Introduction to Ecclesiastes

Introduction to Wisdom Literature and the Book of Ecclesiastes

Well, this morning we begin a new series. We begin a series on the book of Ecclesiastes. And my task this morning is simply to introduce the book. So this is not going to be representative of the tone or the approach we'll have week by week for, we'll probably occupy the rest of this year, maybe even the beginning of the next.

But rather this sermon will be far more of an introduction. There'll be a lot more prefatory material than you perhaps would want or feel comfortable with, but it's an opportunity to actually prepare.

And if I could put it this way, it's a way to begin to cultivate our appetite and perhaps even a way to begin to culture our palate. And what I mean by that is it's an opportunity for us to become aware of and sensitive to things that we'll continue to see week after week throughout the book of Ecclesiastes, in a way that is not typical for how we read scripture or how we approach the study of the Bible.

This is the first full series we'll have done in wisdom literature as a genre. Everything is always a scholarly bone of contention, including whether wisdom literature is an identifiable genre of scripture.

But I'll just take the traditional route and say that there is a genre that we can call wisdom literature. We've perhaps gotten the closest to it when we did the Songs of Ascent, from Psalm 120 to Psalm 134.

We've never done a full corpus, a full body of wisdom literature. Traditionally, there are five books that comprise wisdom literature in the scripture. Job, very significant how these all interrelate too, which I don't know if I'll have time to get at this morning.

But Job, the book of Psalms, the book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Solomon, the Song of Solomon.

Or Song of Songs.

So that's what we call the genre of wisdom literature in scripture. Now, wisdom literature has a unique format. And even within those five books, you'll see differences. The book of Psalms comprise of several books, and books that have been used for singing, for worship, books that contain stylized poetry, prophecy, all sorts of ways that windows and vistas are opened up into other genres and portions of scripture and redemptive history.

We think of the book of Job. This runs as a narrative interspliced with poetry, forms of direct speech. We have a book like Proverbs, really a collection of sayings, as well as long chapters describing virtue or giving wisdom that can be applied to life.

And then in some ways, as we'll see, Ecclesiastes being the counterpart to the book of Proverbs. Proverbs gives a constructive, optimistic picture about how to walk wisely. Ecclesiastes seems to be the other side of that coin.

Ecclesiastes is deconstructive. It rather pokes holes and pops balloons about our highest ambitions and attempts to organize life under the sun. And the Song of Songs, this mysterious romantic interchange, this dialogue between the beloved.

And we think of how that ends this corpus of wisdom literature. And I'm saying, because it's our first full attempt to embark on this journey of study in wisdom, we need to have a palette that's developed toward it.

Easy approaches must be rebuffed. A simplistic reading must die. And that's my hope simply this morning is to kill your darling attempt to simplify Ecclesiastes. It is a book that resists simplification.

Wisdom writing in general is resistant to reductionism or simplification. And Ecclesiastes is a very challenging book for this reason. I'll share some quotes to that effect later on. So having a sophisticated palette is actually just being a studious reader of the Bible.

It's actually a mature ability to discern and digest and apply God's Word. And when we're approaching wisdom literature, it requires wisdom. And wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord, a reverence for the Lord and a reverence for His Word, which means that we don't simply get to the yada, yada, yada of what's really going on in chapter one.

Yeah, I think I got the point of chapter two. If you're approaching Ecclesiastes like that, at any point, you're missing largely the thrust of Ecclesiastes, which, again, resists this very oversimplified way of reducing it to simply one point.

Or, yeah, I think I got it. By chapter three, I figured out the whole book.

No.

Just going through centuries of interpretation, it's hard to find any two alike. The book itself resists that. It's enigmatic. It doesn't mean it cannot be studied or understood. What it means is we have to have a palette that's able to discern the different notes, the quantitative proportions of what it's saying, the quality of its poetry, of its repetition, of its structure.

And I'm going to do that week by week, but I want to try to introduce you to that. If some of you are experienced drinkers, it's like, are we Reformed Baptists or Baptists? Let's say, oh, Pastor Ross is an experienced drinker.

No, don't go around saying that, but I'd like to think that my palette has grown accustomed over time to picking up notes. I'm not much of a wine atelier. I don't know much about wine. I don't think I could tell good wine from two-buck Chuck wine, but I know something of the world of scotch, and when you start out at the bottom shelf for something at the bottom of a budget, you tend to have two notes listed on the packaging, if at all, sweet, spicy.

That's about it. When you move towards your middle shelf, you'll get a few more notes. Sweet like almonds, spicy like white pepper. When you get to your top shelf, you begin to wonder, is this all some myth or can people actually get a palette that picks up on these notes?

Is this actually salesmanship or can your palette grow accustomed and sensitive to things like charred pineapple or the coconut husk in a room filled with chlorine from a hot pool? These are the kind of notes that you get on the top shelf, and what I'm saying is wisdom literature is top shelf scripture as far as what it requires of a patient reader and the reward of developing a palette that can discern those kinds of notes.

So my goal is sometime in 2027 when we end the book of Ecclesiastes, we've moved from the bottom shelf of approaching the study of Scripture toward the top shelf. There's notes and delicacies and sensitivities and wonders and rewards that we were not anticipating.

And that's the goal. How far we'll get in that goal may be a grasping or a striving after the wind.

We will see.

The Human Questions of Psalm 144 and Psalm 143

Well, I open the service with Psalm 144, 3 and 4. Lord, what is man that you take knowledge of him or the son of man that you're mindful of him? Man is like a breath. His days are like a passing shadow.

And then Psalm 143 beginning in verse 5. I remember the days of old. I meditate on all your works. I muse on the works of your hands. I spread out my hands to you. My soul longs for you like a thirsty land.

Answer me speedily, O Lord. My spirit falls. Do not hide your face from me. Lest I be like those who go down into the pit. Cause me to hear your loving kindness in the morning. For in you do I trust. Cause me to know the way in which I should walk.

For I lift my soul up to you. Roughly speaking, wisdom literature as a genre is occupied with the concerns I just read. Lord, what is man?

Who am I? Why am I?

Man is like a breath. His whole life, his whole existence is like a passing shadow. So what's it all for? And how should I walk? Cause me to know the way in which I should walk. I muse on the works of your hands.

Muse is such a wonderful word there. You think of in ancient Greek thought, the muses that inspire discovery or creativity. Amusement, that alpha privative, the refusal of thinking, of creating, of discovering.

I just want to be amused. I want to turn my mind off and be entertained. That's amusement, that's without musing. Then you go to a museum, what's that? It's a thinking place. It's a place I go to muse, to discover, to reveal, to understand something.

Wisdom literature is a museum. It's where we muse. It's where we think deeply. It's where we reflect on the work of God's hands. It's where we begin to not only ask, but attempt to answer the questions, what is man?

Why is man like a breath? In what way is life like a passing shadow? How should I walk?

What is true? What is good? What is beautiful?

And why is there such a thing as beauty? Where's it all going? What's it all for? That's roughly speaking what wisdom literature is concerned to contend with. So we're going to be looking at a series of windows in a museum called Ecclesiastes.

Gallery after gallery and window after window that brings us to see our lives in the world in an ever differing way. G .K. Chesterton once said of the Bible that the Bible opens the world through a hundred windows.

He was comparing that with paganism. He says that the pagans looked at the world through one window. The Bible gives us a hundred windows to look at the world. And what I'm saying is Ecclesiastes is the kind of part of the Bible that gives us not only windows into the world, but windows into our souls, windows into our life.

Some of those windows, frankly,.

Brothers and sisters,.

Are going to be uncomfortable to look through,.

As it should be.

Please, please, please do not undertake this series week after week by keeping the hard challenges of Ecclesiastes at a comfortable distance. These are windows to open up things about yourself, about what drives you, about the values you hold, about the deepest engines of motivation in your life.

And if you keep them at bay, you're keeping God's Word and God's work through His Word at bay. So don't do that. The big questions, the big windows, the big revelations. This is a very different genre than we're used to studying.

It's not the meat and potatoes of biblical narrative, where things are, relatively speaking, put right out in front. There is something ambiguous and enigmatic. It requires a sensitivity to poetic form and repetition and structure.

As soon as we think we've found our balance, Kohelet, the preacher, he's going to throw us off balance. There'll seem to be an apparent contradiction in much of what is said. We have to be studious enough to reconcile all of these things in our course of study.

And as a reminder, this is not some second-place form of genre, second-place form of biblical writing. As Christopher Watkin, I was reading a lot this past week, says there is no ground zero genre of the Bible.

This is not something extraneous on the side. Well, we have the main narratives. That's the meat and the potatoes. Ecclesiastes is nice. It's more of a luxury. It's nice if you have time to understand it.

The pastor said how hard it was. Eh, it's not for me. It's for someone, some academic out there. It's not for me. That's assuming that there's a main, central genre of the Bible, the narratives, maybe the gospels.

Everything else is ancillary to those. Second-place, diminished, perhaps even derivative. That's not the case. All of Scripture is inspired. All of Scripture is profitable. All of Scripture is the Word of God.

And so at the jot and tittles of even an enigmatic and difficult book like Ecclesiastes, we bend our knees and say, Lord, illuminate your Word to me. Help me to hide it in your heart, to turn it over in my mind.

Help me to become a sensitive and sophisticated reader of your Word, knowing how to rightly divide it, how to rightly discern and apply it. And that means even the genre of wisdom is something I have to get my hands around.

What are the conventions? What are the assumptions? What features and attitudes and perspectives uniquely belong to this genre of Scripture that are not as easily found in other genres of Scripture? And you'll find in doing this that the Bible, in all of these ways, is always seeking to work on not only our powers of reason, but even our powers of imagination.

That's a very uncomfortable thing for us to do, to read the Bible imaginatively. That sounds like a recipe for heresy. I hope looking through the windows of the Museum of Ecclesiastes will be an invitation to learn how to let the Scripture inform our imagination.

That is actually something that Scripture seeks to do. And so it doesn't just inform our powers of reason, give us algorithms to download into our rationality, but it actually begins to inform and substantiate a biblical imagination, a biblical way of thinking about the world, of seeing even beyond the world.

And as a result of these things,.

Our will is moved.

It's very important that we understand this. So, what you'll see in Ecclesiastes is wisdom literature as a whole, and Ecclesiastes, perhaps particularly, brings together what modern society always tends to separate.

Moderns like to separate worldly wisdom from spiritual wisdom. Wisdom literature does not do that. Wisdom literature is street smarts and heavenly glories. It holds both together. And so the goal is to become worldly wise through wisdom literature without becoming Mr. Worldly Wise Man from Pilgrim's Progress.

That's a challenge. That's always easier said than done. To become informed with this biblical worldview and know how to carry through life in a God-honoring and blessed way that bears fruit without becoming vain or of the earth, carnal in the sense of Mr. Worldly Wise Man, to be defined by that.

To be worldly wise is actually to be heavenly minded. Wisdom literature always holds these things together. Modern society, modern ways of thinking tend to drive these things apart. But at the same time, and again, here's another off-balance thrust, we need to avoid reading Ecclesiastes as if it was some self-help manual.

It is not. Wisdom literature is not a self-help manual. That's another mistake we moderns tend to make. Dilemma, problem, let me find the answer. Oh yeah, Ecclesiastes 3 had something to say about that.

This is not ask Jeeves for self-help. This is not what Ecclesiastes is. Today, the world is thirsty, is desperate for self-help. There's a self-help industry. In 2022, that industry raked in over $13 billion.

Moderns are desperate for self-help, for self-improvement. There was a New Yorker colonist who complained. He was pointing back to an old writer before the advent of the Internet age named Neil Postman who wrote a very important book on media ecology called Amusing Ourselves to Death.

And this New York colonist said, now we are improving ourselves to death. All this self-help, all this self-improvement, and we're more burnt out, more depressed, more miserable than ever. How could it be that a $13 billion industry has only added to the burdens of life rather than relieved them?

Has only increased or accelerated our tasks of depression and burden rather than alleviated them? So, perhaps more than ever, our society is hungry for wisdom literature. And again, this requires Christians to be sophisticated, sensitive readers of God's Word.

More than ever, we are surrounded by lives that are trying to make sense in a world that seems senseless to them. And yet, because eternity is in their heart, they know it has some sense. That's the frustrating and agitating thing.

That's the source of all depression. I can't make sense of what I believe at a surface level is senseless, but deep in my bones I know has a sense. Has a point, has a purpose. And I want help. More than ever, we find ourselves in a chorus of I spread out my hands to you, my soul longs for you like a thirsty lamb.

And brothers and sisters, we're dwelling in a thirsty land. Ecclesiastes, wisdom literature, the gospel that flows out of these things is living water. So we have to become not only sensitive to what God's Word has to say, but sensitive about the time and the place that we're receiving it.

What kind of world are we living in? To think that you can abstract yourselves from society as it is, from the factors and the influences of the world that we're living in is a fool's errand. Of course we're straddling all of the time the way that our society is, the way that things are formed.

How many of you right now have a smartphone in your pocket, in one of your pockets, right? We're constantly influenced and under the influence of the society around us. And our society is something that requires a certain perspective.

We need to understand the world that we are living in, the horizon of the world that we are living in, in order to rightly apply God's Word, not only to it, but to ourselves. We are not the referees. We are not neutrally detached or third-party observers taking the Word and applying it to the world out there.

We are in the world. We are of the world. God's Word is addressing us along with our society. We are far more like our society than we are like the lifestyles that wisdom literature is putting out for us.

It's really important we understand that. Otherwise, we'll close our ears to God's Word. We live in a burnout society. There's a German-Korean philosopher named Byung-Chul Han. You'll be hearing a lot of weird names this whole series.

And he has a whole book on this, this phenomenon of the burnout society. He says, we live in a competitive, service-oriented society that takes a toll on our lives. Rather than improving life, our fascination with multitasking and user-friendly technology and having a culture of convenience.

Everything is convenient. And every technology is allegedly going to bring even more convenience. We're actually producing disorders in life, ranging from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder.

In the sense of us as a society seeking more convenience, multitasking, we're actually becoming more disordered,.

Not more ordered.

And Han, in his work in this book, believes that it's an inability to actually make sense of or manage the bad things in life, the negative experiences in life. Because our whole age is characterized by this excessive positivity, universal availability of goods and services and technology.

You've got a problem? We've got an app for that. You've got a dilemma? Didn't you see the self-help ad after you watched your YouTube short? That's our society. That's a burnout society. That is going in the opposite direction of a book like Ecclesiastes.

That's going in the opposite direction of God's wisdom, what another philosopher, Hartmut Rosa, calls the uncontrollability of our world. Ever since the 18th century, we've been trying to employ a certain order in control through technology on the world.

It's what we have done since Babel. It's the outflow of the Cainite civilization after the fall in Genesis 3. This really is, as the preacher says, nothing new under the sun. One thing we moderns don't like is living in a world that is uncontrollable or not knowing when the day of trouble comes.

Perhaps even as Christians, we might know the big answers of why it comes and what God's purpose is in it coming, but that doesn't mean we actually invite it or walk wisely in the midst of it. Again, are our ears open, are our hearts open to receive what God's word has to say?

Our lives are being played out every day on the border of what we seek to control and what we cannot control. Because we want a world, as Rosa says, that we can control, we tend to encounter life and encounter experiences in life as objects that we can conquer or master or exploit.

I just need a higher form of technology. I just need more capital, more time, more money, more network. I can actually harness it all. I can actually contain it all. Surely, somehow we can control it all.

All of the tech billionaires that are investing so much of their portfolios into anti-aging research, I would just say, someone get them Ecclesiastes. Someone give them a book like Ecclesiastes. Because we cannot conquer or master or exploit the uncontrollability of life, the unpredictability of life, even life under the sun, we tend toward frustration, anxiety, anger, depression, despair.

We no longer know how to resonate with the very thing that Scripture is putting forth to us. Our ears, our eyes, our glowing screens have us attuned to society in this direction rather than open to God's path of wisdom as given in His Word.

So again, here we are in Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes has a lot to say not only about the burdens of life, the uncontrollability, the horror of life in its deepest throes and pains, but it also has a lot to say about the blessings and the glamours and the treasures of life.

That book I mentioned, and I'll move on from him, by Hartmut Rosa. He begins the book with a simple question. Do you still remember the first snowfall on late autumn or a winter day when you were a child?

He says, that was an unexpected gift. When you were a child and you had never experienced or at least remembered experiencing snowfall, that experience of snowfall was an unexpected gift. But we're living in an accelerating society now, and we no longer encounter life or the world in the sense of unexpected gifts.

Everything's a Google search away. Everything is something that can be not only exploited, but controlled. We're not able to understand life as gift or even experience the things of life as gifts. Everything can be neatly ordered, domesticated, rationalized, not just explained away, but experienced away.

Margins of experience. So the effect of this is the world becomes alienated to us, or perhaps better put, we become alienated to the world that God has made. As we saw from the Sermon on the Mount, we no longer pay attention to the lilies of the grass or look at the birds in the tree.

We don't infer the lessons we ought to learn from looking at the picture book of God's glory. We no longer ask the deeper questions in the museum of God's scripture. What is my life and where does it all go and how do I see the haunting glory of God in light of a world cursed by sin?

How do I reconcile that all together? We become alienated to the world, even in our alienation from God's wisdom. We become unconnected, indifferent, even hostile to experiences of life. Ecclesiastes wants to address all of these things.

And in a sense, all of scripture is, but what I'm saying is for a burnout society, for a society that is tax savvy and is allergic to the uncontrollability and unpredictability of life, the scriptures are a deep well for a thirsty land, a deep well for thirsty land.

If you want to live well in the fullness of what living well means according to God, you have to open up your ears and eyes in brand new ways as we go through Ecclesiastes. What we'll find in Ecclesiastes is both constructive and deconstructive.

And I use the word deconstructive there. Note, not destructive. It doesn't tear down, but it rather dismantles. It takes apart. It wants to build something by pointing out things, but it has far more to do with dismantling things.

If we could put it very crudely, Proverbs has a certain optimism about experiencing life and ordering your life according to God's wisdom. And again, speaking crudely, Ecclesiastes is very pessimistic about ordering your life.

And in wisdom literature, both of these things are held together. Now sometimes in a book like Proverbs, you have the contradictions held together. Answer a fool according to his folly, next verse. Do not answer a fool according to his folly.

You have to do the spade work. You have to figure out by wisdom how and when to apply it. And so also in Ecclesiastes, we'll find that there's a time for building, even as the book as a whole begins to remove and dismantle a lot of the things that we have built our lives with and upon.

And so Ecclesiastes is constructive, but a lot of its constructiveness comes by dismantling and taking apart so much of how we view and live our lives day by day. Again, this is where we have to be willing for the challenges to get uncomfortably close.

How willing am I for God's word for Ecclesiastes to actually near those vital nerves of my motives and ambitions, my goals and my values? Am I willing for it to get into the engine room, the boiler room of my heart?

Well, there's a contrast, and I want to be brief with this, but I think it's a good point. There is a contrast that I think Scripture holds out for us, and commentators pick up on this, Christopher Wright, Christopher Watkins, a contrast between Proverbs and Ecclesiastes that invites us to hold the both together.

And Ecclesiastes is largely deconstructive to what Proverbs is seeking to construct. Proverbs is your glass half full, life under the sun. Ecclesiastes is your glass half empty. That does not mean there's not elements of joy.

Some commentators say Kohelet, the preacher, introduced in verse 1, is actually the preacher of joy. He's the bringer of joy. That rings a little artificial to my reading, but I think the point is there.

He certainly understands something deep about joy under the sun, something that he invites us to understand and contemplate as well. So I don't take Kohelet, I don't take him to be the leader of some late 90s emo band who's just seen through it all with some sort of cold cynicism.

No, if anything, I see him as a realist who's actually understood and lived in God's wisdom. He really has seen it all. He really has done it all. He really has come to the hard and fast conclusions that are sure and trustworthy foundations to build your lives upon.

Christopher Walken puts it this way. You'll have to forgive him. He likes introducing philosophical figures, so just spit out those bones and we'll get to the main point.

He says this,.

Full-orbed biblical wisdom is found in the irreducible tension between Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, between constructing something, this optimism and vision for blessedness, and then the harsh reality of a fallen world and lives that are in constant decay, the uncontrollability, the unpredictability, the day of trouble that must come.

So there's an irreducible tension between Proverbs, speaking in this way, and Ecclesiastes, speaking in this way, between the positive vision of life and its ineliminable counter-testimony. Philosophically speaking, Proverbs is like Plato.

Everything has its place in the system. Everything works like it should. Nothing is lost. Nothing is obscure. Ecclesiastes, by contrast, is like Kierkegaard. The world is obscure, impenetrable, mysterious.

Any system or attempt to systematize it is laughably simplistic. It cannot account for the reality of the depths that they pretend to plumb. That's Ecclesiastes. Our theoretical paradigms of humanity, of society, of the world, almost work.

They almost work. They almost account for the way things really are and what it's like to experience them, but they never quite close the deal.

This is Watkins.

The world invites investigation, but sooner or later it always exceeds any attempt to exhaust it or to theorize it, whether it be the arts or the sciences. The modeled, that is life, the world, always exceeds the model.

And yes, that's even true, Ecclesiastes would say, of our reformed dogmatic models. Something about the grandeur and mystery of life exceeds even beyond that. If you understand reformed epistemology rightly, you'll understand all doctrine eventuates into mystery.

Never actually fully get behind the question, why, rather than why not. The bold juxtaposition of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Bible perfectly captures this irreconcilable experience. Here's what I'm saying.

It's almost akin to left brain versus right brain people. What I'm saying is the mode of our lives tends to be Proverbs dominant. I hope you've followed me up to this point. The mode of our lives tends to be an optimistic understanding that I can systematize an order and then, like pulling a lever, everything will work as it should.

I've actually controlled it, I've actually mastered it, I've figured it out, the equation is actually balanced. And Ecclesiastes comes and says, no, no, no. No, there's a mystery, an uncontrollability, an unpredictability to this all.

No amount of time, no amount of resources, no amount of wisdom or giftedness, no amount of skill can actually bring the answer, the wholeness, the solution, the satisfaction that you seek. So how do you reconcile that?

What do you do with it? It's irreconcilable. I'm saying, again, we tend to live our lives in the mode of a Proverbs dominant way of life, especially in our circles. Do this the right way, order things in this way, and everything goes well.

Some of you in your 20s, without even knowing it, you've adopted this mentality. I know the verses, I have the to-do instructions, and as long as I do it right, it will all work out in this way. And Ecclesiastes is breaking that glass emergency box and it's pulling the lever and saying, no, no, no, no.

There's so much chaos from our experience, from our perspective. There's so much that is unknown. Who can discern the way of God? Who has his mind? Who has been his counselor? We're always put back into the seat of Job in 38.

And remember, though it comes full circle in a Proverbs mind, in Ecclesiastes, you're never at full circle. Yeah, Job realized something about God. He learned something about himself. Yeah, he got children again and servants, but his first children are still dead.

That hasn't been erased. Ecclesiastes is very honest with life and life experience, with the things that haunt and hurt in ways that a Proverbs-dominant mindset and approach to life is not. It cannot be.

If we do things the right way, in the right order, it'll all work out. But Ecclesiastes says, how could you possibly conclude that? I hope I'm unsettling some people. That's my goal. So let's just, in the brief time we have left, let's look at Ecclesiastes 1, 1, and 2.

We'll get a few more introductory matters out of the way. Here's where I start, and these are the words you don't want to hear as a preacher about to begin a whole series on Ecclesiastes. It was said by Matthew Arnold, a writing called A Speech at Eton, 1879.

He says, the book of Ecclesiastes is one of the wisest and one of the worst understood books in the Bible. And I up here am humble enough to say I am not going to be able to figure it out and master it.

Many brighter, many wiser, many more faithful than I have attempted. And Matthew Arnold probably rightly says, no one's fully obtained or sees the vapor that is the book of Ecclesiastes. It simply resists those attempts to harness it, to explain it all, to systematize it.

We begin with Ecclesiastes 1, and perhaps the most important point I can make this morning is found in verse 2. But we'll begin with verse 1 and introduce authorship. Ecclesiastes 1, beginning in verse 1, 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 is Ecclesiastes? Who is the preacher, the son of David, the king in Jerusalem? And how are we to understand this term vanity, this repetitious phrase, vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities, all is vanity?