The Pleasure Pursuit | Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes 2:1-11; Ecclesiastes 2:17


If you have got a Bible with you, I am going to read from Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiastes 2. (There are a few Bibles there if you don’t have one with you.) Find Psalms and move along through Proverbs, you will come to Ecclesiastes.

I am going to read from Ecclesiastes 2 in just a moment, but let me just remind you of something I pointed out last time when we began to look at this rather unusual book in the Old Testament. And I pointed out that Solomon is the author of three books. He wrote the Song of Songs as a young man, discovering the joys of love and romance. It is one of the most beautiful love poems in literature.

And then he wrote the book of Proverbs as a middle-aged man when he is addressing his son who, presumably is at a point of leaving home. Twenty-four times: “my son, my son, my son” and instructs him in many areas of life and wisdom and so on.

And then the book of Ecclesiastes he wrote as an old man looking back over life. But as an old man, it tells us in the record of 1 Kings that his heart had turned away from the Lord. And three words or phrases reappear in this book.

The first is the word “meaningless” which occurs 35 times. As he opens the book,

“Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2)

And the reason why it’s meaningless is found in Ecclesiastes 1:3.

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

And that phrase, “under the sun” occurs 32 times in this book.

Life under the sun is life as it appears at the end of your nose, what you can see, what you can touch, what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste.

And the conclusion is that it’s like chasing after the wind – that’s a phrase that occurs 9 times in this book. And by chasing after the wind, it’s like trying to catch hold of the wind in your hand, put it in a bottle and take it home. And you can’t do it; you have lost it on the way, of course.

And this is the default position of those who live with honesty about what life is like lived under the sun at the end of your nose and it becomes meaningless, is what he says, meaningless, utterly meaningless. It is just a physical, material world that leaves him depressed and empty.

But of course, nobody wants to stay depressed - nobody wants to stay empty. And so, like a vacuum which nature abhors, the human heart sucks into it whatever it may find that seems to offer the kind of satisfaction that deep down inside we know we need.

And so, in Ecclesiastes 2 I am going to read to you what Solomon says about his desire to find something to fill that need in his life. And he says in Ecclesiastes 2:1,

“I thought in my heart, ‘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 foolish. And what does pleasure accomplish?’

“I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly – my mind still guiding me with wisdom. I wanted to see what was worthwhile for men to do under heaven during the few days of their lives.

“I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them.

“I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.

“I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me.

“I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired men and women singers, and a harem as well – the delights of the heart of man. I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me.”

(I don’t think so, but that’s what he thinks.)

“I denied myself nothing my heart desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor.

“Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”

Now down in Ecclesiastes 2:17:

“So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

Sorry to depress you. Solomon’s heart, we’re told in 1 Kings 11, had turned away from God. What turned his heart away from God was women. Don’t blame the women, but that’s what turned his heart away from God.

And when your heart has turned away from God it is not long before your mind is turned away from God. And when you mind is turned away from God, it is not long before your life is turned away from God. And when your life is turned away from God, you try to pursue meaning and purpose and significance in whatever way you hope to find it.

And here in Ecclesiastes 2 he tells us where he searched and how he searched. And I will take just a few moments just to go through those verses I read in order to lay the foundation of the positive truth that comes out of this. And basically, he says, “I searched in pleasure, in power and in prosperity.”

Let me point that out to you. He says in Ecclesiastes 2:1:

“Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.”

And then he gives four areas of pleasure: wit, wine, women and wisdom.

This is what he says: I will search first what I have called wit. He calls it laughter here, but I have used the word wit to sum up some of these things.

“Laughter,” I said, (in Ecclesiastes 2:2) “is foolish. And what does pleasure accomplish?”

Now we haven’t time to do this, but four times he talks about laughter in Ecclesiastes. It is interesting to look at that and see what he says about that. But no doubt he had those who were designed to provide comedy and amusement. He probably had his court jester, as many others have done in that kind of position.

Not only that, but he says in Ecclesiastes 2:8 in the second part of Verse 8,

“I acquired men and women singers.”

That is, “I had live music around me.”

Solomon was himself a songwriter. He was an extremely skilled man. And it tells us in 1 Kings 4:32 that his songs numbered 1005. That’s an incredible repertoire of songs that he wrote, alongside writing 3000 proverbs, of which a couple of hundred make their way into the book of Proverbs.

But none of his songs survive, though his father was a great songwriter and a lot of his survived in the book of Psalms. But he had these live men and female singers who probably sang his own compositions. And in this pursuit of pleasure with all this wit and amusement around him, it may have seemed to have worked at first because in 1 Kings 4:20 he says of other people, “they ate, they drank and they were happy.”

He pursued it in wine, the pleasure of wine. Ecclesiastes 2:3:

“I cheered myself with wine – at least I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly.”

The record tells us (this is in 2 Chronicles 2:10) that he once gave away, it says, 20,000 baths of wine. Now that’s not 20,000 - bathtub equivalent, but it is a lot of wine. It’s actually 115,000 gallons. And he gave that 115,000 gallons of wine to woodcutters who had come down from Lebanon to help him on some of his building projects. (I hope he didn’t give it to them and then they’d go and chop wood. They would have chopped a lot of other things at the same time probably, with 115,000 gallons of wine in them.)

But he said, “I tried cheering myself with wine.”

And then he talks about the pleasure of women in Ecclesiastes 2:8 and a harem as well – the delights of the heart of man. “I had a mass of women available to me.” He married 700 women and he had 300 girlfriends along with that – 300 concubines.

A lot of his marriages of course were diplomatic arrangements with the daughters of kings and princes and governors of surrounding nations. But then he had these girls he just fancied – 300 of them.

And he describes his harem as “the delight of the heart of man.” But he says pleasure also proved to be meaningless.

So, he searched in the area of power. Ecclesiastes 2:4:

“I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself.”

He took on building projects. He built the temple in Jerusalem. It took seven years to build. It was a fantastic work of craftsmanship. He brought in the best cedars from Lebanon. They took them down to the Mediterranean, floated them down, and picked them up. If you have ever been to Jerusalem, it’s up on a high area and they had men take these cedars up to Jerusalem to build it - some of the best materials, some of the best workmen.

It survived for nearly 400 years, was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar when the Babylonian armies overran Jerusalem in 586 B.C. and was utterly destroyed. Although within just the last four years some relics from Solomon’s temple have been found. Some relics from his temple have been found.

Now there are foundations you go down to under the temple, which go back to Herod’s day, but it predated that and most of that is gone.

But having built a temple for seven years, he decided he liked these building projects and he kept on the slaves and the work force that he had established and he built a palace for himself. And that took 14 years. It was twice the size of the temple, took twice as long to build and was twice as costly. (This now is for himself.)

He had slaves. Ecclesiastes 2:7:

“I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house.”

One figure in 1 Kings 5 - and of course the record in 1 Kings is the background to a lot of this that he is talking about here. One record there says he had 183,300 slaves conscripted labor. 80,000 of those were stonecutters, 70,000 were carriers, but he had many more as well.

“So I pursued power, then I pursued prosperity. Ecclesiastes 2:8:

“I amassed silver and gold for myself.”

And 1 Kings 10:14 tells us something about his wealth. It says that,

“The weight of the gold that Solomon received yearly was 666 talents,”

(Which works out at about 50,705 ounces, and we measure the value of gold by the ounce. And if gold is a standard measurement of value and we take today’s rates, he paid himself every year $64,751,306.00 every year. That would put him in the Forbes top 100 of the world’s richest men.)

He had all the money he needed for all the things that money could buy, but he discovers the sober truth in Ecclesiastes 5:10 where he says,

“Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income. This too is meaningless.”

He added a few extra-curricular things. There was remarkable breadth to Solomon’s life. Ecclesiastes 2:4-6 says,

“I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.”

He became an expert on many of these things. He actually gave lectures on them because 1 Kings 4:33 says,

“He described plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the walls. He also taught about animals and birds, reptiles and fish.”

He taught about these things. You look at that list and see the breadth of the disciplines that he mastered. He was a botanist (he described plant life), a zoologist (he talked about animals), an ornithologist (he talked about birds), a herpetologist (he talked about reptiles and snakes and lizards), an ichthyologist (he knew all about fish).

Where in the world he found time for this, I have no idea! Not least because he was king over Israel at its biggest, geographical largest area in their history, and he had 700 wives to look after!

He was also a farmer. Ecclesiastes 2:7, he says,

“I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me.”

And he produced an amazing supply of food for himself. 1 Kings 4:22 says,

“Solomon’s daily provisions” (this is for him and his household) – “his daily provisions were thirty cors of fine flour” (that’s close to 3000 kg.), “60 cors of meal” (that’s close to 6000 kg), “ten head of stall-fed cattle” (that meant they were fed with corn, which brings faster growth), “twenty head of pasture-fed cattle” (that means they were fed on grass, which makes for better meat), “and a hundred sheep and goats, as well as deer, gazelles, roebucks and choice fowl” (a few chickens thrown in with it all).

This was the daily provision for his household. He had some hungry wives and hungry kids. We don’t know how many kids he had - somebody worked out 31 that we know of. And he had a big staff.

But after summarizing his search for pleasure or in pleasure, in power, in prosperity, he concludes in Ecclesiastes 2:10-11:

“I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor.

“Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”

Well, that’s Solomon. Let’s close the curtain on that scene. And let’s open another curtain on the 21st Century world, particularly the 21st Century western world in which you and I live.

And you discover this: you don’t have to go to an old book like Ecclesiastes (nearly 3000 years old) and blow off the dust, wipe off the cobwebs to see what life was like then. This book describes what you will read tomorrow in the newspapers. It describes the pursuit of pleasure and power and prosperity that is the currency of our day. We discover the celebration of wit and wine and women, which is the celebration of our day.

Ironically it was Solomon himself who wrote in his earlier better days in Proverbs 21:17 that,

“He who loves pleasure will become poor; whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich.”

He also wrote in Proverbs 31:2:

“O my son…do not spend your strength on women, or your vigor on those who ruin kings.”

So, he had known better but now he has slipped back and he is in this pursuit of pleasure, this pursuit of power, this pursuit of prosperity. And he is saying this better world doesn’t exist.

Let me talk a little bit about the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure, of course, has its virtues too. Psalm 16:11 says:

“You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.”

Interesting to compare that verse with Proverbs: There are pleasures which make you poor (Proverbs 21 warns) and there are pleasures which make you right (Psalm 16 promises).

Probably the most influential person in the last century has been Sigmund Freud, really the founder of modern psychology. And that of course has spread out into the whole wider culture of our self-understanding. And Freud introduced what he called the “pleasure principle”.

The pleasure principle, said Freud, is that people seek pleasure and they avoid pain. And in his theory of personality, Freud says that the pleasure principle is the driving force of the ego that seeks the immediate satisfaction of its needs and wants and urges, including hunger and thirst and emotions (such as anger), and sex. And when these needs are not met, the result is a state of anxiety and tension within the individual.

But the pleasure principle, says Freud, is modified by what he called the reality principle. And the reality principle is that we learn to endure a certain amount of pain and to defer a certain amount of gratification because of the realities of life that we live in.

And so, in Freud’s words, I quote,

“An ego thus educated has become reasonable; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished.”

In other words, you weigh up “this is the pain; this is the pleasure”. Now these are both realities in life and so to live responsibly I can’t have all pleasure, I can’t avoid all pain, so I work out which pleasures are worth deferring for a little while and what pain is worth enduring so that I can live within this reality principle that I have to live with.

And this has become the basis of modern ethical philosophy. Go for pleasure but avoid pain, but decide what pain you are willing to endure and decide what pleasure you are willing to postpone if it is required that you do so.

And hence the popular ethic around our world today, which is detached from any objective criteria almost exclusively related to subjective criteria – the tension of pleasure and pain.

And often ideas like Freud or anybody gain popularity simply because it resonates with us, it explains, “oh yeah, that’s – yeah, that’s exactly right.”

Now Solomon didn’t have the benefit of living after Freud so he hadn’t thought these things out, but actually he is working with these same tensions.

You see, what if you happened to be the most powerful man in the world, or one of the most powerful men in the world? What if you happened to be one of the richest men in the world? What if you happened to have all the women in the world that are available to you (or at least you have got a thousand anyway)? What if you have all the entertainment, live entertainment that you need? What if you have servants at your beck and call? What if you are one of the most creative men in the world and you are a botanist and a zoologist and an ichthyologist and a… whatever else? You kind of have this incredible IQ and capacity to retain all this information.

Well, you start to believe that you have less need to defer pleasure – you can embrace it all, and less need to embrace pain – you can push it all out.

We are going to see, by the way, next week, Ecclesiastes 3. Trouble is, there is a time to live and a time to die, a time for health and a time for sickness, and so on. He gives this whole, about twelve things.

But what happens with Solomon is that if you have less need to defer the pleasures, you can live gratifying any pleasure you want and you can avoid pain. So, the mantra of Solomon’s life becomes, in Ecclesiastes 8:15,

“So I commend” he says, “the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be merry …and then joy will accompany him.”

Sounds good, idealistic, but Solomon discovers the reality is very different because back in Ecclesiastes 2:10:

“I denied myself nothing my eyes desired.”

In other words, if it is pleasurable, there is no need to defer anything; go for it.

“I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.

“Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”

I followed the pleasure principle but when I woke up the next morning, it had been like getting hold of the wind - got it into my hand, put it into a bottle, take it home; open it and think the wind will come out but there is no wind left.

This is the honest record that many, many, many folks resonate with.

I have a letter here. I am going to read part of it to you. It is a letter that was sent to a relative of a couple who are part of this congregation. And this letter was written this month and they have given me permission to read parts of it to you. It is written by a 38-year old man and it begins (this is an e-mail):

“Today I killed myself. That’s not funny if it’s a joke, but it’s not a joke. (And it wasn’t; having pressed the send button, he killed himself.)

Part of what he says is this:

“I have been thinking about ending my life for a long time. In fact I can’t really remember a time when it wasn’t something close to my mind. I am just not equipped to deal with the stress of life, the discontentment I constantly feel. Sometimes I feel it harder than at other times, but it is always there, even when I am distracted by something nice, like good times with friends and family. There are only moments of happiness. Most of the time it is just a feeling of dread, the weight of things I have no control over and no significant rational basis to value life enough to slug through it. It just boils down to life is suffering; that’s it. There is no winning, there is no getting used to it. There is only a frightened animal searching for ways to survive and minimize the pain. There is nothing inherently valuable about life.”

(Notice, by the way, he talked about pleasure, he talked about pain.)

“I thought about quitting my job and just living for awhile like a glutton with no care but my immediate satisfaction. Something about that sounds appealing, but when I think it through rationally, I know that in the end it would just make me more miserable.”

(This is what Solomon has told us here.)

“I hope that part of me or some part of me continues on after death, and that I can see you all again, but I sincerely doubt it. I hope for some kind of enlightened state where there is not the pain and anguish that I now feel. I suspect I will just end and that will be that. And that’s not so bad either. Thank you for all you have done to help me. Good-bye.”

He is being utterly honest. He also recorded on to a camcorder a message as a supplement to this and I have seen that recording. You see he connected the dots and said, “there is no meaning in this life that I am living.” He was a professional man. Obviously, he was suffering from depression – there are all kinds of factors that play into this of course.

But his rationalizing of the meaning of his life rings an uncanny similarity to Solomon – meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless. I have seen all the things that are done under the sun. All of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Sometimes we don’t connect the dots. We just stick out our chin and say, “well, let’s just do the best we can, let’s just make the best of a miserable life.”

In the recent Cannes Film Festival in the south of France, one of the films that gained a lot of publicity was a documentary on the Rolling Stones that was only just released (it was actually made back in the 1970’s); it’s called “Stones in Exile”. And they spent time in France because of the tax rate in Britain at that stage caused them to become tax exiles in France.

And it was during that period that the three words became linked, if not locked together: sex, drugs, rock and roll. And this film documents some of their hedonism.

And Mick Jagger was interviewed just a few days ago in relation to this film. And one of the things he said – and I read it in an interview – was, “Everyone’s life comes to an end. We all die. We all have the same fate. But I think you should just keep going while you can doing whatever you like to do.”

So, here’s the philosophy: this is going nowhere, so find out what you like doing; just do it.

This was his justification for the hedonistic lifestyle that not only damaged many of them but damaged other people as well.

Solomon could have written that, you see, in Ecclesiastes.

One of Mick Jagger’s colleagues in the Rolling Stones, (although he left a few years ago) Bill Wyman, was the bassist. And Bill Wyman a number of years ago said this – and I noticed it and I noted it and I dug up the quotation again this week. He said, “Getting to the top was an exciting experience. It kept driving you. But when we arrived at the top, there was nothing there. It was empty.”

If Bill Wyman was called Solomon, he would say, “I said to myself, ‘Let’s pursue rock music, let’s pursue getting to the top, let’s pursue fame and fortune’ and when I got there it was like getting hold of the wind. It was meaningless.”

So where do we find any answers? At the end of this book, as we will see later another day, Solomon comes to some conclusions. But part way through in Ecclesiastes 3 he throws out a strong ray of truth, and I quoted this last time, in Ecclesiastes 3:11 where he says,

“God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity into the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

He said, “there is something that I know is beautiful about myself, about the creation – I know that.” And within the heart of a human being God has placed eternity, he says, yet we cannot fathom it out.

Let me remind you the word eternity is not the same as the word everlasting. Everlasting is one-dimensional, it is continuity; it is immortality.

Now if you went to this man who wrote this note and committed suicide earlier this month and you said to him, “Hey, I have got some good news for you. You can have a life that will go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and never end.” I don’t think he would be impressed.

No, it’s not just continuity – there is that dimension to it – but it is multi-dimensional. It is about depth and breadth and height. It is the eternal capacity in the hearts of man designed only to be satisfied in relationship to the eternal One, which is God Himself, for God alone is eternal. To be eternal is to have no beginning, to have no end. Only God has no beginning.

And God has left, says Solomon - the reason why there is so much frustration is because there is a capacity within me, an eternity in my heart that is like a vacuum sucking into it whatever it is that looks as though it may offer some help, but it doesn’t.

Let me try to explain this briefly. There are three kinds of life in this world. There is plant life, animal life and human life. Plant life is just physical life; it just has a body. Whether it is a tree, a piece of grass, it’s just physical life.

Animal life has a body and a soul. Now the Hebrew word in the Old Testament for soul is the word for animal life. It is the component we often describe as personality, mind, emotion, will. Animals have a mind. They think; they think at different levels with different capacities. They have emotions; they have a will.

If you are not sure if animals have an emotion, just put a cat in front of a dog he has never met before. It will go through an emotional experience.

Human beings have body and soul and spirit. We are not just super-smart animals. We share, of course, physical life with not just the animal kingdom but with the plant world as well. They now tell us that we humans, in our DNA, share 60% of the DNA of a banana. So, you are just a smart banana! 60% of the DNA of a banana and of a human being are in common. That makes you feel good, doesn’t it? (It makes bananas feel terrible!)

We share the soul life, the mind, the emotion, the life that inhabits the physical body. But what makes this – and although we share that with the animal world and we are born the way animals are born, we eat the same way, we sleep the same way, we mate the same way, we die the same way, we decompose the same way – what makes human beings unique is that we are spiritual beings.

The New Testament makes a clear distinction between soul and spirit. Now I know there are some Christians who speak about being bipartite – that is, there are two parts to us – the physical and the non-physical. You can generalize about that but I think we have to conclude we are tripartite, that the soul and spirit, both invisible in the physical sense, but are distinct.

1 Thessalonians 5:23 talks about “May your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless.” It talks about the Word of God dividing the soul from the spirit. And that spirit capacity within the human being is that capacity in us that animals don’t have that reach outside of ourselves and ask questions animals never asked. “Where did I come from? Where am I going?” We look up into the sky and say, “What’s up there?”

You see dogs don’t try to trace their ancestors; they are not interested in who their granny is. And if they found her, they would probably fight here anyway.

Cows don’t look up into the sky saying, “I wonder if there is milk on Mars up there somewhere.” They couldn’t care less. They have no capacity – not intellect – it’s spirit capacity.

Cats don’t commit suicide because they have lost the meaning to life. The tabby went off with our thing and I am going to climb a tree and jump off….splat! Cats don’t lose the meaning to life because they don’t have the meaning to life. They don’t have that capacity. They just live and one day they stop living and they don’t even know that.

But you and I are far more than animals. We have within us a capacity that says there’s got to be more to life than this, there has got to be meaning. The whole of Ecclesiastes is searching, searching, searching. You see, when God created those three kinds of life, He also created a governing principle, a governing force for each of those kinds of life. For physical plant life, He created seasons. Genesis 8:22 tells us that, that

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

For seedtime and harvest, you need cold and heat, you need day and night, you need summer and winter. And God created the seasons in order that plant life could survive.

When He created the animal kingdom, He put into every animal what we might describe as being like a little computer chip that we call instinct that determines how an animal should behave.

So, in Proverbs 6:6 Solomon had written this before. He says,

“Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at the harvest.”

He says, “Look at the anthill.” And if you have been to a hot climate country you probably have seen anthills and sometimes up to 100,000 ants can live in that one community and every ant knows exactly what to do. How do they learn that? Do they go to ant school? No, they have a little chip called instinct that tells them how to function.

Jeremiah writes in Jeremiah 8:7:

“Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe their time of migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the LORD.”

So, he says, “How come birds, storks, doves, swift and thrush know when it’s time to migrate, know when it’s time to come back, always come back to the right address, but people somehow don’t seem to be able to function?”

When we lived in England, we had a garage and we had swallows that nested in our garage every year for many years. Generation after generation, they came back to our garage. At the end of every summer those swallows would leave and fly south across the length of England, over the English Channel, across the length of France, across Spain, across the Mediterranean, across the Sahara Desert of north Africa, down through central Africa until they arrived in southern Africa and that was their destination.

When they got there, 6000 miles later, they would say, “Whew, we’re here now” and hang around for the summer in the southern hemisphere. And then at some stage when the weather started to change, they’d say it’s time to go home. They would fly the full length of Africa, the Mediterranean, Spain, France, English Channel, England, and they would come right back to the same nest in our garage right on time.

And every spring one of the things we always did was wait, “Are the swallows back yet?” And when the first swallow was back, somebody would say, “Hey, the swallows are back!”

This is incredible – 12,000 mile round trip. They knew exactly when to come, where to come and they would always come back to our garage – at least those did.

You know my wife had difficulty finding her way back to our garage when she went shopping sometimes. (She heard me say it in the first service; it’s okay.)

Where did these birds – did they have a map (Charles Price’s garage)?

Jeremiah says, “how come the migrating birds migrate on time to the right place at the right time but people don’t know how to live?”

Because when God created human beings, He put a governing force into human beings. We have instinct of course, but that isn’t what governs us. His intention was we would be governed by His own presence, His Spirit in human experience.

And so, in the Garden of Eden, to Adam He said, “Do what you like except one thing: the day you eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that day you will die.”

What happened when Adam ate? Did they drop dead? Did God find corpses under the tree? Physically they didn’t die, but that day spiritually they died. They became, in the words of Paul, separated from the life of God.

Now let me ask you: what happens to plant life if seasons fail, if there is no summer, no rain, what happens to plant life? Well, we have had examples of this in recent years where there have been famines that have come into areas where the rains failed. If seasons fail, plant life dies.

What would happen to a swallow if one of those swallows from our house somehow were to bang its head on a branch of a tree in South Africa and lose its instinct? Would it find its way back home? No.

What happens if human beings lose God? Well look at the newspaper any day of the week. Look at the news on television. We do not know how to live.

And this book Ecclesiastes is a man who has turned away from God and saying, “Having taken God out of my life, I am now looking under the sun, purely materialistically, purely physically. I am like a migrating swallow that has no instinct. I don’t know how to live.”

And of course, the whole of Scripture leads eventually to the fullness and prepares us that it is possible in Christ, that the purpose and the work of Jesus Christ was to make it possible for God to re-inhabit the human heart and life. But as in Adam all die, as in Adam all lost their instinct, as in Adam the seasons failed, if you want to use that as a metaphor. As in Adam, we became incapable of living the way we are supposed to live with the satisfaction we are supposed to enjoy. So, in Christ we may be made alive again.

Those of you watching on television, those of you listening by radio, earlier in our service today we celebrated the Lord’s Supper, the communion. I pointed out then that the giving of the bread, Jesus said, “This bread is My body; it’s for you.” It was Christ offering Himself as a substitute to the Father in order to pay for and meet the demands of God’s justice.

But then when He gave the wine He said, “This is My blood. Drink it.” No Jew ever drank blood simply because the Scripture says that the life is in the blood and there was no provision for life. Now He says under the New Covenant, not only is it Christ giving Himself for you, it’s Christ giving Himself to you. Drink the blood, take the life, put the life of God back into human heart and soul.

That doesn’t mean everything suddenly works out well but it means because life, as we are going to see in the next few weeks, has these very real pains and struggles, but it means you can put your head on the pillow at night and you know who you are and the life makes sense.

David wrote in Psalm 16:11

“You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.”

These are the very things that Solomon is searching for – pleasures and joy. Says David, “the path of life is the life of God and that gives me joy and eternal pleasure.”

He wrote in Psalm 62:1,

“My soul finds rest in God alone.”

It’s not just believing about God; it’s receiving the very life of God, being born again of the Spirit of God, knowing His life in us that empowers us and equips us.

And Ezekiel’s beam of light in the middle of all this despair is that He has put eternity into our hearts though, he says in that same verse, “yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

In other words, there is the eternal capacity and that eternal capacity can only be satisfied by the eternal life that was meant to indwell that capacity. That eternal life is God’s life. He that has, as 1 John puts it, that – let me read it to get it exactly right: 1 John 5:11-12 he says,

“And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.”

This eternal life is the life of the Son. He doesn’t give you eternal life; He is the eternal life. John also says that: He is the eternal life. It is His presence in us that meets the deepest needs of the human heart.

But as we conclude this morning – we will pick up this search next week in Ecclesiastes – there are some of us this morning, and maybe once again in looking into this book, you find yourself looking into a mirror. You could have written it.

And you say, “I know that I am searching”, and Ecclesiastes is written by a man who did know God but he turned away from God. You can be in that position too. And one of the evidences that you turned away from God is that there is a restlessness deep down, there is a seeking, seeking, seeking, probing and every road you go up that offers you hope, you discover it to be a cul-de-sac and you come to the end and there is nothing there.

And maybe there are some of us here and some of us watching and listening who need to get right with God. Maybe you have been a Christian but you have drifted. That doesn’t mean you have stopped coming to church; it may simply mean in your heart you have turned away from God and you are pursuing other things inevitably. And the message is there is eternity in your heart that can be met only by the eternal One.

This is not religion; this is life. It applies to everybody whether they are here or not – every man on the street, everyone on the street – you can know this one thing about them: there is eternity in their heart. They will never be satisfied outside of the eternal One.

Maybe you have never come to Christ yourself, you have never realized that this is not just an optional extra, to get your sins forgiven, to get you washed up on the shores of heaven one day, and it’s that kind of mentality but in the meantime live as you like.

No, this is opening your life to the very presence of God that He now in you becomes the center of your life and the One who gives it meaning, that “at Your right hand there are pleasures forevermore.”

We are going to pray together. Maybe there are some of us here this morning and God has been preparing you for this because you have been through events this week in the last days, maybe thoughts, maybe conversations, maybe experiences of life and you find yourself, yes, that road looks appealing but you have gone far enough down it to know it is a dead end, it doesn’t go anywhere; it’s like chasing after the wind.

And you need this morning to say, “Lord, I want You to take and fill my life with Your presence. I find in You that deep, deep satisfaction for which I was legitimately made, a satisfaction that says, “The Lord is my shepherd; therefore, I shall not want.” I don’t need outside of Him.

Lord, I pray You will make this real in many hearts and lives. Deliver us from thinking of this as only a theory or an idea or a doctrine or theology. Help us to see that this is life itself and to be not only recipients of that life but to live in the fullness of that life, that You reign and work within us. Lord, make this real I pray, in Jesus’ Name, Amen.