1 Transcription of 13ID1370 Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 “Is Life Worth

Transcription of 13ID1370 Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 “Is Life Worth Living?” January 13, 2013 All right, shall we open our Bibles to the book of Ecclesiastes 1:1? This book is found in the Old Testament, amongst the books called the books of poetry and wisdom. They start at the book of Job; they finish at the Song of Solomon. But they’re important books. They presume – these books of wisdom – that the reader desires a relationship with God. Everything that is written in them is written in the present tense. So it doesn’t address your past or your future. It addresses your present walk. And each of these books of wisdom tackles difficult questions: Why do the righteous suffer? Where is God when I need Him? Or as this book - the book of Ecclesiastes – as Solomon writes, is this life really worth living at all? Mark Twain wrote, years ago, he thought that life would be much better if you could start it at age eighty and gradually move backwards to a child. Well, that makes good sense. You have a lot of wisdom and experience that you could apply. You could probably save yourself some grief. But life’s not like that. We start young, and hopefully we gain wisdom by experience. And certainly we gain lots of understanding by asking questions. We ask questions of ourselves. We quiz others. We ultimately turn and ask God for answers. Why am I here? What’s the purpose for my life? And when everything is said and done, when I’m done living, what really will I have left? Where really will I be? Those are pretty deep issues. They’re hard issues of philosophy. Philosophers have tackled them for generations. Most college kids, if I remember my college years, sit around campus discussing them – sometimes over a few beers, but still….you’re looking for answers. The problem is that if we don’t, somewhere along the line in our life, come with satisfactory answers to those questions, my life becomes very disillusioned, and I find, very much, a great dissatisfaction with the life that I live. So, at some point in my life, I have to come up with answers. Solomon asked them honestly. He wrote down a journal that you have before you as the book of Ecclesiastes. He kept good notes. He wrote down the potential answers that he came up with. And then after subjecting them to the rigorous kind of scrutiny of life as he saw it, he would oftentimes find them dissatisfying, 1 unfulfilling. “These aren’t really the answers that I need.” And sometimes more disillusioned than ever before. But he was hunting for the meaning of life. You can certainly find a lot of disillusionment in our world. Just read any political column, listen to any contemporary song’s lyrics – doesn’t really matter if you’re young or old. At every level of society or of development, people have a hard time coming up with satisfactory answers for the important questions of life. And so what the world does is they try to cope with the instability that is caused by not being able to say what life means and trying to just get by. What is the point of it all? Is this life really worth living? That’s Solomon’s quest. I think Thoreau, the philosopher, wrote that, “Men live lives of quiet desperation.” Well Solomon is the fellow that is going to go, with all of his resources, to try to help us to come to the right conclusions about how we should live our life. We read the words in verse 1, “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.” Now, he introduces himself as the Preacher. The Hebrew word is kohaleth. Kohaleth is a word that doesn’t mean a guy standing in a pulpit preaching at you. In fact, in the Septuagint – which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament – this word is translated “ecclesiastes.” It comes from the Greek word “ecclesia,” which is the word that is normally used in the New Testament for “the church.” It means “called out ones” or, literally, “assembled ones.” So Solomon, who wrote the book of Proverbs, and he became the wise teacher with God’s wisdom and who wrote the Song of Solomon (who became the royal lover to describe the love of God for man) - in this book, the book of Ecclesiastes, he gathers together the philosophies of life. He gets information from experience. He gathers information from participation. He takes quiet and careful observation, and he makes notes. “Life under the sun” – that’s what his goal is. What is “life under the sun” mean? He’s a searcher, he’s a seeker, he’s a gatherer. And these are his sermons, his reviews, his observations and his conclusions about life. Now you might say, “Well, what do I care about what Solomon thinks?” Well, for one thing, God had him write the book. But if you look at his qualifications, he’s an interesting fellow. According to the Bible, Solomon, in his generation, was the richest man on the planet. He could buy and pursue, without hesitation, anything and everything that caught his eye. He was able to, without any reservation, gather to himself. Not only was he the richest man upon the planet, he was the wisest man, spiritually, upon the earth. When the Lord had come to him there in 2 Chronicles 1, after his father David had died, and He said, “Solomon, what shall I 2 give you” as the king? Solomon said, “Well, You sure have been good to my father. And that he was able to rule all of the people all of those years, and You’ve established him. And there’s no people like the people of Israel. So, Lord, if You could just give me the wisdom to do as well as he did – I want to care for Your people.” And the Lord’s response was, “Because you didn’t ask for wealth for yourself or power or notoriety, but you’ve just asked for wisdom – I will give you all of those other things.” And Solomon became the richest and the most powerful and the wisest man upon the earth. Honor like no one had had, like none before and none after. So, Solomon had a lot going for him when he, as a young man, began to walk with God. He had tremendous wisdom – wiser than everyone. In fact, in 1 Kings 4, it says, “Of all of the men of the world, none wiser than Solomon.” Not only was he extremely wealthy and extremely wise, spiritually, he had a relationship with God, early on, that was second to none. He was a man of prayer. If you’ve ever read the prayer of Solomon at the dedication of the Temple in 1 Kings 8 - phenomenal insights into the heart and into the person of God. Psalm 72 was written by him as well – credited to him as a prayer. So, wisdom and wealth and a greater relationship with God, early on in life, that set him on the path of life - Solomon was extremely qualified. However, at some point in life, the things that shined in his life, early on, began to lose their luster. Doubts set in, questions engendered by the dilemmas that he faced and the enigmas that he saw in life, and rather than applying the wisdom of God that God had given him, to those questions, he drifted away from God entirely. He began to go back to the world. Back in Deuteronomy 17, God gave to the children of Israel some information. He said, “You know, there’s going to come a time when you, as a nation, are going to have a king like the world – except your king will not be like the world. In fact, your king will be distinct by these things: you shall not gather wives to yourself, not be a foreigner, don’t gather any gold or silver to yourself, don’t gather horses for yourself, don’t allow the people to return to Egypt to gather those things. And as the king, you will take your pen and write a copy of the Law for yourself that you can read in it day and night and know the heart of God and not be lifted up with pride.” Those were the qualifications for the king. Solomon ignored God’s wisdom and later on in life, literally broke every one of them except for being a foreigner. He married seven hundred women – not smart. (Laughing) Had three hundred 3 concubines. He owned enough horses to fill all of the massive stables at Megiddo that you can still see in Israel today. He made gold and silver, in his generation, absolutely useless because of the gold that he owned. And his disobedience to God led to disillusionment. But rather than taking the wisdom of God that he was given revelation-wise, and applying it to his life, he became the kohaleth - the searcher, the assembler of information, the philosopher of life seeking to make sense of it by human wisdom but apart from God. What does life look like apart from God? I think it was Socrates who once wrote, “By all means get married. If you find a good wife, you will find a good life. But if you find a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher.” (Laughing) And I’m pretty sure that’s what Solomon became – a philosopher.

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