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All is Meaningless By John Paterson

Given at the Sovereign Grace Family Conference 1993 at Newcastle NSW Australia.

Lovely to be here.
Let me help you right from the start.
If you want to find Ecclesiastes,
it's Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes.
I remember years ago I was in a Bible study group
and someone gave a reference
and I think it was Zechariah or Joel or something like that
and I was flipping through the Bible
and I thought, strike, I can't find it.
And it was taking a bit long
and everybody else had found it.
And I thought, well, I'm the pastor,
I should know where it is,
so I'll just hold my Bible here
and look like I've got it.
And then someone said,
John, would you read the first verse?
I thought, oh dear.
Well, it's Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,
so please find it.
And we'll be able to look at it together.
Okay.
The approach of Ecclesiastes
is an approach that is very, very important, I think,
in the kind of world you and I live in.
It says things in a way that we don't normally say them.
But it says things in a way
that we need to learn to say them.
For my money, if you asked me
which was the most contemporary book
in the whole of the Bible,
I'd say it's Ecclesiastes.
The most contemporary book in the whole of the Bible.
And yet it's not a book that we use very much.
Partly because when you start to look at it,
you think, oh dear, this is a bit drab or negative.
It's a bit repetitive.
Hard to know where we even fit in it.
Well, I'm hopeful that over the weekend
we'll be able to see where we fit
and better how Ecclesiastes fits on us and on our world.
It's a long time ago since Francis Schaeffer
wrote a book called Death in the City.
Let me read you just a paragraph from the book.
He says, there is a time and ours is such a time
when a negative message is needed
before anything positive can begin.
People often say to me, what would you do
if you met a really modern man on a train
and you had just an hour to talk to him about the gospel?
Schaeffer answers, I would spend 45 or 50 minutes
on the negative to show him his real dilemma,
to show him that he is more dead than he thinks he is.
Then I would take 10 or 15 minutes to tell him the gospel.
Unless he understands what is wrong,
he will not be ready to listen to
and understand the positive.
Now the man who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes
would stand up and cheer I think
if he heard Francis Schaeffer say that
because that's exactly what he does.
He spends time on the negative
to show people that they are really more undone
than they think they are
before he starts to give them the answer.
We are often very good with the answers
if we've got them all, we've got a Bible full of them
and we tend to drop them on people fairly readily
and fairly happily.
But we wonder why people don't want to hear them
because we haven't undone them first,
that they might be done up with what God says.
And the book of Ecclesiastes is a great book
for undoing your, it's a great book for exposing things
as they really are, a great book for showing us
what the world's really like.
Now as I say, that's not a very popular approach.
If I've got pain, I don't want more pain, I want less.
That's why I go to the doctor, if I go to the doctor
and he says, well, you're sore,
well, I'm gonna make it sorer.
Well, I say, thanks, I'll change doctors.
I don't want that sort of doctor, I want relief.
I want release from the pain.
Whether it's emotional pain, I mean you talk to people,
some of you involved in counseling people
and if people are in a painful situation
and you tell them to go this way
and it's going to mean more pain,
they'll run a mile by nature.
Nobody wants more pain, we want less.
We want things easier, not harder.
When you speak to someone who's troubled in some way,
they want relief, they don't want it to be harder.
The book of Ecclesiastes, brethren, makes it harder
before it makes it easier, doesn't make it easier.
Gives the most marvelous answers to a meaningless world
but it says, firstly, do you see how meaningless
the world really, really is?
The technique of the preacher, that's what he is,
the name Ecclesiastes is just really a kind of
a translation of the Hebrew word, the preacher.
It's a sermon, the book of Ecclesiastes.
Now I don't know about you but I think sermons
shouldn't come in half measures, do you agree?
You don't come for 20 minutes one day
and go home and let the preacher
preach the rest the other 20 minutes.
You don't come next week halfway through
and miss the first 20 minutes
and come for the second 20 minutes, you get it in the hole.
Well the book of Ecclesiastes is a sermon
and it's meant to be heard in one go.
That's why it's a great book for a weekend like this.
It wasn't my choice, I might add, it was Don McMurray
so you can blame him that we're looking
at something that's painful.
But it's a great book, it's meant to come in one hit
and hopefully the weekend will give us the opportunity
to look at the sermon that this preacher preaches
in one hit as it were.
Well let's start where he starts.
He wants to speak to modern man
and he says first of all, life in a closed world
is meaningless.
Now let me tell you why I've got that heading.
You may think it's a strange thing
to talk about a closed world.
Through the book of Ecclesiastes,
the preacher uses a term.
He talks about life under the sun or life under heaven.
It's a phrase that comes I think nearly 30 times
I counted in the book.
Life under the sun means life as you can see it.
What you just see around you, what you can touch,
what you can smell, what you can work out with your mind.
Things you can work out logically.
Observations you can make.
What you see is what you get, that's life under the sun.
When the writer of Ecclesiastes, when the preacher says
life under the sun is murder, he's saying
life in a world that is a world that you can just see,
a world that you can just smell but no more,
a life in a world which you can understand
but that doesn't go beyond your understanding,
life in that kind of world is meaningless, futile, awful.
That's the kind of world people today want.
We don't want God above the sun as it were.
We don't want a Bible that comes from behind the sun
to come somewhere to this world.
We just want the world under the sun.
What you see, what you work out, what logic tells you,
what the academics teach you, what you believe intuitively.
That's life under the sun.
I tell you, life under the sun, life in a closed world
where the only facts you can believe
are the facts you can see and understand is meaningless.
The preacher's conclusion, now I don't know how you do
if you write essays to university or school or take
or if you do math sums, normally you do all your arguments
and you put your conclusion at the bottom.
Well, the preacher's a bit different, good Hebrew.
He puts his conclusion first
and then he gives you the reasons
why he got to his conclusion.
So his conclusion in chapter one, verse two,
meaningless, meaningless, says the preacher.
Utterly meaningless, everything is meaningless.
So this sounds a promising set of studies this weekend,
but he's talking about life under the sun.
Life in a world where there's no God, it has no meaning.
The word, it simply means futile, nothing.
It's like when you mend next to the washing up
and you're over the sink and all the bubbles are there
and you burst the bubble and you've got nothing left.
That's the picture, nothing left, you burst it
and there's nothing underneath, it's just a vapour.
Everything is a vapour.
Nothing has any substance.
Nothing has any real answer in a world under the sun.
And the preacher says, that's what life's like.
Life is very, very ordinary when you look at it.
Life is very, very mundane and daily.
Life is very, very repetitive.
Life has nothing in it, he says.
Take a look, verse five, at the sun.
What do you see the sun do?
In the morning, it gets up.
In the night, goes back.
Next morning, gets up.
Next night, goes back.
Next morning, gets up.
Round and round, round and round, round and round.
That's what it does.
That's what the sun does to our mind as we see it.
What about the wind, verse six?
Well, the wind blows from here to here
and then turns around and comes back
and then blows up again
and round and round and round and round it goes,
he says, ever-returning.
All the air currents, they're moving around,
but nothing's ever new.
Going round this year as they did last year
and the year before and last century and last millennium,
round and round, round and round.
What about the water, verse seven?
Well, old streams flow into the sea.
Down the water comes from the rain,
falls into the side of the mountains,
down the stream, out to the sea,
up it goes, round it goes,
round, round, up and down, round it.
That's what life's like, he says.
The sun does it, the wind does it, the water does it.
It might look new the first time you go to Ayers Rock
and see a sunset over Ayers Rock,
it takes your breath away.
It's so new, it's only new to you.
It's been doing that for a long, long time.
The first time you go to a Tasmanian National Park
and see the waterfall, you say, oh, this is breathtaking.
But it's been falling over there for a long time.
It's only new to you.
It's been going down and round and down and round
and up and down and up and down for a long time.
He says, that's what life's like, you see.
That's what it's like, nothing's new.
Verse nine, what has been will be again.
What has been done will be done again.
There's nothing new under the sun.
Always a bit disheartening, I think, to be an inventor.
You spend your life inventing something
and you say, here it is.
And someone scratches his head and said,
oh, the Greeks are back 2,000 years ago.
Well, it takes the heart out of things a bit, doesn't it?
But nothing's new, nothing's new.
It's all been there before.
And there's Thomas Edison, the great inventor said,
inventors don't do anything
except bring out the secrets of nature.
They're not inventing anything.
They're not making anything new.
They're just bringing out what's there.
It's just been going round and round, up and down,
round and round, up and down for a long, long time.
Advertisers, of course, tell you that life's not like that,
don't they?
They say you can break the cycle.
You can break out, wear this lipstick
and life will be new.
Well, it's been going round and round,
but the Romans were wearing lipsticks
well before we even thought of.
The advertisers say, move out of this way of life,
get this possession, do this, get that job
and life will change, not just the preacher.
No, not in your life.
Round and round, up and down.
The preacher is much, much more realistic
than the advertising man.
Chapter one, verse eight,
all things are wearisome, more than one can say.
You can talk about things till the cows come home, he says,
but it's just what we all know in our heart of hearts,
nothing ever really changes.
There's an old, there's a French saying,
the more things change,
the more they turn out to be the same.
The more things change,
the more they turn out to be the same.
Well, that's what the preacher says.
You see things that look like they've changed,
but in reality, things keep going round and round,
up and down.
Now, it's not only advertising men who want to kid us
that it's not like that.
We somehow think that we've got to say
it's not like that if we're Christians.
We somehow think maybe we've got to defend God,
maybe the world's better than that.
We don't see the humdrumness of life.
And we somehow think that we really ought to pretend
that it's better.
And many of the people who are seeing the world
realistically in its stark awfulness,
a world without God,
the people who are not Christians, sad to say,
the people who are artists and writers and playwrights,
they are saying that life is murder.
We somehow think that we ought to say the opposite,
that the preacher's got it right.
He says all his meaningness, all his vaporous.
Other people besides Christians
have been saying it for a long time.
You can go back a couple of thousand years
to Marcus Aurelius,
a stoic philosopher.
He says, they that come after us will see nothing new.
And they who went before us
saw nothing more than we have seen.
Nothing's new under the sun.
Round and round, up and down.
Be a bit more contemporary for a minute.
There are hundreds of thousands,
probably millions of people who are in teenage years.
Who've seen it in a way their parents don't.
You've spoken to some of those millions and they say,
you think I'm gonna get into life dad's got?
You gotta be joking.
Goes to work, drives home, eats tea, goes to bed,
goes to work, comes home, eats tea, goes to bed,
goes, who wants that?
And who can blame them for saying who wants that?
They're basically getting locked into that kind of life.
Drive to work, work, drive home, eat, go to bed,
drive to work, work, drive home, eat,
right round and round, up and down,
round and round, up and down.
Look, who'd want that sort of life?
Says the preacher.
It's a meaningless sort of life.
Brethren, that's what the world is like.
That's what life is like in a world where there is no God.
That's life in a world under the sun.
Things look different, but nothing is different.
Things look new, but nothing is new.
It's been doing it for thousands of years,
says the preacher.
Nothing new under the sun.
I tell you, don't close your eyes to what's real.
That's what it's really like.
Some of you will have read A Streetcar Named Desire,
and in that there's a character Blanche,
and she just says, I don't want realism, I want magic.
Well, sorry, Blanche, you've got to have the real,
the reality, and the reality is that's what life's like.
That's really what it's like.
Well, one other quote that I read somewhere,
and I think it's a good quote,
or one other quote that I read somewhere,
some graffiti on a wall of the university in Britain,
and it said, do not adjust your life.
The fault lies in reality.
Don't adjust your life as if somehow thinking
that moving your life around is going to get things right.
The problem is life is a mess.
We ought to say, yeah, that's right,
instead of rushing in to say, oh no, it's not that bad.
It is that bad.
Life in a world under the sun where there is no God,
and there is no God who draws near,
and no God who speaks is absolutely meaningless,
just a vapor.
What are the answers then, if that's what life's like?
And people in their more honest moments will say it.
My father-in-law, whom I love and respect
more than almost any man I know, he's not a Christian,
but I love him and respect him greatly.
He is a brilliant man, first man at Adelaide University
to be awarded Doctor of Science and Doctor of Philosophy,
written many fine papers in his field
of inorganic chemistry, devoted his whole life to science.
And one night a few years ago, I remember very sadly,
he said, I used to think science had all the answers.
Now I see it doesn't answer the most simple question of all.
He didn't say what it was.
He said, it doesn't even answer the simplest questions.
What do you do in a world like that?
He saw it a whole life devoted to something
that now provided no real answers.
He'd gone to bed, driven to work, taught students,
come home, gone to bed, driven to work, taught students,
round and round, up and down, round and round.
For what?
Where are the answers along the way?
Well, what are the answers in a closed world?
Well, I tell you, not only is the world meaningless,
but answers in a closed world are meaningless.
Now many people are giving the answers, trying to,
but let me tell you, they are meaningless answers.
Again, the preacher gives his conclusion first,
before he tells you what answers he tried.
Verse 14 of chapter one, he says,
I've seen all the things that are done under the sun.
All of them are meaningless, are chasing after the wind.
Sorry, I missed verse 13.
I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom
all that is done under heaven.
I've seen that it's all meaningless, right?
I tried all the answers under heaven, as you can try,
and I came to the conclusion not one of them
has any substance, not one.
Now let me tell you, brethren,
he's a good scientist, though, this preacher,
because he doesn't sit down in his study one day
and say, oh, I've got to preach a sermon
on Sunday on Ecclesiastes and on the world.
I'll give thought for a couple of minutes
to the sort of answers people try,
and I'll say, no, they're no good.
No, he says, I actually tried, I tried the answers.
And as the preacher goes through these next few verses,
you see that he spent years and years and years
trying the answers.
They didn't just come out of his head.
He got in there and gave them a go.
And his conclusion is not one of them has any substance.
He's a good scientist.
He's done the experiments and he's tried hard.
His first experiment was with philosophy,
if we can call it that.
The ideas that people talk about and discuss.
Chapter one, verse 15, he says,
what is twisted cannot be straightened.
What is lacking cannot be counted.
He said, I found out there were just too many hard questions
I couldn't get the answers to.
I've got the answers to some,
but the hard ones I couldn't get answers to.
Such twisted questions, questions I suppose like
if we were to put ourselves in his place.
When I look at this world, how do I work it out?
That some people are greedy and complacent
and living in awful luxury.
And there are 45,000 children a day starving to death.
Come on philosopher, work that one out.
He said, I couldn't.
When I look at my child who gets leukemia
and dies at the age of three and a half,
what's the answer to that one?
What will I hang on to when I'm faced with that?
No, thousands of questions
that don't have any explanations.
No explanations at least that satisfy.
In a closed world, brethren,
where the only information you can get
is from what you see and what you hear,
there isn't enough information.
In a closed world, there isn't enough information
to answer those questions.
You won't know enough, you won't see enough.
You won't be able to look under the microscope
and get enough facts to answer questions such as those.
No, he says, there's no answers.
Going down the road marks philosophy.
Simply not enough information.
And there's a sting in the tail.
There's a sting in the tail of that one.
In verse 18, and I hope you feel the weight of this
because I tell you, brethren,
this is where many non-Christian people are at.
And we need to be a bit more sympathetic than often we are.
We say, oh, these people are trying
to get all these answers to themselves.
They're fools and we just write them off, end of subject.
But he says, verse 18, for with much wisdom comes sorrow.
The more knowledge, the more grief.
It's almost a case of this,
that the more you ask the questions
to get answers to the pain,
the more you ask questions that are painful,
the less you get answers that satisfy it,
the greater the pain of the question.
The more you're perplexed about something
and you long for an answer and you don't get it,
the pain becomes greater, it becomes more intense.
And there are plenty of people in a situation like that.
It's almost a case in a sense that it's true
that ignorance is bliss.
Almost true, that's not right, of course,
but there's a sense in which it's easier
not to ask the painful questions.
It reminds me of a teacher who sent a school report home
to some parents and he said to them,
if ignorance is bliss,
your child will have a very happy life.
Yeah.
Well, it's almost a case that as one writer put it,
the more you understand, the more you hurt.
The more you see that there are no answers,
the greater the pain, the more you understand,
the more you ache.
As we said, the more you understand, the more you ache.
And there are playwrights and novelists
and poets who aren't Christian.
And you see that ache all the way through what they write.
We need to understand what it's like.
We need to make the pain greater.
We might provide, like Shafer says,
that answer which is right at the end.
Well, that's the first thing that the preacher tried.
He says, I tried wisdom or philosophy.
I don't think it's biblical wisdom here,
but human philosophy.
He just couldn't work it out, didn't get answers.
And the more I saw, the more I heard.
He says, I tried pleasure in chapter two.
I thought in my heart, come now,
I'll test you with pleasure to find out what is good.
I'll go and have a good laugh.
I'll make sure I enjoyed some picnics.
I'll do things that just make me feel good.
But he says, that also proved to be meaningless, empty.
Laughter, I said, is foolish.
Of course, you go to the party, you laugh yourself silly,
but you wake up that next morning
and you've still got the same problem.
Laughter doesn't answer anything.
Now, he doesn't say laughter is wrong.
He says, laughter is foolish if you're looking to laughter
to provide the answers.
He does not say laughter is wrong.
Nobody goes out here today saying,
oh, we've got to sort of be like this from now on.
No, no, he's not saying that.
But if you think the answers lie in laughter,
he says, you're fooling yourself.
Laughter is foolish.
I think that Solomon had money to burn.
He could hire the best comics,
rent the funniest videos if he had the opportunity
and all that.
He said, I've tried everything,
anything that money could buy.
And he said, there was no answer there.
No substance in pleasure or laughter, he says.
Some of you are old enough,
if I look around, a few gray hairs here,
you're old enough to remember Tony Hancock,
who was a very funny man.
One of the funniest comedians,
I should think, that Britain has produced.
He knew how to laugh
and he knew how to make other people laugh
at the height of his career.
He had 30% of the British population
watching his show every week.
That's popularity for you.
He had much going for him.
And through his life, his friends said,
people like Spike Milligan and Kenneth Taylor and others,
they said he was one of the most troubled men
that had ever lived.
And after he would perform at night,
he'd come back and he'd sit down with his friends
and he'd talk for hours and hours,
three, four, five o'clock the next morning
to try and ask, find out,
what's the point of it all, he'd say.
What's the point of it?
Where's it all going?
He wanted to find out real answers to real questions.
And of course he, in the end, committed suicide.
The pain became too much.
He was asking the questions.
He knew the pain of unanswered questions
and the pain became too great.
And he opted out.
And as Spike Milligan says of him,
one by one, he shut the door on all the people he knew.
Then lastly, he shut the door on himself.
It's sad.
His Tony Hancock's biography came out in about 1985,
written by two men, one of whom was his son.
And this is what they said,
you listen to these words.
This is for a man who laughed a lot
and he knew how to make others laugh.
He said this, these two authors,
it may be that Hancock eventually managed
to see himself in the cosmic perspective
he'd sought for years as an insignificant speck of dust
in an obscure corner of the universe,
the end product of a long line of accidental survivals.
That's a realistic man who lives without God.
That's the only conclusion.
They conclude this.
Listen to this sentence, last sentence.
It is one thing to talk about the need for perspective.
It must be unbearable to find it.
He could laugh the night before,
but once the party's over and he sees himself
as he really is and he has no answers, it was unbearable.
Now listen, I tell you, you listen to these fellows.
You don't have to go where they've been.
Solomon said, I tried it all.
Hancock says, I tried it all.
And it's not there.
So don't be a fool, learn the lesson.
I don't have to get A's to find out
that A's isn't very attractive.
I can see those who've got it.
Learn the lesson, says the preacher.
Don't go down the road marked philosophy
that says here is the answer to life.
Don't go down the road marked, please,
for saying here is the answer to life.
It's not there.
I'll tell you, says the preacher, I've tried it.
I've run all the experiments.
He tried a third road.
He tried what we could simply call culture.
In chapter two, verse four, I undertook great projects.
He's still saying what he's tried
to find out where there's meaning in a meaningless world.
I built houses for myself, planted vineyards.
I've made gardens and parks
and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them.
I made reservoirs to water growth.
As one writer says, it was like a secular garden of Eden.
It was beautiful, just beautiful,
a secular garden of Eden.
He tried the arts.
He tried agriculture.
He tried architecture, all those good things.
And they are good things.
But any answer there?
Chapter two, verse 11.
When I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was empty.
No answers, you see.
No answers in architecture or art or agriculture.
No answers to the real questions of life.
They're simply not there.
It's a chasing after the wind.
You never grab it.
You think you're close, but then off it goes again.
Nothing was gained under the sun.
People are telling us very often, aren't they?
If only people will find themselves in their work, in labour.
That's what we ought to do.
Get all these dull bloods off the street
and send them back to work.
Then they'll feel important.
Who are we kidding?
Solomon says, I tried it.
There's no answer to life there.
I'm not saying it's wrong to work.
We'll come to that in a minute.
I'm not saying it's wrong to paint or being an architect.
We'll come to that in a minute.
But there are no answers there
to the real questions that life forces us to ask.
One last possibility.
One last thing he put under his microscope
in his experiment to find the answer.
He looked to the future.
See, maybe the answer's not in what we've done
or what we've tried.
Maybe the answer is in the next generation.
We've mucked it up, but maybe they'll find it.
See, in chapter two, from about verse 12 on,
he says, when I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,
sorry, then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom
and also madness and folly,
what more can the king's successor do
than what has already been done?
You think my son's going to find the answer
if I haven't been able to?
What will he have that I haven't got
if things just go round and round and up and down
and round and round?
There's no more information in this world
if it's a closed world.
If the only information you've got
is what you see and think and have taught.
No, he says, verse 13,
I saw that wisdom is better than folly.
I want my son to be a wise man.
That's true.
Just as light is better than darkness, yes,
I'm not despising philosophy.
I'm not despising intellect, the intellect.
I'm not despising learning, he says.
Oh, far from it.
Far from it.
The wise man has eyes in his head
while the fool walks in the darkness.
But he says, I came to realise
that there was no lasting answer there.
The same fate overtakes them both.
And see, this man, Solomon,
if indeed it's Solomon who wrote the book,
if he's the preacher,
when he dies, when any wise man dies
and his body is put in a casket
and the casket's put in the ground,
you stand there and you watch,
you stand back a bit
and you watch the burial take place.
An hour later, a fool will be brought along
and put in the plot next to him.
What's the difference?
At that point, there's no difference.
Wisdom is good.
Intellect is good.
Architectural, agricultural, artistic abilities are good.
But they won't answer the question
because he says, look at the end.
The fool and the wise man
lie side by side in the ground.
No, he says.
I want my son.