The Laborers' Podcast- Pleasure

Good evening, everybody. This is the Laborer's Podcast. This is the collaborative effort or work of the Truth and Love Network. Tonight, we have myself, Dan, the third-string quarterback over here, hosting in the absence of both Robert and Claude.

We have Tyler, who is representing the Bread of the Word podcast, Andy down on the bottom right, representing the God-Centered Theology podcast, and John, who is a pastor at Real Life Community Church in Iron Station, North Carolina.

It's good to see everybody here tonight. Tonight, we're going to talk about pleasure, especially from the book of Ecclesiastes. Tyler, you kind of put this together. You're going through Ecclesiastes on your podcast.

What Solomon Means by Pleasure in Ecclesiastes 2

So why don't you give us a little bit of background, why you picked this topic, where you got it from, all the pertinent background.

Information to kind of put us on the right track. Love to. So Bread of the Word as a podcast ultimately exists to go verse by verse through the Bible to look at how it applies to where we're living now, how God has revealed himself to his people, to his church.

And I found myself led to do Ecclesiastes at just looking at the books that we're afraid to read sometimes, that we're kind of intimidated by, but at the same time we're hungry for, that we want to hear that he's taught and explained.

And so I set out to start going verse by verse through Ecclesiastes probably about two months ago. And I came to chapter two, and there's a lot of good nuggets in chapter two. It's challenging at times.

It's hard sometimes. This is not a clean cut, everything is to be taken literally, necessarily passage, but Solomon is providing a very deep, prodding look at life under the sun, and the good things of life under the sun, and the things that are not so great, and the spots where life is great, and the spots where life makes no sense.

And when we come to chapter two, he's talking about pleasure. And I think as we look at our culture today, that's something we're still talking about is pleasure, is happiness. Everybody wants to be happy.

We want to feel good. We want this and that and all this. And oftentimes we find ourselves looking for all the same things as Solomon, asking the same questions as Solomon. I believe that the questions we're asking were asked by Solomon and answered by the word of God.

Sure. So I guess we'll kind of open it up here. We'll start going through our list of things we want to talk about tonight. We're going to start off by asking the question, what does Solomon here in Ecclesiastes two mean by pleasure?

And if we can contrast that or compare it either way with our modern definition of what pleasure means. So does anybody want to volunteer to go first or am I going to pick on someone? I'll do it. All right, John, take us away.

Man, I knew he was going to do that. I'm the only one on here who don't know how to. I don't know how to speak Hebrew or Greek. So you're all right. I assume we're starting two and two. Sure. I'm going to link the laughter with it.

I said of laughter, it is mad. And the pleasure, what is use? What use is it? I searched my heart, how to cheer my body with wine, my heart still guiding me with wisdom and how to lay a hold of folly till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during a few days of their life.

And just in that verse, I've always looked at it in terms of I've always looked at Ecclesiastes like Tyre is a difficult book. I see what is either the ravings of a genius or a cynical genius at times.

And I think some of the things he's talking about is the same principle that we say whenever there's things like there's pleasure in sin for a season. Does that make sense? He says the laughter is mad and of pleasure, what use is it?

And in the end, he continues down to call all these things vain and vanity. So I think that in this term, the way he's using pleasure is going to be in a fleshly or in some ways, maybe even a sinful nature.

What's your take on it, Dan?

Dan Burton.

I think he's describing things. Well, he describes one, two, three, four, about five things here. He talks about laughter, wine, building or construction projects, wealth. And he says down there at the bottom of towards verse 11, that he kept his wisdom about him the whole time.

So he's talking about things that can bring physical pleasure or a sense of satisfaction. And I think that that's kind of how we define pleasure today, although I think he's trying to get at it from a little different angle is he may define whether it's good or bad differently than our culture would at large.

Does your version have at the end of 11, nothing to be gained under the sun? I'm reading the ESB here.

Yeah, it says, and there was no profit under the sun.

So yeah, or it says, behold, vanity and striving after the wind, you know, is this to say that it's whatever this pleasure that he's talking about, even if it is attainable, it doesn't last. Does that make sense to then?

That's the way I've always seen it. I have a hard time. I have a hard time with this book a lot. Thank you, Tyler.

Yeah, it's kind of hollow, kind of on its own.

Well, I'll tell you where, so some years ago I had to preach when I was going to Emmanuel Community Christian College, they would make us preach from a portion of scripture every week that we didn't get to choose.

I would never preach out of the book of Ecclesiastes, but I had to preach out of Ecclesiastes a couple of times. And I've got a series of nearly a complete set right here on my bookshelf of a man named J. Vernon McGee.

Don't even know who he is. I don't I knew where I got the books when there was a gift to me. And I thought, let's see what J. Vernon McGee thinks about Solomon. And his take on Ecclesiastes was that you see how Solomon's life with all these wives and concubines that he had that were from different religions, how they had affected some of the way that he even spoke.

I don't know if J. Vernon McGee's take on Solomon, and he referred to him more than one time as cynical in this book. I don't know if that's the way that I would classify it, but I do see, especially when you get into the chapter three, that there's a kind of a cadence to the very first part of chapter three that almost does seem reminiscent of some kind of Eastern theology or Eastern ideology, I should say.

You see what I'm talking about? Sort of cyclical? Yeah, almost. I don't want to say yin and yang, but I mean, almost like some kind of hands from both ends back and forth, time to plant, time to pluck up, time to kill, time to heal, time to break down, time to build up.

You know, and some of these things, when you look at, you think that's not necessarily a time to love or not necessarily a time to hate anybody, you know, but it's written in there as if it is. I don't know how much of Ecclesiastes and Solomon's way of thinking was altered by the people that were in his life, but I think that the people that you are going through life with will alter the way that you look at some things, sometimes negatively.

Sure. Sometimes positively. So, I really wish you'd have picked on Andy. I wish, man. Andy, what's your thought?

He wanted me to get picked on first, did he?

I wouldn't even look at the screen. I know he's going to pick somebody else.

I saw the cup going up to your mouth, so I had to do something.

Well, I should have done something like, you know, like I'm losing internet connection or.

Something. You just got to sit really still, make it look like you're frozen.

Do the thing Robert does? Yeah.

If he's watching right now, he's going to get you for that one.

No, my wife would walk behind me or something.

Oh, then you'd be given away.

Yeah, that'd be terrible.

Freeze with the fan on.

Well, I'll jump in on this one. Ecclesiastes is a wonderful book. I love reading it and studying it. And as I was telling Tyler before we got started, it's very humbling. And to me, it really is sort of the anthem or the sheer textbook on the differences between a God-centered theology and a God-centered worldview and a man-centered theology and a man-centered worldview.

Because he never once says in the book of Ecclesiastes that if one is God-centered and seeking after God and looking to do things for God, if they attain any wealth or wisdom or things of that nature in seeking God's glory, that it's grasping after wind, it's striving after wind.

When you look at the overall context, when he talks about, for example, if you back up chapter 1 verse 14, where he says, I've seen everything that is done under the sun and behold all is vanity, vanity or empty, vapor, striving after wind.

You could translate that grasping after wind. It's really a silly thing when you think about it. But if somebody were to go outside in a very high windstorm and they're trying to grab the wind or hug the wind or somehow capture the wind as something you could actually hold or possess.

It's what he says all throughout the book is what man's efforts to have his pleasure to have it his way is like. So when you get to chapter 2 here and he says, come now I will test you with pleasure, enjoy yourself, but behold this is also vanity.

It's in that same context of the pursuit of pleasure from man's own purposes is grasping after wind. It's effortless because, excuse me, it's not effortless, it's a wasted effort because pleasure itself and joy and pleasure, something that's beautiful, something that's good to look at, something that would be good to have, wisdom, all these things are not evil in and of themselves.

It's what you're doing with them. Why are you seeking to attain them? Why are you using them? What's the chief end of your desire to have and to attain these things? And so I see it all throughout that if your goal for pleasure, if your goal for joy, if your goal for attaining things is for your own purposes, and when you understand the differences between the worldview that is dominant right now, that we're just a cosmic accident, we're random bags of gas and air and we're just somehow came to be.

For me, there's no reason to live at that point because what's the point? I mean all this horrible stuff that happens to you and you're just going to die one day anyway, but if all there is is now, why wouldn't you go after these things?

And that's sort of me is the thing, the pleasure he's talking about that's empty, that's worthless, is the pleasure of man for his own purposes.

Yeah, absolutely. It's almost like you look at each one of these things. We'll try out laughter. Laughter is a good thing. We've been laughing it up already. Wine is a good thing. You go to the Lord's table and you receive the grace of God through the sacrament.

Beautiful thing. Building stuff is wonderful. They built the temple. Christ is building his kingdom. Wealth is not a bad thing when used properly. All these things, it's a matter of where you're anchored at.

These things in and of themselves are fleeting and holler. Tyler, you had a question on here that I'm curious about. I'd like to hear your thoughts on. Does the background of Solomon show us the error of seeking after empty pleasures?

Well, with that, let me refer to a passage from Deuteronomy, which I find very on point. It was written quite some time before Solomon, but this is regarding God promising to appoint a king over Israel.

In Deuteronomy 17, verse 14, he says, when you have entered the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and are living there, you may say, I want to have a king over me like all of the nations around me.

In that event, you must appoint as king the one to whom the Lord your God will choose, and he must be one of your kinsmen. This king you appoint over you. You are forbidden to appoint a foreigner over you who is not your kinsman.

However, he is not to acquire many horses for himself or have the people return to Egypt to obtain more horses in as much as the Lord has told you never to go back that way again. And likewise, he is not to acquire many wives for himself so that his heart will not turn away, and he is not to acquire expensive quantities of silver and gold.

When he has come to occupy the throne of his kingdom, he is to write a copy of this Torah for himself in a scroll from the one of the priests that they use. It is to remain with him, and he is to read in it every day as long as he lives so that he will learn to fear the Lord his God and keep all the commandments of this Torah and these laws and obey them so that he will not think he is better than his kinsmen, so that he will not turn aside either to the right or to the left from the commandments.

In this way, he will prolong his own reign and that of his children in Israel. And when we juxtapose that passage about not acquiring many horses and not acquiring much gold and meditating on the law constantly with this list we have in Ecclesiastes of what he's done, I've acquired this.

I had more sheep than anyone in Jerusalem, and I had all these servants and all of this and all of that. We have this, A, he's in direct violation with what God has decreed a king to be, and two, it's demonstrating a heart content here that's problematic, that we are looking at someone who is trying to fill this void with other things, that he's taken what God has made, he's made about him.

He's taken all of these good things that God has made, such as gold and silver and sheep, and he's made it all about Solomon. He's made himself a little god on his throne, and all these things exist for his own pleasure, for his own glory.

I think we have to take that into account when we read Ecclesiastes, that we're reading the account of someone who at some point had to come to terms with the fact that he is not the center of the universe, and that the world does not exist solely for his pleasure.

I want to jump in on that one. That's a great point, because when you look at chapter one of Ecclesiastes, verse 18, he talks about how in much wisdom, there's vexation of spirit. He who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

I would venture to say, I don't know that I'd go as far as to say narcissist, but I think it's very clear that Solomon dealt with arrogance a lot, and if you think about people that are very wise, very smart, very talented, especially in the arena of emotional intelligence, knowing how to act, which strings to pull, how to assess situations, and just all those things, the high temptation that those people have is one of arrogance and thinking that they've achieved what they've done and not God.

Solomon, if you were to read through this book and let that be your background, because the question's about Solomon's background, understanding who he was and what he struggled with, these pages of Ecclesiastes make so much more sense.

I get it. That's a guy that would struggle with that, and he struggles with it throughout the whole book. He said, I'm trying and doing all these things, and I get down to chapter 12, the end of the book, he says, the end of all things is this.

Just obey God. Stop doing it for yourself. You're wasting your time. I feel like Solomon's saying, take it from a guy who's smarter than everybody else in the room and knew it and could prove it by everything I accumulated, and I'm the best king ever, and I'm telling you it was all worthless because I did it for wrong reasons.

So his background, I think if it was anyone else other than Solomon that writes this book, it doesn't hit us the same way. You know what I mean?

I get what you're, absolutely. I've heard it said by one author about Augustine from the 300s that he's like an aged bishop who's handed us a map of all those roads disappointed, and I think that also fits with Ecclesiastes, that these are all the roads that Solomon has taken to try and make himself validated, to try and fill this sinful void within himself with what ultimately can only be satisfied by Christ, by the fullness of Christ.

So I want to add to that. I think you're right on the money. Like I said, I do not care when it comes to studying the book of Ecclesiastes, and even the Song of Solomon, the whole book, I just went through them both in my devotion.

I think it was about a week ago I finished up Song of Solomon, and I was like, you know what Lord, in my prayer time I said this is evidence that man did not write this book. We would have left some of this out.

We've left a lot of this out, but anyway, I digress. I think if you were to look at the opposite of an intelligent man, also a very intelligent man, but a man whose intelligence and his life goal is centered on the personal work of Christ, I think you see that in brother Paul, and then you see the opposite of this in 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

Every time I read the book of Ecclesiastes, I think about 1 Corinthians chapter 15 all the time, and it's because you read in Ecclesiastes, I said at the end, to fear God and keep His commandments or keep the law is the whole duty of man.

It's like that's all you've got, right? The whole duty of man is to keep, is to love God, keep the whole duty of man. You look at 1 Corinthians 15 and 19. If in Christ, if in Christ have hope, well, get 18.

Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we're of all people most to be pitied. In the book of, in King James Version, I think it says, if I have hope, if being in Christ, I have hope in this world only of all men most miserable.

I think that's the way the King James puts it. I don't have it right in front of me. Then you get on over to, I lost my place. I think it's 30, 32, maybe. Is that right? What do I gain? I speak in human, speaking, I fought with the beast of Ephesus.

If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. His hope being on the resurrection, Paul's hope that kept him, kept him pursuing after the Lord and kept him, I don't want to say kept him in the faith because I think that'd be an error in my thinking or it would be taken wrong.

Everything Paul does, he seems to weigh it out against eternity. This is just a, this momentary light affliction is, is not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed in us. Everything Paul seems to go through, he seems to go through it with his eyes fixed on how that's weighted with eternity to come.

And you see an absence of that with Solomon. You see a total absence of that with Solomon all together where it's just like, it's all I got. I got a thousand brawling wives. I'm living in a thousand corners on the roof.

I have no, no place to be tonight because who in the world wants that many women to have to argue with at one time? And can you say amen? Say oh me, I'm just telling you. That's, that's what I always think about when I'm reading Ecclesiastes.

I think what a hope we have in Christ and Solomon for all his intelligence has missed this, this very evident truth. This is something David got all the time in his Psalms. When you read his Psalms, his hope of continually being on the resurrection and continually being on the Messiah to come.

Anyway, I'll take a break.

Thank you.

Good stuff. So we've been talking about what, what it means for, for pleasure to be hollow, for it to be vanity, grasping at the wind, like trying to climb up a sand rope or, or something to that nature.

Christ as the Substance of True Pleasure

So what would give it some substance? What would give those, those things, the things that he tried to find pleasure in, what would give us, we hit on it a little bit but I'd like to hit on a little bit more and then talk about how that, how we approach pleasure and the things of this world.

How, how does, how does our approach show us an inside of our own hearts? So number, number, cause I said a bunch there. So number one how can we find what, what makes the things of this world not hollow?

Like in what way can we experience the world around us and it not be vanity or chasing the wind? And I think we all brought up that Christ needs to be at the center. He's what gives people meaning. He's what gives substance to the world because he is the creator.

So can we expand on that and then show how that reflects or shows or exposes our own hearts when we examine ourselves against those things, you know, how we interact.

With the world around us? One of the simple ways to think about it, it would be the way I instruct my daughter. One of the things I've heard my entire life is you can be whatever you want to be, grow up, be whoever, be whatever you want to be.

Doesn't matter what it is. You pursue it and you, you work hard. It'll somehow come. We hear all these just Christian and non-Christian cliches that just drive me up the wall. And if I hear one more person that professes to be a Christian, use the word karma, I may have a Scanners movie type head explosion because I'm just sick of hearing it.

But they say, you know, grow up, be wherever you want to be. I have started to adopt a different way of approaching it that I believe is God-centered. I say, Hannah, you need to find out as quickly as you can in life why God created you, the purposes for which he created you, what he wants you to pursue because you'll save yourself a lot of heartache because not in every way.

And I think we need to be careful when we start comparing ourselves to biblical characters because they are who they are and you are who you are, but they will see similarities. And to some degree I can see some of myself in Solomon because the first full decade of my adult working life, I was pursuing my own thing.

I was wanting to be a food line. I mean, I had it planned. I was going to be a food line store manager by this time, a director of operations by this time. I had it all mapped out and probably somewhere around the age of 34, I was going to be retired.

Well, I'm 39 and I'm still working. So that didn't go well, but it was based. I do what? Yeah, it was painful, but my whole pursuit initially was based on the false idea that I could be anything I want to be.

And that pursuit of pleasure, that pursuit based on desires in my own heart, which getting to your question was that tells about our desires in our heart was selfish. I wanted to make money. I wanted to be important.

I wanted to be all these things. And it was pride involved. A lot of different sins involved. And as Dan and all of us have hit on, all of those things in and of themselves are not necessarily evil by themselves.

There's a lot of Christians that have a lot of money, and I'm thankful for those Christians because God uses them to fund things that we need funded. Sure. Having notoriety isn't necessarily a bad thing.

God does raise up some Christians and puts them in a public place to be quote unquote famous or whatever you want to call it. I prefer my little background behind the scenes kind of life. But what changed was to make this more extreme long story short, when I realized that I need to be pursuing what God created before, all of a sudden the pleasures I found in life and the things I enjoyed, I enjoyed on a totally different level.

Sure. Because I was pursuing them from the correct starting point. And I think that's what a lot of what Solomon is getting at. If your starting point is incorrect, you're never going to.

End up at the right destination because you didn't start from the right place. Right. That's good.

Romans 11 speaks to this a little bit, just building off of what Andy was saying. Romans 11 33 says, Oh, the depths of the riches and the wisdom and knowledge of God, how inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable are his ways for who has known the mind of the Lord, who has been his counselor or who has given him anything and made him pay it back for from him and through him and to him are all things to him be glory forever.

Amen. That ultimately, everything is his. It says in Psalms that the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. That there's a common phrase in the Old Testament, everything on the earth, under the earth and above the earth.

We're talking about the whole scope of creation, that everything is made by God and for God. And so for us to truly enjoy what these things are, is to recognize from whence they came, to truly have a concept of what is pleasure, who made pleasure, who made joy, and does it reflect the God who made it?

God made, God is a God of pleasure. When we read in Ephesians about the pleasures of God, God takes pleasure in what he does. It says in Psalm 115, that our God is in the heavens and does as he pleases.

So when we take pleasure in things, there's an element of it reflecting that we are made in God's image because God is a God of joy, a God who takes pleasure in what he does. And we can abuse that, absolutely.

But when things are balanced, when things are centered right, we take joy in a way that is reflective of the God that we serve. Does that make sense?

It does. I was thinking about, Brother Andy was saying, hey, if you've ever worked for a large company, and I've had the benefit of working for large companies, there's something that they tell you almost immediately when they give you your plot number or your badge ID number or whatever.

You're just a number. And if you were going to, by Thursday, they'd have somebody by Monday fill your spot, and he would be able to do exactly what you're doing. And while that's true, and it is a little cynical, but it's 100 true.

You're not unique in the fact that you're the only person who can do your job most of the time. I would say there's probably very few people in the world who have that. So if you were looking at it from Solomon's point of view and trying to build it, he felt, I'm sure, that he was uniquely qualified, and indeed he was so, to be the king of Israel.

At the same time, he wound up dividing the king by the policies that he instituted the kingdom into two different kingdoms, right? So yeah, Solomon was the last king over the United Israel before the Babylonian exile.

I'm not mistaking it with some of his policies that initially caused the division because of the financial strain that he put on them. And again, I always think of 1 Corinthians when I'm reading that.

And when I look at 1 Corinthians chapter 3, we'll start in 10. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder, I lay a foundation. If someone else is building upon it, let each one take care how he builds upon it, for no one can lay a foundation other than what is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

Now, if anyone builds on foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man's or each one's work will become manifest, for the day will disclose it because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one of us has done.

Obviously, things like stone and gold wouldn't burn up, but wood and straw would burn up. And I think about Brother Ray Comfort. I don't know if any I enjoy it. He says that his hobbies that he likes are always ones that bear fruit.

He doesn't like hobbies that don't bear fruit. So, he raises chickens because they lay eggs, and he likes trees because he can eat apples and oranges or whatever grows in San Diego off of maybe coconuts.

I don't really know. And his life bears that out. He is continually sharing the gospel because he wants his life to bear fruit. And when I heard him say that one time, I thought, wow, if you lived your days with the thought about eternity, the way Paul seems to weigh that out, then the foundation that you continually lay your work on, you would choose something that wouldn't be as easily burned up, and things that might not pay off as fast as like maybe some of the things that Solomon was looking to pay off.

Because oftentimes, we think about things that are successful, things that we see in our own lifetime, but this is not about us. As Brother Tyler said, this is about Jesus. Right? So, our lives, our lifetime in the eyes of the Lord is less than a breath.

James would say, it's here, you know, it's a vapor. It's gone before, it's gone in the morning. The sun gets up high in the sky, it's going to burn it off. So, maybe the things that we lay, we never see the fruit come of them.

And if Solomon was looking for fruit or looking for some kind of return on his life, then he would have been fishing in an empty pond.

So, is there, would you say, is there a type of pleasure that is worth focusing on?

Absolutely.

And if so, could you get kind of practical for us and just like point at something?

He who wins souls is wise.

There you go.

If you're going to find pleasure in something, you ought to find pleasure in seeing the fruit of the church grow. You ought to see Christians be manifested. You do everything you can do to see what Jesus has told you to do.

And in doing so, I think you find an eternal way to glory, even in here and the world to come. Jesus said that nobody has given up anything that I haven't rewarded him in this life and in the life to come.

That's what he told Peter and them whenever they were talking about having left their families to follow him. So, I do think that there's pleasures in serving the Lord, but they're definitely not going to be carnal.

They're not going to be things like some of the things that Solomon's talking about. It's not going to be like chasing the wind because you've got the evidence of scripture to back up that you're in the right standing.

There you go. Somebody needs to talk to Claude about leaving us that organ. Somebody needs to talk to Claude about leaving us that organ when he goes away. We need to play some organ on top of that.

Goodness gracious.

I would take it one step further in that the man-centered and understanding of pleasure is striving after wind. You're trying to constantly... It's so insane in my mind. I really ought to get my wife to record me next time we have a windstorm, be out there trying to grab the wind and be like, this is Ecclesiastes!