The Question of Meaning

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Today we're going to begin a new series based on the book of Ecclesiastes, which may lead you to wonder whether or not I have completely lost my mind. This is a difficult and confusing book. At first glance, it seems as if the author takes an exceedingly bleak view of human existence and concludes that life is utterly meaningless because of the reality of suffering and injustice, given the transience and the absurdity of human life, and especially given the ultimate inevitability of death. As a result, many people have questioned, what is this book doing in the Bible in the first place? Should we be reading it? Why is it here?

Let me suggest that this book will never make sense to you unless you understand what the author is trying to do. Now the author of Ecclesiastes is referred to here as “the preacher,” but that's probably not the best translation of the Hebrew word. And let's face it, if he were a preacher, he's a complete failure, because who would want to listen to this stuff? Now the old King James Version gets a little closer to the right translation by calling him a “teacher,” but even that's not quite right. It's probably best to think of him as an old, wise professor.

But he's not a lecturer; that's why we shouldn't think of him as a preacher or a teacher. The reason why is because he's not offering advice. He's not telling you how to live your life. If you went out and did some of the things that this guy's telling you to do, it might lead you to the very brink of despair. It might make a wreck of your life. So what you need to realize is that he's a professor, but he's not offering answers. Instead, he's asking questions. He's asking deep, searching questions. And so in a way, if you're a searcher for the truth, a seeker after truth, you might want to read Ecclesiastes first before you read anything else, because Ecclesiastes asks the questions, and then the rest of the Bible provides the answers.

In school, you might have had a professor who didn't give lectures but who led seminars, and some of the best ones do not tell you what you should think but rather they teach you how to think. And the way they often do that is through the socratic method — by asking questions, by asking probing questions. And sometimes it can be a little frustrating, because if you ask a question, they might respond with another one. And that's what the author of Ecclesiastes is doing here. He's asking tough questions in order to challenge our thinking. He refuses to ignore the inexplicable realities of life on this planet and the seeming pointlessness of it all by relentlessly asking deeply searching questions. But his goal, despite what it may seem, is not to turn you into a nihilist but rather to get you to see that your often trite and superficial answers to the big questions are insufficient — they're inadequate, and he won't let you stay there.

So the author, in my mind, could easily have been a New Yorker. We might think of him as the chair of the philosophy department at NYU, because he's brash and he's bold and he tells it like it is. And that's what makes Ecclesiastes perhaps the most contemporary book in the Bible. You would be hard-pressed to find more contemporary relevance than Ecclesiastes, and for that reason, it may be the most important book for both believers and skeptics alike who wrestle with the enigma of life. That is his consistent theme: the enigma of life. So what I'd like to do is begin by turning to Ecclesiastes 1, and as we do, let's consider what it has to tell us under three headings. I'd like us to consider: 1) the searching question, 2) the superficial responses, and 3) the sole answer.

²Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,

vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

³What does man gain by all the toil

at which he toils under the sun?

⁴A generation goes, and a generation comes,

but the earth remains forever.

⁵The sun rises, and the sun goes down,

and hastens to the place where it rises.

⁶The wind blows to the south

and goes around to the north;

around and around goes the wind,

and on its circuits the wind returns.

⁷All streams run to the sea,

but the sea is not full;

to the place where the streams flow,

there they flow again.

⁸All things are full of weariness;

a man cannot utter it;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

nor the ear filled with hearing.

⁹What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done,

and there is nothing new under the sun.

¹⁰Is there a thing of which it is said,

“See, this is new”?

It has been already

in the ages before us.

¹¹There is no remembrance of former things,

nor will there be any remembrance

of later things yet to be

among those who come after.

¹²I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. ¹³And 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. ¹⁴I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.

¹⁵What is crooked cannot be made straight,

and what is lacking cannot be counted.

¹⁶I 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.” ¹⁷And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.

¹⁸For in much wisdom is much vexation,

and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Ecclesiastes 1:2-18

The Searching Question

First, let's begin with the searching question. The key verse here is verse 3, and this is the key to unlocking the whole book. This is the question that the professor is exploring. “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” Now that word “gain” appears 10 times throughout this book; it's a word that means profit, or what's left over. He's asking what's left of permanent value after you've already done everything else? After you graduate from school and land your first job and pay your debts, you get married, you have a family, you start your own business, you take your trips, you live the dream. What next? And what does it matter? What is life accomplishing? What difference are you making? What do you have to show for your life? What exactly is the point of it all?

The singer songwriter Billie Eilish wrote a song called “What Was I Made For?” that appears at the end of the Barbie movie, which came out in 2023. Now, you didn't see that one coming. You didn't see a reference to the Barbie movie in a sermon on Ecclesiastes, but there you go. Disclaimer, I haven't seen the movie, but I have read about it, and I understand that this song, “What Was I Made For?” plays at the end of the film when the famous Mattel doll, Barbie, decides that she's going to become a real human being. Now Billie Eilish wrote the song from the perspective of Barbie, but she also said that it expressed her own life and feelings as a pop star who often feels like nothing more than a plastic doll or a product that is purchased by others rather than a real person. She wonders whether or not she'll ever be able to feel again. Will she ever be able to experience true happiness? And so this is how the song begins. She writes:

I used to float, now I just fall down. I used to know but I'm not sure now. What I was made for? What was I made for? Takin' a drive, I was an ideal. Looked so alive, turns out I'm not real. Just something you paid for. What was I made for? 'Cause I, I don't know how to feel. But I wanna try. I don't know how to feel. But someday, I might. Someday, I might.

Now that, my friends, is the pop version of Ecclesiastess. She's asking the same question that the professor is asking: What is the point? I feel like I was made for something, but what was I made for? Was I made for anything?

Now, at first glance, I admit that when the professor asks this question — What is the point of it all? — it seems as if he's asking it rhetorically, and the expected answer is a depressing one. It seems like the expected answer is, there is no point. What was I made for? Nothing. What has man gained by all his toil under the sun? Nothing at all. But actually, upon reflection, I think this question is not rhetorical or depressing, but rather it's meant to be an invitation. What do we gain by all of our toil under the sun? I don't know, but let's find out. He's inviting us to join him on a quest to understand the meaning and the purpose of our lives — to discover what we were made for.

But what I want you to realize here is that the God of the Bible, the Creator God of the universe, gives us the freedom and the space to ask the question, what is the point of it all? Look, the Creator God made this world good, and he places us within it, and he gives us everything our heart could desire to enjoy. And yet, the fact of the matter is that, given the reality of human sin and the ravages of the fall, all of creation has been subjected to a curse. All of creation has been subjected to futility, and as a result, life often is nasty, brutish, and short. Thomas Hobbes got it right.

But notice that God is not afraid of the question, what's the point of it all? He doesn't get defensive. He's not touchy. He's not prickly. And you see, that's the beauty of Christianity. Christianity does not ask us to turn our brains off or to shut our eyes to the world, but rather Christianity encourages us to ask the hard questions — the seemingly unanswerable questions — and to engage with the fullness of reality in all of its beauty as well as in all of its mess. So this is a deeply vulnerable, emotionally honest, and brave question: What is the point? God dares us to ask.

The Superficial Responses

But notice, here's how the professor is acting a little bit more like a seminar leader than a lecturer, because he doesn't answer his own question. Instead, he's going to engage in a process of elimination by which he will expose one superficial response to that question after another. He's going to expose them all as inadequate. Now let me show you how he does this.

He begins in verse 2 by saying, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” And he picks up the theme again in verse 14: “All is vanity.” It's all nothing more than a striving, a chasing after the wind. You can see the wind is blowing. You might chase after it, but you're never going to catch it. That's what life often feels like. Sometimes these verses are translated as, “Meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless.”

This word “vanity,” “meaningless” is famously difficult to translate. It literally means vapor or mist — a puff of breath, a wisp of smoke. It's like the mist that slowly rises off of a cold lake early in the morning. Now when he uses this word, at times it seems to suggest that life is completely pointless. Everything is meaningless. But there are other times where, in context, it seems as if he's using this Hebrew word to refer to life as a baffling enigma. And that actually might be the best translation of the Hebrew: This vapor, this mist, this puff of breath is a baffling enigma. So wherever you see that word “vanity” or “meaningless,” you could translate it or swap it out for “baffling enigma.”

We've had a lot of cold days lately, and as soon as you step out of your apartment, you might be able to see your own breath in front of you. You can see it, but if you were to try to reach out and grab it, it would be gone. It would slip right through your fingers. And that's what life is like. It's elusive. It's a mystery. We can't get our hands around it, but that's the kind of life we want. We want a life that has weight and substance and significance to it — something that we can hold onto, latch onto and grasp. But that's actually hard to come by.

So what the professor will continue to do is to reveal all the superficial responses to that question: What does man gain from all of his toil under the sun? Years ago, Tim Keller observed that many of these responses could be summed up in terms of some of the great philosophical traditions of the Western world, like humanism or hedonism or existentialism. And so what I'd like to do is group these responses under those headings. But notice that's what makes this book so contemporary. The professor of Ecclesiastes essentially anticipates and answers the great philosophical traditions of the West. (Now I'm going to spend a little bit more time on humanism, because that's the most common, the most typical, and then I'll just run very quickly through hedonism and existentialism.)

Humanism

What is a humanist? A secular humanist rejects belief in God and says that this world is all there is. So a humanist is someone who affirms human values and relies on the power of human ingenuity in order to make the world a better place. That's what animates and drives a humanist. “I'm gonna make the world a better place.” “There may be no God, but we've got so much at our fingertips.” “We don't need God or the supernatural, because we've got music and art and literature and philosophy, and we can solve the ethical dilemmas of our day based on the great writers and artists and thinkers of the past.” As Christopher Hitchens once said, we don't need to rely on the mythical morality tales of religion, because we've got Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and George Eliot.

A humanist tries to create some kind of meaning based on what this world alone can offer. So if you're a humanist, what do you do? You throw yourself into various projects. It might be loving your family or cultivating your gifts or pursuing your vocations in life. You try to do your part — to add to the edifice of civilization and to leave your mark on the world. And that's what you hope people will say about you at your funeral. You're hoping that someone will say, well, so and so is dead and gone, but they'll be remembered because of the legacy they've left behind, their legacy of love — because of the lives that they've touched, or because of the legacy of the work that they've accomplished.

Let's say you commit yourself to a great cause like stamping out injustice or protecting the environment. And you think to yourself, well, even if I don't make much progress in my lifetime, at least I know that others will carry on the work. But as the French philosopher Luc Farry, a self-proclaimed secular humanist, has written, if we ever stop and dare to ask, “What is the point of it all?” — if we're just one more building block in the edifice of civilization — we know, deep down in our bones, that is not enough. That is not enough. It's inadequate. It's insufficient.

This is the exact question that Vincent van Gogh struggled with. During the summer of 1888, he was wrestling with the significance of his life and his work. Remember, he probably only sold one painting in his entire lifetime. He tried to find solace in the fact that artists participate in this long tradition, and the Romantics paved the way for the Impressionists, and so at one point, you can hear his struggle in letters that he writes to his brother, Theo. At one point he writes, “Painters – to take them alone – dead and buried speak to the next generation or to several succeeding generations through their work.” Now he's trying to comfort himself with the fact that he's contributing to this long-standing tradition, but he's got a nagging sense that this isn't quite enough.

The thought of contributing to the future of civilization comes as cold comfort, or maybe even a cruel joke, to the individual who disappears from this planet, no longer exists, and isn't around to see it. So van Gogh just couldn't shake this sense of a need for something more. And that search for meaning and significance would only intensify that summer into the fall and the remaining two years of his life. So again, he writes to Theo and says, “Yes, artists perpetuate themselves by handing on the torch, Delacroix to the Impressionists, etc. But is that all?” It's not enough for us as individuals.

So how does the professor respond to the humanist? Well, throughout Ecclesiastes, the author uses this phrase, “under the sun,” “life under the sun.” It recurs time and time again. What does he mean by that? Well, on the one hand, he's simply referring to life on earth. This is what life on earth looks like. This is what life is like under the sun. “Under the sun” refers to everywhere the light hits. So he's appealing to universal human experience. He's saying, no matter where you look, this is what you're going to find: You're going to find these conundrums, these enigmas, these inexplicable realities. But on the other hand, when he uses this phrase “under the sun,” he's also using it to refer to a perspective on life that doesn't take into account God. It's a perspective that is limited to life under the sun, with no regard for God who is above and beyond the sun, and that makes all the difference in the world. So the professor is saying, look, if you think you can derive lasting meaning and purpose based on what this world alone has to offer, you're kidding yourself. He's basically telling us, you need to get real. You need to get serious. You know, humanists think that they can derive meaning and significance through their life, their legacy, and their learning, but Ecclesiastes says, no.

First of all, just think about your life. The professor says, in verse 4, “A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.” What is the span of your life compared to the life of the universe? How old is the universe? I have no idea. You tell me. 13.7 billion years old? Maybe twice that? What is your life in comparison to 13.7 billion years? Your life is just a puff of breath. It’s just a fleeting moment. It's here one moment, gone the next. Your life is of no significance.

Or you say, well, my legacy. The professor says, the circumstances of human life repeat themselves. There's nothing new under the sun. Verse 9, “What has been is what will be.” And verse 11, “There is no remembrance of former things.” How much do you remember about your great great grandparents? Come on, they're family! They're your family! You wouldn’t be here without them! You don't know anything about them, do you? It's the same with us. No one's going to know. No one's going to remember. Let's say that you put your name in print. Let's say you go viral. Let's say you see your name in lights. Your name is inscribed on the façade of a building. Who's gonna care 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 1000 years from now? Nobody's gonna know. Nobody's gonna care.

And do you really think that your causes are really going to make that much of a difference? You think you can save the world from environmental devastation? Can you prevent the next wildfire in Los Angeles? If so, what difference does it make? Do you realize that our sun is dying? Eventually our sun is going to run out of fuel, and then what? It's going to explode into a red giant. It'll destroy Mercury, Venus, Earth. The whole earth will be engulfed in flames. Nature doesn't make any progress, the professor says. The sun rises; the sun sets. The wind blows south and north and around and around. And my favorite is verse 7: “All streams run to the sea” — all the streams in the world, they run into the sea — “but the sea is not full.” It's never enough.

Well, you might say, even if our life and our legacy is insignificant, we still value human learning. But no, the professor says even that is a chasing after the wind. For in much wisdom there's much vexation, and we all know in our heart of hearts this is true, because the more you gain knowledge, the more you realize how little you know. Life is a mystery. And he says in verse 18 that an increase in knowledge only increases sorrow.

So you see, this is an incredibly devastating critique of secular humanism. If this world is all there is, then do you realize that that means that everything we give ourselves to, everything we commit ourselves to, everything we sacrifice, everything we build, all of it is like building little sand castles on the seashore. Eventually everything — no matter how noble, no matter how valuable — everything you've ever loved, everything you've ever labored for is going to be washed away by the waves of time.

Hedonism

Now I spent a little bit more time on humanism, as I said. Let me run more quickly through the other two. The humanist says, I'm going to rely on human values and the power of human ingenuity to make the world a better place. The hedonist, by contrast, says, you know what, there really is no point of life. It's all meaningless. Therefore, I'm just going to pursue a life of pleasure. And it doesn't necessarily have to be sensual. You could say, well, I'm going to commit myself to loving my family or reading books or enjoying the beauty of nature. But the professor of Ecclesiastes says, nope, that also is not going to be enough. Verse 8, “All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” It's never enough. And you see, if you believe that this world is nothing more than the accidental collision of atoms — that human beings are just a random chance event — then there really is no meaning or significance to anything, including our pleasure.

C.S. Lewis argued for this in 1948 in a little essay. He said, if you believe that human beings are a result of this accidental collision of atoms and that there is a natural explanation for everything, well then it steals your ability to have any real pleasure or to derive any joy from anything, because at the end of the day, you know it’s all just an illusion. He offers some poignant examples. Let's say you fall in love with a girl. Well, Lewis writes,

You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes.

Why don't you bring that up next time on date night? Or how about this. You like listening to music?

You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.

See, unless you realize that there must be something more than life under the sun, you'll be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.

Existentialism

So the professor rules out humanism, he rules out hedonism, and then he rules out existentialism. Now the 20th century existentialists like Sartre and Camus said that life is meaningless because death destroys everything. Nothing can escape the grip of death. But rather than succumb to despair, the existentialist said you should dare to live. Dare to live as if there's meaning and purpose, even though there's not. Defy the senselessness and the cruelty of life in this world. Take responsibility for your actions, and then you will be able to live a truly authentic life, even if, at the end of the day, it is absurd and illogical.

Now I think the best expression of this thought came in the book that Camus wrote in 1947 called “The Plague.” He writes about a city on the Mediterranean that goes into quarantine, goes into lockdown, because a plague creates a pandemic. And this is a story, therefore, to which we can all relate given our recent experience with a pandemic. But you see, the plague in Camus' novel is meant to serve as an allegory for the human condition. Camus rejects belief in God. He believes that human life is absurd because we all live under the sentence of death, and sooner or later, we're all going to die. And therefore he suggests that this is what life is like. Life is like a prolonged period of quarantine. Life is like living through a pandemic, where you're living in exile. You're cut off from the things you enjoy. You're cut off from the things that actually bring meaning and purpose and happiness into your life. And in the end, everything that matters is going to be obliterated by death.

Camus says, but even if death renders our lives meaningless — even if there's no escaping this pandemic — it's more noble to fight suffering and death rather than to give into it. And in the final analysis, he says the most that you can hope for while you're living in quarantine is the experience of human love. That's your only shot at happiness. But he says, at best, that is only a consolation prize, because eventually death will strip away everything and everyone you've ever loved. So he ends the novel by saying that our joy in this life is always imperiled because of the plague — because of the threat of the nothingness of death. It never disappears for good. It may remain dormant for a while, but eventually, it's going to resurface. Now that is pretty depressing stuff, but that is 20th century French existentialism for you.

The Sole Answer

So the professor of Ecclesiastes is trying to show us that all of these responses to the problem of the human condition are inadequate. So what's he trying to do? He shows you that humanism, hedonism, existentialism don't work. And it might seem like he's driving you to despair. He keeps pushing, and he's pushing, and it seems like he's driving you to despair, but that's not actually what he's doing. He's purposefully polarizing you. Do you realize that? He's knocking out all of these potential options in the middle in order to polarize you. He's not going to let you stay where you are. You have to realize that on the one hand, you can accept that there is no meaning to life — everything is illogical or absurd. But you see, he's not trying to leave you with nothing. Rather, he's trying to push you to the one sole answer, which is God. He's forcing you to make a choice: Either nothing matters or everything matters, because of God.

So let me just very quickly close by by thinking through the implications of this if you're not yet a Christian, and the implications if you are a Christian. See, if you're not yet a Christian, there is a very good chance, whether you use this label or not, that you are a secular humanist, which means that even though you say you don't believe in God, you are living as if there is a God. You're living as if there really is something such as right and wrong or compassion and cruelty. But do you realize that if this whole universe is just an accident of blind natural forces, then right and wrong, compassion and cruelty, are meaningless? You have no basis for those distinctions. Why is it better to fight injustice and oppression? Who told you that? You may not realize it, but you are already living as if God is real. You're living off of borrowed capital. You are living off of God's resources without acknowledging God's reality — without acknowledging his lordship, his kingship over everything, including over you.

So what the professor does here is he challenges naïve skepticism. Don't be so naïve, he says. You’ve got to face the facts. There's no middle ground here. Either there is a God who gives our lives meaning, or else our life is a cruel joke, because everything you are, everything you've ever loved, everything you've ever done is just a waste. It's all meaningless, vain, and futile. You can't have it both ways. If you're trying to sit on the fence, this professor is going to knock you off the fence. You've got to choose. You've got to make a choice.

But if you are a Christian, you also have to admit that life under the sun is a baffling enigma. There are so many things that we can't understand. Most of the time it doesn't make any sense, but that's why the professor not only challenges naïve skepticism, he also challenges naïve optimism. He wants Christians to get real, too. But you see, here's the wonder of the gospel. Ecclesiastes is never quoted in the New Testament, but there is an allusion to it, and it comes in Romans 8. When Paul refers to the curse that has fallen on all of creation because of humanity's rebellion against God, all of creation has been subjected to futility. That's what life is like under the sun. And that same word, “futility,” in the Greek is the word that means vain, vanity, meaningless.

And what Paul, therefore, is telling us is that God has entered the world, this fallen world — this seemingly vain, purposeless, meaningless world — God's entered it in the person of Jesus. Which means that Jesus has not only experienced the futility and the frustration of human life, but Jesus experienced the ultimate senseless vanity of dying a nonsensical death on a Roman cross. What was the point of it all? What was the point of torturing and executing an innocent man on a cross? No point that we could see. But do you realize that Jesus has so much weight, so much life, so much substance, so much solidity to him that not even death could hold him down. Jesus slipped through the fingers of death. He blows a hole through death, and he opens up a way through the other side. He turns the brick wall of death into a doorway into a whole new world — the new world that God has promised. And therefore he is the one who gives everything we do now meaning, purpose, and significance.

That's why Paul ends his famous chapter on the resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15, by saying, “be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” If Jesus has been raised from the dead, then everything we do now matters. Nothing will be lost, nothing will be wasted, because this is not the end, and that is what gives meaning to everything.

See, either nothing matters or everything matters. We've got to choose. And we have to live in light of that choice. Either nothing means anything, or if Jesus has been raised, it means everything means everything. So what is the point? The point is Jesus, and all of our searching questions are meant to lead us to him.

Let me pray for us.

Father, we thank you for the professor of Ecclesiastes. We thank you that he is brash and he is bold and he tells it like it is. And he is relentless in the questions that he asks us, not to drive us to the point of despair but to lead us to one sole answer, which is Jesus — the only one who gives meaning to our existence, now and for eternity. And so we pray that you would help us to know how it is that we might embrace him more truly, more fully today so that we might discover and live out the meaning that only you can provide. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.

Sermons

Ecclesiastes: The Enigma of Life Under the Sun: The Question of Meaning

The Searching Question

The Superficial Responses

The Sole Answer