after the wind”.