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Vanity of Vanities | Ecclesiastes 1 (9-3-2023 Mark Evans)
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The speaker introduces a new study in the book of Ecclesiastes and acknowledges that some may question the purpose of studying it. The first chapter of Ecclesiastes is read, which discusses the vanity of human toil and the cyclical nature of life. The speaker emphasizes the importance of gaining wisdom and growing in the fear of the Lord. They compare the book of Ecclesiastes to a hiking trail that may seem pointless, but ultimately leads to personal growth and understanding. The author of Ecclesiastes is identified as the son of David, believed to be King Solomon. The concept of vanity is explored, highlighting its fleeting and ephemeral nature. The extent of vanity is discussed, with the preacher proclaiming that all things are vanity. The purpose of Ecclesiastes is explained as putting man in his place and helping him understand his relationship with God. The preacher poses thought-provoking questions about the meaning and value of human toil. The chapter concludes by emphasizing th Well, if you have your Bibles, do make your way to the book of Ecclesiastes. As is our custom, we continue to alternate through New Testament books and Old Testament books. And so, as we finished Titus last week, we begin now a new study in Ecclesiastes. I was talking with someone this week and they asked, what are you preaching through next? And I said, Ecclesiastes, and they gave me this look as if to say, you mean you're doing that deliberately, on purpose? Yes, we are. This is the Word of the Lord. And so, to get us going, we'll be in chapter 1 today in its entirety. And to get us started, I'll read the first 11 verses of Ecclesiastes 1. And these are the words of the God who dwells in unapproachable light. The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. 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. To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor 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 has been already 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. The grass withers and the flower fades. Let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, we do praise You for Your Word, living and active truth unto us. And so we do pray that You would sanctify us by the truth. Let us know how fleeting we are, that we might get a heart of wisdom. Give us eyes to see. Give us ears to hear, to above all see and hear and listen to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, the King in His beauty. In His name we pray. Amen. Amen. You may be seated. Well, what is it like to walk through the book of Ecclesiastes? Personally, I enjoy hiking, and particularly I prefer hikes that are loops instead of trails that are out and back. If you don't know, a loop is exactly what it sounds like. It's a hike that is essentially a giant circle, a big loop that brings you back exactly to where you started. And when we would go on family hikes, and it first dawned on my children that hiking is just making loops, right, ending up right where you started. It provoked some confusion, even some frustration. Why are we doing this? This is pointless. We just expended a lot of time and energy going up and down and around and around only to arrive back at our starting point. And as dads will do, that launched me into a lecture, as I told them, the point is not that the trail has changed. The point is that you have changed. Yes, the trail remains the same, but you are not the same person as when we began. And I don't just mean that you are hungrier or perhaps grumpier than when we first started. No, you've now gained an experience, a memory, a journey. And that is somewhat what the book of Ecclesiastes can feel like. There really is no other book quite like it. And sometimes it has this feel as if we're just making pointless loops to wind back where we first began. At times, it may feel like we just wasted a lot of emotional energy only to learn, as the very last chapter says, that the whole duty of man is to fear God and to keep His commandments. And we might be tempted to say, yeah, we already knew that. We didn't need to go on this long, circuitous trail to discover that truth. But once again, the point is not that Ecclesiastes is to change. Rather, we are the ones who must be changed by Scripture. And that is the joy of Ecclesiastes, that as the Word leads us and guides us, we grow in our desire, we increase in the fear of the Lord, we begin to recognize the vapors for what they are, all in order to get a heart of wisdom, because nothing is more valuable than wisdom. As Proverbs says, nothing, no riches, no pleasures, no achievements can compare with wisdom. And so our God has laid out for us this path to walk by the Spirit that we might increase in wisdom, which is really just another way of saying that we would be more and more like the Lord Jesus Christ, the one in whom is found all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And so today we begin our hike, that is chapter 1, and it's going to feel like we are immediately descending into an abyss. And we'll walk through this chapter in two parts. We're going to look at the extent of vanity. And secondly, we're going to look at the purpose of vanity. And vanity is indeed the main point. We are meant to see and meant to go to rock bottom, to witness the vanity of all things. Indeed, happy Lord's Day to you. But before we descend, let's first meet our author in verse 1. You see there? He is known as, quote, the preacher, the kohaleth in Hebrew. It's this term meaning a collector of wise sayings. You can think of an art collector whose genius is not just that he collects art, but he so arranges the art in such a way that it has the intended effect upon the viewer. And that's the genius of this preacher, this collector of Proverbs, who has arranged them just right to have the right effect upon you and I. We learn a little more. We see that he is the son of David, the king of Jerusalem, which, despite some commentaries, I will take to be none other than King Solomon himself. Kids, you remember King Solomon, right, that he asked from God not for riches, not for a long life, not for victory, but what did he ask for? He asked for an understanding mind so that he could govern well. And God gave Solomon a wisdom unsurpassed by anyone who came before him and anyone who came after him. And so we are now sitting at the feet of a very, very wise man. And so keep that in mind because the first words of this very wise man in verse 2 are vanity of vanities, says the preacher. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. If you've ever been taught to look for key words when you read, in case it is not obvious, the word vanity is our key word. In many ways, it is the theme of the entire book. And so let's probe the meaning of vanity. This is the Hebrew word hevel, H-E-B-E-L, and it can mean mist or vapor or mere breath. It connotes something that is fleeting and ephemeral. Maybe there was dew on the grass this morning, but by now that dew has evaporated. It is hevel. It has passed into nothingness, and it has left no trace of itself. Now, kids, let's do an activity together, all right? Kids, come with me now. I'm going to count to three, and when I count to three, I want you to quickly breathe in and then breathe out, okay? Don't leave me hanging up here. Here we go. Ready? One, two, three. Okay, kids, that is the shortness of life. That is hevel, as quickly as you breathed in and breathed out. That is vanity. So we know what hevel is, but let's ask, okay, what is hevel's extent? How vast is this vanity? Well, verse 2, the preacher tells us that, quote, all things are hevel. All is vanity. Vanity touches everything, and the preacher is going to prove that out for you and I because he's going to address the things, all the things that we normally assign meaning and significance to, things like wealth, fame, family, knowledge, and power, and he's going to round all of those things up, expose their emptiness, and let the wind drive them away like meaningless chaff. And so now is the time that you should start to feel uncomfortable, maybe squirm in your chair a little bit, maybe even push back a little bit, because is it not the case that as Christians we are a people of great purpose? We proclaim the greatest of purposes. We're a people of great hope, proclaiming the greatest of hopes in the great King. And so let's ask the obvious question. How did Ecclesiastes make it into the Bible with this message of meaninglessness? Does this not cut against the entire trajectory of Scripture that proclaims a message of great purpose? Well, remember, we're going on a journey. And the way wisdom literature works, particularly Ecclesiastes, is by putting man in his place. It's to situate man exactly where he needs to be. In many ways, that is what wisdom is, knowing who God is and knowing who you are in relation to God. You might remember, or know, the opening line of John Calvin's very famous Institutes. It was that Calvin said, everything that we know is really just made up of two parts. What do you know about God, and what do you know about yourself? That is all of knowledge, and that is wisdom. And Ecclesiastes is a most helpful hike to get us there. And the preacher is going to do this by really posing masterful questions, the right kind of questions, questions that we are often not brave enough to ask because we fear the answer. I remember one time after reading Socrates, I came to the conclusion that if Socrates ever asked me a question, my best course of answer would be to run for my life because his questions always had a way of undoing the listener. And that is Solomon at his finest. And you see one such very innocent-looking question in verse 3, what does man gain by all his toil at which he toils under the sun? This is the paradigmatic question of Ecclesiastes. The preacher waltzes up to man, to you, and he says, let's seriously consider your life. Run inside out for me the pockets of your life and show me what advantage, what profit, what increase does your little life actually yield? Now, you might remember, just last week from Titus, Titus told us many things that are profitable. And so you might say, I've got my answer. I know some good deeds, some good deeds that I have done. But as I said, when you ask the right questions, you get the right answers because the question is very carefully framed. And notice the preacher says, let's consider your toil specifically, quote, under the sun. Let's look at life under the sun. It's a way of saying in the grand scheme of things, in the final analysis, the big picture, what does it all amount to? How enduring is it really? And so the preacher would come to you and say, okay, good, you helped out at home last week and you did a good deed. You did the dirty dishes, good for you. But those dirty dishes are just going to pile up again the next day. And in fact, maybe even higher than the first time. Or he'd say, oh, you got a promotion at work. Congratulations, good for you. That is meaningful. But chances are you're not going to work there for longer than a few years. Your work's not going to be remembered. And you will have no lasting legacy there whatsoever. You're really just building a sandcastle next to the ocean tide. Oh, you're about to have your third child. Okay, finally. Now we have something substantial. Congratulations. But of course, the odds that your great, great, great grandchildren will even know your name is slim to none. You will be long forgotten. In fact, let's prove it right now. Do you know the name of your great, great, great grandmother? The one to whom you owe your existence? So you see, then, his answer in verse 4 is this, a generation goes and a generation comes and only the earth remains forever. See, it is this perspective that the Kohaless is asking us to adopt. He's saying, zoom out from the day to day. Zoom out from the rat race and let's consider the totality of life under the sun. And be warned, the preacher is going to do that with honesty, absolute, brutal honesty, having no regard for your feelings, no regard for your self-importance, no spin, no fluff. If the Bible had a PR manager, this book would make him most nervous. Because we're going to see just how far vanity extends. We're going to see how your labor really is of no profit, of no endurance, that there is nothing new, that work is toilsome, that pleasures are fleeting, that the oppressed will continue to be oppressed, that the rich who worked so hard to accumulate their wealth cannot even enjoy that wealth. And that no matter what you do, no one escapes time or chance. Welcome to life under the sun. God sits enthroned above the firmament, and here you are, down here on your two little legs. Just a mist that is here today and gone tomorrow. All is vanity. And so we're right to say, okay, well what then? Is all this talk of vanity intended to lead us to despair? Right? Is Ecclesiastes the cynic's anthem? Could the skeptic, could the pessimist now finally hold up his proof text and justify why he's so grumpy? Well, not so fast. All Scripture is God breathed. All Scripture is profitable. And that means if Scripture is going to discuss meaninglessness, it will ultimately be very meaningful. If Scripture is going to address things that are profitless, it is ultimately going to be to our profit, and very useful for us to know. God is meaning to teach us something through the vapor. And indeed Ecclesiastes has not always been approached this way. In fact, you may know, when the great Ernest Hemingway was in search for a title of his very first book, he found it right there in verse 5. It reads this, the sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. You can just hear there how the sun's daily regimen is repetitive, but it's not necessarily progressive. Right? All this work of rising and setting, the sun's not getting better or improving. No, it's this Sisyphean task for the sun. In fact, that word for hastens in verse 5 is the word for pant. The sun is up there panting, out of breath, hustling, only have to do to wake up the next morning and run the same course that the sun ran the day before. And so Hemingway looked at that verse and he got the title to his now famous book, The Sun Also Rises. And if you know anything about Hemingway, you know that he wrote for a lost and disillusioned generation that tried to find meaning in nothing. And to his credit, Hemingway followed that out to its logical conclusion, and he ended his life by suicide. And many feel such despair is the message of Ecclesiastes, but that is not the God that we serve. And that is not the message of this book. We are right to reject the idea that Solomon is setting before us a discourse of despair. He's far too wise for that. Now instead, the preacher wants us to feel in our bones, not a complete despair, not a total void of meaning, but rather what I would call a purposeful pointlessness, that there's a kind of humbling repetitiveness baked into the world. Creation is God's classroom, and God has purposely orchestrated His classroom with a kind of embedded futility. And if we have eyes to see it for what it is, not only will we not despair, we will be all the wiser for salvation. So Ecclesiastes challenges the pessimist, but it also challenges the naive optimist, Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky Sunshine. It forces him to stare reality in the face. It would ask him, Mr. Optimist, if all those positive thoughts of yours are truly working, why do you keep having to repeat them? Why do you keep inventing new ones? And verses 6 and following are going to show us this futility with even more clarity. And you see there, it begins by saying the world itself experiences a kind of weariness. And you can just hear it in verses 6 and 7, the wind blows to the south, it goes around to the north, around and around it goes. The streams, they run to the sea, but the sea's not full. To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. So whether you look at the winds or whether you look at the waters, creation herself is subjected to a kind of empty repetition. The wind just goes around in a big circle, this kind of hollow circularity. The waters flow to the sea, but those seas don't fill. And what the preacher does is he now says, as goes creation, so goes for you. As goes the habitat, so it goes for the human. You and I live in the wake of this weary reality, and he's going to address that in three ways. The vanity of satisfaction, novelty, and legacy. Firstly, this vanity of satisfaction. Verse 8, he says, all things are full of weariness. A man can't utter it. Your eye is not satisfied with seeing, your ear is not satisfied with hearing. Just as the sea couldn't fill up, you cannot fill up. So a song happens to pop up on your playlist, and as it plays, you embrace it. So you think, this is my new favorite song. You're excited. But you notice, the more and more you hear the song, you start to enjoy it a little bit less each time. It doesn't quite strike you the way it struck you the first time. Eventually, you even grow bored of the song, and you say, I don't want to hear that song ever again. Or you make money to enjoy spending money, only to need to go make more money. You eat to be filled and to be satiated, only to have to eat again. You exercise to build muscle. Of course, your muscles are atrophying until the very next workout. It's summed up well by the great American prophet Mick Jagger, when he said, I try, and I try, and I try, but I cannot get no satisfaction. There is no permanent, enduring satisfaction under the sun. The second point, a concept that Americans are currently unconscious of, and that is the vanity of newness, things new. Verse 9 and 10 say this, what has been is what will be. What's been done is going to be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. Maybe there's a thing of which you can say, look, this is new. No, it's already been done. And our Sunday school series that meets at 9, shameless plug, join us. We've been studying together different worldviews and cults and religions. It's been fascinating to witness a plethora of so-called new teachings, new revelations, new philosophies, new promises emerge with a tantalizing claim. Here is something new for you. Of course, once you pop under the hood, you quickly realize, no, this is just a warmed over rehashed doctrine that is thousands of years old. This is about as new as the golden calf. Yeah, we love new things, don't we? New iPhone, new home, new car, new job, new clothes, new relationship, new emotions. We love the latest whatever. And so you see, there's great wisdom in knowing ahead of time that whatever it is, it is not novel. Now, it would be simplistic to say, OK, I'm going to apply this verse and from now on only thrift stores and used cars for me. This is to miss the preacher's point. The point is to not be duped and deceived by the allurement, by the promises of newness. You see this, for instance, in a macro level, in the ideologies of leftism or progressivism. The progressive mindset truly holds out the promise that man can do something novel, that society really is progressing into new territory all by way of man's ingenuity. This is why you hear it in the claims that we right now, we could be the first ever to end poverty and end injustice or that the modern woman is making never before seen kinds of progress or even our new stances on gender or sexual identity. These are signs of great progress. Just underneath it all is this pretense, this arrogance that man can usher in a new world order. But the clarity of verses 9 and 10 is that that is an empty, foolish philosophy. It would say, indeed, you are progressing, only you're progressing towards a cliff. There is nothing new under the sun. Now, to avoid the other side of the ditch, verse 10 does not mean that things can never improve. That is nearly trivially true. So it is new, for instance, that you and I, we can now zoom through the air at 30,000 feet in a way that your grandfather never could. That is new. But verse 10 would respond by saying, sure, but that's just man going from point A to point B, only a little faster. It's no different than Adam in the garden walking on two legs from point A to point B. Only you have to be frisked by a TSA agent to do that. And so we see the vanity of satisfaction, the vanity of novelty, and thirdly, the preacher exposes the futility of a lasting legacy in verse 11. There is no remembrance of former things, and there will not be any remembrance of later things even of those who come after. This is perhaps the most dangerous of the three because it sounds the most noble comparatively. Right? If someone says, I don't care for pleasure, I don't care for novelty, I want to build a legacy. I want to be remembered. It's got this ring of nobility to it. But verse 11 says, this is to set your heart upon an illusion. Try as you may, you will not be remembered. It was the great Michael Jordan who once said, quote, when you lose, you're forgotten. And no one wants to go to their grave forgotten. As we know, Jordan could put a lot of ones in the win column with that kind of mindset. But what I found amusing is I read that quote to my son this week, and he liked it, but his first question was, who is Michael Jordan? There's nothing new, there's nothing enduring, there's nothing satisfying, all is vanity. And so that concludes our first section of Vanity's Vastness. And now you may have noticed, we have yet to mention God. God's name appears nowhere in the first half. But in the second half of chapter 1, God now makes an appearance. And so maybe you breathe a sigh of relief and you think, okay, once God is brought into the picture, all this vanity will evaporate. All will be right in the world and we'll all live blissfully together inside of a Thomas Kinkade painting, sipping hot cocoa together. The preacher bursts that bubble in verse 12, and he says, when I was king over Israel, I set my heart to seek wisdom and I can report back that it is actually none other than God Himself who has designed the world to be this way. As verse 13 says, it is an unhappy, literally in Hebrew, evil business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. Now just think of all the things that our God gives. He gives life itself. He gives rain and sunshine. He gives grace and peace. He gives forgiveness and restoration and redemption. But not here. And notice that the gift giver of man's unhappy business is God Himself. The sovereign, almighty God is the one preoccupying us with busy work. Now you may recoil at this idea and say, I'm above busy work. Busy work is for imbeciles who don't know any better. I'm a mature man. I'm a mature woman. But again, this is to miss the journey that the preacher is leading us on. Because if you just stampede ahead and say, oh, I will give my life meaning, fine. I will give my life purpose. I will define my own existence. Friends, that is the world's approach to finding purpose and meaning. The preacher instead calls for man to humble himself before God, bow before this sovereign God. Verse 14 gives us the perfect image. All striving, all is striving after the wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight. What is lacking cannot be counted. Kids, just imagine. Imagine for me, kids, that I gave you a thick lead pipe and it was bent. And I said, okay, kids, straighten out this pipe for me with your bare hands. Go on, use all of your mind. And you try and try and try and you soon come to quickly realize no amount of strength, no amount of effort is going to be able to straighten out this bent pipe. By analogy, the world is like that pipe. Reality is bent and there is no amount of man's strength or industriousness or ingenuity that can straighten it out. And the point we are meant to see is that God Himself is the one who has bent the pipe. God Himself has structured it to be so. Remember God Himself said, here is some wind, go shepherd it. Remember back in the garden that when man sins, the curse that enters into the world does not appear out of thin air. No, God Himself sovereignly institutes that curse. He is the one who has bent this pipe. Well, now if all is bent, maybe the best course then is just go the other direction and embrace the madness. Well, the preacher heads off this line of thought in verse 17. He says, I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly, but this too is a striving after the wind. Because there is a mindset that says, okay, if everything is really vanity, then I'm just not going to try. I'm going to embrace the apathy and the ignorance. You might remember those countercultural words of the 60s hippie movement, turn on, tune in and drop out. Time Magazine just released an article this last year entitled, quote, it's harder than ever to care about anything. But this is hardly new. The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece believed they could reach a state of perfect apathy, no much indifference, that the news of the death of your own child would move you no more than the death of any other child. And Solomon says, no, no, this is a striving after the wind. And so verse 17, he concludes, in much wisdom is much vexation. And to increase in knowledge is to increase in sorrow. Are you under the impression that knowledge will make you happy? Every parent believes this to an extent, right? How many parents says, I want my kids to have a good education, the right schools with the right degrees, and they will be happier. But the preacher says, no, the more I knew, actually, the sadder that I was. And if you think about it, the more you know, the more responsible you are, the more accountable you are, the more you are aware. As is rightly said, the more you know, the more you realize just how little you actually know and how ignorant you truly are. This is why we have the mad scientist, the eccentric artist, the absorbed musician, the tortured genius, this quest for knowledge that is so often painful and maddening and burdensome, all this quest to straighten out what God has made crooked. And so the preacher has rounded everything up and he has shown us so far, and he will continue to do so, that all is vanity. But even more to the point, the preacher has shown us that God Himself is the one who has bent this pipe. And so what are we to do? How then shall we live? Well, let us lay upon our hearts two great uses of this great opening of Ecclesiastes. Firstly, know your limit. Know your limit. If anything is clear from this section, it is that there is a God and you are not Him. You cannot escape the repetition. You cannot outsmart the vanity. You cannot out-innovate the mundane. You are a mere breath and you're living in a vaporous world. You're not in control and you never were to begin with. And we're meant to see it is good and right for us to know that. As the psalmist says in Psalm 39, make me know my end. Let me know how fleeting I am. Let me realize my days are just a few hand breaths. I'm a mere breath here today, gone tomorrow. That's how inconsequential I am before the Almighty Creator. And Ecclesiastes is going to box us into those limits unlike any other book, but with the end goal of wisdom. Secondly, not just know your limit, but know your Savior. Know your Savior. As great as Solomon was, and he was great, someone even better than Solomon has come. And that someone, of course, is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, the greater Solomon. Because in Christ, vanity finally has met its match. Vanity cannot stand up to the resurrected Christ. Vapor cannot outdo the rock of ages. Through Christ, God is reconciling the world to Himself in the very futility of creation. And the curse of sin will not only be overturned, but even glorified by way of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that means for those who are in Christ, the Christian can see through the vapors and behold the Lord Jesus. The Christian knows something that Solomon only longed to see. Now to be emphatically clear, this does not mean that the vanity is fully erased when you trust in Jesus Christ. You will still get flat tires. Those dirty dishes are still going to pile up. You will still grind and grind and one day die. But what does change is that Christ has become to us wisdom from God. The Christian knows where true satisfaction is to be found. The Christian now knows that God is making all things new. Indeed, the Christian may be forgotten under the sun, but Christ Himself promises, I know my sheep. I will not forget a single one. And what that means for us is joy. Not only joy to come, but joy right now in this present age that is full of vanity. A joy not swallowed up because it is joy in Jesus Christ, for He is the one who is making all things new. He is the one that you drink of Him and you will never thirst. He is the true bread of heaven to eat of Him and you will be satisfied. And friends, at His hand are truly pleasures evermore that the wind will not blow away. Let us pray. Our gracious God and heavenly Father, we do praise You. You are the sovereign, almighty God who subjected even creation itself to futility. We praise You, Father, that this is not the end of the matter, that indeed the whole duty of man is to fear God and to keep His commandments. And we praise You for the very first commandment, to repent and believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ. And in Him and Him alone shall we be saved, not just now, but for all eternity. And so, Father, we do pray as we live in this world that is currently subjected, that we would live full of hope and joy, knowing that that is not the end, that indeed the Lord Jesus Christ is right now installed far above all rule and authority and power and dominion. And He is making all things new. And so may Christ and Christ alone truly be our joy. In His name we pray. Amen.
