Under The Sun: Monotony Series

How many of you have ever had a job that is just really monotonous and boring? Some of you have a job like that now. I had a job back in the 80s that actually was a well-paying job, but I didn’t even make it through the training because it was so boring and monotonous. It was a job as a letter sorting machine operator at the main post office in St. Louis. I found a picture online. Basically the job is exactly how it sounds. It is someone who operates a machine that sorts letter. You sit at this machine and the letters come down in front of you about one a second and your only job is to type in the zip code. The letter would continue on and go in the appropriate bin. As you can imagine, doing that for eight hours a day could be very tedious. You know 3,000 letters a day can be quite routine and monotonous. So monotonous that you actually received a 15-minute break for every 45 minutes you worked because if you didn’t you would practically go insane. Needless to say, I didn’t make it through training. We have all had monotonous jobs. But the writer of Ecclesiastes seems to imply that not only are jobs monotonous but really life apart from God can be totally meaningless and monotonous. We began the study on the book of Ecclesiastes and the title of the series is Under The Sun, which basically is the author’s reference to life lived for the here and now. Pretty much a life apart from God that really, for all practical purposes, is a meaningless life as he spelled out in the opening verses we talked about last week 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?” If you were here last week, you know that the teacher was none other than King Solomon. We talked about how King Solomon started off as a very good king but later years in his life he began to pursue wine, women, song, and idols. So he really fell from grace with God. In fact, God actually split up his kingdom upon his death. We also spoke about how, although the book was written 900 B.C. or so, it is a very relevant book for today. What it does is it speaks about the culture that has pretty much turned its collective back on God and, consequently, pursues very meaningless things.

Today, we are going to continue to unpack the first chapter. We are going to look specifically at chapter 1, verses 4-11 and see how King Solomon supports his primary thesis that all of life apart from God is meaningless. I would like to have somebody read chapter 1 of Ecclesiastes starting at verse 4 going through verse 11, ideally the NIV version. (Scripture read here.) As you can tell, there are a lot of verses there that are really quite depressing if you think about it. The first verse, verse 4, really speaks again of the brevity of life against the backdrop of never-changing nature. He says “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.” We get into this ego where we think we are lord of our universe when the reality is we are just passing through. It is nature that sticks around. Someone compared nature to a backdrop on a stage or a movie set, and we the people are simply actors that come on the stage, make our appearance, and exit off the stage and somebody new comes on. That is kind of a depressing but actually true thought. Solomon is beginning to unpack the meaninglessness of life. Really what he is talking about in this passage and the passages that follow is that life, for all intents and purposes, is very monotonous and very routine. He begins with the sun and begins to talk about this idea of monotony and routine. He says “The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.” He is not talking as an astronomer here. It is about 900 B.C. He is talking about the sun as observed from a human perspective. From a human perspective, sitting in our backyard looking at the sun, that is how we see things. We view the sun as rising up, going across the sky, and going down, and then the next day beginning to start the whole process over. He uses the idea hurries. The underlying word refers to an exhaustion or a panting. It just gets back to the beginning and starts the whole thing over the next day, which implies a very monotonous existence. A monotonous routine. Really it doesn’t accomplish much. We could say sure it accomplishes things. The trees and plants need the sun, but we are looking at life apart from God. Apart from God, the sun serves absolutely no purpose because there is nothing lasting. It produces nothing that lasts for generations.