Ancient Remedies for the Ills of Modernity

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Bobby Jamieson
Good to be with you, brothers. It’s a joy and a privilege to address a room full of like minded pastors who are united in the gospel and who are laboring together to faithfully preach and Herald Christ and shepherd Christ’s people. So it’s a privilege to be with you, a joy to be with you. Let me open this message in prayer, and we’ll jump right in and Heavenly Father. We, thank you for this time. We, thank you for this time to encourage each other and the labor you’ve given us. We, thank you for this time to encourage each other with the truths of your word, Father. We pray that You would bless this time to equip us. Bless me as I consider again your word in the book of Ecclesiastes. Bless us. Help us to be strengthened for the work you’ve given us. Help us to have fresh eyes, to perceive the beauty of the hope we have in Christ. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen, as Matt mentioned, and as you might have experienced if you came to this last session a quarter ago, the kind of theme of these regional quarterly gatherings for now is equipping for evangelism. And so in keeping with that, I want to take my cues from someone who’s become an increasing help to me in thinking about apologetics and evangelism. That is the 17th century Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal. Pascal made notes for a big apologetic that he never finished because he died real young. Those are called his Ponce. Ponce number 12. Pascal writes, men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next, make it attractive, make good men wish it were true. And then show that it is worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature, attractive because it promises true good. Now only God can give the new birth, only God can make these truths appealing to the fallen human heart by giving a new heart. And yet we’re all committed to the reality that God works through means. And so I take Pascal to be laying out a particular pathway for our use of means in apologetics and evangelism show that the Christian religion really understands human nature show that the Christian religion really promises true good. Ecclesiastes does both of those things superlatively. It really understands human nature. It really promises true good. I think Ecclesiastes offers one of the best biblical examples of a kind of side pathway of evangelism through the heart. Ecclesiastes enters through the side door of the heart. And so in this message, I’m not so much going to talk about doing evangelism from Ecclesiastes. Instead, in a way, I’m going to try to just do it. I’m going to try to model how I try to preach the gospel from Ecclesiastes. It’s as if each of you had brought a non Christian friend with you, and I’m talking more to them than to you, so I’m going to do it, and then we’re going to talk about it in the discussion time together. My goal is to address both the discontents and the delights that our non Christian friends and family and colleagues experience. I’m going to try to do two things with both the discontents and the delights. I’m going to try to show how Ecclesiastes out describes their discontents. It’s as if it gets inside your head. It shows you the life you’re living. How did you know this is my experience? How did you know these are the things I’m struggling with? How did you put such a name to it and describe it so well? I’m also going to try to show how Ecclesiastes out explains their discontents. It actually shows a reason. It actually helps you get from this experience down to a deeper reality of what’s wrong with me and what’s wrong with the world. Out, describe and out, explain their discontents, and the same thing for their delights. Out, describe them. Show you, the Bible gets this. God gets this. It was his idea. Here’s a name for the good things you’re experiencing, and here’s a deeper reason than you’ve maybe suspected is the case for the good things in your life. Out, describe, out, explain discontents and delights. For help with this. I’m mainly going to be drawing on Ecclesiastes, but I’m also going to bring Ecclesiastes into dialog with some key critics of modernity, to kind of bring us up to speed, bring us up in time from the ancient world. Ecclesiastes is describing and observing, I think, of course, under the inspiration of the Spirit and with timeless relevance, but to bring it into dialog with some critics of modernity, to show how some insightful secular thinkers get parts of this, but then Ecclesiastes and God’s Spirit go deeper, and then in the end, so for most of our time, we’re going to talk about these deep roots of our discontents and delights. That’s part one. That’s most of our time. At the very end, I’m going to bridge from all that to Jesus. I’m going to get us from there to the gospel. So Part. On most of our time, Ecclesiastes on the deep roots of our discontents and delights. I want to talk about four features of the book of Ecclesiastes diagnosis of human life, which capture some of the deep paradoxes at the heart of life in the modern world. The first two are bad news, the second two are good news. And after each pair, the pair of bad news, the pair of good news, I’m going to pause and consider how fully understanding each of these realities should lead us to embrace the reality of the God of the Bible. So from our problems to the God of the Bible, from our delights to the God of the Bible, number one, first bit of bad news, the world’s absurdity. The world’s absurdity, the most important word in Ecclesiastes is the Hebrew word heaven. It’s also probably the word that’s hardest to translate. Even if you’re not very familiar with the Bible, you might know how this word shows up in the book’s thesis statement. For instance, in the King James Version, Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, Vanity of vanities. All is vanity. There’s all kinds of ways you could try to translate heaven, fleeting, meaningless, futile. All throughout the book, the author and protagonist, who calls himself Kohelet, examines all of life he encounters every possible pursuit and pleasure. He experiences them all and over and over again. He pronounces it all hevel. The literal root meaning of hevel is breath or vapor. So a lot of people take the word in Ecclesiastes to consistently mean transient or fleeting. Your breath disappears. You breathe it out, maybe you see a little cloud of vapor, and then it goes bye, bye, and you have to breathe another breath. So maybe hevel fundamentally means fleeting, transient passing. And Ecclesiastes does use the word hevel oftentimes to describe something that is transient or fleeting. For instance, chapter 11, verse 10, remove vexation from your heart and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are heaven. I’m coming up on 40. I feel it. The fact that life’s goods are fleeting is part of their problem. But if you say that heaven means fleeting, you don’t quite capture what kohelet’s deepest problem with life is. His problem in a word, is that it’s absurd. Absurd names the disconnect between what we want and what the world gives, between what we deserve and what the world returns between what we cry out for and the world’s indifferent silence. You could sum up kohelet’s teaching on the world’s absurdity with three simple statements. First, we don’t get what we want. Kohelet went on a quest for the meaning of life, and part of that quest involved immersing himself to the full in every possible achievement and pleasure. He tells us at the beginning of this quest in chapter two, verse one, I said in my heart, come now I will test you with pleasure. Enjoy yourself. But behold, this also was absurd. The following verses tell us that he sought pleasure in work, wine, women, wealth, music, and more. He indulged every conceivable appetite to the fullest possible extent. But at the end of all, he tells us in chapter two, verse 11, then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had expended in doing it. And behold, all was absurd and a striving after wind and there was nothing to be gained under the sun, we don’t get what we want

Bobby Jamieson
sometimes, because the world, straight up, doesn’t give it to us more often, because even when it does, it turns out that we want something else, or we want something more, we’re barely even done enjoying the thing the world has given us when our hearts are already moving on to new territory, fresh conquests. Second, when we do get what we want, it either doesn’t satisfy or doesn’t last. We see this, especially with kohelet’s teaching on money, chapter five, verse 10, he who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income. This also is absurd. Some bathtubs have a little shut off switch or release valve, like two thirds up the side, so that if you overfill it, it doesn’t go over the edge and flood your house and ruin everything. There’s a built in shut off switch. Money has no built in shut off switch. You can always want more. You can always get more, however big that account gets. You could always add to it whatever things money has gotten you, if you. Like the taste of it, you can always try to get more money, to get more of those things that money can get you. Money also always has a new trick up its sleeve. It can find another way to disappear, even if it stays put a while. Money never gives you a reason not to want more of it. The more you love money, the more treacherous and deceitful money proves. And neither money, nor any of the things money can give you will last as long as you want it to. In one of kohelet’s most famous lines, it sort of resonates throughout our culture without people knowing where it comes from, 515, as he came from his mother’s womb, He shall go again naked as he came and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand more than just a good lyric and an iron and wine song for those of you Nashville indie music, hipster types, third, we don’t get what We deserve. As Kohelet observes in chapter eight, verse 14, there is an absurdity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is absurd. One of the weightiest realities Kohelet observes is the prevalence of injustice. He says, In 316 I look to the place of righteousness, and even there was injustice, meaning the courts, the places that should be dishing out fair and impartial justice. In his day, he saw them as thoroughly corrupt, the very places that should be handing out appropriate sentences, vindication, protection of the innocent, condemnation of the wicked, were corrupt. So many people, so many times, do not get what they deserve. The absurd is the gut punch of seeing someone get the opposite of what their character merits. It’s as if someone switched the ledgers, as if some sick, cosmic account swap occurred. The righteous receive what the wicked have stored up for themselves, and the wicked receive what the righteous have stored up for themselves. This happens all the time, from courtrooms to boardrooms, this world is overflowing with people getting what they don’t deserve, and often getting the very opposite of what they deserve. Now, with all those factors in mind, we don’t get what we want. If we do it doesn’t stay or doesn’t satisfy, we don’t get what we deserve. Kohelet is not saying those things never happen, but he’s observing prevalent patterns of human life. This is the way the world doesn’t treat us the way we want. That’s what Kohelet means by Heaven. What Kohelet means by hevel is essentially what the 20th Century French Algerian philosopher Albert Camus means by absurd. It’s the key to his book, The Myth of Sisyphus. What unites kohelets, hevel and Camus absurd is the judgment that an event or situation embodies an expectation that the world fails to meet. Here’s the football. Lucy holds it out for Charlie Brown. He goes to take the kick, and she pulls it away. Every time. That’s the absurd you expect the ball to be there when you kick it, and Lucy snatches it away. Camus talks about in a similar idiom to Ecclesiastes, a state of affairs in which the world fails to heed our desires, expectations or sense of justice. Here’s Camus, and I think he’s speaking in the same voice as Kohelet. What is absurd is the confrontation of this irrationality and the wild longing for clarity, whose call echoes in the human heart. At this point of his effort, man stands face to face with the irrational he feels within him, his longing for happiness and for reason the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. We talk to the world, and the world doesn’t talk back. We say, here’s what we want, here’s what we demand, and the world doesn’t give it now to transition from then to now. I think those experiences and observations resonate with us now, but there’s ways we can bring critics of modernity into the dialog to even sharpen it. So I’m going to especially work with Hartmut Rosa. Rosa identifies modernity as a vast project of control that even intensifies our experience of the absurd. Rosa says that the central drive of modernity is to make the world engineerable. Predict. Comfortable, available, accessible, disposable in all its aspects. In other words, modernity tries to make the whole world controllable. We want to control everything. Rosa says, the history of our modern relationship to the world is a history of conquering and dominating. The night with electric light, the sky with airplanes, the seas with ships, the body with medicine. Now the world has always resisted our efforts to control it, but the more you expect to be able to control, the more you will resent the uncontrollable, the more dominant you expect to be, the more the world’s resistance will disturb you. Heaven is the tragic divorce between act and result, yearning and outcome, deserving and fate. It is the world’s refusal to give us either what we want or what we deserve. And as the secular philosopher Jeffrey Gordon put it, if human life is indeed absurd. It would be difficult to imagine a more important fact about it. Another way to describe this condition of absurdity is to say that we are alienated from the world and from ourselves. Alienation is a state in which the world itself appears indifferent or repulsive and does not yield to our effort or desire. Alienation is the opposite of being at peace with yourself and at home in the world. Of course, you expect to be at home in the world. You expect to be at peace with yourself, but you’re not. Which forces us to ask, Why? Why are you? Why am I? Why are we alienated from the world and from ourselves? If life is absurd, why is it absurd? If the misfit between the human heart and the world we live in creates a standing condition of absurdity, how did it get to be that way? We’ll come back to that first. We’re going to get to point two, a second discontent, second bit of bad news, our heart’s insatiability. Our heart’s insatiability, I mean that our hearts have appetites that are not able to be satisfied by anything in this world. Our hearts are unsatisfiable because our longings are infinite. Consider kohelet’s observation in Ecclesiastes one, verse eight, all things are full of weariness a man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Kohelet is saying that for our sensory organs, everything is never enough, not your eye, not your ear, not your hand, your nose, your tongue can be satisfied with the kind of things it can access and experience. Now, why does Kohelet not describe our senses as neutral instruments of detection, sort of like lab instruments that are just lying around that we can use when we want them, we can leave them there. They don’t make any demands on us. Instead, Kohelet attributes to our body’s receptive faculties, an insatiable appetite, an insatiable desire. Why does he do that? One clue to the answer comes in kohelet’s portrait of a workaholic in chapter four, verses seven and eight.

Bobby Jamieson
Again, I saw an absurdity under the son, one person who has no other either son or brother. Yet there is no end to all his toil and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks for whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure? This also is absurd and an unhappy business. This person has no other person to work for. Yet he never stops working. He doesn’t even slow down enough to ask himself why he willingly enslaves himself to his work. What keeps him spinning his own hamster wheel? Ecclesiastes tells us his eyes are never satisfied with riches. He is insatiable. He wants more no matter how much he gains from his work, his gains will never match his desires. Similarly in chapters, chapter six, verses seven and nine, Kohelet makes a point about our physical appetite. In order to make a point about our deeper appetites, all the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied. Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite. This also is absurd in a striving after wind. Here, Kohelet treats physical hunger as a paradigm for our innate insatiability. One could almost say that humans don’t have appetites. We are appetite. Our appetite is like an industrial garbage disposal that’s always running no matter what you chuck in, it will get digested. It will get whisked away, and the thing will just stay empty and stay open. Whatever you put in it will not fill it. Now, what does modernity do with this insatiable craving? It makes it the basis for an entire way of life. It makes insatiable craving the necessary condition for the ongoing existence of an entire civilization. If we stopped wanting more and more and more, our whole society would come crashing down. Hartmut Rosa has suggested that the categorical imperative of late modernity is this always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased. The relentlessly repeated mantra of modern life is that the more of the world you bring within your effective influence, the better your life will be. Rosa writes, the modern way of acting and being in the world is geared towards making more and more of its qualities and quantities available, accessible and attainable. In other words, modernity answers the insatiable desires of our hearts by making more and more of the world of something we can grasp and something we can consume. Ecclesiastes argues that our hearts are not just unsatisfied. They’re unsatisfiable. They’re unsatisfiable by anything this world has to offer, and that condition of insatiability is innate. We’re born with it. It’s in each of us. We All Long For something bigger than the world. Now, a number of insightful secular thinkers have termed this innate insatiability something like cosmic nostalgia, or a nostalgia for the infinite meaning. Somehow, there’s a stamp on our hearts. There’s an imprint on our hearts that leads us to yearn and long for something the world can’t give. For instance, here’s the philosopher Jeffrey Gordon again describing this experience, which he says is common, capable of feelings that embrace all mankind, the world, all the cosmos. We crave contact with the whole with all the time unfurling before us with all the space of the galaxies, and though this is not a constant craving, the most profoundly moving moments of our lives, whatever their earthly occasion, are marked by this nostalgia for the infinite those times when we feel most alive and Most in touch with the world, we long for something beyond the world and bigger than the world. So to sum up these first two points, the absurd and the insatiable, we can say this, there is a standing disconnect between what our hearts yearn for and what the world provides. The world does not give back what we want or deserve or think is right. And even when the world does offer up something to enjoy, it doesn’t satisfy our hearts. We keep yearning. We keep craving. All this should lead us to ask, why here we move from describing to explaining. Why? Why is there a standing disconnect between what our hearts want and what the world gives? Why should life so dependably frustrate us? Can evolution explain such a perfect mismatch between our expectations and our environment? That does not sound to me like an adaptive advantage that supposedly drives the whole world, shaping process of natural selection. How is it an adaptive advantage to consistently want what the world can’t give? Ecclesiastes itself offers an answer. Chapter three, verse 11, He that is God, has put eternity into man’s heart yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. What God has put inside us guarantees an enduring mismatch between what we want and what this world can give. The eternity that gapes within us does not satisfy us, but renders us innately insatiable. Is that just a cruel trick? Is God playing jokes on us? Sorry, here’s this desire, but nothing can satisfy it. No. And here’s where both of these observations, absurd and insatiable, lead us to faith in the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible created us, and He created us for himself. He created us to be satisfied. In Him. He implanted in us an infinite appetite, because he is himself infinite good, and he can satisfy us to the full. How Did there come to be such a mismatch between our hearts and the world? How, if life is absurd. Here. How did it become absurd? It’s because while God created us good, we turned away from him into sin and folly, and as a judicial response, God cursed this world to futility, to vanity, to heaven. Hevel is a result of God’s curse on our sin. Ecclesiastes 729, see this alone, I found that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. So much of our non Christian friends, deepest problems comes from taking as given and as granted the broken, fractured, ruptured condition of this world, as if it never has been anything different and never could be anything different, but the world as we encounter it does not reflect the factory settings. Humanity, as we encounter it does not reflect the factory settings. A radical rupture lies between God’s original creative act and the people we encounter every day, including ourselves. What people now seek is not what God made us to seek. What is normal. In experience is abnormal, according to our designer, the 17th century Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal takes humanity’s wretchedness as the proof and measure of our greatness, in other words, the specific kind of wretched we are. Bears a stamp, an imprint of the glory we used to have and were created to have. He says, all these examples of wretchedness prove his greatness. It is the wretchedness of a great lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed King. We are not merely poor, but we’ve lost a fortune. We are not merely lost, but we’ve suffered a shipwreck, as CS Lewis put it, talking about the whole world nature has all the air of a good thing spoiled. The only way to understand the deep roots of your discontents is the Christian doctrine of original sin. The only way to understand the deep roots of this world’s brokenness is the Christian doctrine of original sin. Here’s Pascal again. Certainly nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine. It’s offensive and yet, but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition was twisted and turned in that abyss, so that it is harder to conceive of man without this mystery than for man to conceive of it himself. Whatever mysteries, the doctrine of original sin proposes to our minds, it is the only way to explain the lives we live. Now that’s how the bad news of the human condition leads us to recognize God as the author of our previous good condition and as the only satisfying goal of all of our yearning. But Ecclesiastes also discerns the deep roots of our delights. So much more briefly, here are two further observations from Ecclesiastes on the deep roots of our deep delights. Number three, the gifts and gift of life, gifts singular, gifts plural and gift singular. The gifts and gift of life, much of Ecclesiastes is taken up with cohelots observations of life’s absurdities, making for very many a difficult sermon to prepare and to preach.

Bobby Jamieson
But at seven points in the book, another perspective entirely breaks in, out of nowhere, with no warning, no signal. You could call it the perspective of gift. Here’s one key passage, 224, to 26 there’s nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This, also I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment, for to the one who pleases Him, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner, he has given the business of gathering and collecting only to give to one who pleases God. This also is absurd and is driving after wind. Now here Kohelet considers all the same subjects that he previously pronounced hevel upon eating and drinking wealth and enjoying possessions, but he renders a radically different verdict. He says there’s nothing better. How can he say this? The key is, in the phrase from the hand of God, he’s considering the same stuff from a different angle. He has, as it were, ascended the steps from looking at the world from the ground floor to looking at it from a second floor window that gives you a higher and deeper perspective, from seeing the world as it’s fallen, according to Genesis three and four, to seeing the world as a gift of God, according to Genesis one and two, Kohelet sees everything now in a truer, deeper light, in its character as a gift. Gift from God. But let’s bracket God out of the picture. Again. We’re still trying to work our way to the God of the Bible. Think about some of the happiest, most fulfilling moments in your life, maybe winning a division championship, graduating with honors, releasing a record to rave reviews, getting married, giving birth to a child, whether you’re a Christian or not, whether you’re a theist or not, many people’s overwhelming sense in those peak moments of their lives is of receiving a gift, whatever work or effort you contributed to that situation coming about seems tiny in comparison to the whole thing. When you pause to reflect, it feels like that moment was handed to you, delivered to you, gifted to you. And people talk that way all the time. You hear the post game interview or the press conferences, the tour is wrapping up, and I’m just so thankful to be here. I’m thankful for all the team has contributed it. This is a gift. I don’t know what to say. I didn’t earn this. I didn’t deserve this. People say that all the time. But here’s the thing, if times like that are a gift, who are they from? If you don’t believe in God, you might sincerely say life is a gift, and mean it, but all that can be is an empty metaphor. There’s no there. There. It isn’t a gift unless there was someone there to give it. However grateful you may sometimes feel for life and all its most basic and abundant enjoyments, if there’s no God giving it to you, you have no one to thank. Who can you thank for the softness of a newborn’s cheek? Who can you thank for a snow day? I think the weather patterns, the sort of average temperatures here, are probably similar enough to DC, where I lived for seven years, and Chapel Hill where we live now, that snow days are pretty rare, right? Matt, once in a long while, similar snow day once every two years, right? So for kids like mine, you know, when that snow day comes around, you drop everything. You can’t plan it. You can’t schedule it. You can’t count on it. You hear the forecast. The kids get their hopes up two to four inches, then it’s nothing. You can’t summon it. You can’t engineer it. When it comes you drop everything my son, who might complain that the water at the pool on a hot summer day is too cold, because it’s 79 degrees on a snow day, he’s out there for hours. He’s got ice trickling down his pants, and he doesn’t care why, because, as Ecclesiastes says, 518 to 20. Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment and all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him. For this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil. This is the gift of God, for He will not much remember the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart. My son will not much remember the cold on the snow day because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart. If you really believe that life is a gift, what does it do? It turns all of life into a snow day. You didn’t make it, you couldn’t plan it, you can’t control it. All you can do is receive it. All you can do is enjoy it. That’s what treating life as a gift does. What does this mean? If your life is a gift from God, it means that ultimate reality is not random or empty. It means that ultimate reality is not mute or malicious, but it is personal. It is loving and it intends you good. He rather intends you good. In a world that is impersonal and undesigned, enjoyment can be at best, a meaningless accident, but in God’s world, enjoyment is a clue to reality’s deepest, brightest secret, namely, that the universe is the gleeful invention of an unassailably happy God. This is all here because he wanted it here. You’re all here because he wanted you here. None of this had to be. It was just a sheer overflow of goodness and gladness that God chose to bring about. Who can you thank for the best things in your life? Who can you thank for life itself? One of the deepest secrets to our deepest delights is that life is a gift. Every gift bears a trace of its giver. Enjoyment is fitting. It fits the shape of this world because joy beyond and behind the universe joyed you and all things into existence. To enjoy life as God’s gift is not to play make believe. It’s not to pretend. It’s not to pretend life is something it isn’t. It’s to receive life as what it is to enjoy is not to act as if, but to act because, point four, on a similar theme, more good news, the joys of resonance. The joys of resonance that what we that’s what we saw in Ecclesiastes 518, to 20, this sense of present tense enjoyment your heart and the world resonating together. The world offering you something that makes you sing inside, that absorbs you, occupies you. Ecclesiastes is ethic of enjoying present gifts strikingly overlaps with what Hartman Rosa calls a sociology of the good life that he’s given the one word label of resonance. Resonance, according to Rosa resonance, occurs when some aspect of the world moves you, reaches you, touches you, calls to you. In resonance, the wire that connects your heart to the world starts to hum. The world’s like a tuning fork that somebody has struck your heart is tuned to the same frequency, and so it starts singing the same note, according to Rosa, resonance is inherently uncontrollable, just as with falling asleep. The harder we try to make it happen, the less we succeed. Rosa says it is a peculiar characteristic of resonance that it can be neither forced nor prevented with absolute certainty. Think about a breathtaking sunrise. Think about a series winning three point shot. Think about a look from someone you love that says all you need to hear. Think about hearing live the opening chords to your favorite song. None of those would cause the skin on the back of your neck to tingle if they were something you could control. There’s something that can only be given

Bobby Jamieson
because resonance is uncontrollable. Rosa says it cannot be accumulated, saved or instrumentally enhanced. To test this, try listening to your favorite song 10 times in a row for 10 days, it will probably not be your favorite song anymore. At the end of those 100 repetitions, no matter how many photos you take, you can’t bottle the moment. Resonance cannot be stockpiled now, all of this commentary from Rosa on resonance resonates with Ecclesiastes ethic of enjoyment. Enjoyment can’t be stockpiled. You can’t save it up for a rainy day or hoard it later to be consumed in retirement. The snow only lasts as long as it does. As Kohelet says in these verses from chapter five, you have to accept your lot and rejoice in your toil. That’s how God keeps you occupied with joy in your heart, not rejoicing in the toil you’re planning, not looking back on the joy on the toil you’ve accomplished, not thinking once my joy, once my toil is over, I can finally get around to enjoying it. No, no. All you have to rejoice in is this present moment of toil. That’s how God keeps you occupied with joy in your heart. Now I’m not presenting a comprehensive ethic according to Ecclesiastes, of course, there’s eternity, of course, there’s judgment, of course, there’s rewards beyond this life, Ecclesiastes itself says so. But in terms of in the moment enjoyment, there’s a way that limiting the focus of your heart to the present is the necessary condition for opening up whatever enjoyment the President has to offer. You have to be there. You can’t be at the next thing. You can’t be at the last thing to enjoy whatever God’s giving you right now. You have to be here right now, now to get to the explaining part. Why should we resonate with the world at all. If this world is built to resonate with you at least sometimes, and if your heart is built to resonate with the world at least sometimes, is that merely a happy accident? A trick of evolutionary biology? How could it be an accident? Does the note that this world rings? In our hearts mean anything, or does it signify nothing? Gavin’s done a wonderful job on this in the chapter on, is it on beauty in your why? God makes sense? Is that the chapter heading? Well, whatever it is, whatever that chapter is, the argument from beauty, argument from something. It’s exactly what I’m getting at here, that experience of resonance is a clue to the meaning and nature of reality. It’s not a false trail, it’s not a trick, it’s not an illusion, it’s a hint. If this universe is a tuning fork, who struck it? If your heart is a bell, who rung it? If you hold that the nature of ultimate reality is impersonal and purposeless, you must work hard not to think of such things while you try to construct meaning for yourself. If you believe that there is no ultimate purpose, you must keep that thought at a safe distance from all the smaller, fragile purposes you are trying to cultivate in your little plot of life. If you want a meaningful life, you must not let the universe’s meaninglessness ruin your party. But if you believe that life is good, because life is a gift, and life is a gift because God gives it, and life is full of good things, because the creator is constantly flinging good gifts at you faster than you can catch them, then any meaning you discover is catching up with the meaning God has already built in. Any goodness you enjoy is scratching the surface of the goodness that God Himself is. Any happiness you experience is a glimpse of the one who is happiness himself. Part two, very briefly, Christ is deeper still, God’s answer to your absurd life, according to Ecclesiastes, this world is a gift because God created it. The world is also absurd because we sinned and God cursed it. Our hearts are insatiable because God made us for himself, and nothing in this world can satisfy us. Satisfy us. Now the book of Ecclesiastes basically states these truths, leaves them side by side, points them out at us with sharp edges facing us, so that we get sort of cut and hurt by them. Ecclesiastes is more of a question than an answer. Ecclesiastes doesn’t tie up the big picture in brief. In closing, I want to show how Jesus is the answer to Ecclesiastes question. The incarnation of God, the Son, is a mystery and a marvel. To put it a little bit playfully. We might even call it absurd. What is God doing here as a human? Isn’t that a little weird? Yes, it is weird, cosmically weird, unpredictably weird. But absurd times call for absurd measures. An absurd disease demands an absurd remedy. The novelist Walker Percy discovers in Jesus’ incarnate redeeming work what he calls a new law in the cosmos. If you’re a big enough fool to climb a tree and like a cat, refuse to come down, then someone who loves you has to make as big a fool of himself to rescue you. That is why we have this absurd means of salvation. For Jesus, the incarnation was only the beginning of the absurd. As one of his first followers said, Jesus went about doing good, but what he received in response to that good was anything but good. He was mocked, opposed, persecuted and rejected. He was brought to trial, declared innocent, and then, in an absurd perversion of justice, condemned and crucified anyway. Never was the disconnect between deserving and receiving as extreme as it was in the life and death of Jesus, of Nazareth, Jesus was alienated. He was not alienated from himself, but from just about everyone else. He came to His own and His own people did not receive Him. Jesus was alienated from his family who thought he was out of his mind. He was alienated from his friends who abandoned him in his hour of need. He was alienated from his community’s religious leaders who envied him schemed against him and conspired to get him killed. He. He was alienated from political authorities who spinelessly bowed to crowd pressure to execute him. Worst of all, more than all, while suffering on the cross in and according to his human nature, Jesus was alienated from God, crying out My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me? Why was Jesus plunged into absurdity and alienation, not because he deserved it, but because we do? His incarnation was a rescue mission. He came to experience and exhaust and eradicate the forces of absurdity and alienation. He did it by pulling them up by their roots. This world has been subjected to futility against its will, as God’s judgment against our sin. Until that curse is lifted, Heaven will remain. Jesus endured that curse in his own person, in his own body, on the tree. By enduring the curse, he eradicates heaven by suffering the judgment. He exhausts and lifts the judgment. Jesus endured the full measure of God’s judgment against sin for all who will turn from sin and trust in Him, Jesus suffered the most extreme absurdity and alienation which we all deserve so that we would receive the wholeness and fullness that only he deserves. Kohelet laments in chapter verse eight, no man has power to retain the spirit or power over the day of death. Someone who commits suicide doesn’t have power over death. They’re just, in a sad and tragic way, declaring their own defeat. No one has power over the day of death. No one that is except the one who said, For this reason, the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. No one has power over the day of death, except Jesus.

Bobby Jamieson
Jesus was not taken by death, but gave himself into death. He gave himself into death’s grasp, and then on the third day, he broke himself out of it again. He rose from the dead bodily into a whole new mode of life, a life utterly untouched by any chilling shadow of death, he freely entered death’s prison in order to not only break himself out, but to demolish the whole structure. If you are somehow here in this meeting for pastors and you have not repented of sin and trusted in Christ. Believe in Him. Trust in him. Even today, Jesus alone is God’s answer to your life’s absurdity. Let me close this in prayer, and we’ll transition to discussion. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the good news that our savior has entered into our absurdity and alienation, that he’s suffered the curse and the judgment at the root of those conditions, and that he has busted himself out of the grave and will bring us with him, Father, we pray that we build each other up and encourage each other as we think well together about how to present these truths to those who don’t trust in Jesus, we pray in His name. Amen.