Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Oak Hill podcast, Deep Roots, Conversations about Life and Ministry.
I'm Eric Ortland, and I'm back from sabbatical. And I'm going to be standing in for my colleague, Tim Ward, who's going on sabbatical until the summer.
And I'm joined today by my friend and colleague, Graham.
Graham, would you like to introduce yourself for anyone who might not know you?
Sure, gladly. I'm Graham Bynum. Here at Oak Hill, I am the director of independent training.
I'm at the college a couple of days a week. The rest of my time, I'm pastor of Grace Church in Cambridge.
Now, Graham, you and I were talking together a couple of weeks ago, and you mentioned you had preached through Ecclesiastes.
I had just been working on Ecclesiastes on the sabbatical and been writing about it.
And we thought this would be a good book to bring to the podcast, but not an easy book to bring to the podcast.
No, no, not easy at all. In fact, we had a discussion as elders at our church about preaching series.
It was maybe six months into the pandemic, and someone said we should do Ecclesiastes because everyone's asking questions about meaning of life and everything.
Yeah. And they were really keen. And I was sitting in the corner going, guys, it's really hard.
You don't know what you're asking for. And I know I'm going to have to do most of this preaching.
But they pushed, I relented, and I was really pleased that we did. It was great.
I'm glad. It was really great.
Ecclesiastes is not a book that people have mild reactions to.
You either love it or hate it, but it's a tough book to get through regardless.
My sense is that the book is trying to teach us things that we know are true, but that are hard to listen to.
They're easier to ignore, easier just not to remember.
Yeah.
Does that fit with your experience?
Yeah, it does. It does. And I think that even connects with like how it's written and the experience of reading it.
It's not simply propositional.
Hey, you're going to die, guys.
Yeah.
Life is short.
Yeah.
It takes simple facts like that, but kind of takes you on a journey through them.
And so it's almost like an experience you have in reading through it.
And that that experience is part of the point.
Yes.
And you won't get it otherwise.
Yes.
Instead of being spoon fed proverb after proverb after proverb.
For sure.
Yeah.
You have to journey through the book to the very end.
And I feel often like it's like a camera coming into focus where if I've read it through several times, many questions at the beginning.
By the end, OK, I understand more what he wants to say.
Yeah.
Graham, what would you say to someone?
And I've come across this opinion.
And although I disagree with it, I understand it.
What would you say to a Christian who takes a negative view of Ecclesiastes and says Ecclesiastes is in the canon to show us what we get that life has no meaning without God.
It's taking a secular position to its logical outcome, something like that.
That's one way the book is approached.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, yeah, no, and I've come across that and I can see the attraction because there are lots of passages which read a little like that.
Life is meaningless and empty.
And futile and effectively, what's the point?
Yeah, life, you know, life is hard and then you die.
And so they then say, well, there's the problem and the answer is Jesus.
And we have resurrection hope and life is meaningful in him and so on.
Now, all that I've just said in the second half is true.
Yes.
But I think Ecclesiastes is not as negative as that.
I think it's dealing with life in a fallen world.
Yes.
In which the answer will be Jesus, but I think the answer is actually in Ecclesiastes itself still.
And what you'd have to then do is to get into, which we will in a second, I'm sure, get into some of the key kind of interpretive issues.
What is this meaningless thing?
Yeah.
And how do we put the whole book together?
Yeah.
That's going to be some of the detail which would help convince that person.
I've never read a book like Ecclesiastes before ever by any Christian anywhere.
I am fascinated by this unique text and especially the way it says some of the most depressing, disturbing things, things I don't want to think about.
Like how quickly my life will be over, how little I am in control of and how little impact I have under the sun.
And that's going to be important that we come back to that.
And yet at the same time, you get this exuberant joy in just earthly things that you will never find anywhere else in scripture just enjoying your work, whatever it is, enjoying your food with your friends.
That doesn't sound like a skeptical, cynical atheist to me.
So I have never found convincing someone who says that's life without God.
When it seems to me the whole point of the book is every day is a gift from God to be enjoyed as such.
That doesn't sound like an atheist talking to me.
No, it doesn't. And what you have to do is try and put together those more, what sound like more despairing passages with the type of passage you've just been mentioning.
Enjoy life.
God has already approved of what you're doing in life, that kind of line.
Put those together and think what picture of life is he painting for us?
Yes.
And what fascinates me is the book wants us to put those together.
And it's not like you leave behind the depressing stuff to get to the happy stuff.
Both always go together.
And even tell me if you would agree.
I get the sense that Ecclesiastes thinks we cannot really enjoy life as a gift from God without the depressing stuff there.
We won't enjoy it as a gift otherwise.
Yeah, no, I think that's right.
It's when you've come to realize things like how transient and brief it is.
That you say, so I want to enjoy each day as a gift each day I have.
I Ecclesiastes, one of my favorites in the Bible, because whenever I finish reading it, I feel calm and sort of sane.
And like I can go back to ordinary life and I feel it's it's like physical therapy, you know, where someone's working into your muscles and it hurts.
But when they stop, you just feel great.
And I Ecclesiastes is therapeutic for me in that way.
Now you have the NIV open there.
I do.
And very first word meaningless, meaningless, totally meaningless.
We need to talk about the translation there.
We do.
I don't want to rip on the NIV, but I think the end my opinion.
Tell me what you think.
My opinion is that the NIV has put the reader as at a disadvantage by translating that word that way.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
I agree. And I had to spend my first sermon discussing this word.
So if we say meaningless in English, we tend to think directionless, kind of existential angst.
What are we all about?
And so on.
And the word could be translated breath or vapour or something like that.
And in lots of instances in scripture elsewhere, it's very much to do with the brevity of life, that our life is just a breath.
And there are some instances, I would say in Ecclesiastes, where it's pointed out there's someone know what you think in a second.
But the kind of you enjoy life with your wife all the days of this fleeting life, brief life.
Banish anxiety and cast off the troubles of youth for youth and vigor are fleeting, brief.
But then, but then elsewhere, that kind of idea of transient doesn't quite work so well.
Yes.
So does it have a mixture of meanings or is there a more kind of basic meaning?
Yes.
What did you say in your commentary?
So I think that the man who wrote this is something of a genius who is able to take normal Hebrew and kind of twist it in his own ways, not in utterly unique ways.
But the verse you quoted earlier from the end of chapter 11, enjoy youth because it is, and the word in Hebrew is hebel that gets translated as meaningless.
It can't mean meaningless there.
Because if life is meaningless, that's not a reason to enjoy it.
But if it's transient or fleeting, if it's a breath, well then that makes perfect sense.
Enjoy youth before it's gone.
Fine.
I also get the strong sense, tell me what you think, that elsewhere in the Old Testament and definitely in Ecclesiastes, it's, you never quite get away from the sense of fleeting,
but you have this sense of it doesn't give me what I legitimately expect from it.
It's disappointing and frustrating and in vain, I think, is a good translation in a number of points.
I'm not sure any one word in English quite gets everything he's saying, you have to vary.
But I remember in chapter 2, the man, the teacher, which I think is a good translation from the NIV, it's not that he fails in everything he wants to do in life.
We get a kind of mini autobiography in chapters 1 and chapter 2.
He succeeds, he accomplished everything on his agenda, he got done.
And he faced how quickly he was going to have to pass it on to someone else and he was going to be gone.
And this other person might ruin it all.
He has no control over that.
Yeah.
And he says, why then have I been so very wise?
And it's as if he wanted something more from all those accomplishments that he didn't get.
So the brevity and the vanity, the frustration, the futility, that idea seems prominent in the book.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think that then does have implications for what we might think of as the meaning of life, because it does mean that pursuing things in life is going to be empty and frustrating.
So you can kind of arrive at that existential sense of meaning eventually, but it's not what the word means in the first instance.
Right.
And if we think that, then I think we're already off down an unhelpful path.
Yes.
Particularly down that path of, well, this book is just saying everything's empty and sort of the skeptic kind of approach that you were outlining at the beginning.
And that life is not worth engaging with.
And the book wants to push us exactly in the opposite direction from that.
One of the articles I read in the book pointed out that if he's saying everything is meaningless, there's no reason for him to say something is better than something else, if everything's meaningless.
If it's meaningless, there's no reason for God to bring everything into judgment, whether small or little, that just won't work.
How did you, when you preached Ecclesiastes, what word did you use for Hebel?
Yeah, we varied, because I think it is tricky.
I began just by saying it was like breath and that it was fleeting like breath.
It was insubstantial and you couldn't get hold of it, that kind of sense.
Yeah.
It's the very opposite of something being kind of concrete.
Yes.
Yeah.
You mentioned life in a fallen world.
Would you agree with the statement that Ecclesiastes is a commentary on life after Genesis three and wise instruction in how to live in a world that is good, but under God's curse,
which I want to explain, but in general, that Ecclesiastes is the one part of the Bible where God says, let me help you deal with life after the fall and the things that have gone wrong with creation.
Yes.
Yeah, I agree.
And I think it's worth just possibly backing up slightly and seeing it as part of the wisdom literature.
Yes.
And just thinking of wisdom literature as different to like the salvation history kind of events.
Yes.
Of what God is doing and different to instruction in law as to how to live.
Yes.
But helping us understand exactly this life in a fallen world.
Yes.
So Job understanding the perplexity of suffering or even not understanding, grappling with Proverbs, perhaps giving us some of the regularities and normalities of how life tends to go.
Yeah.
And Ecclesiastes maybe even as countering that or complementing that some of the other ways life goes in being confusing, you know, life and events happen to everyone and you're not in control.
Yeah.
And that's something that God wants us to read.
That's our Heavenly Father instructing us in this.
I found it really helpful when I was writing to keep Genesis three in the back of my mind.
And when God curses creation, that does not mean he thinks it's bad or awful.
Creation is still good.
Creation, it just curses the opposite of blessing.
It means creation will not work with the same easy success and abundance and fertility that it would have had otherwise.
It's by the sweat of your brow that you eke out.
So within that, I suppose, I mean, we can use the Pauline term frustration.
Ecclesiastes is helping us negotiate life.
It's important to put Ecclesiastes in the context of wisdom literature.
It fascinates me that the altism isn't just a set of rules.
Living in God's world is more than just being good and following the rules.
You need this kind of skill in the subtleties of that's fascinating to me.
How would you...
What mistakes might it be easy for...
Let me put you on the spot a little bit.
What mistakes might it be easy for Christians to make if Ecclesiastes was not in the canon?
Hmm.
Yeah, I need an advance warning on these sort of questions.
Apologies.
We can circle back around to it if you want.
That's fine, I'll have a go and then you can tell me the right answer.
Right.
I think we'll just take that comparison with proverbs,
something like, you know, train a child in the way they should go
and in the future they won't depart from it.
That's my paraphrase.
Yeah.
And it's an observation on some of the regularities.
Now, even that, that's not a promise
that nothing will ever go wrong with your child if you've raised them properly.
But it's an observation of how things tend to go.
And if you multiply those, you're going to tend to think
there's a kind of regularity and normality to life,
which doesn't...
Which does fit because God's world has a sort of order to it.
But it doesn't fit with that frustration and futility.
And we could end up going, what's gone wrong with my life?
I don't understand.
And what did I do wrong?
And therefore, what did I do wrong?
Why am I to blame?
Did I make some mistake or has God against me in some way?
Rather than, you know what?
Life is incredibly mixed
and lots of really rubbish stuff is actually going to happen.
And you're not in control.
And it could feel like you will pass through this world and not leave a mark on it.
But, and we'll get to this, I guess.
But that doesn't mean it's pointless.
And that doesn't mean there's not a good way to live in it.
And that doesn't mean it's meant to be rejected.
For sure.
The cynic who holds back from everything,
who is certain there's something else going on and never wants to be taken in again.
Ecclesiastes is very much not wanting us to go there and trying to protect us from that.
Yeah.
The from verses two and three of chapter one seem to be crucial for the whole book.
Vanity of vanities or breath of breaths, whoever exactly want to say that.
And then one prophet is there for a man in all his toil with which he labors under the sun.
And that under the sun phrase I find really helpful for the whole book.
Sorry, the teacher is not denying an above the sun reality.
One commentary I read helpfully said that part of what it means for God to be God is
that he's not subject to this transience and vanity and whatnot.
But in life under the sun, which is also another way of saying life within this age before the eschaton.
Yes.
They've found graves from ancient Phoenicia, I think,
that talk about the time of the dead persons, the time that they were under the sun.
So it means it's not just spatial, but the time of your earthly life.
Yes.
I think if I were to answer my own difficult question, apologies for putting you on the spot.
I think Ecclesiastes helps us not to have an over realized eschatology.
It helps us be realistic about life in this age before the second coming,
before the new creation and live wisely and and still be able to engage with life
and drink it to the leaves and just relish it.
And the way that the teacher goes about that is just fascinating to me.
Now, all of that means that our whole approach to the book is really significant.
As a preacher, it's one of the dangers of if you just started week one in chapter one
and hadn't decided how you're going to approach the whole thing,
you'd be in real trouble by chapter three or four.
Yes.
Is it worth just outlining some of the different ways people take it
and maybe some of that might connect with some commentaries?
Yeah, I see basically three approaches to the book.
You tell me if this fits with what you've read.
Yeah.
On the one hand, I've read people that I thought mishandled the book
either by not giving enough attention to the frustration in the book
or not enough attention to the joy.
Yeah.
That's the difficult thing.
I say the thing I wrote, you need to keep a sense of bothness in Ecclesiastes.
Life is both really frustrating and really good, both at the same time, always.
And I've read...
I don't think I've read Long Necker actually, but I've read some commentaries.
One, by a very fine Old Testament scholar that just took the word as brief
and took it as a way of saying all the frustrating stuff is going to be over soon,
so it's all okay.
And he didn't do justice to the frustrating aspect.
I've read others by Tremper Longman, which is a name probably many people know,
and another one by James Crenshaw, who only got the frustration and life is bad
and only took it negatively.
And James Crenshaw, in his commentary, actually, on some of the joy passages,
he will just say, this doesn't seem to fit in the book at all,
and maybe somebody added it later, which is completely unconvincing, you know.
And yet I've come across a couple of commentaries
that I think got the bothness really well.
I think in general, those are the sorts of things I read.
Does that fit with what you've read?
Yeah, it does.
Because I was struggling so much and understanding it,
I think I bought more commentaries on Ecclesiastes
than I have with lots of other books.
And you soon learn that how they take the whole book
and how they take a heavy breath, futility, is really key.
So Longman, for example, basically takes the majority of the book
as basically kind of wrong.
It's kind of heretical.
It's like expressing a sceptical desire that they shouldn't have.
And really only the epilogue corrects everything.
Yes.
Which will make it a very strange book to preach.
Very strange.
Others, it seems to me, take a little bit more of a mixed position,
kind of going, he's kind of almost lapses into scepticism sometimes,
but then kind of brings himself back out of it.
And sometimes they connect that to the under the sun sort of language.
Or now I'm almost like I'm pretending God doesn't exist, so I'm being negative.
Oh, now I'm remembering he does.
But it seems to me the under the sun language doesn't work that neatly.
And then what you end up doing is effectively evaluating,
do I think this is a correct passage or a wrong passage?
And in both of those, you basically end up only ever saying
what you know is true from elsewhere.
You sort of read your theology in.
Exactly.
And in the history of interpretation,
it's common to have some people saying, oh, hell, it is arguing with sceptics
and disagreeing with stuff.
Yeah.
But that's way too easy.
Yeah.
And then others take it as a no, this is basically an orthodox book all the way through.
Some statements taken in isolation are hard and perhaps we'll mention some
particularly difficult bits later on.
And yet, actually, it's not just the
the epilogue about fearing God and so on and he'll bring everything to judgment.
It's not that that just provides a kind of, oh, there's our final kind of safeguard.
Actually, that drips through the whole book.
It does.
So mentions of fearing God and mentions of judgment come through the book.
Yeah.
And our almost little anchor points, I think, which help us see that we're being
helped all the way through to wrestle with the frustration and the joy in the light of what will come.
It's brilliant to me that the teacher never lapses into cynicism and never says,
oh, it doesn't matter if you obey God or not or what, just do whatever you want.
But he will want to say there are things you could reasonably expect to use new
covenant language from being a good Christian, and they may not always obtain.
For sure.
Your life may not.
It is still absolutely worth obeying God.
Yeah.
But be realistic about the scurriness of life.
Yeah.
It life will not always play out the way you could reasonably expect, but he doesn't go
the direction we expect and say, well, who cares?
Who cares about discipleship or anything?
He still says unambiguously it is absolutely worth doing that.
But he's helping us have realistic expectations about life after the fall.
Yeah.
I was reading a thing from a pastor I liked on Ecclesiastes, and at one point he said,
go ahead and get frustrated and lose your faith.
There's some kinds of faith worth losing.
Huh.
And that stuck in my mind as one of the reasons I warm to this difficult, depressing,
outrageous sort of book, I find my tendency, I'd summarize the book as basically saying,
I don't think it's about meaning so much.
It's about value.
It's about what value does your life has.
In Chapter two, verse three, he makes a search to see what is good for the sons of
men to do in all the days of their life under the sun.
Yes.
What's worth investing your time in?
Yeah.
What's the best life to live?
And I find my own tendency, if you were to ask me, if I haven't read Ecclesiastes for
a while, if you were to ask me, why is all your work worth doing, Eric?
I would probably tend to say I'm making a mark in the world.
I'm making a difference.
And I've just managed to sort of bracket out and not notice very soon.
I'm going to be in the ground.
And although my eschatological reward is sure,
very soon it will be as if I never existed.
Yeah.
And I feel that as a troubling imposition, I sort of think, well,
why am I working so hard then?
And the teacher guides me to say it's only as you resolutely stare at that,
that you will be able to let go of being...
I'm talking about myself here.
I will be able to let go of being obsessed with my own accomplishments,
wondering how much of a mark I'm making and just say the work God has given me
today is a gift from God.
Under the sun, I won't get anything permanent from it.
This conversation, enjoyable as it is, will be forgotten sooner or later.
It's still absolutely worth doing because the God of eternity has given you to,
us to, to talk about this today.
That's the value that it has.
I have never read that anywhere, anywhere else in the Bible, any other
Christian book, I've never come across that.
I find that so helpful.
Yeah, very much.
And I think it's particularly helpful for our culture today.
Yes. That's the next thing I wanted to ask you.
Because just, I mean, in terms of denying the reality of death and the transience
of life, and that was one reason it was interesting doing it in the pandemic.
Yes.
And of course, it wasn't the pandemic made death more of a reality.
It only made it a more conscious reality.
We never had numbers of people dying before on the news.
Yeah.
And, but the statistics ultimately didn't change one in one die.
Yeah.
And just even in chapter one, that thing about being forgotten.
Yeah.
I told people at the end, one of my applications, I had some unusual
applications in Ecclesiastes, I told people to visit graveyards.
And I told them to visit a graveyard and find a gravestone that had a nice, you
know, engraving on it.
Yeah.
And it was, you know, a name and dates and loving father, whatever.
Okay. Imagine your name on that gravestone and what it would say about you.
Yeah.
And then I said, go and find a really old gravestone where the whole thing is
really weathered and you can't even read the thing.
Exactly.
That's your gravestone.
Exactly.
No one even remembers you existed and knows who you are.
I will do exactly this, exactly the same thing.
I will say, go to a grave, read the name
and etch your name there for me, 1976 to whatever.
And then imagine the wind and the weather wiping it away.
Yeah.
And eventually it's just and it's part of God's wisdom for us, God's imposition of
frustration on creation, it's not a rejection of us.
It's not that he hates.
It's so easy to slip into the trickily, sentimentally sort of isn't life wonderful.
Every Christmas time we get these horribly sentimental ads on the one hand or on the
other hand, just sheer cynicism that I'm not going to be taken in anymore and I'm
not going to get my heart broken again.
I will never be disappointed again because I will assume the worst about everything.
And Ecclesiastes gives us a way to hold on to both of those.
And it's by holding on to both of them.
It's fascinating to me in Chapter two,
the teacher says almost nothing about God as he is out there killing it, doing
everything he wanted to in life and having a great time and succeeding at everything.
I mean, anything you want to accomplish in life, he did it.
Yeah.
He says basically nothing about God.
And if God had not subjected my life to frustration, if I if I tell my students
in Hebrew without the fall, you could just stare at the page and you'd get it.
And you'd be up and reading the Old Testament in about two weeks.
It would be easy with the faults by the sweat of your brow that you get through
this class, you know, if I could just master my existence.
If there if it had never been subjected to frustration, would I care about God?
Yeah.
Would I?
Yeah.
Probably not.
Yeah.
Uh, in the commentaries as to right, I try to say Ecclesiastes is the best of both
worlds because after sin, God doesn't take our earthly lives away from us.
He gives them to us, but he takes out of them everything that would make them
spiritually dangerous. It's impossible if we're honest to turn them into an idol
and find our satisfaction there, which is really very kind of us.
But he still gives us each day to enjoy.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Very good.
I was thinking of your comment earlier that you don't read the elsewhere in the
Bible, and I agree there's an emphasis here.
Yes.
Ecclesiastes that you don't get elsewhere.
Yes.
But one of the things I was struck by was some of the New Testament resonances.
Tell me.
We've mentioned Romans eight.
Yes.
Futility or frustration is perhaps a bit of a global term for the book.
But for example, the idol of money, for example, I think when Paul wrote 1
Timothy six about the love of money, rid of evil and so on, and you enter the
world with nothing, leave with nothing.
He's been reading Ecclesiastes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Some of it's almost a paraphrase.
Yeah.
And then something like James four and your life is a mist.
Exactly.
Is very much Ecclesiastes.
And so you're not in control.
Yes.
And you can't say what you're going to go and do and not do in life.
Yes.
It's all subject to other forces.
Yes.
Outside of your control.
Yeah.
And then some of the stuff on good gifts.
One Timothy five, for example, about, you know,
bits of all the creations, good gift from God to be enjoyed.
Yes.
James one about good gifts from our father.
Yes.
Really echoing some of the food and drink of life with your wife and so on is a gift from God.
So just seeing some of those help me both think this isn't unusual.
Yeah.
And again, and it's not like the New Testament suddenly turns it on its head and goes,
oh, I've got a spiritual answer for you.
And we don't have to worry about Ecclesiastes anymore.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I heard a sermon on Ecclesiastes once.
They gave the most perfect sermon illustration.
I think the preacher went through the text and then he held up his coffee cup.
He said, this is my favorite coffee mug.
And I drank coffee out of it this morning.
Yeah.
And then against the background of everything in your life is a gift.
You didn't win that for yourself.
And it's all going to slip away from you very quickly.
But God gave that to you.
He said, OK, let's think about this.
Five thousand years ago, there was some Sumerian man working the field,
and he sees his son playing around in the mud and he's making different shapes.
And then the sun runs off and the sun is shining down.
It's hot.
And he sees that the mud stays in those shapes.
And he thinks the Sumerian man thinks, that's interesting.
I'm going to mess around with that.
I wonder if I make that clay even hotter.
I wonder what will happen.
And at some point, pottery is invented and it spreads throughout the world and it's refined.
And the preacher said one of the reasons why God gave it to that,
whoever that Sumerian gentleman was, however many thousands of years ago,
was so that I in 2020 could enjoy a cup of coffee this morning.
That's one of the reasons why that happened.
It's kind of staggering to say each half hour I have in my day is a present from God
that he won't give me forever.
But I did not create this.
I can't hold on to it.
I don't know what results it will have.
He says in chapter 11, work in the morning, work in the evening.
Don't withhold your hand from anything because you don't know what's going to succeed.
Everything might succeed.
It's out of your control.
So throw yourself in and leave it with God.
That is so different.
I naturally tend to think I'm the one in control and I'm going to establish my own
significance through my works.
It's so liberating for me to be freed from that.
One other New Testament resonance.
I wonder if in the passage from Ecclesiastes 9, God has already approved of everything you do.
I've always wondered if there's not an echo with justification by faith there
because the verb there is ratsa, which often gets used in Leviticus for the Holy God
receiving and accepting and approving your gifts and you are able to enter his presence.
And the word work there in Ecclesiastes means your day job, not religious works.
And yet the message in Ecclesiastes, you don't establish anything permanent through your work,
but God has already approved of everything you do irrespective of your accomplishment
because long term you don't accomplish anything.
Am I crazy to think that sounds close to justification by faith irrespective of all our works?
Am I reaching too much there?
I'm cautious.
That is just fine.
But you have spent longer thinking about it than I have.
The already approving irrespective of accomplishment.
Sure.
It's not the same.
No, no.
It feels like an echo.
I can see a parallel idea.
Yeah.
I'm less sure that's immediately what's happening in chapter 9.
What I think is happening in chapter 9 about the embracing your work and working with all your strength.
Yes.
I do think Paul picks that up in spaces like Colossians 3, whatever you do, work at it with all your heart.
Yeah.
And ultimately for the same reason, because you have a heavenly father and a heavenly judge,
a heavenly master who will reward with you for what you do.
Exactly.
Have you read David Gibson's Destiny?
I have.
Learning to Live by Preparing to Die.
I think that's my favorite book on Ecclesiastes.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's really helpful.
Really helpful.
He doesn't do every passage.
That's right.
So we decided to preach all the way through.
Good for you.
Occasionally he went, David, where's...
Help us out here.
But he takes this kind of approach we're talking about, obviously, and I think is really helpful.
I want to ask you what your favorite passage in the book is.
But before I do, Ecclesiastes talks about religion more than once.
Yeah.
In a new covenant context, let's say there's a Christian who with the best of intentions ignores the difficult but wise teaching of Ecclesiastes.
How might that show up in church on Sunday morning?
How might it be easy for...
I'm putting you on the spot again, Graham, I apologize.
How might it be easy for Christians who perhaps don't take Ecclesiastes to heart the way they should to be unwise according to what Ecclesiastes thinks is wisdom?
Any thoughts?
Yeah, I think so.
Well, I think the section in chapter five on how you kind of come to the temple is really interesting here.
It's basically don't over promise to God because you might not be able to do it.
So, I mean, I guess we have to draw a distinction between what sort of aspirational in terms of what would I like to be able to do.
But don't be, just like with your work and everything else in life, don't be overconfident of what you will achieve and the mark you'll leave.
The person, the enthusiastic and well motivated believer who wants to say, I'm going to change the world for God.
Well, again, I admire the aspiration.
I don't want to dampen that down.
Yes.
But I do want to say Ecclesiastes actually says, don't say that sort of stuff because you don't know what you'll be able to do.
I think that's a really helpful comment and it fascinates me.
It seems to me Ecclesiastes would want to say to that very enthusiastic, energetic young man, you are either going to have to lie to yourself about your range of influence,
or you're going to start hating going to church.
It's going to frustrate you so much because you're going to be saying, why can't I get my agenda done?
Because life resists you, right?
Yeah.
And Ecclesiastes gives us a way to be frustrated with life without rejecting it.
Which reminds me of something else I was conscious of in preaching.
Yeah.
Tell me what you think of this.
I ended up wrestling because I thought, you know what, this is like a middle-aged person's book.
I'm in my mid-50s and so I have to go, yes, I really, really am middle-aged.
And a man, some of this stuff is resonating with me.
And I'm finding some of the things about being forgotten and stuff, as we've already said, like curiously kind of grounding in kind of going, yeah, that's your starting point.
It's edifying.
And so like very negative and yet curiously grounding, edifying and encouraging.
But what I found myself frustrated with was I kept on wanting to say to like our teenagers and people in their 20s, it's like, you've got to get your head around this.
But I know you won't immediately feel it the way I feel it.
So it felt like a more age and stage of life specific book compared to other books of the Bible.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
In chapter seven, verse three, the ESV has sorrows better than laughter for by sadness of faith, a face, the heart is made glad.
That seems like a motto for the whole book.
There's a kind of sorrow that leads to a deeper and more solid joy than you would have otherwise, as opposed to just ignoring the things I don't want to think about in life.
And there's a happiness that's easier to get to, but is much more brittle and vulnerable.
What's your favorite passage in the book?
Oh, that's so difficult.
Can I give you sort of some themes and mention some passages?
Like, I think part of the.
A kind of don't try and fight life, I kind of submit, I guess, particularly chapter three, a time for everything, that beautiful, you know, tiny ball on time to die, etc.
I think in my sermon, I called it kind of submit to the seasons so that you don't you know, that time, time your life brings under God all these different elements.
Yeah.
There'll be a time to mourn.
There'll be a time to rejoice.
People get married.
There'll be weddings, there'll be funerals.
Yeah.
There'll be health, there'll be sickness.
Yeah.
And rather than sort of railing against it, saying there is a time for these things.
And the question then is, is how do I live well in that time?
Yeah.
It reminded me, if you'll forgive a cross reference of Lord of the Rings and Gandalf saying to Frodo, something like that is not given to us to decide the times we live in.
Yes.
But to live well within those times.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.
Whatever has been given to us.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And then I was just, well, the other one that really comes to mind, it's kind of similar is in Chapter 12.
That's where I was going to go.
So what I think of as the kind of, you know, it's a sort of description of aging.
Yes.
You know, in a sort of metaphorical thing, we had the funniest, funniest moment in this as a lady at our church who heard me preaching this.
It was during the pandemic.
She was listening online at the time because of isolation.
And she said she was sitting at home and she was just getting more and more angry.
And she said, Graham, you're telling me everything that's going on in my life.
Oh, no.
Everything that's going wrong with me.
Oh, no.
Effectively.
So what she was feeling was she was feeling the pain of that description.
Yeah.
And kind of both wanting to say, no, I hate it.
And yet at the same time, you're right.
It's happening.
Yeah.
And that sense again of it just it's giving us, as it were, hard and painful truths, but truths that we will do well to submit to rather than fight.
And we'll be happier in the long run.
And we'll be happy in the long run as a result.
Yeah.
I love chapter three as well, especially eternity in their hearts.
Yes.
But so that we can't find out what God has done from beginning to end.
So God puts our he beautifully orders our lives in different seasons, but he puts an impulse to something bigger and above time in us.
But he never can quite figure out what it is.
He blocks the sight of that.
He gives us very good lives, but he doesn't let us get comfortable in them.
We know there's something more that explains so much about human beings.
And I can't find anywhere else in scripture that quite says it that way.
I'm thankful for that.
And I find chapter 12 just surreal and really gripping.
And I'm just glad it's in the Bible.
You can read it about the breakdown of the body.
I wonder if it's even a little bit faker than that, if it's just meant to be a series of images communicating an atmosphere of, you know, birds gathering on windowsills and normal work in the town has stopped.
And there's dark storm clouds and it's all getting dark and quiet.
And then in verse five, let's see, grasshopper drags itself alone, desire fails because man is going to his eternal home and the mourners go about in the streets.
It's almost like the town is shut down for a funeral and they're bearing the casket.
You look in it and it's you in that casket.
He is able to make you feel very much that the bell is tolling for you before it does.
It's not the only passage about death in the Bible.
It's beautiful to me that the Bible describes death as falling asleep.
Nothing more strange than that.
Just going to sleep in the hope of waking up in the resurrection.
But this is one of these passages.
It is this deep sense of mourning and that something precious is being lost and the teacher won't let us look away.
Yeah.
And it connects with what you're saying about keeping Genesis three in mind because it has the dust returning to the ground.
Yes.
Echoing Genesis three directly.
And I've actually since preaching it, I've ended up using some sections of chapter 12,
particularly that kind of remembering him before the silver cord is severed and so on, using that at funerals.
Yeah.
And the spirit returning to God who gave it.
Yeah.
Just that hint of a much better world in the new creation.
Yeah.
But that's not what Ecclesiastes is about.
Yes.
Yeah.
We've mentioned frustrating passages.
Yes.
Perhaps we shouldn't end on this note because it would be negative.
But you've had to write something on it.
I've had to preach through it.
Yes.
Were there passages where you ended up just going, I still don't really know what's going on here.
That's a good question.
There are a couple of verses in chapter four, like the king is served by a field and whatnot in verses seven and eight.
Yeah.
I still struggle with those.
I find them very cryptic.
I had to rely very heavily on a book by Zach Eswine who teaches a covenant who writes on Ecclesiastes very helpfully.
Chapter 10 is a bit obscure to me.
I found Zach Eswine very helpful there.
Yeah.
A couple passages in chapter four in the middle parts of the book, chapters one through three, 11 and 12, I feel I have a firmer grasp on.
Yeah.
You?
Yeah.
To be honest, it depended a little bit.
I preached most of it, but I didn't preach every passage and so where I didn't have to do the work in getting into the common trees.
Yeah.
So like I just glance to earlier chapter seven, not being over righteous or being over wise or being over wicked.
It's like, you know, in context, maybe I could make more of that, but at first sight, at least it's like.
It's a shocking thing to say.
Yeah.
I can't help but think of the over righteousness there is that enthusiastic young man.
Okay.
Who is promising himself great results from his piety.
Yeah.
And hasn't factored in the frustration of creation and the curse.
And in, let's see, in chapter seven, it's don't be over righteous.
Yeah.
Don't be overly righteous.
Don't make yourself too wise.
Why should you destroy yourself?
That there's a kind of brittle, naive faith that can give up on God and give up on Christianity.
Yeah.
When it doesn't get what it wants right away, because why isn't this obeying me?
Yeah.
I wonder if the teacher is helping us.
Sure.
Defending us against a kind of naive spirituality that hasn't reckoned with how God disposes this present age.
Yeah.
That's what I wonder.
Well, there's a good example of, you know, a little bit of ecclesiastical where you read it at first sight, you go, what on earth is that?
And even that can't be right.
Yes.
I mean, chapter 10, money is the answer for everything.
That can't be right.
And in fact, it can't even be right in Ecclesiastes, because he's already told us how it isn't the answer to everything.
Right.
And you'll leave without it and so on.
Right.
And yet, wrestling with it, you come up with some of the more profound insights.
Yes.
If you read Ecclesiastes and you think that the Bible cannot be saying that, you're not doing anything wrong.
Yeah.
He's trying to provoke you and prod you.
I mean, it says at the end that the words of the wise are like goads.
Yeah.
Which is meant to push you where you don't want to go.
Yeah.
So you're not doing anything wrong if you hear it that way.
Yeah.
But it's worth wrestling with.
Yes.
There is gold.
Yes.
That you will not find anywhere else in the Bible.
Yeah.
It really is unique.
Yeah.
That's a convenient place to stop.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Please feel free to leave a comment with any questions that you have.
Thanks.