Where Is Providence in the Vanity of Ecclesiastes?
00:00:00.000 | (music)
00:00:04.000 | Well, the book of Ecclesiastes is enigmatic.
00:00:07.000 | It's puzzling.
00:00:09.000 | It's puzzling because it tells us that much of life is vanity.
00:00:12.000 | Chasing after wind.
00:00:14.000 | It says this from the second verse of the book.
00:00:17.000 | "Meaningless, meaningless," says the teacher.
00:00:19.000 | "Utterly meaningless."
00:00:21.000 | Everything is meaningless.
00:00:23.000 | But God's providence tells us that everything in life is meaningful.
00:00:28.000 | So, what gives?
00:00:30.000 | This is a sharp email question from David in Brookville, Pennsylvania.
00:00:34.000 | "Hello, Pastor John. I've read a quarter of your new book, Providence.
00:00:38.000 | The avalanche of scriptural evidence to prove that nothing is random,
00:00:42.000 | nothing is without purpose,
00:00:44.000 | nothing is pointless, and nothing is meaningless is truly overwhelming.
00:00:49.000 | My question is regarding Ecclesiastes.
00:00:52.000 | If providence proves that nothing is random or meaningless,
00:00:56.000 | why does Ecclesiastes repeatedly say just about everything in the drama of human life is meaningless?
00:01:05.000 | How do you reconcile this?"
00:01:07.000 | Well, I do admit that Ecclesiastes is a perplexing book.
00:01:12.000 | I suspect that the author of Ecclesiastes, the preacher, Kohelet, in Hebrew,
00:01:20.000 | I suspect that he intended it to be complex and perplexing
00:01:24.000 | precisely because as we looked at the world that he was looking at,
00:01:28.000 | it was a perplexing world.
00:01:30.000 | I find the book of Ecclesiastes probably the most difficult book in the Bible to understand,
00:01:37.000 | but it is in the Bible.
00:01:40.000 | And the Bible that Jesus loved and Jesus esteemed and Jesus considered to be infallible.
00:01:48.000 | And I don't believe that the message of the book contradicts the overall message of providence in the Bible as a whole.
00:01:56.000 | God is sovereign over all things and is purposeful and wise and just and good in all that he does,
00:02:03.000 | and I think that's true in Ecclesiastes as well as in the rest of the Bible.
00:02:09.000 | To be sure, the book starts like this.
00:02:12.000 | "Vanity of vanities," says the preacher.
00:02:15.000 | "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
00:02:18.000 | What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?"
00:02:24.000 | Chapter 1, verse 2.
00:02:26.000 | But he answers in verse 11, "Then I considered all that my hands had done
00:02:32.000 | and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind,
00:02:40.000 | and there was nothing to be gained under the sun," verse 11.
00:02:45.000 | And yet he says two verses later that perhaps it's not so true that absolutely nothing is to be gained.
00:02:55.000 | "Then I saw that there is more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness.
00:03:07.000 | The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness,
00:03:13.000 | and yet I perceived that the same event happens to them all."
00:03:18.000 | So, yes, there is a sense of frustration that, quote,
00:03:23.000 | "the same thing happens to both the fool and the wise, both die," for example.
00:03:30.000 | But still, it's not true that there's no such thing as wisdom or light.
00:03:37.000 | There is more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness.
00:03:44.000 | The wise person has his eyes in his head, the fool walks in darkness.
00:03:49.000 | So there are tensions that we feel in this book between its seeming description of the world as meaningless,
00:04:01.000 | and yet, here's chapter 12, "The end of the matter.
00:04:05.000 | All has been heard. Fear God. Keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.
00:04:13.000 | For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil."
00:04:20.000 | So you have a reigning God of justice, and you seem to have a world of meaninglessness.
00:04:27.000 | The tension is not just between Ecclesiastes and the rest of the Bible.
00:04:32.000 | The tension is within Ecclesiastes itself, or is it?
00:04:39.000 | In other words, is the tension resolvable?
00:04:43.000 | It seems to me that you can look in one of two directions for some resolution of the tensions that you feel when you read Ecclesiastes.
00:04:53.000 | One direction would be to say that there is a pessimistic, God-ignoring spokesman
00:05:02.000 | writing his narration of the meaninglessness of life in the main part of the book,
00:05:07.000 | and then a God-centered person picks up at the end and closes the book by saying
00:05:14.000 | that all that bad theology is what you get when there's no God in the picture.
00:05:19.000 | But now I'm going to put God in the picture and close with a God-centered perspective and set everything right.
00:05:25.000 | In other words, you could think of the book of Ecclesiastes the way you think about Job,
00:05:30.000 | when we realize that 29 chapters of the book of Job is his thankless friends
00:05:39.000 | battering him with bad theology that doesn't understand the ways of God accurately.
00:05:46.000 | And then those 29 chapters are set straight by Elihu and the speeches of God and Job's repentance at the end of the book.
00:05:55.000 | You could think about the book of Ecclesiastes that way.
00:06:00.000 | The other direction you could go and look for some kind of resolution is to say,
00:06:08.000 | "No, the entire book is in fact written by one God-centered, truly inspired person,
00:06:17.000 | and we need to understand some of his terms in a way that will help us not overreact
00:06:23.000 | to some of his descriptions of seeming hopelessness and perplexity and confusion and meaninglessness."
00:06:29.000 | For example, it may well be that meaninglessness is not the best translation of the Hebrew word "hebel,"
00:06:39.000 | usually translated "vanity," but that it might better be translated "enigmatic" or "perplexing."
00:06:50.000 | And the term "under the sun," which occurs 29 times, may not mean,
00:06:58.000 | "Well, this is a portrayal of the world as it is without God and therefore meaningless,"
00:07:04.000 | but rather maybe it means a world where we can't see all that God is doing
00:07:13.000 | so that it looks like perplexity, it looks like an enigma.
00:07:19.000 | But it's not. There is providence behind what we can see.
00:07:24.000 | For example, Jason Deroshes, he's an Old Testament prophet, Midwestern seminary,
00:07:32.000 | good friend of mine, he describes this "under the sun" like this.
00:07:41.000 | "It is a shorthand for the restricted sphere of activities that the author was privileged to observe."
00:07:51.000 | So a restricted sphere that he can see without any bracketing out of God or his providential role.
00:08:02.000 | In other words, the perspective of the writer is not godlessness and meaninglessness,
00:08:09.000 | but limitation and enigma, perplexity, riddle.
00:08:15.000 | So Deroshes says, "Everything in this time-bound curse-influenced creation bears a level of enigma,"
00:08:26.000 | meaning that life under the sun is frustratingly perplexing, puzzling, or incomprehensible,
00:08:36.000 | "though still with meaning and significance," close quote on Deroshes' comment.
00:08:44.000 | So he concludes that the message of the book of Ecclesiastes is this.
00:08:50.000 | It's a call to turn from striving against God's providence toward trusting the God who is in control
00:09:00.000 | and who is both willing and able to help all who fear him.
00:09:05.000 | This is the goal of Ecclesiastes, that believers, feeling the weight of the curse
00:09:12.000 | and the burdens of life's enigmas, would turn their eyes toward God,
00:09:19.000 | resting in his purposes and delighting, whenever possible, in his beautiful, disfigured world.
00:09:28.000 | In this alone will one find lasting gain into eternity.
00:09:36.000 | So, whichever direction you take to find resolution in the book of Ecclesiastes,
00:09:44.000 | we know for certain that under God's wisdom and his inspiration of Scripture,
00:09:51.000 | the message of Ecclesiastes is not contrary to the glorious God of all-embracing, all-pervasive, all-wise providence.
00:10:02.000 | In this book, God is God, man is man.
00:10:06.000 | One is infinite, one is finite.
00:10:09.000 | One is all-knowing and all-governing, one is ignorant of millions and millions of things that God is doing
00:10:15.000 | at any given moment, which is why things can look so perplexing.
00:10:21.000 | So the writer says, "I perceived that whatever God does endures forever.
00:10:28.000 | Nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it.
00:10:32.000 | God has done it so that people fear before him.
00:10:37.000 | He has made everything beautiful in its time, and he has put eternity into man's heart
00:10:45.000 | so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end."
00:10:53.000 | In other words, providence is designed not only to provide our souls with peace in God's rule and wisdom and goodness,
00:11:03.000 | but also designed to provide perplexity and humility and point us away from ourselves to a Savior.
00:11:14.000 | Amen. Thank you, Pastor John. Thank you, David.
00:11:16.000 | For the questions, you read the new book, Providence, and have questions of your own, send those in to us.
00:11:21.000 | Send us your questions or search our growing archive or subscribe to the podcast.
00:11:25.000 | You can do all of those things at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:31.000 | Well, we are to fear God and we are to flee to God.
00:11:37.000 | And while those two things, fearing God and fleeing to him, may sound oddly contradictory, they're not.
00:11:44.000 | And Pastor John will explain why we can flee to God and fear him at the same time.
00:11:50.000 | That's up next time. I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Wednesday.
00:11:54.000 | [Pastor John's Office]
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