Confronting Humanism - [Ecclesiastes]

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Now, Ecclesiastes is a very challenging book. And it's a book that a lot of preachers and commentators over the years have really struggled with and grappled with, because there's a question of just what, there's some questions around, well, what is its purpose here in the
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Holy Scriptures? Why did God include it? And also, there's a lot of questions around just what is the authorial intent here?
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Or even, there are some who question exactly how many authors there are. Or maybe, rather, the right way to put it would be how many voices are being represented in what's being written.
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So we're gonna talk a little bit about that as we go through, but what I really wanna get to is that first question about the purpose.
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And if you have a bulletin, the title of today's Sunday School message is about confronting humanism.
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Confronting humanism, because I believe that that is the purpose, or at least one of the main purposes, one of the main authorial intents about why this is in our scriptures, is confronting humanism.
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It's had a lot of different names, but it's been around from the beginning, right from Cain and Abel, this idea of humanism.
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So let me ask, I'll throw it out to all of you, who can define humanism for us?
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What does that mean? Right, right. So it's the idea of reason above, how did you put it?
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That reason is supreme, that humanity is supreme. And in fact, that's really good in the idea of that the ultimate reality for humanism is reason.
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And I mentioned Cain and Abel, and really you could go back to the fall, because any idea of unbelief is a reflection of turning away from God, and God's word, and relying on man, and man's idea of what's right, right?
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And so with Cain and Abel, right away we had this conflict where we had one brother who had an idea of what was the right way to sacrifice, the right way to worship.
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And we had another brother who was trying to follow how God had prescribed it to be. Right, and their conflict was rooted in this idea of these two worldviews, who was right.
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So Ecclesiastes, I'm gonna get really big here on context. Ecclesiastes is part of what we call the wisdom literature of the
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Old Testament. And I wanna start with just talking about how it fits in between those wisdom literature books.
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So we've got Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, okay?
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And Proverbs, in Proverbs we're presented with this view of that God has created everything, and that in his creation he has set up certain rules of how things are supposed to go, and that if you follow wisdom, if you follow biblical wisdom,
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God's wisdom, things go well for you, right? That's the promise that comes up over and over again in Proverbs.
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Do follow God's way, things go well for you. Go your own way, things go bad for you, right?
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Seek wisdom, seek biblical, godly wisdom. That's the message of Proverbs, and what it's trying to teach is that biblical wisdom.
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And then Ecclesiastes comes along, and in Ecclesiastes we have the voice presented to us of a skeptic, of a person who says, well, wait a minute, it doesn't really always work out that way.
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And we all know that from our human experience, right? Sometimes someone does all the quote -unquote right things, and things still go not well for them.
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We're all touched by some level of tragedy in our lives, right?
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And in particular what the author of Ecclesiastes says gets to his main point is that eventually all of us die.
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Whether we're good or bad, the sinner or the righteous, all of us eventually die.
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We can't escape it. And then comes Job, the book of Job.
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And the book of Job is sort of an answer to both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, and that we see a man, exactly what
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I just described, right? We see a man who God himself declares as someone who was following after righteousness, right?
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And he was serving God and loving him with all his heart, and yet bad things happened to him.
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And I think it's very important for us to remember, I'm not gonna get into Job today, but the one point I wanna make sure we all realize is that at the end of Job, when
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Job cries out and God speaks to him, comes to him and speaks to him,
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Job asks, why God? And God answers, who?
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God does not answer the why question. He only answers the who question, and that is he answers who he is, who
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God is, right? And we, when we read Job, get the picture of the scene in heaven early with Satan confronting and then later on, and we have that whole narration.
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But Job himself doesn't get that picture. He's never given that through all of his sufferings.
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He never gets the why, he only gets the who. And at the end of it, he says, the who, he correctly realizes is enough, right?
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Is enough, it's enough to know who God is and to be settled in that.
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All right, so let's get through this. So Kidner says that the function of Ecclesiastes, to get back to Ecclesiastes, is to bring us to the point where we begin to fear that the shrug, the what am
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I supposed to do? We all die, whether I'm good or bad, that the shrug is the only honest comment on life.
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And so it is if everything is dying, we face the appalling inference that nothing has meaning, nothing matters under the sun.
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It is then that we can hear, and this is how Ecclesiastes ends, as the good news, which it is that everything matters.
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For God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
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And that is how the book will end. Eaton looks at Ecclesiastes and he says that it's an apologetic essay.
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It's essentially a demonstration of the end of the slippery slope of humanism.
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What happens when you reach the bottom? All right, so humanism, as we said to review, it's the ultimate reality.
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The humanism's ultimate reality is reason, logic.
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And its history after Cain and Abel, if we look in written, recorded secular history, the first time we kind of see it pop up in a very large popular way is in ancient
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Greek philosophy, particularly a fellow named Epicurus, who, by the way, lived a few hundred years after Ecclesiastes was written.
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And does anybody know Epicurus? Ever heard of Epicureanism, Epicurean philosophy? Who can, there's a really famous sort of pithy saying for it and does anybody know it, what it means?
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There you go. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. That's it, he rejected any notion of supernatural, of afterlife, of, and he did not, advocate no morals, he wasn't an amoral person, but he did advocate just sort of this notion of why, don't deny yourself of enjoying life because it's all there's going to be, is what he taught.
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So enjoy it to its fullest. The next up came the Renaissance.
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During the Renaissance, humanism as we know, this is where humanism as we know it today really got its start, but it started out very interestingly as just a literary movement, just a scholarly literary movement of a bunch of folks that we would nowadays consider to be sort of like the intellectual elite.
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And none of them, when they started it, thought of it as anti -Christian or secular or really in any way against faith.
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And in fact, most of the quote unquote humanists of the Renaissance period were priests, they were monks, they were what we would consider to be religious people of their day.
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The most famous probably humanist of the Renaissance is Erasmus, who we know from all of his work in translating the
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Bible and creating a Greek New Testament. And their motto was ad fontes, which means to the sources, to the sources.
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Because they had, when we got to the Renaissance period, there was this sudden explosion of availability of ancient texts that during the
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Middle Ages had been lost and they didn't have them before. And now they suddenly had access to ancient manuscripts of Greek philosophy and also, you know,
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Erasmus' thing was that we suddenly had, we were discovering ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that we didn't have previously or that had been lost for a long time.
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And so there was this revival in interest in all things ancient, right? And they really wanted to get back to the sources, is what they said.
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But part of that motto was that it became very evidential, right?
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And everything was around like, can I prove it with some fact, some physical, tangible, material thing that I have, okay?
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And so it sort of embraced a non -theistic, philosophic base, all right?
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And we'll talk about that a little bit more later. So today, what we call, popularly call humanism has advanced to the point where it's totally secular and atheistic.
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If you go to the American Humanist Society's website, I don't recommend it unless you have a bucket nearby.
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They say, their motto right at the top of the webpage is good without a
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God, right at the top. I was like, well, there you go, right? We're not pulling any punches, are we guys?
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Good without a God. Humanist beliefs, I'm quoting them here, stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.
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Solely rational ways of solving human problems, right? So the humanists, as opposed to say, like the postmodernists, they're still,
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I don't know, hopeful might be the right way to put it. Like they think that there's such a thing as possibly being able to be moral and good without having any kind of theistic worldview.
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And whereas the postmodernists have sunk totally down into the relativism of that there's no absolute truth, there's no absolute good or whatnot.
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Humanists would still say that there is some kind of absolute truth, that absolute truth is just something that you can arrive through totally and solely through reasoning.
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So to the humanists, the three methods for improving the human condition are one, the scientific method, two, free inquiry, and three, education, okay, hurrah.
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It's all about those three things with humanists. All right, so let's look at Ecclesiastes chapter one.
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And what I'm going to, we'll start in verse 13. It opens with this wonderful poem. Actually, no, let me,
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I shouldn't start with verse. Yeah, we're gonna start in verse 13. Who can read verse 13 for us?
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Chapter one, verse 13. All right, what does that sound like to you? Anybody? Come on, I think I set it up enough here in my introduction, right?
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What does that sound like to you? Humanism, yes, humanism. Solomon, the preacher, whether it's
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Solomon or not, it's probably Solomon, the preacher, which by the way, the preacher, can you pronounce it?
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Or does anybody have the Hebrew way of pronouncing it? Quoholith, quoholith, we going with that?
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Okay, does that sound right? It's actually a, it's a untranslatable
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Hebrew word. And we've tried all sorts of different variations on it.
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All the different English translations have certain variations on trying to translate that word. And usually it settles on preacher.
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It could be like messenger or just, or teacher or any of those types of things. And so, you know, in ESV it uses preacher.
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But anyway, so the preacher, let's just keep calling him the preacher for the sake of English. I mean, not having to stumble over the
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Hebrew pronunciation. So the preacher, he's taking the, he's going to as he walks, as he writes
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Ecclesiastes here, he's gonna take the humanist approach to learn about everything. And so we're gonna start with reason.
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We're gonna start with wisdom. We're gonna start with like free inquiry. I'm gonna seek after wisdom.
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And I'm gonna immediately find that it's an unhappy business, seeking after wisdom.
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I have seen, he goes on in verse 14. I have seen everything that is done under the sun and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
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Does anybody know, has anybody heard before what that vanity word means?
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It does not mean vain in the modern sense of like being obsessed with beauty or something like that.
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Meaningless, yep. A lot of translations say meaninglessness. Keep going, there's lots of words.
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The word is rich enough that we need lots of words put together. Futility, yep,
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Charlie. Temporal, yep. Vapor, vapor, yep.
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It's, what's that? Useless, yeah. It's like the smoke, right?
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Sort of floating through the air. You can see it, it looks solid, but as soon as you go like this, you got nothing in your hands, right?
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And it's gonna blow away and disappear on you in an instant, chasing after wind.
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Can you catch the wind? Can you catch the smoke? No, you can't, it's an unattainable thing.
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You want it, you're trying really hard. You're saying, you know what, if I just keep applying this wisdom, eventually
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I'm gonna come to some sort of absolute truth. I'm gonna unlock the secrets to the universe and you don't, you're just chasing after wind.
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You get nowhere. In verse 15, what is crooked cannot be made straight and what is lacking cannot be counted.
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I said in my heart, I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me. And my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.
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And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. And I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.
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Wisdom and man himself alone is in fact powerless. What's crooked cannot be made straight.
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I can't fix it, we can't fix it on our own. We try and we try and we try and we can't.
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You know, humanism as itself, well, sorry, verse 18, let me finish. For in much wisdom is much vexation and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
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So let me tell you one of the prime tenets of humanism and post -modernism to some extent too, is the idea that we're getting better.
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We're getting better. So let me ask you all, are we better off today than let's just say folks who live, who lived in the
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Renaissance time? Are we better off? In certain ways, how are we, how do, let's hear it.
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How are we better off? Longer life, yeah. Medical advances, sure.
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What's that? Greater amenities, okay. Better weapons.
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More efficient weapons, yeah. What's that?
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Easier access to food, yeah, sure. But are we better? What's that? Google.
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We can tap into the hive mind. But really, are we really better off though?
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Are we really better off? I mean, technology, is it helping us?
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So we have all sorts of devices to do work for us and yet we still call it doing chores, right?
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I don't have to do the wash by hand anymore but I'm still doing the wash when I put my clothes in the washing machine, right?
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I have all sorts of fancy ways to amuse and entertain myself and yet I still feel bored sometimes, right?
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I supposedly can be more efficient and get lots more things done and it might very well be that I can be more productive and get more things done and yet no matter how much work
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I do or how much I produce, there's still more to be done and more to produce.
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Yes, Charlie, exactly. Yeah, there is definitely a part of that too. Yes, yeah.
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So if those of you who couldn't hear, there's a thing about that ignorance is bliss in a way, right?
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That the simple man who just stays, keeps his nose to the grindstone, focused on Friday, that he actually can find happiness in just the sort of routine of life and the simple things of life and takes pleasure in those things whereas someone who's like the genius, the person who piles intellect and wisdom upon to himself, maybe let's call it earthly wisdom upon to himself, ends up with some sort of existential crisis eventually because they just keep thinking and thinking and thinking and they realize
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I'm not getting anywhere, I'm not reaching an answer, right?
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And their brain kind of just snaps one day. Yep, yep.
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I think it was Bertrand Russell who was one of Einstein's friends and contemporaries who just before he died said something to the effect of, those of us who know the most are the least optimistic about the human race.
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I'm paraphrasing but it was something to that nature. Yeah. Wisdom from Legos, here we go.
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Right, right, yes. Everything is awesome, right? Because they just kept doing the same thing over and over again.
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They didn't have any idea, yes. Yes, I'm sorry now, everyone who has that song here in their head again. Anthony?
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Oh yeah, that is another, yeah. Another good Bertrand Russell quote, yes. Most people would rather die than think.
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Yes, right, exactly. Like I said at the beginning, if you look at Ecclesiastes as an apologetic essay of the end of the slippery slope of humanism, this is where you come to this depressing blackness if you think without God.
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Now what I want to make clear right now because I'm hearing it and I just want to make sure everyone understands is that God, the
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Bible does not tell us not to think and I do believe that the world has that misconception that religion is sort of a anti -intellectual crutch, right?
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Check your brain at the door when you come in, we don't want you to think, we just want you to get brainwashed into whatever
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Pastor Mike says and you're just gonna nod and smile and go with it, right? And that is not true at all in true biblical
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Christianity and the best evidence I have for that is this. You're supposed to bring this with you and search the scriptures, right?
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Search them. Peter says that grace and peace is multiplied to you through the knowledge of your
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Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father. Knowledge, God does not require us to check our brains at the door, he in fact tells us and if you remember from the last,
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I actually mentioned this the last time I taught Sunday school was that the order is believe and then
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I will teach you, right? Have faith, when we have faith, when we are saved, that then
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God opens our minds and we are taught and we will learn from him and the more we will know, the stronger our faith will grow and it's this wonderful positive feedback loop that comes into our lives as we're sanctified and we grow.
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Christianity is not unreasonable. True biblical faith is not unreasonable and we shouldn't be surprised by that because God, right,
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God himself, who set up this logical, ordered, systematic universe, it is
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God himself who invented reason. So they're very close, the humanists, when they say the ultimate reality is reason, they're just missing the fact that it's the creator of reason who is the ultimate reality, right?
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And in that sense, humanity is just like all the other Romans 1 idolatries and that they're worshiping the creation rather than the creator, okay?
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All right, let's look now at Ecclesiastes 2 because in Ecclesiastes 2, we move on from wisdom seeking, intellectual seeking to materialism seeking, okay?
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This is the Epicurean flavor of humanism. I said in my heart, come now,
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I will test you with pleasure, enjoy yourself. But behold, this also was vanity. I said of laughter, it is mad and a pleasure, what use is it?
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I searched my heart how to cheer my body with wine, my heart still guiding me with wisdom and how to lay hold on folly till I might see that what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life, right?
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By the way, the reason I pointed out about Epicurus living a few hundred years after Ecclesiastes was written is because the secular humanists like to say, they like to say like, oh,
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Solomon must have learned this from Epicurus. Like he got that from the Greek philosophers and that's how it got into the
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Bible, but it's quite the opposite way around. So you can correct anybody if anyone ever tries to tell you that.
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I made great works, I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made gardens and parks, planted them in all kinds of fruit trees.
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I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. And anyone who has a pool knows how much work that is.
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I bought male and female slaves and had slaves who were born in my house. I had also great possessions of herds and flocks more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem, right?
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Just a pile of stuff. He just keeps going on and on. All the stuff he's heaping up for himself, right?
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And in the end, we get down to verse 10 and at whatever my eyes desire to keep from them,
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I kept my heart from no pleasure for my heart found pleasure in all my toil. And this was the reward for all my toil.
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And then you can almost hear the sigh in between those verses. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil
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I had experienced and expended in doing it and behold, all was vanity and chasing after wind.
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And there was nothing to be gained under the sun. And as we already said, the more concerned we are with things, the more enslaved we become, right?
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We open ourselves to hurt actually because when we love things, because things, anything decays, breaks down, falls apart.
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The moth eats, the rust destroys, the people that we love get sick, get old, die, right?
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Places that we go to eventually will be destroyed, come to ruins. There's, so humanism, it tries to focus on the material and we find that the material of course is completely, it's the vapor, right?
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It's not sticking around. We can't rely on it.
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We can't base anything or stability on it. And then we get to a little further on,
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Solomon gets to in verse 15 through 19, he talks about, this is where we sort of get to this idea of work, work, work, verse 18.
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I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me.
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Work, work, work, and you still die and someone else gets everything else that you worked for. Remember the parable that Jesus taught of the man who had stored up for himself great things and was raising up barns for himself?
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And what does God come to him and say? You fool. Tonight, your life will be, your soul will be required of you,
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God says. And all that you've heaped up for yourself, you can't take with you.
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You're gonna just leave it behind for your heir. The man who dies with the most toys still dies, yes.
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Very true, yes. It shouldn't surprise us, by the way, that when you look at all the ancient burial sites, right, of kings and princes and all the important people, what do we find in their tombs?
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Stuff, stuff. Treasures, sometimes even like their actual mistresses and concubines got buried in there with them, right?
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They were trying to take it with them. Their whole afterlife religious system was built around trying to convince themselves that all the stuff they had acquired, that they weren't gonna lose it, they could still keep it.
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And in fact, other than the few rare examples, most times when the archeologists cracked open those tombs, what did they find?
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They had been stripped bare, right? We had some evidence that stuff had been there. And in fact, it had all been, the robbers had still broken in and stolen, just as Jesus warned us, right?
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Good and bad things happen to the foolish is what the humanism says. So what's the point of becoming wise and you get lost in your lofty wisdom and you get bitter, and this is the same things that we've been talking about, right?
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Your heir who inherits your fortune, they could be a fool or wise, it doesn't matter, they get your stuff, right?
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History is littered with dumb kids who inherit great fortunes from their very wise and wise businessman parents, right?
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And then those kids just fritter the fortune away. Humanism gives us no answer about the afterlife because they don't believe in the spiritual, obviously.
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And so their rather lousy answer for the reason for living is to try, let's try to just improve the world, let's leave it a little bit better than the way we left it, is what they say.
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And to which I think we can all say, well, how are you doing at that, right? We might make our lives more comfortable, we may make our lives more convenient, we might even make our lives last longer, but have we really gotten anything better?
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Death still wins, still batting 1 ,000, right?
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People still get sick, we cure one disease only for another disease to seemingly crop up out of nowhere and be a new plague on humanity.
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Where's that coming from? And we know, we know of course, we know that the curse is not going to be lifted, the curse is going to stay upon us, that humanity can try, try, try to fight against the curse but we're not going to win because the
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Almighty is the one who has placed that curse upon us. And creation is groaning, right?
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Is groaning at waiting for its redemption, creation itself is groaning. And actually I have a really great, where's that in my notes?
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I remember that, I had a really great point about that. Turn to Romans 8, yes, Romans 8, verse 20.
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For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it,
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Adam, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
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For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
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And not only the creation, but we ourselves, right? Who have the first fruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons.
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My point is that futility back there in verse 20, futility, that word, guess what that same
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Greek word, that Greek word, guess what in the Septuagint, that Greek word gets used, vanity. It's the same vapor, can't grasp it, right?
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Creation is subjected to this useless, meaningless smoke. We just can't, we're chasing after the wind and we just can't get it.
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And what's the, and so Paul really sort of in a nod, if you perhaps he's, he even has
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Ecclesiastes in mind here when he's talking about this, because of course, as we know,
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Romans eight goes on to finally give us the answer, to answer that critic, the humanist critic in Ecclesiastes, right?
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Because my time is running out, so we're gonna get towards the answer now. That the answer is the rest of Romans eight.
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What's the answer? What does God tell us? Christ, Christ what?
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He is, what's that? He is sufficient for everything. He is supreme over everything.
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What's happening when we see bad things happen to good people, Rabbi Kushner, right?
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What is it? What is really happening? 828 is happening, that's right.
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Go ahead, Brian, tell it, read it to us. Right, all things, all things, the good things and the bad things.
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The answer about Job, the answer that Job got was a redefinition of good, wasn't it?
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And that's Rabbi Kushner's problem if you ask me, that famous book about why bad things happen to good people is the problem is the definition of good in that sentence.
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Because who are the good people? None, there are none righteous, no, not one, right?
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And 828 tells us who are the good, so 828 does tell us who are the good people.
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Because the answer, the good news is the answer does not stop with none, but then goes on that all those who, what?
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Called of God and love him, right? Right, those are the good people.
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And that all things for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
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Of course, it's still hard when the bad things happen. It's still hard, it's so hard.
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Absolutely, it's hard. Because we don't get the picture, right? Just like Job, we very often don't get the picture.
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I'm not even entirely convinced that we'll ever get the picture. Some people say that, well, when you get to heaven, maybe then
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God will reveal to you, you know, why that tragedy had to occur in your life or whatnot.
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I'm not even, I'm not entirely convinced that that's true because I'm not sure I wanna spend much time in heaven dwelling on the tragedies that happened during this very brief blip of life compared to the thousands upon thousands of years that I'll spend in heaven, right?
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I don't know what my glorified body, I'm not sure how much great memories I'm going to have of earth, but my current fallen body,
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I can't barely remember the details of three months ago, let alone 10 ,000 years ago someday, right?
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But if God's gonna wipe away every tear, there's gonna be no more sorrow or pain or crying in heaven.
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I'm just, I'm not, me personally, I'm just not entirely convinced I'm gonna spend much time dwelling on the bad things that had happened to me or even wanna ask about them.
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I think I'm gonna be more wrapped up in just the glory of God. Charlie? Yeah, yeah.
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Yep, it is all respect, I love that. Why did you bring pavement with you? Yep. The great treasures here of earth, right?
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It's just asphalt in heaven. It's just the concrete, it's the stuff you walk on.
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Yeah, yep. So we're completely out of time.
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And so maybe we'll try to convince someone to let me do the rest, another someone over there, to be able to finish more about this with Ecclesiastes.
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But I do wanna leave you with this notion of just that humanism, right?
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It gives us no answer. It tells us, funny enough, that we can know everything. But God tells us that though a wise man think to know it, yet he shall not be able to find it.
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And God is pleased for the foolish to become wise and the wise, those who think themselves wise, to be proven fools.
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And that when, if you yourself are ever, and here in New England, you're going to find plenty of folks who fancy themselves intellectual humanists.
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Even the common people of New England, I think, like to pride themselves on the idea of being intellectual humanists.
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They learned it all from Facebook, right? But when you are dealing with people like that, when you're having conversations with people like that and you try to have a spiritual conversation with them, what
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I would encourage you is don't get stuck in the trap of having an intellectual battle of wits with them because you can't change their mind.
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You actually can't even change their heart. God is the one who's going to change their heart, but you can't change their mind until God changes their heart, right?
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And so the most important thing to do, just like Jesus did with the woman at the well, is while he was ready to give an answer to her questions, he always changed the subject right back to the real issue at hand, which is what do you believe in your heart, right?
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And so that ultimately, preach the gospel, preach it often, preach it clearly, proclaim it clearly, who, right?
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We should answer who too, right? Yeah, I think that's a great point. That if people ask you why, if they want to know why
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God, if they want you to answer the question why God for him because you say that you believe in God and some tragedy has happened to them, just like Job, perhaps the best answer is who.
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Don't try to play God and provide the why answer. Just answer who
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God is. Let God change the hearts, okay? Let's pray.
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Heavenly Father, we thank you so much as we see even from our lesson this morning, just the amazing sufficiency of scripture that you left no stone unturned, no challenge unanswered.
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That the modern day humanists think that they are inventing fresh objections to the
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Bible and finding new ways to prove it wrong and prove you don't exist. And yet you confounded them all by writing down and recording the answers to their challenges thousands of years before they were even born.
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And Lord, we thank you. We thank you, Lord, that you have given us the insight from your word to know that when tragedy comes, that when bad things happen,
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Lord, that we know that in truth, all things, all things work together for the good of those who love you.
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And that you have staked your very name and reputation on the wellbeing of your people.
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And that you will not lose a single one of your sheep, but you will bring us all through.
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And that we will all one day be glorified and that we will all one day stand in heaven and stand in the awe and majesty of your glory.
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so to your glory alone, Lord, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.