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Vanity. Futility. Frustration. All words that describe life in the fallen world. Is there any hope? Can joy be found on this earth? What does it matter?
Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.
Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Ebenroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Ebenroth.
Did I say Eben-broth? Still a little under the weather. You could pray for me. Who knows what my lungs are like after the COVID stuff. I�m on some antibiotics now. I was hoping to be out and ride bicycles in the nice weather.
This weekend is supposed to be like 95 or something. I love riding when it�s super hot and just, you know, go out and ride three hours and lose three pounds. That�s what I like. If I were to play something for you, what would you think of if I played this?
You know what I�d think of? I would think of last night when my wife and I were at rumba class. Every Thursday night, seven to eight o�clock, we have ballroom dance lessons. I�m still not really any good.
You know, they�ll say things like, �Don�t do this robotic thing and act like you have no hips. And then I usually just blurt out in class, �Why are you looking at me But it gives us something to do, and it�s fun to dance with your wife.
And you know what, husbands, wives like to dance. You probably want to have a happy wife, right? I know you want a holy life more than a happy life, a wife and life, but you have to lead on the dance floor, men and women.
You have to follow. Isn�t that hard in marriage? It�s hard to lead if you�re a man, it�s hard to follow if you�re a woman. So we do the dance. And so at least for an hour a week, I�m leading properly, she�s following properly, and then many other times.
You can always write me, mike at nocompromiserradio .com. Hopefully the assurance book will be out soon, doing some more American gospel stuff, planning things out, but you never know if you don�t have any lungs to do it, how does that work?
Hopefully make it to California this summer, and this fall see the new little baby, finally a grandpa. I wonder what kind of grandpa I�ll be. I was crazy dad when the kids were younger. Kim was a much better parent when the kids got older, i .e., how to take them to driving lessons.
How to give them driving lessons. Oh man. Well, I want to talk a little bit today about the meaning of life. Just a short, small little subject, doesn�t really translate into relevance into your life.
Just a tiny little thing, you know, the meaning of life. Okay, let me ask it this way. Do you, dear listener to No Compromise Radio, I didn�t say pactum listeners, I didn�t say heidel cast listeners, sometimes I, well, I listen to all the heidel cast, but sometimes I listen to heidel cast and then I�m on the intro saying something.
Tell me something good. Anyway, you never know, might make it back, might make it back to heidel cast. Maybe one day if Scott Clarke is minding his manners, we�ll have him back on No Compromise Radio, but I�ll have to call his agent.
What�s the meaning of your life? Why are you on this planet? There are a lot of people on this planet. Why are you? Why do you exist? Why were you created? I could put it this way. Does your life matter?
To whom does it matter? Important questions? I think right up there. If not the ultimate questions, penultimate questions. Source unknown. Life�s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, ouch, but a lot of truth to it from a certain perspective. Mark Twain. You like Mark Twain, don�t you? Most of it, maybe some of it. A myriad of men are born.
They labor and sweat and struggle. They squabble and scold and fight. They scramble for little mean advantages over each other. Age creeps up on them, infirmities follow. Those they love are taken from them and the joy of life is turned to aching grief.
Death comes at last, the only unpoisoned gift ever had for them by the earth. They vanquish from a world where they were of no consequence, a world which will lament them for a day and forget them forever.
Man, that�s sobering, isn�t it? That�s why you turn to this radio station, this podcast, these iTunes, because it�s positive. It�s encouraging. It�s uplifting. While there�s no answer between those two men, at least they�re admitting the problem.
They�re honest. So many people today in this world try to mask the problem of the meaning of life and the frustration of life by fake smiles, white picket fences, as it were. You ask them how they�re doing, �Good, good.
How are you? Good. Good, and you That�s what we say in New England. �How are you? Good, and you? Good, and you? Good, and you What does the Bible say? If you had to pick a book of the Bible that would address this, that you could get some answers from, you would go to the book of Ecclesiastes.
Good thinking. We�re going to talk about the book of Ecclesiastes today, and I want you to know my thesis statement from the very beginning. Your life can have meaning, but that meaning can�t be found in life.
There it is. I probably stole it from someone. Your life can have meaning. It should have meaning, but you�re not going to get the meaning of life from your own life, in your own life, or in this world.
It�s going to have to be from your Creator, the triune God. You see the world, you see the problems, you feel the pain, frustration, vanity, futility, and you think, �You know what? I despair. But I don�t want you to stop there.
I want you to keep going. Let your despair drive you to the God who made you. I think you will be able to find, because of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, that your life, even though hard, and probably will get harder, can be full of joy, satisfaction, fulfillment, because of the triune God, because the Father sent the Son by the Spirit.
I think you�re going to be able to do that. I think that�s what Ecclesiastes is going to teach us. I think really, in the midst of all the vanity of vanities, it�s going to teach us to have our eyes go higher than this world, to really look up and not within, not to look just out, but up.
If your life is basically not looking above the horizon, it�s going to be really, really bad. This happens to all of us, and so that�s why it�s good to go to the book of Ecclesiastes, which really helps reorient you rightly.
Is there more to life than what life gives? Is this it? I think Ecclesiastes answers it. Ecclesiastes 1, the words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. The preacher. You could look at the Hebrew word kohelet, and it means somebody who preaches.
They gather information, they gather stuff, and they give it to a congregation. They teach. They gather and proclaim. This is not a name of a person. This is a title, and Luther translated this as preacher.
Goes back to Martin Luther�s day. We use the word for this book, Ecclesiastes, and you think about ecclesiology, it has to do with a local church, the assembly. This is someone given a title who speaks to the assembly.
Who speaks to the assembly? The son of David, king in Jerusalem. You can argue all you'd like about is Solomon here the writer? Why is Solomon writing? Should Solomon even be the writer? How can this be Solomon?
And simply it says in verse 1, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. So technically speaking, there's not a personal name, so you could call this book anonymous if you want, technically speaking. But this person, they obviously knew what they were talking about.
They were very wise. They were prosperous. And I think you could probably say, Solomon was those things, and he was the son of David and king in the Middle East, right? King in Jerusalem. Some people think Solomon, when he was a young man, wrote Song of Solomon.
When he was raising sons, he wrote Proverbs, and then after he had a lot of problems and repented, he wrote Ecclesiastes later in his life. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter to me because the Spirit of God wrote this.
That's not my main problem. You know, you start studying the Bible, and then you start going down rabbit trails that you don't need to go down. Should you be affirmed and confirmed in your mind, hey, yeah, this is the Bible, yes.
But we're not talking about, oh, the Jews didn't recognize it, and it wasn't in the Septuagint, and Josephus said it wasn't in the canon. We're not talking about canon. We're talking about, okay, who wrote it?
So do you care if Solomon wrote it or not? I personally think Solomon wrote it, but I'm not going to die on that. I'd die for, is Ecclesiastes in the Bible? Yes, of course. And when you come to Ecclesiastes, probably the best thing you can do is you can say, how do I interpret this genre?
That's the best thing to do. How do I interpret this genre, where it's provocative, there's lots of wisdom stuff here. Remember, it's wisdom literature. He gives some specific instances compared to the Proverbs, which might be general.
And so don't let that catch you off guard. He's got pithy sayings and sarcastic things. When you come to any book of the Bible, you should say, other parts of the Bible that speak to the same thing will help me interpret things that are difficult.
That's the analogy of scripture. You look with the passages of scripture, comparing the clear, comparing the difficult with the clear. You say to yourself, there's one divine author with all the books of the Bible.
He doesn't contradict himself. And therefore, the general sense of the meaning of scripture, knowing that there's a theological system involved, you can't come to the Bible without presuppositions. And then you say to yourself, this is all driving me to the Lord Jesus.
This is the scope of scripture, scope of scriptura. And you think, okay, what does this have to do with Christ? And what kind of Christocentric interpretation does the Bible even have? Nehemiah Cox said, the best interpreter of the Old Testament is the Holy Spirit speaking to us in the new.
Latter texts shed interpretive light on earlier texts. And so we don't just stop with Ecclesiastes, in other words. We say to ourselves, there are more books of the canon. And that's how we're going to interpret the book of Ecclesiastes.
Certainly inspired, certainly in the canon, written by a king who knew what he was talking about. And if I were to look at the first chapter or two, you're going to see all kinds of problems. There's an analysis.
There's a diagnosis, and it's pretty bleak. There is going to be a solution toward the end of Ephesians, Ecclesiastes chapter two. But at the beginning, trouble, trouble, trouble. Why do they say trouble in Denmark?
There's supposed to be no trouble in Denmark. Why does it say trouble in Denmark? Vanity of vanity, says the preacher, Ecclesiastes one, two. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity. One, two, three, four, five, vanity.
Now that word vanity is ambiguous, it has ambiguity. And I think the writer knew that. So we're going to have to look at different context to know what he means by what he says using that word. It's used a lot, 35, 40 times in the book of Ecclesiastes.
In one sense, it means like a riddle. It's a puzzle. You look at what's going on in the world and you're like, you scratch your head. This is, this is, something's not right. And there's a struggle with there.
That's one of the ways you could translate it. The other way you could translate it, there's three ways. The second way is things are futile. They're frustrating. They're vain. There's no profit. And hence, vanity of vanities.
It's a meaningless world, an empty world, a frustrating world. Nothing seems to go the way it's supposed to go. And is it going anywhere? The days are consumed in futility. And then lastly, the word, kind of its origin to its root, it means transient.
It means fleeting. It means vapor, transience, passing away, things that don't last like breath. And it's like a wind, right? It's, it's here today. It's, it's gone tomorrow. Like a little puff of wind.
Or if you have, um, what are those bubbles that you would get at the dollar store? And it's got a little ring around the stick. You take the stick out and there's a little bubble, um, round area and you blow into that with all the goop on there and you blow bubbles.
And then the bubble floats for a second or two and then pops. That's the idea here. So it could mean, uh, perplexing, frustrating, or temporary. That's what we have to understand. And here in chapter one, verse two, he says, all of life, it's vanity.
Everything. It's all vanity. It's meaningless. Wow. Vanity of vanities. That kind of repetitions make, it should make you think, hmm, serious. It expresses absolute, right? Behold to the Lord, your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens.
That's everything. Jesus is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. So this is vanity of vanity. Just one big clump of vanities. Where's the answer found? Everything is vain. Everything's vain. Everything's frustrating.
Everything's fleeting. Then we're not going to get answers there. He's giving us a little hint. He's giving the preacher, the teachers, giving the class a hint. You're not going to find the answers in life.
You're not finding the answers to life in life. Not going to be found here. You're going to have to go somewhere else. And you kind of have my attention, Solomon, preacher, as the message Bible calls him, the quester.
He's on the quest. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? That's verse three. I ask you the question, if you're listening, all the work you've done. Think about the jobs you've had.
I started off, what was my first job? Catching crawdads. What we called affectionately Crawdad Creek. We'd have to wear shoes because it was stuff would poke your feet. You couldn't go barefoot. But you had to make sure you had socks on too because the leeches, if you didn't have socks on, would grab ahold of you at Crawdad Creek.
That's how bad we wanted to make money, catching crawdads. Then I became, I work on a farm and we would clear out bean fields and troughs and stuff like that, cattle troughs. And then I work for the phone company.
And then, and then, and then all these, what use is it? I want to ask you the question, what do you gain by all the toil at what you've toiled under the sun? What do you have to show for it? What do you have?
Has it contributed to the meaning of life in any way, shape or form? What advantage do you have in all the work that you do under the sun? Enya says. And I think we get a little hint here under the sun.
Used regularly, at least 25 times in Ecclesiastes. On this earth, on this fallen earth, what happens? I don't think this has to do with secular or sacred. I think this has to do with fallen under the sun, fallen.
This world has been affected by the fall. There's vexation. We, we believe in the reality of original sin creation. Romans eight waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God for the creation was subject to futility.
That's the exact word translated in the old Testament, Greek, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it under the sun. Remember the sin in the garden. I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing in pain.
You shall bring forth children to the woman. He said, your desire shall be contrary to your husband. He shall rule over you to Adam. God said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.
Cursed is the ground because of you in pain. You shall eat of it all the days of your life, thorns and thistles. It shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the plants of the field by the sweat of your face.
You shall eat bread till you return to the ground for out of it. You were taken for you are dust and to dust. You shall return under the sun. What's the gain by the way? I love the Bible for lots of reasons.
One of the reasons I love the Bible are these questions. These dissecting questions, these question of all questions, these $64 ,000 questions. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
Questions like that in the Bible. Those are important. What can a man give in return for his soul? Probing questions. How can man be in the right before God? How can he who is born of a woman be pure?
How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? Good questions. And the question here is, what does a man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun in this fallen world? Rhetorical question.
The Chicago Cook County sewer employee used to say something like this, allegedly. I dig the ditch to get the money, to buy the food, to get the strength to dig the ditch. What's the gain? What's left over?
What's the extra? What's the positive advantage? If you're not looking anywhere else, if you're just looking at this world and you don't have a divine perspective, you're smoked. Solomon, or the writer, goes on to talk about just cycles of vanity, cycles of futility, what some call sad rhythms.
Just back and forth and on and on. And nothing seems to have any gain, no gain. A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. Whether you believe the earth is six million years old, six billion years old, or seven 6 ,000 years old, the earth stays, generations come and go.
Vapor, meaningless. Sun rises, the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. Wind blows forth to the south, goes around to the north, around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits, the wind returns.
Comes around, goes around. It's like it's mocking us. It's like it's a broken merry-go-round. It's not so merry at all, is it? Sun rises, it doesn't even go anywhere. Back and forth, it goes back to where it was at the beginning.
Same, same, same. All the streams of the sea, they run to the sea. The sea's not full. I mean, you think it'd fill up by now, don't you? To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness.
A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Probably even better that I'm a little sick as I go through this, because my sickness could add to the just vanity of it all.
The wearisomeness of it all. The tiresomeness of it all. The laboriousness of this all. How are we to find satisfaction here under the sun in this fallen world? Can you have joy and satisfaction here?
Jean-Paul Sartre said, Things are entirely what they appear to be, and behind them there's nothing. What has been is what will be. K. Sarasara. And what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
If there is a thing of which it is said, See, this is new. It already has been in the ages before us. And that's how verse 10 of chapter 1 ends. You think, wow. History's going nowhere. I'm going nowhere.
We're all going nowhere. No wonder Karl Marx said, History is a farce. It's a tragedy, then a farce. Well, I have to give you a sneak peek, because I can't land with the bad news here. When you recognize life as a gift from God and see everything from his good hand, you realize there's a God who works all things together for our good, for his glory.
That he's going to make all things new, Revelation 21. That his mercies are new every single morning. That he loves sinners. Sent his son to die for sinners. That there's a resurrection. Your bodies will be raised.
What you do on earth matters. When you work under the Lord, it matters. When you do dishes under the Lord, it matters. When you serve at the local church under the Lord, it matters. And everything changes.
And so that's what we're going to talk about next time on No Compromise Radio. My name is Mike Abendroth. You can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com.
With Pastor Mike Abendroth. It's a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church, firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.
Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.