So, our scripture reading is from the book of Ecclesiastes. Last week when Pastor Gordon was preaching on Psalm 39, he mentioned many ties with Ecclesiastes. So when I was called to see if I could preach, I thought that would be a good way to go about this. So we're going to look at Ecclesiastes chapter 1, and we're going to focus really on verses 1 through 11. But we're going to read a little bit more. We'll read all of chapter 1 and a little bit of chapter 2. So, here is the word of the Lord. The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north. Around and around goes the wind. On its circuits, the wind returns. All streams run into the sea, but the sea is not full. To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done. And there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, See, this is new. It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of latter things yet to be among those who come after. I, the preacher, have been king over Israel and Jerusalem, and I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun. And behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said in my heart, I have acquired great wisdom surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me. And my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation. And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. And then let's jump up to verse 18 of chapter 2. I hated all my toil in which I toiled under the sun. seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all which I had toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun. Because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God. For apart from him, who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For to the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy. But to the sinner, he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. It certainly gets our attention, doesn't it, as he cries that. It maybe even throws us off balance. What is he raving about? It doesn't seem very pious, necessarily. Maybe not even very Christian. How can this preacher say this about life? Why is it in the Bible? Our gut reaction maybe at first is to say the preacher, he didn't really mean this. There must be something more. Maybe he was exaggerating. Maybe he was just having a really bad day. And then the preacher, we see in verse 3, goes on, what does man gain by all this toil? What is it all for? Is this guy just a pessimist? Maybe he just doesn't want to get out of bed that day to go to work. He doesn't know what it's all worth. What is the meaning of it all? And we all have that sometimes. I know it was exam week last week for the junior high and high schools. And I'm sure you guys said sometime, what is all this toil? What is the use of all this toil? Well, what are we to make of the preacher's words here in our text? Well, what I want us to see tonight is that the preacher here is describing life as it is. As you and I experience it under the sun. And we have all experienced what he describes as this vanity of life to some degree or another. And we can all identify with the cry of the preacher and take it as our own cry in the frustrations of life. But that is not the end of the story. And so as we go on, we need to first really be clear about what this vanity is. that he's talking about, and why it is this way. And we also need to look at what he means when he talks about under the sun. And so we'll look at first what under the sun means, then what his vanity is, and then a little more closely at our text in light of that. And so the preacher here, he makes it clear that he's talking about life under the sun. Maybe you caught that as a phrase throughout here. You see that there in verse 3, and then we find it many other places. Verse 9, for example, nothing new under the sun. What does he use this phrase for? What is he telling us? Some have suggested maybe that it means life without God. it's it's under the sun so excluding heaven or something like that that the preacher is here really just looking at life hypothetically as if God were not there and what what would his conclusions be about life but I don't think that is what's going on here because as we read we saw the preacher very much mentions God. He talks about God. He talks about God's activity. He even talks about God's involvement in this vanity. And so I think instead the preacher uses this term under the sun to describe life that man lives. Regular, ordinary life. Our lives under the sun on this earth. But I think we can also, and we need to add one more proviso on that. It's life in the world as we know it, life in a fallen world. The preacher is very specific that he is referring to life after fall. He's describing life after Adam's sin and his breaking of God's covenant and God's judgment upon that. What God brought, this partial judgment that we can call as the common curse. But it is also life under the sun that connotes that it's life before one other thing that the preacher talks about. He talks about another judgment that is coming. In 11.9, he says, walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment. And in 12.14, he says, for God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil. And so this life under the sun is also a life that will end in this judgment. And so that's what we need to see. This preacher, he is observing what life is like in the world as he knows it. The world that we know it. The world under this common curse before God returns to judge. Now, the vanity is a little more difficult. And we could see this just by looking at various translations. There have been a number of words that have been proposed to translate to the Hebrew word hevel, and which the ESV here translates as vanity. The ESV has vanity. The NIV has meaninglessness. The JPS translation has futility. What is he getting at here? What does this word mean? Well, I think it's important to first say what it's not. And we might be confused by vanity, that it has something to do with looking in the mirror. It doesn't have anything to do with that, nothing to do with being conceited. But it also, I would argue, doesn't have anything to do with being meaningless. And thus, the NIV is probably the least helpful here. He's not declaring here that there's no meaning in what he looks at. Instead, if we look through the rest of the book, he has a very strong view of God's sovereign plan. In chapter 3, you have the famous section where he talks about everything having its proper time. Everything, God has made everything beautiful in its time. And vanity itself has some problems if we tie it with useless, because that's also not what he's getting at here, that something is useless. It's not uselessness, as if things don't matter whether they had been done or not been done. Instead, the term that he uses, and I'll continue to translate it as vanity, elsewhere in the Bible it can speak of a vapor or a breath. And you could think of going outside on a cold morning. And what do you see? You see your breath in front of you. And yet you can't reach out and grab it. Right? It's there and then it's gone. And so that's part of what he's getting at here, that stuff just comes and then disappears. It's short-lived. It's not long-lived. But he adds another element to it. And this is maybe best seen in his descriptions of the world as bent. He says the world is bent, and that's part of this vanity. It doesn't work like it should. It doesn't work like it ought to work. Life doesn't fit in how things should be. He looks at certain actions, and then he looks at their consequences, and they don't line up. He sees that life is often contrary to reason. It's unjust, it's unfair, it's an evil business. And thus, this vanity, this bentness of life is tied with futility, with frustration. It doesn't work right. And he gives many examples, if we would look throughout the book. He sees places where wise men, they're ignored, but fools are listened to. That is vanity. Righteous men suffer while the wicked prosper. That is vanity. Men labor for wealth, but they never enjoy it. That's vanity. A wise man may labor only to leave his work to a fool. All of these things are vanity as he looks at them, frustrating the bentness of life. But the worst thing he sees is the fact that all men, Whether they're wise or fools, whether they're righteous or wicked, they all end up in one place. They all end up in the grave. Dust, just like the animals. For him, the death of the righteous man, the death of the righteous woman, that is the height of vanity. And here it's probably helpful to mention that the term that he uses here happens to also correspond with the name of one of the first named people in the book of Genesis, Abel. Abel's name is Hevel, is vanity, and he best exemplifies what he's getting at here. The righteous snuffed out too soon. The righteous killed by the wicked and the wicked living on. And so as we approach this, we see that the preacher here is commenting on what life is like under this curse. That the way life was created by God, the way it was declared good, that it's no more. Instead, God has bent this world in his judgment on Adam's sin. God made the world no longer to operate as it should, but instead made it this time of vanity. And we can see his declaration of this most clearly in chapter 7, verse 13, as he says, Consider the work of God. Who can make straight what he has made crooked? God is the one who subjected the world to this common curse. This common curse that we're reminded of each and every day as we see it, as we experience it, as it reminds us of his judgment and his coming judgment. So with that in mind, we can look a little more closely at verses 1 through 11. And the preacher here, he sets up the question in verse 3 of what he's going to illustrate. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? And he answers it by a series of illustrations. In verse 4, what do we see? He speaks about this continuous flow of people on the earth. People, they're born, they live, they die, only to be replaced by more people who are born, live, and die. And yet the earth continues. What is the prophet? Verse 5, he thinks about the sun. It rises, and then it sets, only to do what? To rise again, and set again, and rise again, and set again. It just continues. And then he goes on, and he thinks of the wind. It blows here, it blows there, it blows round about, it blows all over the place. And yet, it's ever moving, ever going, but what is it gaining? Verse 7, he talks about streams. Water is constantly pouring into the ocean. And does the ocean fill up? Well, no. Whether he fully knew the evaporation cycle or everything here, but he sees it again happening all over again. All that water flowing down to the ocean only to end up back up flowing again. Flowing, flowing, flowing. and the ocean never filling. And so the preacher looks at all these cycles, and he's asking where the prophet is. All this labor goes on, but what's the gain? What's the end? It all just happens over and over and over and over again. And so the preacher, he's using that as he looks at his own labors. What benefit do they have? Whether they can produce something good. And he's looking at them really from the standpoint of, do they last? Do they really endure? Are there eternal consequences for them? Are my labors bringing about some ultimate end, reaching some final conclusion? And as he looks, he says he doesn't see any profit or gain in that sense. What of the peace and justice that he was known for in that land? His son, who was a fool, though Solomon himself was foolish in many ways, he split the kingdom. But maybe more importantly, there's no lasting effect in the Middle East, as we know it now. And so, as we think of our own lives, we think, well, what if I cure cancer? What if I could find the peace solution for the Middle East? What if all of these things? Would that finally change the world? Well, unfortunately, we know there would be more diseases. There would be more wars. Now, as we look at this, the preacher doesn't despair, as we'll look on. And he doesn't want us to despair. This book of Ecclesiastes wasn't given to us by God to make us despair. Instead, it was made so that we might have insight into life and so that we might live accordingly. Now we could illustrate how maybe this despair works in one response to it by quotes from one movie I saw that was about this secret service and the director of this secret service, he had his operative that he got to go out and go after some bad guys, some terrorists. And the guy went out there and he risked his life and through all these crazy things that happened, he finally brought them to justice. But then at the end, he finds out that the people he had taken out, that they had just been replaced by other terrorists, by other bad guys. And so he comes to his director and he says, did we accomplish anything at all? Every man we killed has been replaced by worse. And his director gives one response to that. He says, why cut my fingernails? They'll just grow back. He says, that's the way life is. Fingernails grow, I keep cutting them, no matter what. Life is like this, that stuff will just continue to happen. Such is life. And so when we read through Ecclesiastes, we might come to the conclusion he comes to something similar. We saw all of his different things, and then we come to verse 24, and there he just says, Well, I saw there's nothing better for a person than that he should just eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. Also, this I saw is from the hand of God. And we could read that in a similar sense, that life is hard, get over it and just live it. But I don't think that's what the preacher is doing there in his response to it. That he is doing a lot more. There's much more as he finally reaches that conclusion. That it's grounded in nothing else than really his faith in a God who controls this world. And we can see this in that first chapter, what we looked at. He talks about all these cycles. The cycles of generations, the cycles of the wind, the cycles of the rain going to the ocean. All of these things that are going in cycles. And yet as you look and read his book, he also talks about something that has a beginning and something that has an end. Because he says there is a God who created and there is a God who will judge in the end. And so he's seeing this cycle, and yet undergirding that, he sees something that is linear, that has this line. And how does he maintain that? How does he hold that together? And this is where we need to see that the preacher, when he's looking at human activities, he's looking at what we would call our cultural activities. And in this, this is where he sees this cycle. Sure, some things are better, some things are worse. Some times are better, some things are worse. But they just keep going on and on and on. And why is this? Well, as we said, he shows us that it is God who has made this world this way. that God is the one who made the world as it is, but it was in response to man's sin. And he says that in 729, See, this I found that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. And so this cycle, this continual thing of man's culture, is because of God's curse on man's sin. And as he sees that, it assumes that there is a right way that the world should work. That the world could be unbent. And that that would be different for man and his culture. And that is really what life would have been like without Adam sinning. Do we know exactly what his life would have been like? What his culture would have been like? Well, we don't, we're not given many details, but we can be sure. It would have been without this frustration, without this futility that we now experience. Right action would have resulted in right consequence, right result. And we can be sure of another thing. The world wouldn't have been filled with sinners and fools. That Adam, as he worked, perfect, godly Adam, would have been working together with his perfect, godly offspring, fulfilling all of God's commands in that world. And yet, what is the world that we have? Well, it's again a world of God's doing. Because who is it that established this world in which we, as Christians, are alongside our non-Christian neighbor? It's God who established that. Remember Cain and Abel. God is the one who said that Cain would be under his protection. God is the one who allowed this world to continue without his immediate judgment on every sinner. Instead, it's this time, we could say, of this delay of judgment. And so it's this world in which there's both Christians and non-Christians. We work side by side. We don't form two separate societies. We don't form two separate cultures. Instead, we work together in this common cultural area. Just as Jesus says, give to Caesar what is Caesar. And Paul tells us to submit to the pagan Roman authorities. And this is where we can ask, well, why? Why has God made this world this way? Why has God sustained it? Why would he uphold such a world? Why would he allow it to continue? And that's where we can say he did it out of his love, out of his grace. Because this time of common curse, it's also the time of redemption. And if we look carefully, I think we can see that the preacher understands this, that he gets this. Because even as he looks in this world that he sees all of this vanity, that strive as he might, he can't fix what's out there, it doesn't cause him to despair. Instead, it causes him to look to his creator. And that is nothing less than really the faith that the one who created will make it right. That the creator will be the redeemer. That he is the one who will redeem this world from sin. And that is what we know happened. That this time of common curse, it's into this cursed world that God was incarnate, that he became man, Jesus Christ, so that he could accomplish all that we could not accomplish for ourselves. God has sustained this bent world so that he might save it. And this is where we need to see that the preacher, he has an Old Testament perspective. He is situated in his Old Testament time. The preacher, he says, there's nothing new under the sun. It just keeps going and going and going. But we as New Testament Christians, we're blessed to have a different perspective. Because I would argue there is something new under the sun. And what is that? Well, there was a man who came into the world, who died, but then he was raised to life and will never die again. The resurrection is new. The resurrection is something new under the sun. And that's why Paul can call it this first fruits that we can look to. that gives us hope of what will be true of us as we believe in him. And so we need that. We need to know that as we look at this world around us. And so we can conclude by saying that the preacher, though it's painful, though it's trying, The preacher helps us look at the world we live in, helps us look at it rightly. We need to know what to expect of this world. Otherwise, we can so easily lose heart. We can so easily become frustrated. We can't place our hope in our labors. We can't place our hope in this world. Instead, we should expect frustration, that we may have to watch something that we worked so hard on disappear like a sandcastle hit by the wave. But what is our response? How are we to respond to this vanity that the preacher describes? Well, it's not despair, but it is submission to our God. We are called to labor. We are called to labor in this world in submissive obedience, taking joy in the pleasures that God gives us, but also accepting the frustration and pain that we have. And I think that is how we need to read the preacher's conclusions that we see. So, for example, this is how we need to read what he says in chapter 3, verse 12 through 13. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and to do good while they live, that everyone may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all his toil. This is the gift of God. So may we look at it rightly. May we enjoy as God gives us pleasure in it. And let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, may we use the gifts and abilities that you have given to us for your glory in this world. Even as we so often are frustrated in our tasks, so often they seem to end in futility, and yet we know they are the tasks given by you, that they are what we are called to, and that we place our confidence and our trust in you. That they are not useless. They are not meaninglessness. But instead, we as your servants are called to them for your glory. Give us the strength that we need to go each and every day about those tasks. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.