The Way of Wisdom 2: Finding Wisdom in Ecclesiastes

Today, we continue our conversation on wisdom. If you haven't been here in the

last few weeks, the last two messages are on Facebook and will be on YouTube later this week.

But we kind of took two weeks to dive into Proverbs and I'm not going to take a lot of time.

I mean, this kind of series is, I realized last week as I tried to pack way

too much in, this is the kind of thing that you could take an entire year and unpack Proverbs.

You can take an entire year and unpack Ecclesiastes, and you can take an entire

year and unpack Job, and as we look at what has been known as the wisdom literature

in the Scriptures in the Old Testament,

and we've talked about how wisdom is the creative power of God to remake us,

and by which we, as we learned last week, also can partner with God to remake

the world, as we looked at the Proverbs.

Today, we're going to look at Ecclesiastes.

I think my father once said that he doesn't trust anyone who says he'll like

the book of Ecclesiastes.

Let's just open up with one verse, two verses. The words of the teacher,

son of David, king in Jerusalem.

Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher.

Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.

God bless you. We'll see you next week.

You know, the conversation of wisdom in these three wisdom books and all of

the scriptures, as I've said multiple times, multiple writers,

one story, not the old and the new, not the better. It's all one story.

To say that the new is better is to say that the Empire Strikes Back is better

than the first Star Wars, which it is.

But you didn't have Empire Strikes Back without Star Wars. It's one story without

new hope. And then you couldn't have Return of the Jedi.

Then you couldn't have all of the new ones if you didn't. They're all part of

one story. This is my nerding out, so sorry.

And the conversations of wisdom that we get in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,

and next week we'll talk about Job, they invite us into a conversation, a concert, so to speak.

Not a contradiction, not just two voices saying different things.

They are saying different things, but they're working together in harmony.

And the wisdom books invite us into this tension of the conversation,

kind of like a great, the best songs have these moments of tension that they

build up and then they release and, and they invite us to meditate and to ponder.

There are not equations.

There are not books full of just these propositional phrases that you just got

to take the one. It's an equation. As long as they do that, that works.

And as we've looked at Proverbs, it kind of looks that way.

But as we know that that's not how Hebrew poetry worked and it was poetry.

It didn't invite us to grab a hold of these propositional statements.

And every time we do these things, they work.

Proverbs tells us that life is ordered. It connects us to the wisdom of the

heavens, how to live skillfully in a broken world.

Life is ordered. Live wisely, and it will usually go well.

But then we have Ecclesiastes.

And Ecclesiastes is like, well, Proverbs, hold my Coke Zero.

Because I've discovered there's a glitch in the system.

What about when the rules don't seem to work? What about if I've done all the

things that I've dug out of wisdom, out of all of these voices of wisdom?

What about when I do them and it doesn't go so well?

What about when Proverbs doesn't work? And of course, Job, as we'll talk about

next week, the same harmonious concert is, What about when everything falls apart?

Where's the wisdom in that?

Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes was deconstruction before Descartes,

which was the French philosopher who really was the father of critical theory

and all of communism and socialism, all this idea of dismantling everything.

Deconstruction. Ecclesiastes was deconstructing before he made it popular.

He was deconstructing before social media made it a trend.

Let's deconstruct our faith. And guess what? The Bible already did it.

Ecclesiastes may sound cynical. In fact, we're going to call the teacher, the critic,

It may seem cynical and may sound dark, but it's an essential voice in the wisdom

conversation and one that we must or should, we don't have to,

but can draw great value from and understanding the way wisdom works in our

life, how it remakes us, how it allows us to move through a broken world in such a way.

It teaches us how to live when the neat sayings of wisdom break down.

The book. Let's just talk for a second. I'm not going to take a lot of time.

Proverbs has many sayings of wisdom. It's attributed to Solomon,

Proverbs, but we know that they're not all Solomon.

It's a collection of many wise sayings over generations.

There's old sayings of the wise. And of course, it's attached to Solomon.

He wrote many of them. We know that he did.

He's kind of like the archetype of wisdom in the Hebrew tradition.

And where there's many multiple voices over time, Ecclesiastes is different.

It's the most, There's no other books in the Bible like Ecclesiastes.

You can find kind of New Testament equivalents to Proverbs and all throughout

the scriptures and the story, kind of these equivalents to Proverbs wisdom saying,

but there's nothing like Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes is different because it's taking us on one person's basically experiment

of trying everything, everything that I can do in the world,

everything, as he constantly says, under the sun.

I've done it all. I'm going to

do it all. and I'm going to come to draw my conclusions as I do them all.

And Ecclesiastes takes us on this journey, leading to the same conclusion each time.

Now, one thing that's important to understand about Ecclesiastes that I never

quite understood before is that it actually has two voices.

It has the author, which we see in very verse 1. These are the sayings of the teacher.

He's an anonymous author. He introduces the main character.

He's collected the words of the teacher or the critic.

And he wants us to let the critic's voice turn our view of the world upside

down. He's like, I want you to hear the words of this person.

There's wisdom in them. It's dark. But I want you to let these words just kind

of turn your black and white understanding of the world upside down.

That's the author. Then we have the teacher.

It's the Greek word or the Hebrew word, aliphate. And we call it Ecclesiastes

because the Greek equivalent to aliphate is Ecclesiasticus.

Because basically this word means one who gathers. Teacher is not a bad word.

John Goldengay, in his commentary on this, one of my favorite voices in Hebrew

scholarship, he calls him the churchman because Ecclesiastes means gathering,

but is traditionally mostly often used as the gathering of worship.

And so he says, this guy is the churchman. And he's saying things that you wouldn't

expect a churchman to say, because that's the point of Ecclesiastes. It's honesty.

But here we have the critic, and he comes and he gathers people and he brings his wisdom.

Some people think it's Solomon. For years, I thought it was Solomon,

and it very well might be.

It is more likely, the way it is written, that it would not have been Solomon,

the kind of Hebrew that it is. It doesn't matter.

They want us to think about Solomon, because Solomon is what you think about

when you think about wisdom. But it also leaves it open-ended,

because it could be anyone.

It's somebody who's wise, and it's probably a king, but it doesn't matter.

This person had wise words to say that were weird.

And the author wants us to let these words make us think. And it's important

to realize, I said that there's two voices.

It's important to realize that because the teacher is not the author.

If you just read the bulk of this and think, well, this is just scripture.

It is just, again, these propositional true statements, rather than understanding

that the author has collected these statements, He introduces it,

but the author has the final word.

The author says, listen to these words. And then he comes in and says,

those things are good, but let me give you the final word.

It's important to understand that because we need to see that there's something

trying to be accomplished in this writing.

It's supposed to make us think because we sometimes approach scripture like

it is all just literal truth that we're supposed to just read it and we're supposed

to just do it word for word, but that's not how it works.

It's supposed to make you think. It's supposed to dig into your soul.

And so understanding that there's two voices helps us navigate this very weird

and dark collection of writings.

So let's begin just for a moment. I don't have time to, I love Ecclesiastes

and I would spend the rest of this month talking about it, but we're not going

to. And I promise I got my timer going.

I will not exhaust you, but let us look at what this book, what this voice and

the conversation and wisdom, what it has to offer us, what kind of wisdom can

we take out of it and apply to our lives?

Not just in it, but how can we also see in light of the cross?

So here we go. The critic's voice has already been introduced by the author.

And this is what the critic, imagine him as this weathered, where Proverbs is

like wisdom, lady wisdom.

She's youthful and probably beautiful. And she has things and she's words.

You want to hear what she has to say.

This is like the grizzled middle-aged man smoking a cigarette,

one of those long little sticks.

No, not a cotton candy vape, an actual cigarette, because that's what critics smoke.

Sorry, it doesn't matter, but I just hate vapes. And so he's just kind of weathered,

and he's like, hmm, Proverbs, that's wonderful.

But let me ask you this, and he starts off like this.

Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher, utterly meaningless.

Everything is meaningless.

What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?

Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun sets and hurries back to where it rises.

The wind blows in the south and turns to the north.

Round and around it goes, ever returning on its course.

All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. to the place the streams

come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome.

I lost my place. More than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing,

nor the ears full of hearing.

What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again.

There's nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one can say, look, there is something new?

Those weird Elon Musk trucks. That's new, but it's not really new.

It's just different. It's just a truck.

It was here already long ago. It was here before a time.

No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not

be remembered by those who follow them.

I, the teacher, was king over Israel and Jerusalem. I applied my mind to study

and to explore the wisdom, all that is done under the heavens.

What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind.

I have seen all the things that are done under the sun. All of them are meaningless,

a chasing after the wind.

What is crooked cannot be straightened. What is lacking cannot be counted.

That is great.

Meaningless, meaningless, utterly, not just meaningless, utterly,

completely meaningless.

The King James translates this word vanity because vanity had a different meaning

when it was translated by, worked on by Tyndale way back in the day.

Doesn't really mean the same thing to us today, but really neither one of them

properly communicates what this word means. Not that they're bad.

They're trying to communicate what it means, not just figuratively,

not just what the word means, but what the word actually means is the Hebrew word hevel.

And simply it means smoke or vapor or mist.

And the critic is not actually saying here, there is no meaning,

but rather like smoke, it's hard to understand, hard to grasp.

It looks like something you can grab but when you do your hands are empty ever

see clouds in the sky and then they look like they're literally you could eat

them like cotton candy or you can lay on them like a pillow but when you fly

through them in an airplane you get closer and then it's like they're gone.

And the critic often uses, he uses this phrase figuratively.

Sometimes it uses it to mean temporary.

It's like smoke. When you go to get it, it's gone. It's here and it makes shapes.

Oftentimes he uses it like it's a paradox or an enigma, something that makes

sense at one moment, then it doesn't the next.

You can't control smoke.

We have our, I love haze. I'm sorry. I know some people don't like it.

I'm trying to be more sensitive about it, use it less. But you can't control

it. It's going to go where it goes.

You can try to gather it together, and it's just going to go through your fingers and through the cracks.

And that's what the teacher is trying to tell us. Not that there's absolutely

no meaning in life, but rather it is hard to understand.

It's fleeting. When you think you have the meaning, it's gone.

Or when you have it, all of a sudden things change.

Things in life are out of our control, unpredictable, at times unfair,

and they're fleeting like smoke when you try to grab it. Or as he says,

grasping after the wind.

There's so much beauty and goodness in the world.

But just like that, tragedy strikes and it all seems to blow away.

Or we have a sense of justice.

But all the time, bad things happen to good people, meaningless, meaningless.

It doesn't make sense. It's confusing when I think I get it.

All of a sudden flipped the script is flipped and it's gone.

And on his lifelong experiment to find meaning something to hold on to,

what can I hold on to that is tangible, that will remain.

And that is full of meaning, not just a mystery. What can I hold on to?

And it goes through life under the sun.

And he comes to the same conclusion through it all. I'll just give you three

examples. It says, pleasure is heavil.

It says in 2, 1 through 3, I said to myself, come now, I will test you with

pleasure to find out what is good.

But that also proved to be meaningless.

Laughter, I said, is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?

What does it actually do?

I tried cheering myself with wine and embracing folly, my mind still guiding me with wisdom.

I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the

few days of their lives. And he goes on to list for a while in this chapter,

all the things he did from sex to success, all these things.

I did everything. And he ends like this.

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired.

I refused my heart, no pleasure.

My heart took delight in all my labors. And this was the reward of my toil.

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done, what I had toiled to achieve,

everything was meaningless.

It made no sense. It was gone. It was fleeting. It didn't do anything.

A chasing after the wind.

Nothing was gained under the sun by chasing pleasure, the pleasures of my flesh,

the things I desire to find meaning.

He goes on to say that work and leaving a legacy is hevel, is smoke.

Ecclesiastes 2, 17, so I hated life. Again, remember, the author is giving us

a critic's voice. This isn't God saying, I want you to hate life.

So I hated life because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me.

All of it is meaningless and chasing after the wind.

I hated all the things I had told for under the sun because I must leave them

to the one who comes after me.

You say, I want to leave a legacy, but legacies don't always work.

And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish.

Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil and to which I have

poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless.

As long as I can have the most successful career, as long as I can just do a

great, have a great job and build something to leave behind.

Then I will die with meaning. And here he says, but then you're dead.

The person who takes what you built, he might just throw it away. It's meaningless.

And third, he goes on to say, wealth is hevel.

Ecclesiastes 5, whoever loves money never has enough.

Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless.

As goods increase, as the things that we have, as they increase,

so do those who consume them.

And what benefit are they to the owners except to feast their eyes?

And I can just look at what I have.

The sleep of a laborer is sweet, whether they eat little or much.

But as for the rich, their abundance permits them no sleep.

In other words, wealth isn't going to find you. It's not going to buy you peace.

It's here today, gone tomorrow. As fast as you make it is as fast as it's gone.

And no matter how much, if you, if you try to have more, it's never enough.

Everything under the sun, success, laughter, even wisdom itself,

he goes on to say, feels like chasing the wind.

And throughout his poetic lecture or critical tirade, he unpacks three disturbing

realities about life under the sun.

This is why it's meaningless. Number one, the march of time or the fleeting nature of life.

Ecclesiastes 1.4, we already read it. Generations come and generations go,

but the earth remains forever.

It goes on to say, we're here, but then we're gone, but the earth stays the

same. Everything else stays the same. We're just here and then gone.

111, it says, no one remains or remembers the former generations.

Not even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.

To Mackey in the Bible Project, he says this, so on a cosmic scale, you and I are just a blip.

Stars are born and then they die and form planets which orbit new stars.

And those planets, they change over time and eventually they burn up.

And amidst this cosmic backdrop, all these things happening,

my entire existence is like a blink in time. He's saying it's meaningless.

It's just fleeting. Time is constantly marching on for us as humans under the sun.

Second observation he makes is that we're all going to die.

Did you know that ecclesiastes 319 it says surely the fate of human beings is

like that of the animals the same fate awaits them both maybe we're better but in the end it's the same,

as one dies so dies the other all have the same breath humans have no advantage

over animals everything is meaningless.

Verse chapter 9, he goes on to say, all share a common destiny,

the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad,

the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those do not,

saying those who adhere to and lean into God's covenant at the time,

and as it is with good, so with the sinful, as it is with those who take oaths

and those who are afraid to take them.

This is the evil, everything that happens under the sun, the same destiny overtakes all.

The hearts of people moreover are full of evil, and there's madness in their

hearts while they live, and afterward, they join the dead.

This is such a happy book. All of us, the wicked, the righteous,

the good, the bad, all leading to the same end, death, which levels all human pride.

And third, dark element that the teacher unpacks, the meaninglessness of life,

the smoke, the hevel, is the random nature of it, but you really can't control anything.

Ecclesiastes 9, 11 through 12, I have seen something else under the sun.

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come

to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned,

but time and chance happen to them all.

Moreover, no one knows when the hour will come as fish are caught in a cruel

net or birds are taken in a snare.

So people are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly on them.

Life is random. But what the Proverbs tells us, as long as you do these things

go well, the Proverbs give us wisdom that this is the rhythm of the heavens, the rhythm of God.

And if you do them, your life will be better. It should be good.

But the reality of this broken world that we live in is that life is random.

Kind of puts a monkey wrench in some of our sovereignty understanding of God,

which the scripture doesn't really give us.

You can give some proof text, some scriptures in the Psalms that are giving

imagery that God is bigger than all things.

But sometimes we think that everything happens because God is like a puppet master order.

I've heard people in reformed theology say, if you died of cancer and you're

five years old, God did it for a reason.

That's not actually what the scriptures tell us.

The scriptures tell us that we live in a broken world and that God is in the

New Testament come near to us so that even in a broken world,

we can have a piece of God's future because he promises a future will fix all these things.

And here he says, Jesus himself said, in the world, you will have trouble,

but I've overcome the world.

But here the teacher tells us, no matter what I do, I am not guaranteed to be free of evil times.

I've known people that I'm gonna stand up like the wisdom teaches me to be a

man of integrity in the workplace. And because I wasn't willing to be cutthroat,

I actually lost my job. Where's the wisdom in that?

Sometimes things happen. And if you try to control life, if we live from this

posture of, Lord, how can I even use wisdom to control everything?

Lord, how can I use the scriptures to control everything that happens to me?

And we live in this constant tension, in this constant place of,

well, God, did I do something wrong?

That's why these things happened. And the reality is, time and chance happens to all of us.

If you try to control life, you're just setting yourself up for a fall.

And as dark, though, as the critic seems, he does actually acknowledge,

I've seen all these things, even seeking after wisdom. In the end, I'm still going to die.

But he says, yet, I've discovered that the best way to live is through wisdom

and fear of the Lord. But he also.

As he's leading us through this dark maze of Hevel and the three realities,

realities of life under the sun, he also brings us to the reality that these

things actually have within them their own wisdom.

And in chapter three, we have the poem, a poem and a phrase that becomes like

the refrain throughout this book.

Hevel, meaningless, meaningless. Hevel is used 39 times as kind of like the

core idea, but the chorus in the middle of all these things is this one phrase

that we'll read right now, but it starts with a poem in Ecclesiastes 3, 1 through 14.

I read it at every funeral I've ever done. It says, there's a time for everything

and a season for every activity under the heavens, a time to be born and a time

to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them.

A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.

A time to search and a time to give up. A time to keep and a time to throw away.

A time to tear and a time to mend.

A time to be silent and a time to speak.

A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace.

What do workers gain for their toil? I've seen the burden that God has laid on the human race.

He's made everything beautiful or can be translated fitting,

proper in its time, but beautiful is a good way to say it.

In its time, he has also set eternity or permanence in the human heart.

Yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good

while they live, that each of them may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all of their time.

In other words, they may enjoy the fruit of their labor.

This is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever.

Nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.

God does it so that people will fear him.

Life and all his randomness through every season is still full of beauty and meaning.

In fact, the wisdom in this is the very fleeting and sometimes mysterious nature

of it actually allows for a different kind of beauty.

You know, each line in this poem contrasts something good and something bad.

It does not make the point that we're supposed to avoid or pursue any one of

them. This isn't like, do you want life or do you want death?

Do you want mending or do you want tearing?

It's saying this is simply the reality of life under the sun.

Wisdom doesn't fight time. It flows with it. There is a time for everything.

Life under the sun in this world that we live in as fleeting vapor,

as humans, there's a time for everything.

There will be a time to live, but there will be a time to die.

There are times for all seasons under the sun.

And this refrain that I have concluded that it is good to enjoy the fruit of

my labor to eat and drink, for this is a gift from God that he uses seven times,

is not saying, I've discovered just party while you can.

It's saying that time is marching on. Life is short.

Life can change in an instant. And the gift of God is this moment.

Because it's the only moment that you know you have.

And there is beauty that is there to be discovered and shared in this moment.

So live each season as if they were all a gift from God.

John Goldengay says in his commentary, the poem doesn't tell us to fix the seasons.

It tells us to live wisely inside them.

Because sometimes we're like, I'm in a season of terror. I got to fix it.

I got to mend it. No, he says, this is a season that you're in.

So live wisely in it until the next season comes because it will be followed by another season.

Every good season is followed by either another good season or a mediocre season

or a bad season. Every bad season is followed by another season.

This poem doesn't tell us to fix the seasons. It tells us to live wisely inside them.

We can't grasp life, so wisdom teaches us to enjoy it rather than control it.

When life won't make sense, enjoy the day you're in. That's your act of faith.

Even though life is hevel. Choose joy because everything is a gift.

Choose today to enjoy a conversation with a friend.

I've seen under the sun that it is good to enjoy what I have.

A conversation with a friend, a good meal, or the sun on your face,

or like Georgia, our beloved three-year-old crazy granddaughter who just wants it to snow.

We asked her in the middle of summer. Hey, we're going to go swimming. Can we go sledding?

No. Can we have a snowball fight? No.

But to her, in the moment, it's beautiful. And it is beautiful in the moment.

You can hate and fight against winter, but it has a beautiful purpose.

It's harder than the summer. But then the summer comes and you complain that it's hot.

Choose joy because this is a gift from God.

Even seasons of great heartache can be moments of profound meaning.

My wife has often said as she tells the story of the last moment that we all

as the family of her father got to share around his bed as he took his last

breath throughout the hours of the morning and early afternoon,

and to be there with him, to sing for him, to hold his hand,

to pray with him, and to watch him take his last breath, she said,

was the best, worst experience of my life.

Because even though we can fight against it, we don't want any death,

death is going to happen.

But even in those moments, when we decide to see God's hand in beauty,

in it can be moments of eternal, sacred meaning.

So then the teacher or the critic, he ends with a poem.

Ecclesiastes 12.1, remember your creator in the days of your youth,

before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say,

I find no pleasure in them.

It goes to unpack more things that are just going to happen.

Life's going to get hard. So acknowledge God now.

Even though I've discovered it's all meaningless, I also realize that the only

way to meaning is if you fear God.

So remember him now when you're young, because the

times are coming when it will be harder to find your way

to him and then he ends with six and eight this

particular poem remember him before the silver

cord is severed and the golden bowl is broken before

the pitcher is shattered at the spring and the wheel broken at the well and

the dust returns to the ground it came from and the spirit returns to god who

gave it meaningless meaningless says the teacher everything is meaningless the

final thought in his writings is that life is unpredictable It's hard to grab a hold of.

And it is meaningless without God, for sure.

And we do not know when the moment will end, this moment I'm living in.

We do not know when our lives will end, the greater moment of our lives.

And if we wait until a better time to find and acknowledge God,

who is the source of meaning in life, the only source, we may never get the

chance. This was always my favorite scripture as a youth pastor.

12.1, remember your creator in the days of your youth. It is easy to think that

I've got plenty of time to get serious.

Right now, I'm just finding my own meaning and living for myself, pleasure,

all things that aren't bad, but if they're just things that happen within your

life, but I promise you, if they are your source of meaning,

it will end and it will leave you with nothing to show for it.

And finally, we have the author's voice as I come to a close,

as he lets the teacher speak.

After the words of the teacher, he ends. The author now gets the final word.

And he begins to say some things. He compares the teacher to a shepherd,

to a goad that pokes, like a kind of a weapon.

He says he has many wise and truthful things to say. And they're like things

that are poking you. I hope these words poked you, he says.

I hope they prodded you. He's also like a shepherd.

And he says, don't go too far into trying to understand everything.

He's like, his words were good. but he actually says, the search of wisdom will

just lead you to looking for more things.

Let the wisdom lead you somewhere like a shepherd.

These words were supposed to be leading you to something, somewhere,

not just the ends to him or just the end. They're the ends to a mean.

He says, what are his words? What are all these things that I hope have caused

you to think, that I hope have poked you and prodded you, and I hope they've

directed you to this last thought?

And this is what he says at the end of his book, the author.

He concludes the matter. Now all has been heard.

Here is the conclusion of the matter. We should take this seriously because

he's the one who wants you to get what he wants you to get out of this book.

And this is what he tells you to get.

Fear God and keep his commandments.

For this is the duty of all mankind.

For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing,

whether it is good or evil.

The author does not tie up this weird story with a neat answer.

He ends where Proverbs began the fear of the Lord and this word does not mean

terror fear of the fear of the Lord.

Means reverence. It means awe. It means wonder.

To fear God is to take him seriously, to remember we are creatures,

not the creator, to know our place in the universe, to wake up to the wonder.

By saying in the middle of a hard season, thank you, God, for your presence instead of why me?

By choosing to worship in seasons of confusion, by living as though each day

even the hard ones belong to God.

The hope of Ecclesiastes is in the very last line, for God will bring every

deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.

Now, we hear this and we say, oh, so the end is judgment.

But we have a weird relationship with this word. It's not what the word actually

means. The Hebrew word, the Greek word, it's not as much about the judgment the way we use it.

Oh, finally, God's going to judge us. No, it means justice.

God's justice. It means that everything, every fleeting, broken moment will

be gathered into his justice.

He will have the last word.

He will make everything right.

Even though to you it feels like smoke, and at times it is unfair,

at times it's confusing, it's always fleeting,

yet God has promised that he will bring every one of those hevel moments into his justice.

The book talks a lot about in Ecclesiastes, why do bad people get good things?

Why is justice not seen? And here the author says, God's justice will be revealed.

So therefore, you can find joy in your moment today, knowing that God is infinitely

in control and all things will be summed up in Christ. And that leads us to Jesus as we close.

Jesus steps into life under the sun. Jesus was wisdom embodied.

He said the word became flesh. The logos became flesh, which is a synonymous

word with wisdom. It means a creative power of something.

The creative, it's kind of more like a poet's words than just, hello.

Jesus was wisdom personified.

Jesus lived the Ecclesiastes life. He steps into life under the sun and he shows

us what God-centered joy looks like, what meaning in a meaningless world looks like.

He laughed, he wept, he feasted, he suffered, fully human, but fully wise,

fully God, but fully human.

And at the cross, he enters into the deepest hevel, the deepest smoke,

the death itself, and turned it into resurrection.

In Jesus, we meet the God who is with us in the vapor and beyond it.

The cross shows us that God's presence is in the mist, and the resurrection

shows us that mist doesn't last forever.

Even the unpredictable, unfair, even death itself, meaningless,

meaningless, in Jesus, its sting is swallowed up.

That's why Paul in 1 Corinthians, when he unpacks this reality of the death,

the resurrection, that all things summed up in Christ's resurrection,

that all things were made new,

and with, therefore, all that you do now in Christ, nothing you do is in vain.

Because even though for us, it feels like its vapor is fleeting in Christ's

resurrection and the reality of that truth, even the mist becomes full of meaning.

Because of Jesus, even fleeting, confusing moments carry eternal weight.

Connect to the concept of wisdom that we began developing in the last two weeks,

living this kind of wisdom becomes God's instrument of creation,

painting the world a picture of life beyond the mist.

As everybody is living in this crazy fleeting and seasons and not knowing how

to navigate, and they see those whose hope and confidence is in Christ living

the same crazy, unpredictable life and yet see something beautiful.

It becomes the shining of light of the gospel for all to see.

So how do we practice Ecclesiastes' wisdom?

Can you do this this week? Well, number one, name your Hevel.

Take a moment this week. Name your Hevel. What in your life keeps feeling fleeting,

uncertain, or out of your hands? Probably all of it.

But in this moment, there's something particular for all of us that feels out

of control, that feels fleeting.

Perhaps it is raising your kids and it's coming to an end a certain season.

It's like, it was fleeting. I thought it would last forever.

I remember when we had to put our dog down, Frodo, that we'd had for 14 years.

And through most of my kids' lives, particularly Aiden, he didn't remember a world without Frodo.

And at this point, Aiden was getting older. Our other kids were already older and grown.

And I remember when we put him down that night, just weeping.

I mean, I didn't really like the dog, but weeping because it symbolized the

end of a season. And I remember thinking, I just didn't know it would go so fast.

Maybe that's the season that you're in. Maybe like us, you're in a season where

somebody else's decision, some random thing happened, whatever it may be,

that now your life is turned upside down.

And we have a mother and her two children living with us because everything's turned upside down.

Even here now, I can name it and I can write it down and I can pray,

Lord, help me see beauty here. Help me see you in it.

Because this is a moment I'm in. I can live just desperately you're waiting

for it. You're over. And there's a part of me that is.

And at the same time, I can say, but this moment is only for now.

Even the hard parts of it have something beautiful to show me. Help me see you in it.

Choose presence, being present over pressure.

Instead of trying to fix every season, be faithful in the season that you're in.

Simple things you could do. Turn off notifications during family dinner.

Let the moment that you're in matter.

Find joy in simple gifts.

Eat slowly. Take a walk.

Listen without waiting to answer.

Life as grace rather than grasping it as achievement or something to control.

Practice reverence, living in awe. This could be a simple practice you can add to your life.

I've only in recent years really added it as an everyday practice,

beginning each morning with reflecting on the reality that God is here and this day belongs to him.

This too belongs to you, and you are in it with me.

End the day whispering, you are God, and that is enough. Go ahead and stand to your feet.

Where do you feel the mist, the hevel, things that are uncertain,

passing beyond your control?

What beauty might God be inviting you to see there?

How might Jesus be revealed in it?

Not just revealed to you, but through you in this particular season that you're in.

Can we just take a moment and just...