The Search for Meaning

Well, if you have your Bible,
I wanna invite you to turn with me to Ecclesiastes chapter one. Ecclesiastes chapter one. And
we are gonna read verse 12 through chapter two, verse 26. I have
the privilege of being with you this morning and tonight in worship. I’d invite you to come as well.
We’ll be reading from and looking at Acts chapter two. with you
this morning and next Sunday morning as well. And we are going
to take a mini overview through the book of Ecclesiastes. And
so I want to begin in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 today, and then
we’ll finish up and just take a look at the end of the book,
Chapter 12, next week. Ecclesiastes is one of the most
fascinating books in all of scripture. It tackles the ultimate questions
that all of us, regardless of the phase of life that we are
in, tackles those questions that we are facing in life. And it
instructs us on how to live and how not to live on this side
of heaven before God and before others. The presumed writer of
Ecclesiastes is King Solomon. And what he does in this book
is he zeroes in on some of the issues and some of the props
that he would lean upon to hold him up on this side of heaven, and he
finds them, as he goes throughout the stages of his life, to be
vanity, meaningless. If you’re familiar with the book
of Ecclesiastes, you’ll know that that is a common refrain
in this book. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity
or meaninglessness. He’s leaning on all these things
apart from God, and he finds himself to be sort of on this
never-ending hamster wheel, a search for meaning, where he gets nowhere
apart from God. And so we’re gonna look at these
areas of our life and examine them before God as well as this
passage sets before us today. So with that in view, I would
turn your attention now to the reading of God’s word from Ecclesiastes
chapter one beginning in verse 12. Hear God’s word. I, the preacher,
have been king over Israel and Jerusalem, and I applied my heart
to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under
heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children
of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is
done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and is striving
after the wind. What is crooked cannot be made
straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said in
my heart, I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were
over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience
of wisdom and knowledge, and I applied my heart to know wisdom
and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also was
but a striving after win, for in much wisdom is much vexation,
and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. I said in my
heart, come now, I will test you with pleasure, enjoy yourself. But behold, this also was vanity. I said, of laughter. It is mad
and of pleasure. What use is it? I searched with
my heart how to cheer my body with wine, my heart still guiding
me with wisdom, and how to lay hold on folly till I might see
what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during
the few days of their life. I made great works. I built houses
and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks
and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself
pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought
male and female slaves and had slaves who were born in my house.
I also had great possessions of herds and flocks, more than
any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I gathered for myself
silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I got
singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the delight
of the sons of man. So I became great and surpassed
all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also, my wisdom remained with
me, and whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept
my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all
my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered
all that my hands had done, and the toil I had expended in doing
it, and behold, all was vanity, and a striving after wind, and
there was nothing to be gained under the sun. So I turned to
consider wisdom, and madness, and folly. For what can the man
do who comes after the king? Only what has already been done.
Then I saw that there is more to gain in wisdom than in folly,
and there is more to gain in light than in darkness. The wise
person has his eyes and his head, but the fool walks in darkness.
And yet I perceive that the same event happens to all of them.
Then I said in my heart, what happens to the fool will happen
to me also. Why then have I been so very
wise? And I said in my heart that this also is vanity. For
of the wise, as of the fool, there is no enduring remembrance,
seeing that in the days to come, all will have been long forgotten.
how the wise dies just like the fool. So I hated life because
what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity
and is striving after win. I hated all my toil in which
I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man
who will come after me. And who knows whether he will
be wise or a fool? Yet he will be a master of all
for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also
was vanity. So I turned about and gave my
heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the
sun, because sometimes a person who is toiled with wisdom and
knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone
who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great
evil. What has a man from all the toil
and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For
all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does
not rest. This also is vanity. There is nothing better for a
person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment
in his toil. This also I saw from the hand
of God, for apart from him who can eat and who can have enjoyment? For to the one who pleases him
God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he
has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give
to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving
after wind.” Amen, this is God’s holy, sufficient, and inspired
word to us this morning. One of my favorite songs is a
song that could have been written and almost inserted as a chapter,
as a poem, in the book of Ecclesiastes. It’s a song by the band U2, I
Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. And many of you
know it, it’s a song that’s, from I guess the 80s and it’s
sort of stood the test of times and you know the refrain, he’s
climbed the highest mountains, he’s run through the fields and
he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for. And I hear that
song and I think, you’re you too. You’re Bono. You guys play in front of crowds
of thousands all over the world. You have the riches, you have
the fame, you have the ability to acquire any creature comfort
that you could possibly want, and here you are, writing this
song, singing that you still haven’t found what you’re looking
for. And if that’s the case for you guys, what hope is there
for me to ever find what I’m looking for? How is that ever
gonna happen? It resonates though, doesn’t
it? It resonates with you and it resonates with me. It’s a
song that really has stood the test of time because it speaks
to what’s going on in the heart of each one of us because all
of us have been on this quest in life to some degree where
we have not found what we were looking for. You had dreams of
what your marriage would look like, your children, how they
would turn out, how your career would go, how your relationships
with people would be. And no matter how wonderful they
may actually be, they’re probably still not as amazing as maybe
you concocted in your mind at one point in time. and we still
haven’t found what we’re looking for. So Solomon in Ecclesiastes,
really throughout the whole course of the book, but particularly
in this passage, is writing in prose what you too wrote in poetry. that we’ve done, and we’ve experienced
things, and we have the ability to do so many things, especially
as Americans living in a prosperous world, and there’s a measure
in which we still haven’t found what we’re looking for, and we’re
on this treadmill. And so you read this passage,
it’s a long passage, and you get to the end of it, and Solomon
is writing this later in his life, and you think, well, you
know, maybe he’s just a curmudgeon, maybe he’s just kind of this
crotchety old man who’s, you know, experienced what he can
experience, and he’s at the sunset of his life, and he pretty much
just sits in his lazy boy and watches cable news and complains
about politics all day long and how the world could be so much
better, and he’s, You know, he’s just looking back with this nostalgic
kind of look backwards, forgetting the words of the great theologian,
Billy Joel, who once said that the good old days aren’t always
good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems. He’s forgot that. He comes off,
he certainly does, I mean, let’s just face it, he comes off as
a bit of an Eeyore, a pessimist at the very least,
but Solomon’s getting at something here. He’s going somewhere, he’s
not just complaining, he’s trying to convey to us a message. that
we need to hear. And he’s gonna walk us through
some of the stages of his life, the seasons of his life, the
things he’s experimented with that he thought would give him
meaning, but that ultimately failed him. So what he does in
this passage is he displays where meaning cannot be found, and
the first place he brings us to is to wisdom. We find that sort of at the outset
of the passage in verses 16 through 18 of chapter one, and then again
he returns to it down in chapter two, verses 12 through 17. One
of the things that you’ll remember about Solomon is that Solomon
was David’s son. And when David was about to die,
and Solomon was about to take the throne, you may remember
in your scriptures that God promised to give Solomon whatever it was
that he asked for. And you think about, if God verbally
comes to you and says, I will give you anything that you ask
for, just ask me, what would you ask him for? You could ask
him for innumerable different things, but what Solomon asks
is he asks for wisdom. That’s what he wanted from God,
he wanted wisdom. And it was such a noble thing
that he asked for that he not only got wisdom, but he got wealth
and power and pleasures and so many other things associated
with it thrown in. So Solomon received what he asked
for from God, and God was faithful to his promise. And his wisdom
is inscripturated. It’s inscribed in the passages
of Scripture. Solomon wrote the Proverbs, right?
It’s wisdom literature. It’s where we get tremendous
wisdom. There’s wisdom in this book of
Ecclesiastes. Solomon was known for his wisdom
as being one of the wisest or the very wisest person in the
world at the time. And he discovers as he gets to
the end of the road of his life that the acquisition of wisdom
and the pursuit of wisdom at the end of the day was simply
a chasing after the wind. It was vanity. There was meaninglessness
to it. Why? Would that be the case? Because wisdom is obviously a
noble thing. Why would that be the case? Well, the reason why
is because no matter how much wisdom he had, he discovered
a couple things. Number one is he could not control
all the affairs of life no matter how much wisdom he had. And number
two, the more wisdom he was able to gain, the more sorrowful he
became. In fact, we look in chapter one,
verse 18, for in much wisdom there is much vexation. and he
who increases in knowledge increases in sorrow. It’s like the more
you know, the more questions you have. The more you observe
of life, the more you realize you’re out of control of it.
Why is it that some people can go through the drive-thru and
eat a Big Mac every day of their life and a large fry and a big
Mountain Dew and they live until they’re 95 years old, happy as
can be. And there are these other people
who, You know, they spend $12 on grapes, organic grapes that
are this big at Whole Foods. And they eat all the whole grain,
caged-free, free-range, non-GMO foods. And they exercise. They run. They could drive, but
they run. And that’s what they do. And
they take care of their bodies. And they drop dead at 60 years
old. It happens, right? Why is that? Wisdom can’t make sense of that. Wisdom can’t make sense of so
much of the world. It just stirs up more questions,
more why questions. You realize that there’s more,
the more wisdom you have, you realize that there’s more that
you don’t understand that you do. You want to know that one of
the main things I learned by getting through three years of
seminary and finishing that, that there’s so much more that
I don’t know that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I mean, it
just showed me that the gap in my knowledge and understanding
of God and people and the world was so much greater than I ever
imagined. You may know what this is like
with children. You look at the evils of the world. You have
to explain to them. They somehow discover, you know,
they see riots in the streets like we saw last summer. They
see a global pandemic. They see terrorism. They see
all kinds of horrible things, maybe even happening at their
school or in their life, and they ask the why questions. And
you may be able to answer the surface-level presenting issue,
but the second why question and the third why question is a mystery.
doesn’t always make sense. And we can get terminal degrees
from the best institutions, and we can become a scholar, and
we can become well-rounded, we can read, we can be around people
who are thoughtful, we can be thoughtful people, we can try
to acquire wisdom, and we still find that we don’t have the answers. and there’s much vexation, there’s
much trouble. They say that ignorance is bliss,
and there’s a sense in which that’s true. And then you kind
of move on down to chapter two, you see a little bit more about
the wisdom that Solomon is speaking of here in verses 12 through
17 of chapter two. And he says that there’s basically
vanity in seeking wisdom over folly. That’s a good thing, but
as the chief pursuit of our life, it’s meaningless. If you’ve ever
had the privilege of getting to know older Jewish people,
particularly Jewish people who may have lived during the Holocaust,
If you’ve gotten to know them, one of the things that you will
learn as you get to know them is that they always very highly
valued education. Because the Nazis took everything
from the Jews. They took their possessions,
they took their businesses, they took their homes, they took their
families, they took everything. They completely wiped out everything
of earthly importance to the Jews, but you know, the one thing
that they couldn’t take from them was their education, what
they had learned. They couldn’t snatch that away
from them. And so it was something that
they valued tremendously. And that’s something that is
good to value, right? I mean, that can’t be taken from
you. It’s better to live a wise life,
a life where you have some knowledge, than to just be tossed around
by every… every cultural breeze that comes
our way, every new fad that comes down the line. It’s good to be
thinking critically about things. And when you read in verses 13
and 14 here, you discover that there’s more to be gained from
wisdom than there is in folly. But then you get to the bottom
of verse 14, it says here, the wise person has his eyes and
his head, but the fool walks in darkness. Yes, that’s true,
but then what’s the next sentence say? And yet I perceive that
the same event happens to all of them, which is they die. That’s
what happens to them. The bones of Beethoven and the
bones of Joe Schmo, who is buried right next to him, are pretty
much the same. There’s no difference in the
knowledge and the wisdom that we gain. It becomes obsolete
over a few years. The wise and the foolish both
end up in the grave. And if that’s the case, then
shaping your whole life around that, orienting your life around
acquiring more intelligence, more wisdom, is folly, it’s foolishness. Well, Solomon goes on here and
he says that the place not to find meaning is not only in wisdom,
but it’s also in pleasure. making pleasure as the chief
objective of your life. It’s meaningless. And here’s
where Solomon really goes through life stages. And no matter who
you are, you’re seeking this, right? Everybody’s seeking pleasure. That’s why donut shops exist.
That’s why pizza exists. That’s why entertainment exists. That’s why it all is out there
because we’re just seeking a more comfortable, pleasurable life. And so Solomon kind of goes through
his younger stages here. And he starts at the beginning,
and he’s saying that he had all of these resources. He was able
to have all the parties. If he wanted music at the party,
he did not just plug in iTunes, he could hire the band. And when
the band needed a break, he had another band to be able to come
in and play while the first band was taking a break. He had those
resources. He had the best food, the best
drink, He had the best people around, and another song would
be sung, and another joke would be told, and another great meal
would be had, and everyone would have a great time for a while,
and it was all wonderful, and it was great. It was the frat
party of the century, and then you get to the end of it, and
he lays his head down on his pillow, and he’s like, what?
is this ultimately all about? And eventually, the luster wears
off. And eventually, it becomes dull. Eventually, it becomes
the same old thing over and over again, and the rush is gone,
and it becomes predictable. And he discovers that the objects
that promised him pleasure and meaning in life, building his
life around it, ultimately robbed him of that joy. And so Solomon
matures a little bit. He gets a little bit older. He
becomes, you know, he becomes more of a grownup, so to speak. And he still pursues the same
quest, but it’s just a little bit more refined than it was
in his youth. And so he builds a beautiful
estate, and it has parks, and it has vineyards, it has everything.
You know, in the United States, We really have two kind of real
castles, don’t we? We have Hearst Castle in California,
and we have one here in North Carolina, the Biltmore Estate.
Many of you have been to the Biltmore. I grew up in California,
and so I’ve actually had the privilege of being to both Hearst
Castle and the Biltmore, and they’re awesome in the truest
sense of that word. They are architectural marvels. The furniture, the detail, the
landscaping, the grounds, the scenery. is unparalleled. It’s incredible if you’ve been
to these places. The Jerusalem temple was something
along the same lines. It took seven years to build. It had gold and precious stones
in it, but it took seven years to build. Solomon’s house took
14 years to build. Twice as long. It was ostentatious. And it had to be because as you
read here, he had all these concubines and wives. He had, in fact, 700
wives and 300 concubines. That’s a lot of people to put
under one roof. And that’s just the women. That was his life. And he had
women at his beck and call all the time. the pick of who he
wanted. He had the best, he could employ
the best. Think about the pride that that stirs up. Think about
maybe the first house that you bought, your very first house
that you bought. You moved out of that crummy apartment that
was too small, and you were done with it, and you actually bought
your own home. and they gave you the keys, all
the documents got notarized, they gave you the keys and it
was yours. You had your name on the title. And the pride that you feel of
home ownership, I mean, that’s something that you can, it’s
something tangible you can look to and there’s a measure of pride,
like you’ve accomplished something so that you can have this. Magnify
that exponentially by what Solomon had. Right? He didn’t own a 1,200 square
foot little track home. I mean, he owned this mansion.
And if Solomon wanted something, he could get it. If he wanted
a fruity drink with an umbrella, someone would bring it to him.
If he wanted a little massage, someone would give it to him.
If he wanted treasure, someone would give that to him. If he
wanted music, anything he wanted. And was it pleasurable? Yes.
Yes, it was. It was all those things. It gave
him that pleasure, but eventually it wore itself out. And you lay
your head down, you’ve gotta say, there’s got to be more than
this. One of the poignant aspects of this passage that it sort
of stirs up in me is that we’re always wanting just a little
bit more, right? How many of you have driven down
the interstate and you see those lottery signs and it goes up
to like $500 million? I mean, what do you get, $500
million? You couldn’t spend that in the
course of, I mean, 500 million? You don’t want 500 million, you
just want a million, right? Just a million would be, gosh,
if I could just get that million, right? John D. Rockefeller, the
standard oil guy from 100 years ago, probably known as the richest
person to have ever lived, someone asked him one time, how much
money is enough? And he famously said, just a
little bit more. If we could have just a little
bit more money, Just a little bit more peace and quiet. Just
a little bit more time to ourselves. Just a little bit more sleep.
Just a little bit more health. Just a little bit more of this,
a little bit less of that. Everything would be good, right? We would
be rolling. Solomon says, not so. Because
it’s never enough. And if you build your life upon
it, you will become a person who just sinks down and down
further and further into despair. Because it’s hopeless. Finally, the third thing, the
last thing, and this is the shorter one, is that Solomon would seek
meaning in work. He would seek it in pleasure,
he’d seek it in wisdom, and he’d seek it in work. And Solomon
here is focusing on what he’s gonna leave behind when he dies. his work, all of the tribulation
he’s been through to gain what he’s had. There was an article
a while back in the Wall Street Journal, the title of the article,
the headline was Lost Inheritance. And it was an article about the
Rogerson family from Boston. And they had made hundreds of
millions of dollars in real estate and in banking endeavors. The son of the father who’d made
all the money remembered that he would fly off to summer camp
every year in his father’s amphibious airplane. Does that sound like
your summer camp days growing up? Just get on your dad’s amphibious
airplane, just fly off to summer camp? That’s what he did. And
that was just normal. That’s just, you know, like hopping
in the Toyota and going down the road for him. What happened was they had made
all this money, and then all of a sudden there was an investment
that went bust, and they lost the inheritance. And it speaks
of inheritance and how this often works. The first generation makes
it. The second generation, by the time the second generation
dies, 70% of that inheritance is gone. By the third generation,
90% of it is gone, on average. Three generations, all wiped
out. Hundreds of millions of dollars.
And Solomon knew something of this. He knew that all the work
you do, all the creativity, the 80 hour work weeks, the nights
away from home, away from family, the sleepless nights, three generations,
poof, it’s all gone. Vanishes. Even godly people,
godly people who are not pursuing just riches and fame and fortune
and all that. So much of what missionaries do, ministers do,
people in the pews doing godly, wonderful things, they put their
heart and soul into it for the sake of the glory of God and
the sake of the good of their neighbor and it gets, it can
get lost and forgotten. and misused and taken for granted
in a few generations. Melanie and I, we were in New
Jersey a couple months ago. We were at Princeton University,
Princeton University. Pick up US News and World Report.
It gets ranked the number one or number two university in America
every year. they have like a $30 billion
endowment. And Princeton University was
the Presbyterian University, right? It was the university
where Jonathan Edwards was the president of it, and Samuel Davies,
and John Witherspoon, he was a Presbyterian minister who was
also one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
These were men who loved God, and loved the gospel, and loved
His mission, and loved His church, and they sought to honor God
through that great institution at Princeton University. And
we were there, and we saw the Witherspoon statue, and then
we walked across the street to the seminary, and I went into
the church, where Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield had preached. These names may not mean anything
to you, but these are men who were just profoundly influential
in the spiritual health and well-being of churches in America and throughout
the world, and really were trailblazers. I mean, they were just great
men of God, and they, they had done all of this great work around
this great university and you go to it now and it’s an absolute
fest of debauchery and idolatry and of just wickedness in so
many ways. God’s still there, there’s still
good things going on for the sake of the gospel, but in the
institution itself, all the work that they’ve done has crumbled
down. It’s as secular as the day is long. Future generations,
they squander it, it happens. So, I hope you’re glad you came
to church today, because it’s kind of been a bummer of a passage,
right? The quest for wisdom, pleasure, and hard work is vanity. But what Solomon wants us to
see is that ultimately there’s hope and light, right? We can get into Solomon’s shoes
and we can read this and think it’s kind of a bummer, but we
also read ourselves into it and say, yeah, I mean, there is dissatisfaction
in my work and at home and things aren’t always exactly what they
meant to be and something’s still not right and I still don’t have
the joy that I wish that I had. And what we do is we take that
and we transfer it on to God and we assume that that God really
isn’t all that interested in our joy. That’s not what he’s
really about. And sometimes you hear it reinforced
in the church. You’ve heard things like God
isn’t really all that interested in your happiness, he’s interested
in your holiness. That’s how a lot of people sometimes
hear things, and there’s a measure of truth in that. But the fact
of the matter is, is we just confessed it a little while ago,
and if you know your catechism, you know the first question is
that the chief end of man is to glorify God and then do what?
Enjoy Him forever, which means that God has created us for joy. He’s created us for pleasure. Every pleasure that He brings
into our lives, whether it be through just pleasure, or the
acquisition of wisdom, or finding satisfaction in work, or family,
or home, or whatever it is, those things are gifts from God, and
what we discover in the book of James in the New Testament
is that He’s given us every good gift to do what? To enjoy. These
are good gifts from him and we ought to enjoy them. But so often
what we end up doing, and this is where we get it wrong and
this is where it goes awry, is we place our hope in the gifts
rather than in the giver of those gifts. And that’s what makes
all the difference. So Solomon is gonna land the
plane here in verse 24 of chapter two. You can find enjoyment in
this life. You can find it, but it’s ultimately
to be found in the giver. It’s ultimately to be found in
him. The joyful, blessed life that
God gives to us is a thankful life, thankful for the gifts,
but ultimately thankful for the giver. It’s a life where you
ultimately remember that all of these pleasures that you have
in life are things that you don’t deserve. Remember that old commercial,
you know, he did it the old-fashioned way, he earned it. Well, no,
that’s not the way it works in God’s economy. You don’t deserve
these pleasures, you deserve what we discovered in Romans
chapter one that we read in our New Testament reading this morning,
which is the unmitigated wrath of God. You’re gonna get the benediction
here in just a few moments. What you don’t deserve is that,
you deserve him turning his face away from you. and punishing
you for your sin, for your failure to live up to His standard of
holiness, and instead what He gives you, what He gives to everybody
just by common grace, our earthly pleasures, but what He gives
to you and to me, those who have rested in the finished work of
Jesus Christ for us in the gospel, who’ve repented of our sins and
look to Him alone for salvation as He’s offered to us. What we
get is the hope of glory. An inheritance that can never
perish or spoil or fade. A love that will never let us
go. Nothing can separate us from it. We get no condemnation. We get sins plunged into the
depths of the sea. We get the promise that He will
never leave us nor forsake us in the midst of the deepest possible
pain that we could be going through. and that He will carry us through
to the end. And all of these little pleasures that we have
here in this life, which we ought to enjoy them for what they are,
are just, they’re like the tiniest little sliver of the piece of
the cake that He is about to give us. There are just four
tastes of it. They’re just small little reminders
that God loves us and He’s with us and He’s good to us. And He
is interested in our joy in this life and in the life to come. So the answer is to not dock
your ship at the port of earthly blessings, but to turn to Jesus. to place your hope in him and
find your eternal joy in him, the one who loved you and gave
himself for you. Amen, let’s pray. Father, no doubt each one of
us here can relate to Solomon’s search for meaning in life. We
may sing that our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood
and righteousness, but so often we find our hope built on the
gifts you give rather than in you. So we pray that you would
help us to understand the pleasures and the opportunities and the
skills and all the abilities that you’ve given to us as gifts
that are designed to not only to help us thrive in life, but
ultimately to point us to you. Satisfy us, Lord, with yourself
and with the love and faithfulness you bring to us by the grace
and through the finished work of our faithful Savior, Jesus
Christ. For we ask it in his name, amen.