A Testimony to Meaninglessness | Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes 1:1-14


If you have got your Bible this morning I am going to ask you to turn to one of the strangest books in the whole Bible. It is the book of Ecclesiastes. You find Psalms, which is the longest book and you turn right; you will go through Proverbs; and second to the right you will meet the book of Ecclesiastes. If you have gone to Isaiah, you have gone too far. Come back to Song of Solomon and there you will find Ecclesiastes.

And I call it the strangest book in the Bible for a number of reasons, not least because it says a number of things that you would not expect to find in the Bible. I am going to read one or two of them to you. Listen to this:

“Man’s fate is like that of the animals. All have the same breath and man has no advantage over the animal.” (Ecclesiastes 3:19)

Does that sound like the Bible?

Here’s another one:

“Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?” (Ecclesiastes 3:21)

Here’s another one:

“I commend the enjoyment of life because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be merry.” (Ecclesiastes 8:15)

Here’s a very strange one:

“Do not be overrighteous, neither be overwise - why destroy yourself? Show restraint.” (Ecclesiastes 7:16)


Does that sound like the Bible to you?

Here’s another one:

“All share a common destiny – the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean. As it is with the good man, so it is with the sinner.” (Ecclesiastes 9:2)

These are rather unexpected statements to find in the Bible, aren’t they?

And this book has a lot of cynicism in it as well. Let me read you some rather cynical observations:

“I declare that the dead who had already died are happier than the living who are still alive. It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting. Death is the destiny of every man.” (Ecclesiastes 4:2, Ecclesiastes 7:2)

Here’s another one:

“Sorrow is better than laughter because the sad face is good for the heart.” (Ecclesiastes 7:3)

That is a twisted perspective, isn’t it?

“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning. The heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.” (Ecclesiastes 7:4)

So, which would you rather be?

Now there may be some subtle profundity in some of those statements, but by and large, they are fairly cynical. What in the world is this all about?

Let me read you from Chapter 1. Ecclesiastes Chapter 1:1; it says,

“The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem: ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’”

Wow, that’s a good verse, isn’t it? Make a great memory verse, huh?

“ ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.

“ ‘What does man gain from all his labour at which he toils 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 to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.’

“ ‘All the 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, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing…

“ ‘What has been will be done again will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’”

Ecclesiastes 1:12:

“I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men!

“I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

That’s as far as I am going to read, and you are probably glad about that. You can’t get more empty, more depressed than this. Ecclesiastes is a depressing book because it is written by a depressed man.

He identifies himself in Ecclesiastes 1:1:

“The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem.”

Now David had a number of sons. In fact, he had 19 altogether. But only one of them ever became king in Jerusalem and that of course was Solomon. Now his name is never mentioned here and there are those who dispute that Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes. It seems to fly right in the face of the wisdom of the book of Proverbs, which was compiled or written by Solomon.

And the son of David could mean grandson and great grandson and anybody in the whole line of David. Even Jesus was called Son of David. So, there are lots of reasons, a number of reasons, why people question whether Solomon wrote this.

But I am going to assume he did, not least because there is a lot of autobiographical information in this book that fits exactly the life and times and experience of Solomon.

And when Solomon wrote this book he is depressed. There are three words or phrases that are the key to understanding this book. The first is in Ecclesiastes 1:2:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

The word meaningless is repeated 35 times in this book. There are 12 chapters – that’s about 3 times every chapter. “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless!” That’s a key word to this book.

And the reason why everything is meaningless is found in the question in Ecclesiastes 1:3,

“What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun?”

Now that phrase “under the sun” occurs 32 times in this book if you include the three times it says, “under heaven”.

In other words, he is looking at life as it appears at the end of your nose – what you can see, what you can touch, what you can smell, what you can hear, what you can feel and handle, what you can taste - life purely under the sun – what you can physically and materially see and experience.

And the conclusion is – the third phrase – that it is like “chasing after the wind.” That is a phrase that occurs 9 times. In other words, trying to find meaning by looking at life under the sun in a purely physical, material way is like trying to get hold of the wind, grasp it in your hand, put it in a bottle, take it home and you discover you have lost the wind in the process.

And these three elements all come together in Ecclesiastes 1:14:

“I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

And this is the default position of life if we are living it honestly, purely under the sun with a humanistic perspective that is purely taken up with material and physical and tangible things and where there is nothing that is spiritual – only that which is material.

And he comes to these depressing conclusions by two means.

By personal experience - and he talks about his own experience that left him empty, all the cul-de-sacs that he ran up thinking “this is going to be it”. And when he got to the end, he hit a brick wall. So, he tried another one. He tried another one. And we are going to look at some of these over the next couple of weeks.

By personal experience, and also, he arrives at this conclusion by personal observation, looking around him, looking at life lived under the sun. It’s meaningless. And finding meaning is like trying to catch on to the wind and grab it and take it home and you can’t do it.

And I am going to look at this with you over a few weeks and I want to prepare the ground a little bit this morning. And I want to understand Ecclesiastes against Solomon’s own life and Solomon’s own experience, which he alludes to on a number of occasions.

Solomon is the most famous and successful king in all of Israel’s history. Today they tell you that Solomon and Alexander the Great are the two men still looked to in the Middle East, in Arabia, amongst the Jewish people, as the great men of their history.

Solomon was known as being very wise – that’s the most known thing about Solomon probably - but also as being very rich and being very famous and being very successful and also of being very spiritual.

Let me just explain those things to you. He was so wise that 1 Kings 4:34 tells us that,

“Men of all nations came to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, sent by all the kings of the world, who had heard of his wisdom.”

So, kings in distant territories, having heard of the wisdom of Solomon, sent their best men to sit at his feet and solve their issues for them. They came from all over the known world. Such was his wisdom.

He was also very rich – so rich that 1 Kings 10:14 says,

“The weight of the gold that Solomon received yearly was 666 talents, not including the revenues from merchants and traders and from all the Arabian kings and the governors of the land.”

So, his pay pack – not the bonuses – was 666 talents of gold. That works out to 23 metric tonnes of gold. That in turn works out (if my math is right) at 811,292 ounces of gold. And Friday’s closing value of gold, if we take gold to be the consistent means of evaluating material wealth – on Friday gold closed at 1272 Canadian dollars per ounce. That works out at (in today’s rates) $975,173,000 plus a little bit of change every year. That was his salary – 975 million dollars – close to a billion dollars a year. That’s how rich he was.

He was so famous that it says in 1 Kings 10:1 that,

“When the queen of Sheba heard about the fame of Solomon and his relation to the name of the LORD, she came” (all the way from Ethiopia, which is where Sheba was) “to test him with hard questions.”

And later it says her conclusion was:

“She said to the king, ‘The report I heard in my own country about your achievements and your wisdom is true. But I did not believe these things until I came and saw with my own eyes. Indeed, not even half was told me; in wisdom and wealth you have far exceeded the report I heard.”

“I heard all about you, Solomon. I thought ‘this is impressive; I can’t believe all of this’ so I came and I discovered that not only was it all true – I’d only ever heard half of it.”

Haile Selassie, who was the last emperor of Ethiopia, and his dynasty traces back to the throne in Ethiopia, back to the 13th Century, and he was deposed in a coup in 1974. But Haile Selassie traced his ancestry back to a liaison between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, which is why there are many Ethiopian Jews to this day because they trace their lineage back to Solomon and Queen of Sheba.

He was so successful that 1 Kings 4:20 says that in the days of Solomon,

“The people of Judah and Israel were as numerous as the sand on the seashore; they ate, they drank and they were happy.”

You know when Solomon was king the boundaries of Israel were larger than they were ever before or have ever been since. He reigned, it tells us in 2 Chronicles 9, over all the kings from the river Euphrates to the land of the Philistines, as far as the border of Egypt. The Euphrates today runs through Syria, down to Iraq, into the Persian Gulf – all that territory down to Egypt was under Solomon’s reign.

And he never saw war. David his father was often at war. His son Rehoboam and successors were at war. But during the forty years of Solomon’s reign, he never saw war. It was a politically stable time.

Now the superpowers of Egypt in the south and Syria in the north and the east were weak at that time, but despite that (and therefore they weren’t the threat they had been at other times); nevertheless it was the wise leadership of Solomon that kept the nation so at peace that it says of the people: “they were numerous, they ate, they drank and they were happy.” He’s a great king.

And he was so spiritual that it says of the queen of Sheba in 1 Kings 10:1 that,

“When the queen of Sheba heard about the fame of Solomon and his relation to the name of the LORD, she came to test him with hard questions.”

In other words, what she heard about Solomon was not just his fame and his wisdom, but this was a man who knew God – that was his reputation.

As a young man God asked Solomon, when he came to the throne, “Solomon, what would you like to ask me for as you take the throne? Ask me and I will give it to you.”

And Solomon said, “I am not going to ask You for wealth, I am not going to ask You for victory over enemies if I have any, I am not going to ask You for length of life; I am going to ask You for wisdom.”

And God said, “Because you have asked for wisdom, you will get all the others thrown in. You will have victory over any enemies, you will be wealthy; you will have length of life.”

And Solomon’s wisdom was a spiritual gift. He wrote 3,000 proverbs. Only a few of those are in the book of Proverbs. And the wisdom of God was with him for much of his life.

Solomon wrote three books – the book of Proverbs, the book of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. He wrote those three books at different stages in his life.

He wrote the Song of Solomon as a young man. He had discovered the joys of love. He had just married. He had his bride. He was madly in love with her. He talks about his love and the meaning of it and the place that she had in his life. And Song of Solomon is the most beautiful love poem about the joys of love. He wrote that as a young man.

He wrote Proverbs as a middle-aged man. And the reason I suggest that is because much of Proverbs is addressed to “my son” – 24 times. “My son”, do this. “My son,” avoid that. “My son”…and this is a father talking to his son.

And his son is about to step into adulthood and his father, probably in his forties, is talking to his son about all the important things in life.

Above all, he told him, get wisdom. He talked to him about wealth and the place that that can have and the dangers of that. He talked to his son about sex. He talked to his son about how do you treat the poor. Many things. This is a father, middle-aged, talking to his son.

But the book of Ecclesiastes is written by Solomon as an older man. And what has happened is this: that as an old man he has known God, but he has turned away from God and developed an outlook on life that is Godless and is describing the disappointments of old age when you have left God out.

We know that because at the end of the book he says, “Remember your Creator in the days that you are young.” And then he talks about why you need to remember your Creator when you are young (we will talk about this another day) because, as you get old, he talks about all the things that have happened. Now he has gotten old.

You see what happened was this: 1 Kings 11:9 says that,

“his heart had turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice. Although he had forbidden Solomon to follow other gods, Solomon did not keep the LORD’S command.”

You know some people do not finish well. Old age is a dangerous time. We think our best years are behind us. We begin to take off some of the disciplines and the restraints that have been necessary to wholesome living. And Solomon’s downfall was the old traps of sex and greed. And then these become unrestrained in your life and your outlook, they tear apart the inside of a person.

Do you know how many wives Solomon had? 700. Can you believe that? I mean one is a full-time task.

You know the king of Swaziland has 14 wives so far. He gets a new one every year. They have all the young girls, teenage girls, in Swaziland come and do a big dance and he picks out one.

Well, he’s got 14; he is 42 years of age. If he lives until he is 82, that’s another 40; he’ll get 54. That’s nothing.

Do you know how many girlfriends he had? Another 300.

You know a part of his foreign policy was to marry the daughters of kings from the nations round about. His first wife was the daughter of the king of Egypt. That was a good tactical move. And he discovered that if he married into the families of the kings and the national leaders round about, that when there is any point of dispute, he is dealing with his father-in-law or with his mother-in-law or with his brother-in-law, or later on, with his nephew or niece-in-law. And it kind of makes it a little easier to deal with them.

“Hey, you want to come and take some of my land back? I have got your daughter here.” It was a sort of foreign policy tactic.

But not only the wives; he had all these girlfriends, all these concubines they are called, women he didn’t marry, but which were available to him. Solomon was the rock star of his day. He could pick them out, click his fingers and they would come.

1 Kings 11:3 says this:

“He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old,” (as he grew old) “his wives turned his heart after other gods.”

Of course, they did. That’s why it says in 1 Kings 11:1,

“Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter – he married Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the LORD had told the Israelites, ‘You must not intermarry with them, because if you do, they will turn your hearts after other gods.’”

They had plenty of warning. Of course, they turned his heart after other gods.

As Paul wrote later,

“Do not be misled. Bad company corrupts good character.”

And so, when the bad company he has kept for tactical reasons begins to corrupt his own good character, he begins to turn aside after the other gods.

And years later as an old man he takes time to sit down and write about the meaning of life from this perspective: it is life purely under the sun because none of these gods are real gods. And life at the end of his nose becomes meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless.

We might thing when we first read this book - it is written by a young man who is searching for meaning and purpose in life and so he takes the liberties of youth, and he goes over the boundaries and he tries this and he tries that and he tries the other. And after awhile he says, “Oh boy, man, there is nothing there.”

Well young people often do that.

But this is the tragedy of an older man who has strayed from God. Even great men don’t always finish well. And we can best understand the depression of Ecclesiastes against the background of Solomon’s own life. You know he uses the pronoun, “I, me, my” 115 times in this book.

“I denied myself nothing my eyes desired.”

“I refused my heart no pleasure.”

“My heart took delight in my work.” Etc.

He is writing out of experience, and he has turned from being wise to becoming a fool. And the result is his horizons have shrunk to no more than the end of his nose living under the sun, as much, as far as the eye can see.

He can no longer hold the joy, the purpose, the meaning, the fleeting moments of happiness, the fleeting enjoyments that may have been part of his life. They are like grasping hold of the wind and you can’t get hold of it and take it home with you. Yes, you can blow in it for a little while, but it doesn’t last. And life becomes meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.

And you find yourself – and he says this: you find yourself living like an animal and dying like a dog, because he writes,

“Man’s fate is like that of the animals” (in Ecclesiastes 3:19).

“All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal.”

What is the advantage of being human? He says. You might as well be a cockroach.

William Lane Craig, who is a philosopher and theologian, asks this question:

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies (in other words, dies and bang, that’s it), then what ultimate meaning can be given to his or her life? Does it really matter whether they ever existed at all? It might be said that their life was important because they influenced others or affected the course of history, but this only shows a relative significance to his or her life, not an ultimate significance. His or her life may be important relative to certain other events but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? Ultimately it makes no difference.”

I mean a hundred years from today, who in the world am I? What do I matter? I may have some great grandkids around. They probably don’t know I’m their great grandfather – not interested. And if they were, because they like to trace the family tree, a thousand years from today, a million years from today – it’s meaningless, lived under the sun.

Now Solomon had known God and had enjoyed God, but now he is living like an atheist.

And there are two kinds of atheists. One kind of atheist believes there is no God – he is a theoretical atheist. And there are arguments that people present for that, and that’s fine.

But the other kind of atheist lives as if there is no God. He is a practical atheist.

Now Solomon is not a theoretical atheist; he knows too much of God to know that God is, but has become a practical atheist; he is living as though there is no God.

And he has discovered that the lights of his world have switched off. It has become dark and meaningless. It is not always intellectual disillusionment with God that is our problem. It is more often our moral controversy with God that is our problem. This is what causes us to turn away from God. That is, we have stepped out of his will, we have disobeyed his Word, we have lost fellowship with Him. This is Solomon’s case.

And suddenly He is absent, suddenly He is distant, He is remote, He is unreal, so we live as though He does not exist. And little by little, as I give free reign to whatever it is I want to do, my life becomes emptier and emptier, darker and darker, more meaningless and meaningless.

You see the truth is we cannot make sense of life without God. And there is a bugging issue that never leaves us, that never left Solomon. And it’s in Ecclesiastes 3:11 where he says this:

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.”

Let me read the Amplified Bible’s version of this. It says,

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also planted eternity into men’s hearts and minds, a divinely implanted sense of purpose, working through the ages, which nothing under the sun but God alone can satisfy.”

Why is everything meaningless, meaningless, meaningless? says Solomon. Because He has put eternity into the hearts of man.

Now let me define that. Eternity is not just longevity. It includes that but it is much more than that. You see eternal and immortality are not the same thing. The word everlasting or the word immortal is one-dimensional. It’s about time, it’s about time going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on…bye…and it goes on.

I used to lie in bed as a kid and think about what will it be like when there is always going to be a tomorrow?

That isn’t what he is talking about here because you see, for someone like Solomon, that is not an attractive proposition. If life is bad now, who wants it to go on and on and on and on and on?

You meet a person trying to commit suicide and you say, “Hey, listen, you can have everlasting life.” That’s the last thing they want. They will pull the trigger even quicker. If life is bad, who wants an everlasting life?

Eternal is not simply everlasting, a one-dimensional, on-going time. Eternal is multi-dimensional. It includes time with no beginning, no end. It includes space. It includes meaning. It includes everything taken to its ultimate end, if it has one.

And I went through my Bible this week to see what the Bible says is eternal. It is very interesting. It speaks of the eternal God, of the eternal Spirit, of His eternal Word – that’s why never try to add to it; it has exhausted everything - His eternal Word, His eternal ways, His eternal purpose, His eternal kingdom, His eternal nature, His eternal glory. And of course, it talks about eternal life, which is in His Son.

But that eternity is far more than just living forever because life doesn’t get more meaningful just because you live it longer.

William Craig writes about a science fiction story in which an astronaut was marooned on a barren chunk of rock and lost in outer space. And he had with him two vials. One contained poison; the other contained a potion that would make him live forever.

And realizing his predicament, marooned on this barren chunk of rock somewhere in outer space, he gulped down the poison, only to his horror to discover he had swallowed the wrong vial and he had drunk the potion for immortality, which meant he was to be cursed to exist forever with a meaningless, unending life on a barren rock.

If God does not exist, our lives are just like that, utterly without meaning forever and ever. Who wants an everlasting life? That’s why somebody might say to you, as I have had people say to me, “I don’t actually want to live forever.”

That’s not the issue.

What it means to be eternal is to know God. Jesus defined eternal life. And if Jesus defined it, don’t revise His definition; it’s the final word.

John 17:3:

“This is life eternal: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

That eternity in the hearts of people is designed that we might know God and know Christ.

Now it does have an everlasting component to it, but it is meaningful because it is in the context of knowing God.

That’s why those who say that salvation is primarily about going to heaven have not understood the gospel. It was never in the ministry of Jesus primarily about going to heaven, never in the preaching of the book of the Acts, never in the epistles of the New Testament. The gospel is primarily about knowing God and being reconciled to God.

That’s why Jesus said,

“I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life. No one comes to the Father…” (John 14:6)

(I heard somebody just recently preaching on that verse saying, “No one comes to heaven” – that isn’t what it says.)

“No one comes to the Father but by me.”

Now, you will go to heaven, so relax. But what gives life meaning is that we are designed to be in relationship with God. That’s when God created the world and created man, He said everything was good, good, good, very good, until He created man. “It’s not good for man to be alone.” We were made for fellowship, made for relationships and ultimately made to know God and be known by God.

That’s why Paul wrote that Christ died for us in 1 Thessalonians 5:10:

“Christ died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him.”

When he says “awake or asleep” he means whether you are alive or dead. That same letter he talks about those who are asleep in the Lord, as death.

So, he says, Christ died for us, whether awake or asleep; whether we are alive or dead is irrelevant; it’s that we might live together with Him.

Now some people misread that – Christ died for us so that when we are asleep we can go to live together with Him. That’s not the gospel. It’s that here and now we might know Him, that that eternity in our hearts might reach out to and be reciprocated by God Himself who alone fills that place.

Eternal life is not essentially about a place; it’s about a person. This is eternal life: “that they know You.”

And we do have the wonderful prospect of going to heaven but it’s a by-product of the gospel.

And what Solomon cannot escape no matter what I’m trying to plug all the gaps with, there is this eternity; there is something in my heart that is never satisfied.

I was talking to Simon Whitaker on Thursday about this message I was going to give this morning and he reminded me of something C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, “Mere Christianity”, and I quote it to you. He says,

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger – well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim – well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire – well, there is such a thing as sex.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove the universe is a fraud” (which is basically what Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes). “Probably what it means is that earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it but only to arouse this awareness to suggest the real thing.”

Every appetite in the human experience is designed to be met, and this one can only be met with God.

As Augustine famously wrote in the 5th Century,

“You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.”

We have an appetite that cannot be satisfied outside of God. And God has not left us without witness to this fact. In fact in the New Testament, it says that men are without excuse because of the witness God has left of Himself.

And there is a witness if you start from the inside deep in the heart of a man and a woman is this sense of eternity in their hearts. There has to be more to life than this. There is something, someone, somewhere that I need to connect with to find meaning and purpose in my life.

Move out from that, there is a witness of a moral conscience that God has given even to those who don’t know the law, the book of Romans tells us.

Outside of that there is the wonder of creation. As Psalm 19:1-3 says,

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.”

Don’t ever say that God is hiding. He has revealed himself from the deepest part of your own heart by putting eternity, this sense something bigger, that life under the sun, a humanistic life, a materialistic life, can never satisfy.

You know the book of Ecclesiastes, as we look at it over several weeks, you may discover to be the most biographical book of our age. It was written 3000 years ago; it could have been written this year without any need to alter anything it says.

We will see – he says, “I looked for meaning in pleasure, I looked for meaning in wine, I looked for meaning in creativity, I looked for meaning in possessions, I looked for meaning in wealth, I looked for meaning in sex, I looked for meaning in my reputation, I looked for meaning in sensual hedonism – just enjoy whatever is going – and every one of those pathways run into a brick wall.” And the one thing it did not satisfy – oh yes, there’s fun in all those things.

The Bible doesn’t say these things are not fun – it just talks about the pleasures of sin for a season. They are seasonal pleasures. Sure, at the time they may seem fun – you might be in the middle of some pleasure right now. You have not yet hit the wall so it’s fun for a season.

But the end of every one of these, says Solomon, this is the bugging thing: God made everything beautiful; He put eternity into my heart.

And the good thing about this book is that as he explores all these avenues, as he writes all these despairing comments about a humanistic view of life, he comes back and back until by the end of the book he has come back to God. “Remember your Creator.”

This is why it is in the Scriptures. It is an inspired part of the Word of God because it is a true perspective of a man who has turned from God. But now he is brought back.

“Remember your Creator in the days of your youth.” (Ecclesiastes 12:1)

And at the end he says, this is the whole duty of man:

“Fear God and keep his commandments.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13)

I don’t know where you are this morning, but I do know it may well be that there are some of us here and looking into this ancient book you are looking into a mirror where you say, “This is me.”

Take courage and humility to acknowledge it but Ecclesiastes wonderfully gives us too the answer: “Remember your Creator. Get back to God. Get back to God.”

On the basis of this book, I can only believe that Solomon did that before it was too late.

Some of us here have been pursuing all kinds of things - some of them secretly – nobody else knows about them except you. But you are pursuing and trying to find some meaning and pleasure and lasting significance and you know the emptiness of going to bed at night and saying, “That wasn’t it.” But you go back because there is nothing else that you have yet discovered.

You need to know God in His fullness, Christ in His fullness. We will explore the roads that end up leading you into the ditch and the road that ends up leading you into life, that life that satisfies the deepest part in a person’s heart.

And if you don’t know that this morning and you know you need to, there will be several of us here at the front after the service and we would love to talk to you. Some of you are watching on television and you may have turned on just by chance, but you know this has been a description of your life and your experience of life - it’s meaningless, meaningless.

But there is an eternity in your heart that can be filled only by God. And as you open your heart to Him, say, “Lord, I confess to You, I am separated from You, I am distant from You, I am a sinner before You. Forgive me; come to live within my life and fill me with Yourself.”

This is life eternal: that you may know God, you might know Jesus Christ. And this is the invitation of the gospel.

Let’s pray together. Father, we thank You this morning that we are not just living in a fantasy land and we’re not creating an artificial hope but that hundreds of people in this building and countless people through the centuries have found that they are complete only in Christ. As Your Word says, we are complete in Christ.

And I pray that by Your Holy Spirit you will draw some of us who have strayed, some of us who have found we have begun the compromises that open much bigger doors than we ever anticipated. Lord, forgive us and bring us back. Those of us who have never known You, bring us, we pray, to know You as Saviour and the very center of our lives.

We pray it in Jesus’ Name, Amen.