Bible Passage: Ecclesiastes 1:1-2, 12-14, 2:18-26

Pastor: Joel Jenswold
Sermon Date: August 3, 2025

Bulletin – August 3, 2025

In the name of, and to the eternal glory of, Jesus,

Our text today is from the book of Ecclesiastes.  Ecclesiastes is not the easiest book of the Bible to understand.  Some Christians avoid it in their devotional life.  Some consider it depressing.  Just two verses into the book we hear these words:  Meaningless!  Meaningless!…Utterly meaningless!  Everything is meaningless! (1:2) A noted atheist once wrote this about Ecclesiastes:  [Ecclesiastes is} “a book of the Old Testament that I, an atheist with an ardent distaste for religion, find consoling, calming, and wise.”

To make sense of this book, we must pay attention to a little phrase that will be found 27 times in the twelve chapters of Ecclesiastes.  Five times in our text alone!  And that little phrase is under the sun. (1:14, 2:18, 19, 20, 22)  That little phrase gives us the frame of reference for much of what the author says.  “Under the sun” is King Solomon’s, the author’s, way of referring to this fallen world disconnected from its Maker.  And when he looked at the world disconnected from God, Solomon would conclude Everything Under the Sun is Meaningless…without Him.

We mentioned a moment ago that King Solomon is the author of this text.  How do we know?  He identifies himself in the first verse:  The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem. (v. 1)  David only had one son who was king in Jerusalem after him, Solomon.  We  remember that occasion just after Solomon became king when the Lord came to him and offered him anything he wanted as he began his reign.  Solomon asked the Lord for wisdom.  And the Lord gave it.  So much so that the Lord said to Solomon, I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be. (1 Kings 3:12)

Solomon was a smartie.  And as smarties tend to do, he thought about things… a lot!  He tells us, I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. (v. 12)  Solomon contemplated life and the meaning of life!  Life under heaven (v. 12).  Life under the sun (2:18, 19, 20, 22).  And what was his conclusion?  Everything is meaningless! (1:1)  In our text he outlines just one meaningless aspect of life under the sun.  I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. (2:18)

Solomon begins to feel, “What’s the point of hard work? What’s the point of all the worry and stress and sleepless nights?  You work to get a bunch of stuff.  And then you die.  And someone else gets what you worked so hard for!”  And here’s what really frosted Solomon.  Who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool (2:19)  How many stories are there of fathers who left a fortune to children who squandered it all?  Three times Solomon says of this, This too is meaningless! (2:19, 21, 23)

Do you ever feel like Solomon?  Do you ever feel like, “What’s the point?  I get up every day and go to this job.  If I stopped going tomorrow, the world would not be affected in the least!”  Sometimes the pensioner struggles with such thoughts.  “Why am I here?  My children are grown and I never see them.  Now I don’t even have a meaningless job to go to every day!  What is the point?  What is my purpose in life?”  Greek mythology tells the story of a king named Sisyphus.  Sisyphus angered the gods and so they punished him.  His punishment was that for all eternity he would roll an immense boulder up a hill and every time it got to the top it would roll back down.  So he would push it back up.  This he would do eternally.  Ever feel like Sisyphus?

If you do, it is likely because you are looking at life only under the sun.  You are looking at the world disconnected from its Creator.  You are trying to make sense of the world disconnected from the only thing that gives it any sense and purpose and meaning!  This cosmos was never intended to have any meaning or purpose disconnected from its Creator!  Without God, everything under the sun is meaningless!

You need God to make sense out of existence.  Solomon realizes that, too.  At the end of our text he says, A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in his work.  This, too, I see is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? (v. 24-25)  Without God life will seem meaningless.  With God you can enjoy life!

With God, you can enjoy who you are.  You know that you are not just a random assembly of molecules that happened by chance.  You are a unique creation designed and built by God!  And God made you with a purpose.  He wants to have a relationship with you.  And to make that happen he sent his one and only Son into this world to purchase and redeem you with his holy, precious blood.  That is what you are worth to God!  He didn’t spare his Son for YOU!  How can a life redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus be “meaningless”?

Connected to your God through Christ, what you do has meaning and purpose.  Even the littlest things we do have meaning because they are done to the glory of our Creator and Savior God.  As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.  Martin Luther once said the Christian shoemaker doesn’t make shoes and put little crosses on each one.  But he makes the best shoes he can make because God likes good shoes.  That job you think is meaningless is infused with sublime meaning and purpose because it becomes the way you love your neighbor.  You are, to use Luther’s term, the “mask” God wears as he loves people.  That means something!

Your life has meaning, because it means something to God!  Through the blood and righteousness of Jesus, God has woven you into his huge, wonderful metanarrative that stretches from eternity past and reaches to eternity future.  How could that ever be meaningless!

Amen.