40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Ecclesiastes 1:12-2:11 (Episode 421)

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Wisdom only increases vexation if there is nothing above the sun. Hedonism only leaves you empty. And the things you think have meaning will likely not be esteemed by those who come after you. Have a listen. Show Notes: Support 1517 Podcast Network Fundraiser! 1517 Podcasts 1517 on Youtube 1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts 1517 Academy - Free Theological Education What's New from 1517: Available Now: Encouragement for Motherhood Edited by Katie Koplin Pre-order: Hitchhiking with Prophets: A Ride Through the Salvation Story of the Old Testament by Chad Bird 30 Minutes in the NT on Youtube Remembering Rod Rosenbladt Available Now: Be Thou My Song by Kerri Tom More from the hosts: Daniel Emery Price Chad Bird

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All right, Chad, this is episode number two in the book of Ecclesiastes, and we did a lot of sort of preamble last week, kind of talking about the book and the authorship and all that stuff, and then got into kind of what is the sort of introduction. It does seem that something is going to kind of change a little bit here. The first 11 verses really sort of set the tone for the book, right? And so we talked about vanity or the fleetingness of all things, the insignificance of all things, particularly if there's nothing above the sun. If everything that is exists below the sun, then what exactly is the point of all this? And that's sort of where we ended up, that you're going to die, and not only are you going to die, but shortly after you die,

a generation or two, no one's going to even have a single memory of you. Even if there's a photo of you somewhere, even if someone can utter your name, there will be nobody that says, well, I remember this one time, Chad and I were doing this thing. No, you're about two generations from that not being a possibility, which is, you know, that's kind of a depressing thought, if there is no resurrection yeah it's very very much a depressing thought i mean and that's where all of this kind of horizontal thinking leads you if there's no no over the sun perspective then ultimately everything is as he says vanity of vanities you know i was talking with somebody about uh this atheist guy that was talking to a friend of mine and he was he was saying like that

no like people want to build a legacy and this kind of stuff and i was like well that's not the same as a memory he's like yes it is people have memory of stuff like so abraham lincoln is in our like collective memory i'm like no no no he's not like that's not that's not true like you have knowledge of the past you don't have nobody has any memories of abraham lincoln what are you talking about like there's no memory of him there's just knowledge of him nobody alive could tell you what he was really like because there's nobody that knew him you're just you just have information but it's not memory yeah yeah that that is so true i mean how many times have maybe it's a sports star maybe it's an author whoever you know we've learned a lot about them

watch their videos watch their games read their books whatever and we think that we know them pretty well but we actually don't you know talk to their brother sister their child their wife their best friend now they know them a lot better than almost anybody else does it's kind of like that you know even with the abraham lincolns or the julius caesars or the whoever's of history i mean we can get to know a lot of stuff about them but do we really know the person yeah not really yeah there's no there is no memory of that like i said like there's no one that you could talk to that could be like listen i spent a lot of time with them and they wouldn't have they would That's actually—they wouldn't have said that.

That's not something they—this happens with theologians and stuff sometimes, too, where people get in arguments about what a theologian meant by something or what he couldn't have meant by something based on who he was, and these arguments are always dumb because, well, you don't know. I mean, all you have is other things he's written, and maybe you could say that's inconsistent with what he's written before, but you don't know him, so you could never say he would never say that. because you don't know him you don't know what he would or would never do

yeah and such is the uh such is the fate of every person right after after a generation or two unless you got the resurrection and then you just be like well i'll ask him when i see him yeah i can't wait until we have that conversation one day so that yeah that's uh that's the introduction to everything that's first 11 verses and as we pointed out last time that's in the third person And Kohelet, usually translated as teacher or preacher, is the one who's speaking. And we're going to shift now in verse 12 to first person. He's going to start out, I, Kohelet, so I, the preacher. And he is going to remind us that he has been king over Israel in Jerusalem.

Sometimes that Hebrew verb is translated as was. It can be translated that way. I think a lot of translations lean today toward have been in order not to give the impression that Solomon or the author is no longer the king. I mean, that's if I if I hear somebody say I was blank, my immediate assumption is, well, you're not that anymore. Right. So the the have been is probably a better translation of this. So I co-held it have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. We already knew that. We're just reaffirming that, adding a little bit to it.

But now he's going to go on and tell us what he did as king over Israel and Jerusalem. He said, I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is under heaven. That applied my heart literally in Hebrew is I gave my heart. One scholar translates it as I devoted myself, which I kind of like. You know, the heart, of course, is the epicenter of the human being in the Hebrew way of thinking. so I took my innermost being, my heart, and I devoted that, I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. Of course, this is the key here, this is the interpretive key to understanding why so much of what he has to

say is depressing, because this is not the over heaven or over the sun perspective, this is under heaven kind of stuff. You know, when you're reading that verse, if you go back, even you can if you're just now joining us or something you could go back to us going through first and second kings and you have this description of Solomon and like he becomes like not he's not just the king but he's like a zoologist and like uh he's like really into like plants and he's trying to figure out like you know like let me get every spice that could possibly be discovered and make sure I can try all those and I want to lay my eyes on every animal and I want to see every tree, and this sounds like him, right?

Because he was doing all this stuff. There's like this curiosity and this desire to gain knowledge about everything around you. And what's interesting about it is that when you read it, when it's talking about it as a narrative, it seems like he's kind of really enjoying these things, and this is something that he actually enjoys doing. like, hey, I want wood from over there to build this thing,

so let's ship it all the way across the known world so I can build some monuments over here. But what also is true is that if you assume that this is, whether it's Solomon or someone sort of writing as Solomon, and you know how this goes, and this is like The Great Temptation, if you're much older, there's this melancholiness that can set in maybe you devoted yourself to all these things now you're an old man and you sit back and you're asking this question exactly did is was any of that worth oh yeah yeah i mean

he's gonna he's gonna make that explicit when we get into into chapter two about you know all the things that he did uh and yeah i mean it's just like well you i think most of us who get older do we look back and like what was you know what was i thinking or was that really worth it and solomon if anybody could do that he could i mean he was i think people do that even with good things like where because i think that you've this is what you discover in life is that something can be very interesting to you or maybe you're trying to do something and uh it matters a lot to you it's very important to you there's a lot of there's a lot of meaning attached to it and then you discover as time goes on that that meaning is only attached to you

nobody else cares about this stuff the way that you care about this stuff and this becomes very depressing and discouraging where you're like i did all these things and i i enjoyed doing them and i thought that they meant something but it turns out that the rest of the people in this next generation and the generation after that as i'm watching them they don't care about any of this so what was the point yeah right i mean i've uh without getting into particulars i've seen that in the case of my own father who passed away about a year and a half ago i mean some of the things that were extremely important to him and i'm glad that they were weren't extremely important to the next generation you know or two generations later i mean and and that was fine for him you

know but we easily kind of get the impression that we're going to be passing on to the next generation, something that was, that is going to be as important to them as it is to us. And that's just simply not the case. Most of the time, most of our interests are pretty idiosyncratic, you know, for instance, just to pick a kind of a silly example, I'm sitting here recording in my study with hundreds of books around me. And, and I love these books. I've been collecting them for the last 30 years and I consult them all the time. And I can tell you, I mean, I can remember where I got them, how I've used them, all this kind of stuff. Is anybody else going to care? No. That's just one example. You can multiply that many times over with things that are

important to individual people. You don't think your daughter is going to treasure those books the way that you do? Yeah, it's like she's going to be looking through them. Oh, look, my dad highlighted this line. I wonder what he was thinking. Or look, he scribbled a note here at the side. No, I mean, I know what's going to happen to these books when I die. They're going to get given away or sold. I mean, that's just the reality. So I think that more than we can have kind of a you know an honest appraisal of our personal things whatever those are that matter to us yeah the the less the less we're going to be invested in them in a sense that we're really passing on a legacy here actually no we're not yeah and i know we're trying to get through this

book but here's i see that it's just because i see this example all the time where i live so i live in an area that's like in the last 20 years and i've lived here for more than 20 years like has like grown exponentially like it's just blown up and when i first moved to that the area that i lived there was tons of farmland and there was all these all these farms you know cattle or hay all this stuff all these and these were generational farms and they've been in the same families for a long long time and over the last 20 years not the farmers but the farmers children don't want to be farmers and there's a lot of developers that want that land and you see in some of the farmers that are still around are you know it's sackcloth and ashes as

the children of their friends who were also farmers who built this thing up and probably you know maybe they even inherited from their dad or whatever but he taught them the way and there's this there's all of this this pride and and and even just sort of uh there's like an ethic almost involved in it and you're breaking some unwritten rule like that you can't just sell that to a developer so they can build a hundred houses like don't you know like the blood the sweat the the all that stuff and guess what grandkid don't care about that because he just sold it for five million dollars yeah i was gonna say he's looking at a lot of dollar signs here and that's really all that matters to him.

And it seems like, like I said, you could tell some of the old-timers that are still around that are holding on to this stuff when younger people are selling their farmer buddy's stuff, you could tell that they feel like an injustice has been done, like there's a lack of appreciation. Oh, absolutely.

It's like an act of betrayal. Yeah, you know how much they sacrifice to make that land what it is and to be able to pass it on? And I say all that to say I think that this is what it means in that kind of way when he just says it's an unhappy business that god has given to the children of man to be busy with like basically you're gonna be busy with building this thing

and then what's gonna happen is that no one's gonna care about that blood sweat and tears and no one's gonna care about like the sort of ethic of like keeping it in the family or whatever whatever your situation is or whatever this situation is and this business turns out to be like actually a very unpleasant business yeah yeah one uh one of the commentators translated unhappy businesses it's a lousy job which which i kind of like i mean the the hebrew there the adjective is raw which uh which can mean bad uh evil i mean it can unhappy there's a lot of it's one of these words with a broad range of meanings but you know having you translate it translate it in a way that's in accord with the whole tenor of ecclesiastes you know it's it is unhappy it's

it's lousy it's bad it's evil it's an evil business that god that god has given right and this is the uh kind of the introduction to the divine theme so he is dealing here with life under the sun uh life under heaven but he's also he's not he's not simply you know saying there is no God, but he's saying that God has given this kind of life to us under the sun. So he's, he's working here, not with an atheistic view. He certainly has a theistic view, but he's saying that, yeah, God exists for sure. And here's what he's done to us. This is, this is what he's provided for us, an unhappy business to be unhappily busy with in the few short years of life that we have here. So he's still limiting his perspective, even though he has some theology

that's at play here. It's also almost like the thing that maybe you did find some joy and becomes unhappy, it's like it turns to dust in your hand, right? Where you thought maybe you were involved in something that you thought mattered, and then it turns out that this is maybe the most unhappy of businesses because uh oh this only matters to me yeah yeah and if i'm going to pass it on then there's a high likelihood the next generation is going to mess it up anyway yeah which is yeah he'll yeah that's going to be a huge theme in here he's going to say that yeah you could tell there is like a sort of like old man on the front porch screaming at the younger generation that happens in this book for sure yeah alternate subtitle for ecclesiastes the old man on the

screaming at the illustration. So verse 14 says, uh, I have seen everything that's done under the sun and behold. So here's his conclusion. All is Hevel. It's vanity. And, uh, I love this image striving or chasing after, after wind, which, you know, we talked about last time. It's a, it's a humor. It's, it's both humorous and extremely depressing metaphor. I'm going to chase that wind down. And if I ever do catch it, I'm going to have me something. Yeah, you're going to have nothing. You know, just trying to spoon water out of the ocean. Good luck with that. And then he has a little proverbial saying here that exemplifies this. It's one verse, what is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. So it's kind of the

idea that you know you've got life under the sun is full of unfixable problems and unsolvable mysteries so good luck good luck straightening out what's uh what's crooked and good luck counting what is it was what isn't even there it's just kind of another proverbial way of accenting the the vanity the emptiness the temporality the absurdity of life under the sun so verse 16 while this reads 16 through 18 that'll take us through the end of chapter one i said in my heart so he's uh some kind of musing here is uh is going on he does a lot of this you know i said my heart so i'm reflecting i'm talking sometimes that has a very negative connotation like when jeroboam says in his heart he's going to make the golden calves and sometimes it's just

i think this is a way that you know i was sitting there thinking we might say we might put this old man on the porch is talking to himself and he's yes right he's he's muttering to himself some stuff here yeah a little little old man soliloquy so i was talking myself i said my heart i have acquired great wisdom surpassing all who were over me all who were over jerusalem before me and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge and i applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly i perceived that this also is but a striving after wind for in much wisdom is much vexation and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow this is ignorance is bliss this is what this is that's what this is for sure it's for sure

what it is he's saying that all right well i i what i did was decided i would to get to i would try to know as many things as you can know and uh the what i came to find out is that the more you know like where you suffer the more the more sorrow that you have like uh better to be ignorant and just and be happy than to know and by the way there's a that's largely true uh you know like if you don't want to be uh despairing uh i'll just use like a real practical example If you're like, listen, I can go two routes here. I can just like every four years in November, I can just go and just vote for somebody. I'll just pick my party, and I'll just like vote for that down the line, and then I'll leave.

And I'm just going to happily believe that those people are aligned with what I – like they're working for me, and this is great. You might decide, like, you know, the responsible thing to do and the right thing to do would be for me to, like, really start looking into, like, how politics works. And I'm going to, like, really look into, like, how the governments run. Let me tell you something. That will increase vexation and sorrow for you. No, no, saying it so. You might, like, you'll know more, but I don't know if you'll be happy that you know it. I don't know that you will either

yeah I experienced that first hand back in 2020 I was listening to a lot of political shows, a lot of political podcasts to make you happier and my my vexation

levels were rising let me put it that way so yeah I kind of adopted a political ignorance is bliss to some extent as a result of that You know, I was, I was thinking when, uh, just this morning, this never hit me until this morning when I was looking at these verses that, uh, you know, one thing that Koheleth did not try

humility. I have acquired, you imagine me, you and I having a conversation like, Dan, you know, I, I've acquired great wisdom surpassing all who were over all who were over Texas before me, you know, just, I've got great experience of wisdom and knowledge. So there, there is a certain arrogance here in his speech now i'm not denying that solomon certainly did have great knowledge and great wisdom but uh come on a little bit humility goes a long way yeah so uh anyway he's yeah he did i mean he great wisdom and god's gift to him in fact was wisdom and he you know he uh strengthened that by becoming a polymath and learning you know biology and botany and zoology and all these other things so he did that uh he's going to get to the

he said i also applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly now he's going to get to that in chapter two he's kind of just introducing it here and he's telling us ahead of time he he does this repeatedly you know most of the time we'll you and i will say you know what i tried this and we'll talk about this that you tried blah blah blah and at the end you gave me your appraisal you say well it was pretty good or no it was it was not good kohelis doesn't do that i mean right away he just says i tried this it didn't work it was terrible and then he goes on to tell you what it was he kind of gives you the the conclusion up front on on each of these uh madness and folly uh like i said you can unpack more of that in chapter two that's probably

i'm guessing this is probably one of these cases where it should be translated something like mad folly so there's a there's a term called the hindiades which is kind of a fancy way of saying sometimes we'll put we'll say a and b and by that we mean uh something like this so we'll say it was man it was a it was nice and hot outside today we mean it was nicely hot or i'll say you know they they came they came to the party despite the despite the cold and weather i really mean despite the cold weather but we'll we'll put an and between those two and i think that's probably what's going on here so when he says to know madness and folly it probably just means mad folly yeah because you're more adjectivally yeah because it almost like it reads like he's making

it like there must be a distinction between these two things yeah you know so if i was to say uh you know like i've he if he said uh i've applied my heart to know wisdom and to know joy and sorrow you'd be like okay so this is a contrast he wants to know both of these things so he can have like the full you can understand all things so you gotta you gotta experience both but madness and folly yeah it seems that he's talking about the same thing uh that yeah that uh yeah i want to i want to know wisdom uh and turns out like what i really discovered is a bunch of there's a bunch of crazy people out here acting dumb yeah yeah probably we could say the same thing with wisdom and knowledge he wants to know wise knowledge i mean yeah it's it's it's using the two words

more or less uh synonymously so uh yeah that's the end of that's the end of chapter one uh he ends it by uh saying you want to you want some vexation get more wisdom and you want more uh more sorrow then get some get some more knowledge and one of the things we should accent here is that and this comes up a lot in in books commentaries that are written on ecclesiastes is that what happens here is kind of the same thing that happened in the book of Job. You kind of take your stereotypical wisdom categories where life seems a little bit predictable. You know, if you do this, then this will result.

Or if you do this bad thing, then this bad thing will result. And it questions not the whole wisdom genre, but it questions just how safe and secure some of these conclusions are. So most of the time, you know, you read Proverbs, and they're all about increasing wisdom, right? Get more wisdom. That's what you need. You get more wisdom, and life's going to be better for you.

And Koheleth is like, ah, I'm not so sure about that. Or maybe, well, that depends on your perspective, doesn't it? Because it doesn't always work out that way. Yeah, I mean, you might think that if I could, you know, if I could just be like the wisest person that ever lived, then i would find out the this is funny right so if you're going to find try to figure out the meaning of life the the secret right the the great the great unknown secret to happiness and uh and the secrets of the universe and kind of solomon saying like yeah um here's the here's

the secret um it's all vanity and so that ended up being a pretty depressing discovery is that I did have all the wisdom, and I went out to find the meaning of life and found out there isn't one. Yeah. Of course, under the sun. Under the sun, sure. Here's a little knowledge for you. It doesn't matter.

Yeah, yeah. Give up the quest. So we're going to, let's do a little pleasure, a little hedonism. That's going to be our next step in the process. This is chapter two. so i i said in my heart again this is this the old man of the port soliloquy going on here uh come now i will test you with pleasure enjoy yourself kind of uh one of these experience the good life so we're gonna we're gonna try this out we tried wisdom that didn't seem to work

so let's uh let's try some pleasure let's let's enjoy ourselves for a while and then this is what i was talking about earlier he didn't he doesn't before he goes on to talk about what he did he already says but behold this also was vanity so lest you lest he be accused of leading you on he's gonna just let you know right away no this failed to yeah so this would be like if you said i'm gonna find out the secret and the meaning of life and like oh there isn't one well i guess uh that discovery leads me to this that you you have a finite amount of years and so uh the pursuit of pleasure seems like the the best option here i mean you might if there isn't anything else uh let's just i'll just do it all for me and uh yeah he he lets you know right away like yeah that

that was fleeting uh that that was vanity too i mean i think there's probably gonna be some other other parts of the of the book which uh which may uh compete with this one for kind of the summation of a lot of modern life, but man, it's pretty hard to compete with this as kind of a general introduction to how a lot of people today

who don't believe in God are kind of approaching life. You know, so this is what he says. A set of laughter. It is mad. And a pleasure. What use is it? I search with my heart.

This verse is great. I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine. So we're going to try some alcohol, all right? And then he adds this in kind of parentheses. My heart's still guiding me with wisdom and how to lay hold on folly till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life.

Let's stop there for a second. The reason I find this so funny. So he says, all right, you know, I'm going to try alcohol. but he he does so in such a way that he's like no i'm not gonna i'm not gonna like just go out and get drunk though here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna i'm gonna try alcohol but as i'm doing it i'm gonna do it as an experiment it's like he's not just like i'm gonna get together with friends and we're gonna go open three or four bottles of wine you know what we're just gonna enjoy ourselves we're gonna tell stories we're gonna sip wine we're gonna laugh we're gonna joke it's

gonna be a great evening no he's like all right uh i'm gonna take a sip and then more sips and i'm gonna i'm gonna finish this bottle and but the whole time i'm going to do it is a philosophical quest because my heart is going to be guided by wisdom the entire time i do it it's just kind of a silly image here like this is my that is the fun way to drink yeah right yeah hmm let me how am i feeling right now yeah a little buzz i'm not quite intoxicated yeah pausing to take notes let's see how i've had half two glasses now how do i feel let me search this out with wisdom there's kind of a yeah it's kind of a silly approach to to this but that's that's what he did my heart's still guiding me with wisdom so he's gonna see uh you know what what good this is for the children

a man to do under heaven during the few days of their life so the accenting here the the short lived nature of our existence here which of course is a huge biblical biblical theme so he introduces that but he's not done yet he's got a few more things here verse four he shifts more from pleasure to i guess what today we might call accomplishments you know what have you done with your life what what would you count as your successes what are the what are the things that kind of your bragging rights well he says verse four i made great works and listen to all these eyes in here by the way i made great works i built houses and planted vineyards for myself i made myself gardens and parks and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees i made myself pools from which to

water the forest of growing trees i bought male and female slaves and had slaves who were born in my house i also had great possessions of herds and flocks more than any who had been before me in jerusalem i also gather for myself silver and gold and the treasures of kings and provinces i got singers i got singers both men and women and many concubines the delight of the sons of man so i let me go i guess i'll finish this out i'll finish two more verses three more verses so i became great surpassed all who were before me in jerusalem also my wisdom remained with me and whatever listen to this just whatever my eyes desired i did not keep from them i kept my heart from no pleasure from my heart found pleasure in all my toil

and this was my reward for all my toil then i considered all that my hands had done and the toil i had expended in doing it and behold any guesses yeah all was vanity and a striving after win and there was nothing to be gained under the sun wow he did it all i mean pleasure yep i mean he did the the whole uh alcohol thing uh he did uh many concubines which is the translation of that is debated but the majority do think that is the the proper the the proper translation of that literally in hebrew it's like one and two concubines which is a uh unique way in which hebrew says there were a lot let's put it that way i didn't even say concubines literally in hebrew it's one and two breasts is a is a way of basically saying i had a lot of women that's

that's his that's his uh way of summarizing that but not only that i mean entertainment he had singers of course he had plenty of plenty of possessions riches riches galore he you know made a lot of houses and vineyards and gardens and parks i mean this this guy did did a lot of things and and not in a not in in such a way as to try and make things better for others too notice how many eyes were in there i myself that's exactly what i was going to say like he says his wisdom remained with him so i guess it did the sort of selfishness right yeah the problem the problem is obviously if there's nothing under this above the sun then yeah indeed what does any of it matter ultimately uh however uh even just in life like i don't know

i think you figured the sooner you figure this out the better unfortunately you don't usually don't figure it out until like you're a little bit older but stuff done for yourself like doesn't hold up doesn't even satisfy from the under the sun no it's it's empty it's very it's very empty It's maybe good in the moment, but things, whether it's building things or doing things, enjoying things, whatever it is, it's not durable. It's only good when it's being done, but there's no durability. It doesn't last. the things that you end up being proud of or uh or feeling like there was a there's some purpose and meaning attached to them are always the things that are done in the service of others

i mean if you have kids or if you're in a family like you discover this that like that's that's the stuff that you uh feel good about at night the rest of it is whatever yeah yeah and and just kind of build on that you also discover i think the older you get that maybe when you were younger you took great pride in your own accomplishments but what happens the older you get the things that make you happiest are the accomplishments of like your children or your grandchildren yeah i mean it's like so you did a great thing last week okay whatever the the the pleasure from that is very fleeting but you know your your child did some you know great thing got into a great college landed a great job married a great person whatever it is you're like that makes you happy

i mean that that other focus definitely begins to be more of a of a reality yeah the older the older you get. At least that's the way it's been for me. It is weird. It's one of the things that doesn't show up really in Ecclesiastes. And then I tried selflessness and pouring myself out for others. That's not really one of the things that he said to his heart. Let's try

sacrificial love. Let's see if that works. That doesn't really show up. He tried lots of stuff, but that is one route that he did not go down. Yeah. He didn't try humility and selflessness. Who knows, maybe Ecclesiastes never would have been written if that were the case.

Well, I think that part of that is, too, is like, those things only make sense if, yeah, you got to have something probably above the sun for that to make sense. Yeah, that perspective on life definitely is in over the sun, kind of. I did not come to be served, but to serve. Yeah, that descends from heaven, that particular perspective. Yeah. Yeah, it's contrary to everything else that we experience. So yeah, I mean, I went through here and highlighted all the I's

and for-myselves, and they're all over the place. He tried it all for himself. Didn't hold anything back either. Yeah, and of course the point of this passage, I mean, of course that's what he's going to say, because the point of this is like, hey, I tried complete hedonism. I gave it a shot. just in this particular obviously in this section of course he's not worried about anyone else

because that's not this that's not the uh experiment he's running right here yeah yeah i mean he's he starts out i uh this section we began today i the preacher so this is very much of uh this is who i am this is what i accomplished this is what i experienced this is what i built and yes i did it all for myself and i'm here to give you my appraisal of this way of life and it is that it's all for nothing it's all vanity and a striving after the wind and yeah to i mean a lot of these things that he did there's nothing wrong with them i mean it's great to do build houses and if you want to plant a vineyard great if you want to uh do a lot of things that he describes here it's fine you know some of these in moderation of course no concubines moderation maybe not maybe

not concubines in moderation maybe not the concubines yeah yeah let's cut those directly out uh but yeah i mean some of the things he did were fine i mean it's good to we can enjoy a glass of wine together we can you know build something together so there's a lot of things in life which are perfectly fine to do except if you're doing them only from the under the sun perspective eventually you realize even they the pleasure was fleeting the enjoyment was was temporary and in the end you die so if you if you want to see life in its proper perspective then it has to be from the perspective of over the sun and not under the sun and then that that transforms i think all of these experiences whether it's a a good pleasure something that a

pleasure that God has actually given to us or, you know, a good project that you work on. Everything is revolutionized when you're looking at things from the perspective of above and from the perspective of everything that Christ modeled for us and giving up his life for others. Then, yeah, you can be engaging in some of the same activities that unbelievers are engaged in, but your perspective is different because you're looking at things not from just a this world perspective, but from the perspective of eternity. Yeah, that's right. And that is it, man. We are out of time, so we will leave it there. Pick it up again next week. Solomon's going to try some wisdom. Maybe if you could just

exercise all the wisdom, that'll be the way. And you can imagine what his conclusion is going to be there, but we're going to dig into it next episode. I'll see you then, Chad. See you then. Hello, 1517 Podcasts listeners. This is Caleb Keith, director of the 1517 Podcast Network, with a special announcement. Throughout the entire month of June, the Podcast Network of 1517 is hosting a special fundraiser. During the time of this fundraiser, two generous donors are doubling the impact of your generosity by matching dollar for dollar gifts given up to $75,000. The podcast network has a goal, including this match, to raise $150,000 during the month of

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