Hear now the word of the Lord from Ecclesiastes 1:1-11.
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.
Ecclesiastes 1:1-11, ESV
This past December when my family and I were decorating for Christmas. It was my job to hang out the outdoor Christmas lights and get them working. A big chunk of those lights were not working and they were not lighting up in the way they should.

Well in that moment, on the spur of the moment decision, I decided something very uncharacteristic for me. I decided that I was going to fix that set of lights. I don’t fix many things very often, but I decided you know what I’m going to do. So I pulled up a Youtube video, I went to Menards, and I bought a circuit checker. I bought some replacement light bulbs to figure out where the burnt ones were so I could replace those, to let the broken circuit be repaired so that it would work.

I’ve got to tell you it felt really good. I understand why people like to fix things. However, I made no progress whatsoever in this work. I spent hours on this and it was all for nothing. Vanity of the vanities.

Now life often feels that way, whether we’re doing a small project or whether we’re after a bigger ambition. When we feel like we pour in tons of time and energy and effort, and if we make any progress whatsoever, which is never guaranteed, that progress always seems too little. Was I really investing this much of who I am in getting that small of a return?

We’re starting this sermon series this morning on the book of Ecclesiastes, a book that wrestles with that issue. How do we live, how do we go on in a world that is so broken? In a world where we are trying to cultivate good things and instead of spring thorns and thistles.

I want to warn you and maybe you’ve got a sense of this as we read this introductory passage though, that this is a book of wisdom. A book that doesn’t give us tidy, neat answers that we can just sort of have and receive wrapped up in a little bow, and it’s just a wonderful thing that gives us ten principles for living a victorious life today.

What we are instead seeing is the preacher here, largely engaged in the work of clearing away errors. Error in ways when we look at this world. Clearing away all of this error in the way that we live our lives, either consciously or unconsciously, to try to give us a view of what the truth is. He’s not going to give us this tidy neat answer, he’s going to clear away the error so that we can clearly see what the rest of the Bible tells us about what the truth is.

So in this passage our big idea, and this is a theme that will be unfolded through the rest of this book as we study it, but the big idea this morning is this there is no salvation under the sun. 04:43

So this morning our three parts to consider this passage.
1. The Preacher’s Motto
2. Perpetual Motion
3. No Progress, No Memory
The Preacher’s Motto
So the first section, the preacher’s motto, look at verses one and two. In the very first verse we have the author identified for us. We read, “the words of the preacher the son of David king in Jerusalem.” Now this word for preacher is going to come up a lot as we study the book of Ecclesiastes so we should say a word about it as we get started. This word is very difficult to translate, but it comes from a word that means to assemble or to gather.

This word that’s related to the Old Testament word that when it’s translated into Greek it becomes the word that in the New Testament is commonly translated as church. So this is the one who gathers or assembles together the church. So when we read about the words of the one who’s gathering together the church, this idea of translating this as a preacher is a very good translation. It doesn’t capture all of the nuances of what’s included here and some people translate it differently, but the preacher is a very good way to translate what is going on here.

Who is this preacher? This is the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Now when we read this is the son of David, this could be any of the sons of David. Remember David was the great king of Israel. This could be any of his sons, any of the sons who ruled over Jerusalem, over the nation of Israel, but then over the smaller nation of Judah. Normally if we read someone described as the son of David, we are talking about Solomon.

Now if you have a study Bible or if you’re maybe familiar with Ecclesiastes, you may know there’s actually a pretty big debate about whether Solomon in fact was the one who wrote this. Many of the arguments are very technical, they deal with the vocabulary and the style of the Hebrew. The thinking is that this was a style of Hebrew and a vocabulary of Hebrew that wasn’t spoken and written until after Solomon actually lived.

I don’t think that those arguments are all very well founded. I think many of them have been answered, I’ll give you some information about those objections in the sermon notes if you want to read more about it. I will say this, I do think this is Solomon but I will say this, it is interesting that he never identifies himself, he never names himself explicitly as Solomon.

This is different from Proverbs where we read, these are the Proverbs of Solomon. Or the Song of Songs, this is the Song of Songs which is Solomon. Solomon is very explicitly identified as the author of Proverbs and Song of Songs in a way that Ecclesiastes never quite comes out and directly says it’s Solomon. On the whole I think it’s very clear that this is Solomon speaking so that’s the way I will be approaching this as we read this great book together.

Well Solomon, the preacher in verse 2 then gives us his motto. This is really the theme of the book, this is what Solomon wants to communicate to us in verse 2.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
Ecclesiastes 1:2, ESV
So what is vanity? We are not talking about a mirror that you might have over your bathroom sink or something like that. When we are talking about vanity, this means a mist or a breath or a vapor. It’s something that is here today and gone almost immediately afterwards. In Ecclesiastes we might triangulate this meaning, for understanding what’s happening in the book of Ecclesiastes, by looking at sort of three parts to this.

In the book of Ecclesiastes sometimes this word vanity refers to something that is empty or futile. That no matter how hard you work at it, it will never bring you the happiness or the satisfaction that you were looking for. Other times this word refers to something that is insubstantial, no matter how much you work at it you don’t gain much from it, or the gain you have is very short-lived. Other times this refers to something that is grievous and evil, something that is a tragedy of living in a broken sinful world. Things just happen, even this week we had a terrible storm out of the blue. That would be a grievous vanity that Ecclesiastes would talk about, there was no real rhyme or reason it seems, it just happens and it brings misery. In addition to all the other horrors that fill this broken world.

We might also look outside Ecclesiastes to understand what this word vanity means. Outside of the book of Ecclesiastes this word for vanity appears 32 times, nearly half of those times, it’s really interesting 13 of the 32 times, this is a word that refers to idols, false gods that people worshiped. That’s not the only word for idols in the Old Testament, but it is the main word that refers to idols. They are vanity, they are insubstantial, they can’t accomplish anything for you, they aren’t alive.

Also in other parts of the Old Testament we have something like the vanity that we see reflected in Ecclesiastes. For example in Psalm 144:4 we read,
4
Man is like a breath;
his days are like a passing shadow
Psalm 144:4, ESV
He’s a breath, he’s a vanity, he’s a vapor or a mist. That is very much what the author of Ecclesiastes wants to get across to us.

There’s one other place that we should look to triangulate what this word vanity means. It’s in the New Testament. You may be aware that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, whereas the New Testament is written in Greek. So they’re not quite the same language, but there was a Greek translation of the Old Testament that was very common in use in the days when the New Testament was written.

So if we look at the word that the Greek New Testament has translated this word for vanity it’s interesting to see where that word pops up in the New Testament. There’s a particular place in Romans 8:20, where the meaning very much captures what the author of Ecclesiastes wants us to see when he talks about vanity. In Romans 8:20 Paul writes,
20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
Romans 8:20-21, ESV
Another way to translate this is “For the creation was subjected to vanity”.
This is the word that describes the world in which we live. A world that is broken, a world that is fallen, a world where you cannot make real progress. This is a book that is wrestling with how do we live if that’s the reality of the world that surrounds us?

We can’t cling to this world, it is a vapor, it’s a vanity. We can’t find satisfaction, this world is empty, futile, and frustrating. Ultimately, and here’s what the author of Ecclesiastes wants us to hear, the preacher wants us to know that we cannot find true wisdom in this world under the sun. It’s broken, it’s sinful, whatever wisdom we may find will not come from this world.

It’s important to understand that as we study this book, what the preacher tells us is not entirely bad news. This sounds thoroughly depressing, this sounds very dark, but really this isn’t entirely bad news. We’re going to see the hope that comes out of this book. Martin Luther actually considered this to be a thoroughly optimistic book, one of the most optimistic in all the Bible, because it clears away the false paths that we might take. It clears away the error in order that we may find the truth of the hope of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now let me explain what this book is trying to do in clearing away error. The story I mentioned a little bit earlier about hanging up Christmas lights probably illustrates a persistent character aspect of who I am, but probably it’s a character flaw. Mainly that I am a hopeless packer, I love to keep things. I rationalize it to myself saying someday I will find a use for this. If it’s broken it doesn’t matter, if I need it I’ll be able to fix it. I don’t want to get rid of it, I want to hold on to these things.

My wife on the other hand is not a hopeless packrat, she’s the opposite, she’s a ruthless purger. So in our marriage we have something of the immovable object, don’t get rid of it versus the unstoppable force, throw it away. I rationalize that someday I’m going to need this, but let’s be honest my wife is far more realistic about this. She knows that in all likelihood I will never find a use for the junk that I’m trying to cling to in our home. It’s just going to be clutter, it’s just going to take up space.

Even if I do potentially someday find a use for this object, she also knows that just like in the case of the broken light bulbs, I probably won’t be able to fix whatever is broken to the point where I’ll just have to throw it away and start over. If I would just do that and get to buying something new when I need it, I’d be in much better shape. One thing I’ve learned in 12-plus years of marriage with this immovable force of the ruthless purger with whom I live, is that there is something freeing, something wonderful about letting go of things. It’s hard for me as a hopeless packrat, but there’s something freeing about letting go of things that are broken. It removes clutter from your life. It lets you move onto something better.

That’s what the author of Ecclesiastes is trying to tell us. This preacher is not so much worried about minimalism and what we consume in the stuff of this world. He wants to get what we’re thinking. He says you’ve got to clear away this error, you’ve got to get rid of it, don’t cling to this world, it cannot ultimately offer you what you are ultimately hoping to find. The preacher is helping us to clear away error so that we can find something better.

That’s where this bold thesis begins. He wants us to know from the beginning that vanity of vanities, all is vanity. That’s bold. As packrat people like we are spiritually, we want to cling to the stuff of this world, the promises of this world. We don’t want to believe this at first. I’m pretty sure I can find some use for this or that that I find in this world.

Knowing that this would be a controversial motto, the preacher immediately begins to give arguments to back this up. In this first argument he wants us to observe and consider the world around us creation. To see the way in which the world is always moving but never arriving.
Perpetual Motion
This brings us to our second point, about the perpetual motion of life and the perpetual motion of creation in verses three through seven. The preacher moves on in verse three to ask what does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? What does man gain, that is a financial word that references financial gain from business dealings. What do you gain from all of the toil with which you toil? We live our lives in so many different areas and circumstances, what do we really profit from it?

Of course our Lord Jesus echoed that same question in Mark 8:36 when he says,
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
Mark 8:36, ESV
He says imagine that you’re not just trying to fix a $4 set of Christmas lights. Imagine that you can gain the whole world, it still won’t prophet you much in comparison to forfeiting your soul.

To underscore the foolishness of trying to find substantial gain in this life, in this world, but the preacher then asks us to consider creation itself. So in verses four through seven, we have a contrast from creation and an illustration from creation. The contrast comes in verse 4. In contrast to us, who come and go, the earth endures forever, creation endures forever. James 4:14 echoes this point.
14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
James 4:14, ESV
In contrast to the enduring sense of creation, your life just continues for a brief time and then is gone forever. So our generations are in contrast to creation.

Then the preacher moves on to illustrate the vanity of the way in which we toil by pointing to the way in which creation is always moving but never arrives. Look at verse five, the first place that the preacher points us toward is the sun. He says the sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it arises.

So the sun is always in this great orbit, and I understand that it’s actually us not the sun but we still call it the sunrise and the sunset too so the point remains. The preacher is saying think about the sun, how it’s always moving across the sky. As soon as it’s done ,what has it done, what is it accomplished? Has it fulfilled its course? No, it hastens back to the point where it started to start the whole process again every single day.
The word for hasten there is pants. You ever run late for something, maybe to catch a plane or a train or try to catch up to a meeting. You’re running, running, running and you finally burst in finally barely on time and you’re panting. Well that’s the sun, always moving but never actually accomplishing anything lasting, the whole thing starts again the next day.

It’s not just the sun, in verse six it’s the winds.
The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind,
Ecclesiastes 1:6, ESV
You have the wind that is always flowing here and there, it’s always moving, never stopping, always going somewhere. What does the wind accomplish? For all it’s blowing here and there and everywhere, it never stops, it’s always working and always moving.

In verse seven,
All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.
Ecclesiastes 1:7, ESV
Think about all the work that rivers do. Always pouring, always carrying, always moving this water into the ocean. The ocean is never full, the ocean is never done. It’s always happening again and again, everything is always moving and it is never arriving.

Now this is bad news. In the endless activity of your life, what this tells you and we have to face this, is that you will never make any real progress. Whatever you think you are accomplishing in your life, the preacher tells us we will never make any real progress. We will always be moving but we will never actually arrive.

It’s bad news also because when the ceaseless cycles of creation will repeat forever, they at least get to keep moving. Your life is short. You’re here and then you are gone.

There’s also good news again: the preachers are trying to clear away the error to help us to see the truth about this. In part as we think about creation we have to be reminded this is a part of God’s good order for this world. It is good news that the sun rises every morning. It is good news that the seasons continue. If the sun didn’t rise, how would we live? If the seasons didn’t continue, how would farmers grow food? How would we go through the normal course of our life?

In fact God promised after destroying the entire world with a flood in Genesis 8:22, that while the earth remains seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease. The fact that these cycles continue ceaselessly is God’s good provision for our lives. There’s no progress, but there is stability. This idea of stability is an important part of what the preacher wants to point us toward in this life.

Again, the preacher is clearing away error. It is easy to think when we are making progress in our cooking and cleaning and yet the work still remains. It is easy to think that we are making progress when we make a dent in the laundry in our houses, yet somehow the clothes get dirty again. It’s easy to think that we’re making progress when we get to inbox zero or when we clear away our work assignments and yet things keep piling up. Or landscaping, no matter how many times I mow my lawn it keeps growing back. Ceaseless, always moving, never arriving.

We have to ask, this is kind of harsh, is it really true that there’s no progress to be made? I mean that seems dark, that seems hopeless, is that really really true? Especially when we live in the year 2021, where we’ve seen all manner of technological and scientific advances in so many areas. The preacher in this book is going to acknowledge that there is real possibility for growth for development and for improvement, but in spite of all that he still sticks to his point. That real progress, true progress to bring about something genuinely new is not actually possible. We need to hear him for what he says.
No Progress, No Memory
This brings us to the third point. There is no progress and no memory. No
matter how much more wisdom or pleasure or work or wealth we gain in this life, we will find no ultimate satisfaction. All of it will be vanity, all of it will be emptiness. 22:59

In verse 8 the preacher says this,
All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
Ecclesiastes 1:8, ESV
It’s just perpetual motion that we’re engaging in our lives, it’s weariness. Our eyes will not be satisfied, we will not see one last thing and that will be enough. We won’t hear one last thing and our souls will be filled. All of it is simply weariness, it keeps going and going and we are never truly satisfied.

Then in verses 9 through 10 the preacher says that in spite of our accomplishments, there truly will be nothing new under the sun. Verse 9
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a saying that says, “See, this is new”?
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, ESV
It has already been in the ages before us. With all of our science and technology, we can maybe accomplish more or do it better, we can perhaps bring it about faster. Yet in everything that we have accomplished there is nothing truly new. We are still trying to live our lives just as those who came before us did. We’re still trying to find satisfaction in our work, just like those who came before us did. They didn’t succeed and we aren’t succeeding in finding lasting satisfaction. We’re trying to raise our families, we’re still trying to pass the baton on to the next generation.

Even there as we are thinking about the next generation, verse eleven reminds us that the next generation will not even remember us.
There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who come after.
Ecclesiastes 1:11, ESV
We don’t remember the past and those who live in the future won’t remember us. How many of you know the names of your great-great-grandparents and if you do, do you know the names of your great-great-great-grandparents? People who were literally responsible for making sure that you are here, do you even know their names much less anything significant about their lives? We don’t remember the people who came before us. Only the greatest of all achievements are preserved in our memory and even those are only the smallest slices of the lives of the people who work to accomplish them.

One of my favorite poems is by Percy Bysshe Shelley, it’s a poem called Ozymandias. You may have heard this one. It’s a poem about a man who brings back word from a distant land about seeing the remains of an ancient empire that was glorious in its day. The poem goes like this, it’s very short.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
No matter how great your achievements are, even those whose accomplishments cause others to look on them in despair, ultimately time will bring them to nothing.
Ultimately time will bury them in the sand and they will be forgotten forever.

This is not positive and encouraging as we might hope it would be, this is heavy. We have to ask ourselves, in this word of inspired scripture what error is the preacher clearing away for us? Beyond this, what truth is he trying to lead us towards?
Application
The two applications. The first has to do with the error, the error to expose.

1. Brothers and sisters we must consider well the vanity of this life. That’s the first application, consider well the vanity of this life. This is so painful, maybe it’s not what you came to hear this morning, because we want our lives to have meaning. We want all the things that we are doing to count for something real in this world. Because of this we so often deceive ourselves into believing that our lives are at the center of the universe.

Now we might not say it this way, but the way we live and the way we think and the way we act expose what we believe, we become self-absorbed. We look after our own interests alone and not after the interests of others. We believe that we are making real progress and that we are on the brink of finding true satisfaction, on this Ecclesiastes pours the coldest of buckets of water.

The preacher forces us to consider the incredibly short duration of our lives. To reckon with our inability to make any real progress. Then the fact that all of our toil will be forgotten anyway.It may feel satisfying now to inflate ourselves for importance but what will that ultimately gain us?

The preacher is in fact, whether it feels like it or not, he is doing us a great kindness by stripping away our vanity by clearing away our errors. Because brothers and sisters, if we have hope in this life, and if we think that we can find satisfaction and meaning in this life only, then we are of all people most to be pitied.

Where then are you tempted to feel self-important as though everything revolved around you. Where are you tempted to worry, as though everything depended on you? Where you attempted to obsess, to obsess as though your toil will gain you lasting satisfaction? If only I could accomplish what I’m after. Brothers and sisters consider the vanity of this life.

2. We have to not only clear away the error. As the book of Ecclesiastes will do, we have to have that error cleared away so that we can more clearly see the truth that we must consider and that is our second application. Look for salvation above the sun. There is no salvation under the sun, we must look for salvation above the sun.

Again, stripping away the errors of thinking that this world has something to offer us, so that we can find what is truly substantial. What is not short lived by what is lasting. What is not grievous and evil but what is good and from God.

If you’re following the news right now you may know that there are three billionaires who are trying to do something new. Now it’s not new, it’s just one more extension of what human beings have always been doing. But three billionaires are trying to be the very first to get into outer space.

Now some of this is because they want to start a brand new industry of space tourism. For the low low price of $200,000 even you can take a round trip to outer space. More than this, they want the fame of being the first private people, not professional astronauts, but the first private people who pay for the experience of getting into outer space.

If you’ve also read they’ve explained, a part of this has a very deep humanitarian need, because this world is being destroyed. There’s pollution and there’s sickness and we need to find a Plan B if we’ve screwed up earth so badly. Through this, in the Los Angeles Times, there was an editorial this week by Michael Hiltzik that recognized this project for what it was, a mere vanity project.

Well that so much echoes what the book of Ecclesiastes would tell us. Now to be clear I would take a trip to outer space if I could, I’m not going to spend $200,000 on it, but I’m not opposed to going to outer space, this is a remarkable thing. Yet the idea of being the first to do it and the thinking that we will find a Plan A for the brokenness and the futility of this world is entirely misguided.

We do need a Plan B, we do need to ascend above the sun to do it, but we won’t accomplish this by interplanetary space travel any more than in Genesis 11 that the builders of the Tower of Babel were able to build a tall enough tower to reach up into the heavens where God is seated on his throne.

The goal then was the same as the goal now, we are trying to escape our problems. We are trying to escape the futility and the vanity of this world. No more can we build a tower to escape it, then we can fly high enough into outer space to escape it. We cannot get high enough. We cannot lift ourselves above the sun to escape the problems of this world. We need someone to come down from heaven for us.

This is what Jesus Christ has done for us. He says, don’t look at what this world offers to you, you cannot descend into heaven on your own strength. He says in John 3:13 that no one has ascended into heaven. All the efforts in all of human history, including what came after Jesus, all of these efforts to ascend into heaven have been failed attempts. No one has ascended into heaven, except he who descended from heaven, that’s the son of a man.

Jesus descended, he came down from heaven. All the creation, the vast reaches of the created universe included, cannot provide ultimately what we are wanting. Eternal life, our lasting satisfaction, there is no salvation under the sun. No matter who travels in outer space, no matter how far they are able to travel, they too will ultimately die. There is nothing new under the sun by getting into outer space or anywhere else.

What we need is Jesus Christ who came down from heaven. He came down from above the sun in order to raise us up to the heavenly places, where we can be with him. He did this by coming to die in our place so that our sins might be forgiven, so that he might raise us up spiritually today, even in the midst of this broken dying world. We are raised now to the newness of life spiritually. At the end of time to raise even our bodies from the dead to live in a resurrected new heavens and new earth with him forever, a world that will not be marked by futility. A world that will not be marked and plagued by thorns and thistles. A world in which we will enjoy lasting satisfaction in the presence of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

You cannot find what you’re looking for in this world. The preacher clears that away and we will see that so clearly as we work our way through this book. You can’t find what you are looking for in this life under the sun, vanity of vanities, all is vanity here. But the gospel of Jesus promises that for all those who trust in Jesus you will never be put to shame, your life will not be vanity. You will be raised with the sons of God on the last day, in the days of resurrection.

Beloved do not put your hope in the vanity of this world, put your hope in the solid hope of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father we pray that as we study your word, you would help us to repent of areas where we have attempted to put too much faith, too much hope in this world. We pray now and instead you would lift our eyes to the heavenly places where Christ is seated at your right hand. With the eyes of faith we would see him there, seated by your throne. And there we would believe in him and trust in him and live lives even as our outer man is wasting away that we would be renewed in him day by day and as we await the day when the vanity of this world will pass away forever and then we will be resurrected to solid lasting joys through Christ Jesus our Lord. In his name we pray. Amen.