Well, it's a delight to be with you. And my dear wife is able to be with me, which I'm very thankful for. She doesn't usually get to be with me when I travel. And so it's great to have her. And of course, the Larsons are dear friends and got to know your pastor a little bit. And he's just a delight. So it's a privilege to be able to come and to speak God's word to you. And so I'm going to ask if you would take your Bibles and turn to Ecclesiastes chapter 1. And while you're turning there, let me just set things up for you. So tonight, I'm not going to be preaching as much as trying to really persuade you about what the book of Ecclesiastes is all about. And so these two sessions tonight may seem a little, let's say, academic, but I trust that as your roast beef and carrots are digesting, that you will pray to God for help. Oh, thank you. So let's go ahead and look at just the first two verses, famous verses, of course. I'm going to be reading from the New American Standard. The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, vanity of vanities says the preacher, vanity of vanities all is vanity. Let's ask for the Lord's help. Father, we thank you that we were just able to sing over all, God reigns forever. Through all ages he is king. And Father, we celebrate the fact that our God reigns. We rejoice that you are the king over all of the earth. We thank you that there's nothing that happens apart from your fatherly hand. And Father, we thank you for gathering us here tonight and we Pray that you would help us tonight to, you would give us ears to hear. We pray that you would open our hearts and our minds. We pray, Father, that you'd help us to, just to be good listeners and to process the things that we hear. We pray that your spirit would be mightily at work in us. And Father, we pray that you would sanctify us in the truth. Your word is truth. And Father, we also recognize tonight that apart from Your Holy Spirit, we can do nothing. And that includes preaching and teaching Your Word as well as hearing it and applying it. And so we pray for the help of Your Holy Spirit, whom we so desperately need. So we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. So I've always been fascinated by the book of Ecclesiastes. But to be honest, the message of Ecclesiastes has always seemed elusive to me. I think that going back to the earliest times of my Christian life, I'd read Ecclesiastes, and I thought, this is an amazing book, but this is a tough book. And as I went through it, I went off to college, the fascination with Ecclesiastes never left me. And I made up my mind that I would not preach it until I had really become settled that I understood what it was about. And so in 2003, my family and I are on vacation. We always go to the same place. It's a ritual for us. We go to the Oregon coast to a little town called Bandon. We love it. Our children have grown up. That's our vacation spot. It's 2003. We get to the cabin and, of course, the sea air. It's just one of those every year. It's just a delightful experience. And I'm standing there and I'm watching my kids play. just having this sense of fatherly delight, and then all of a sudden it hits me. My daughter is going to be a freshman. My sons are growing up. And I thought, where did the time go? Where did the time go? And then I started to think even more about this and I thought, you know, they are going to watch me bury my parents just like I've watched my dad bury his parents. And I started to get this melancholy sense of Oh for the days of my little girl wearing Oshkosh bigosh overalls and oh for the days when they were little and I started to get really melancholy about it. And I thought soon she's going to not only be in high school, then she'll be in college, then she'll be a wife, then she'll be a mother. And my goodness, where has the time gone? Have you ever had an experience like that where all of a sudden the quickness of life and the brevity of it just overwhelms you? At that moment, I was having, okay so this is one of the words that you need to learn tonight, I was having a Havel moment. I know that that's probably a word you've not heard before. It's a Hebrew word, but just keep it in mind. Havel, if you want to spell it, it's H-E-B with a little dot underneath, E-L, alright? Havel. Alright? I was having a Havel moment, and what that did is it compelled me to want to dig into Ecclesiastes. I can't actually explain why I felt like I should dig into Ecclesiastes. But in my mind and in my heart, there was this joining together of this overwhelming sense of how transitory life was, how quickly it was going by, and the need to dig in to Ecclesiastes. And so later that next winter, I packed up as many books as I could. and I drove back up to that same cabin and I spent two weeks there and I did nothing but dig into the book of Ecclesiastes because I knew it had something to say about what I was struggling with. Well, here we are today, 2023, Ashley is a wife, she's a mother, she's going to have her 34th birthday next week. My boys are grown, one is a husband and a father, and my kids have watched me bury my mom. And so I ask one more time, where has the time gone and why does it go by so fast? And what I want to suggest to you tonight and labor to show you and then flesh it out tomorrow is that Ecclesiastes has everything to say about that aspect of life. Now I'm going to tell you that if you believe that the apostolic era of miracles is over, I'm going to do a miracle tonight. I'm going to squeeze four sermons into two. Now I haven't cut out any material, so it will be a miracle. So what makes Ecclesiastes so difficult? Well, if you look at the literature, you read things like this. Ecclesiastes is perhaps the most enigmatic book in the Old Testament. One writer calls Ecclesiastes the black sheep of the Bible. My Hebrew professor from seminary used to call it the problem child of the family of scripture. Jewish rabbis actually used to say Ecclesiastes defiles the hands. One Old Testament commentator says, and I love this, Ecclesiastes has a long history of perturbation behind it. You don't even have to know what perturbation means just to know, wow, that's Ecclesiastes. So, I went to Biola University, was a biblical studies major, and I had a wonderful Old Testament prof, and I took wisdom literature from him, and I I was exposed to Ecclesiastes at a different level than just reading it as a Christian. And I loved it, but still felt like there was something missing in the picture. Went off to seminary, wonderful Hebrew professor, took wisdom literature from him, and again the same thing. I felt like maybe my grasp was getting a little better, and so I would read articles, I'd collect commentaries, I would collect anything that I could on the book of Ecclesiastes, and it was all utterly elusive. But then that moment on vacation happened and that Havel moment compelled me to take that time and to dig into the book and I would wake up every morning during that period of time and I would read Ecclesiastes through in one sitting, okay? Brought different translations with me, read it through in one sitting that morning, and then spend the rest of the day just reading and reading and reading, and at the end, I came away with some conclusions. So, let me just give you a few basic assumptions about the book of Ecclesiastes that I carry into these sessions. First of all, The writer's name, the writer I'm going to argue in a minute is Solomon. I think Solomon wrote it. But the Hebrew title and the name of the author is Kohelet. So I'm going to use his name. So when I say Kohelet, you just know that I'm talking about the book or the author of the book. So Kohelet is like a jigsaw puzzle. Do I have any jigsaw puzzle fans here? like three lonely souls, all right? So when you do a jigsaw puzzle, you spread out all the pieces, hopefully this is the way you do it, and you have the cover of the box, so you know what the picture looks like, and you start doing what? You start trying to find the corner pieces and the edges, right? That's just sort of the way that you do a jigsaw puzzle. Too often, people come to Ecclesiastes and they have the jigsaw puzzle pieces in front of them and they pick up this piece and they go, oh wow, look at this. And then they pick up another piece, oh wow, look at this. And they end up looking at the individual pieces without knowing what the big picture is. In a sense, you could say Ecclesiastes or the book of Kohelet is like a forest and people get enamored with the individual trees. The problem is that the individual trees, i.e. the verses, some of them sound really good and some of them sound really bad. Like crazy stuff. Like, I probably shouldn't let my college-age child read this book, right? And so instead of saying, OK, there's got to be a larger context that the pieces fit into, or there has to be a forest that the trees fit into, people become enamored with the parts instead of looking at the whole. The other assumption that I'm bringing into this is that Kohelet is not your regular Bible teacher. We're going to talk about him in a few minutes, but Kohelet is something of a shock jock. He's going to say things that you're not going to read in the Proverbs. He's going to say things that you probably shouldn't say in a Baptist church. He actually says things and he says them because he's not afraid to let something sit on you and disturb you and make you wrestle with it. So he is, in this sense, He's like a tour guide who is messing with you throughout the whole tour. But he wants you to think about what you're looking at. He wants you to think about what you're hearing. So he's going to say it in ways that you're not accustomed to hearing, right? So, you know, as Christians, we have a certain way of talking, right? We kind of call it Christianese. And if you meet a Christian that doesn't speak Christianese, you immediately doubt their Christianity. They don't talk right. And in a sense, Kohelet doesn't talk right. He doesn't talk according to our expectations. And so if you remember that as you go through, What we're going to find is that, one, there is a big picture, and two, there are reasons why he says the things that he says. So what are some common views of Ecclesiastes? Well, one is that Solomon or Kohelet was a cynic. Some have even argued that he was agnostic. Some have argued that he was just purely a hedonist. Others have argued that he was nothing more than a skeptic, a nihilist, or somebody that was just flat-out worldly, right? By the way, I mean, your pastor can tell you, you read the literature, all of those things and more are attributed to the writer of Ecclesiastes. And so, just to let you know that these aren't some sort of outlandish claims, What do you make with a verse in the Bible that says this? So I hated life. Okay, Christians aren't supposed to talk like that. Because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is, and I'm going to use this word, meaningless. Or what about this? So I commend pleasure. Well, everybody knows as Christians you're not supposed to enjoy anything. So, how in the world can... I mean, especially if you're Baptist, right? Like, you should be miserable and happy about it. So, I commended pleasure, for there's nothing good for a man under the sun except to eat and to drink and to be merry. Or how about this? This is not going to make it in most sermons tomorrow. Don't be excessively righteous. Or how about this? Money is the answer to everything. Now maybe if you're watching a TV preacher you'll hear that, but you're not going to hear it in most pulpits. So what is it with Ecclesiastes? And so there are a number of different ways that people have approached the book. One of my, and by the way, I don't like any of these except for the last one that I'm going to tell you. Some have said what this is, is it's an accurate record of flawed human reasoning. So it's inspired in that it's been accurately recorded, but the content is flawed human reasoning. Now, I want to say that I wholeheartedly reject that idea. I mean, why not just put Friedrich Nietzsche in the Bible and just say, well, we accurately recorded it? Seriously. Why not just put an episode of Dr. Phil in and say, we accurately recorded it? Inspiration is not just a matter of accurate recording. It's also a matter of the inspiration of the content. There are other views that say something like this, from the writer's perspective, life has no ultimate value and what is in view is a fatalistic wisdom. One of my least favorite is the idea that you have two authors of Ecclesiastes. You have the unorthodox teacher, that is the guy named Kohelet, then you have a guy who's called the frame narrator, and so Kohelet gives this unorthodox skeptical perspective of life. The Jews are on the brink of saying, yeah, it doesn't belong in the Bible. Frame narrator comes by and says, I know what I'll do to save the book. I'll claim Solomon wrote it up at the beginning, and then I'll say, fear God and keep the commandments, because this is the sum for every man. And so we have two orthodox bookends, but everything in between is unorthodox skepticism. By the way, I'm presenting to you not liberal views of Ecclesiastes, I'm presenting to you evangelical views of Ecclesiastes. Of course, one of the most common is that the book of Ecclesiastes is like this internal debate going on. So Kohelet is playing on the one hand sort of the pessimistic cynic or even the atheist, and then every once in a while he has a little glimmer of faith, and so then he's playing the believer. Some people have said what Ecclesiastes is, is it's an evangelistic work that is caused to depress you into conversion. I'm not kidding. Others have seen it as some sort of book of an antithesis, or sort of this dialectic on life with God and without God, and so they capitalize on the idea of life under the sun, and they're like, you don't want to live life under the sun, you want to live above the sun. Life under the sun is empty without God and you need life above the sun. So it ends up being sort of this faith versus reason dialogue. And what I want to say, and this is important, all of these views of Ecclesiastes and others that I haven't mentioned all understand the book negatively. Alright? Now there's a reason why These views, even though they're different in terms of nuance and perspective, there's a reason why they're all negative. And that is because they all come to our word havel with the same basic assumption that havel means either vanity or meaninglessness or futility. Now let me just illustrate why that inevitably leads to a negative view of the book. Everything is meaningless. If that's the case, why keep reading? Everything is vanity. You don't even know what that means. Think about how weird that statement is. All is vanity. Does that mean like pride? What does it mean? Everything is empty. So you can understand that all of the negative views in a sense converge on the meaning of that word Havel. I want to present to you a different view and that is Ecclesiastes is first optimistic wisdom that realistically deals with the Havel of life. So I'm going to tip my hand and I'm going to tell you Havel means vapor, or breath, or mist. And so, the idea of Ecclesiastes, if I were to put it in a nutshell, I would say the message of Ecclesiastes goes like this. Life is a vapor, which means that it's really short, but life is also a gift from God, and so we're called to enjoy this short, vaporous life, and then trust God with everything else. Now, I hope that by the time we're done, you will see that you can eat a steak to the glory of God. And by the time we're done, I hope that you will see that going on a walk with your wife and holding her hand and then making out with her later is for the glory of God. Alright? Okay? I've never said that when my wife wasn't with me. So we come to this book and, I don't know, do you have the ESV? Okay. So you're going to be my ESV guy when I say, what does the ESV say, all right? Okay. All right. So the book starts like this. The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Does ESV have preacher? Okay. All right. So here's our word Kohelet. So the text says the words of Kohelet, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. So there's been a number of ways to try to translate Kohelet. And of course, preacher is a very, very common way. But when you hear preacher, what's the immediate connotation? Church, right? Some say teacher. What's the immediate connotation with teacher? School, classroom. So there are connotations with words, right? You can't help it. Others have tried to be a little more creative. Professor. What is the connotation there? The academy, college, right? Others have tried to argue debater. Of course, that implies skeptic. My fellow pastor Daniel Corey made the suggestion, it'll never stick but it's a fairly good one, provocateur. I actually like that, but nobody's going to say the words of Provocateur, the son of David. So the word Kohelet comes from the Hebrew word Kahal, which means assembly or congregation, which is why in the Latin Vulgate, it's called Ecclesiastes. So Ecclesiastes has to do with ecclesiastical, has to do with church. And so the connotation of Ecclesiastes is that it's related to the church. Sometimes it's seen to be maybe the academy or a group of students or something like that. But the word actually just simply means one who convenes an assembly. You could, if you were a little on the cheeky side, translate it chairman. But here's the idea is that Any English word we give to Kohelet has a connotation that's probably not in Kohelet. Alright? So what we're going to do is for the next however many sessions there are, we're going to refer to the author and the book as Kohelet. That way, if I say preacher, you have a connotation. If I say Kohelet, guess what you're thinking? Why does he keep using that word? Now, Kohelet is in fact Solomon. Now if you turn to the end of the book, chapter 12. Have you ever read a book backwards? If you read Hebrew, you have to read it backwards because it goes from right to left. But I mean, do you ever read the end of a book before you read the beginning? Most of us are way too OCD to read the end of a book before the beginning. But if you ever read a book all the way through, get to the end and then re-read it. You ever done that? So do you re-read the book differently in light of how you know it ends? Well, the answer is yes. You actually can't help it. So if you're reading a mystery novel and you read this whole long drawn out story of the gun on the table in the library and the librarian and Colonel Mustard and Mr. Green and whatever and you get to the end and you find out Mr. Green killed Colonel Mustard with a candlestick in the library, right? And then you go back and you go, I'm going to reread this thing. Do you notice, oh, that's why that happened. That's why that's there. Oh, that's why he mentions, right? So you don't know it in the course of the story, but you know the end. And then when you go back, you read the end into the story. And so here's how we're going to read Ecclesiastes. Verse 9, in addition to being a wise man, Kohelet also taught the people knowledge and he pondered and searched out and arranged many proverbs. Kohelet sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly. So guess what that does to all of these other views of Ecclesiastes that say he's unorthodox, he's unconventional, he's a skeptic, he's a cynic. Actually, the very end of the book says that he wrote delightful words, not pessimistic, downer words, And he wrote words of truth correctly. Verse 11, the words of wise men are like goats, and the masters of these collections are like well-driven nails. They are given by one shepherd. So where do the words of Ecclesiastes come from? They come from the one shepherd, who is actually God Himself. And then of course he gives us a warning, which I don't really follow. Beyond this, my son, be warned, the writing of many books, or we should say the reading of many books, is endless and excessive devotion to books is wearing to the body. That part's probably not inspired anyway. So, you read the book in light of the end, delightful words, accurate words of truth, right? Words given by one shepherd. You read it like that and it's kind of hard to walk away going, He was an unorthodox skeptic, right? So who wrote it? Well, Solomon wrote it. It becomes pretty clear in the beginning. He identifies himself as son of David, king of Jerusalem. Obviously the book is written during a monarchy. One of the things that you'll notice if you do any reading on Ecclesiastes is that even most evangelicals don't believe Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes. One scholar, Old Testament scholar, Daniel Fredericks, actually has identified multiple verbal parallels between Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, and Solomonic history as we have it in Kings and Chronicles. And so the book certainly, I would argue, is written by Solomon. And I think that's important. The book seems to be written in the twilight of the author's life. This is not a book that's coming from the pen of some young buck. This is a guy who's experienced life. He's seasoned with the experience of age. It is possible, you can't be dogmatic, but it's possible that Ecclesiastes at some level may even demonstrate Solomon's repentance. So, overview of the book. Notice, back in chapter 1, this famous statement. And I'm just going to read it to you like this. Verse 2, 1-2, Havel of Havels, says Kohelet, Havel of Havels, all is Havel. So, one Old Testament scholar says the whole history of interpretation of Ecclesiastes is really a history mainly of the meaning of Havel. Now that word Havel is used 37 times in the book of Ecclesiastes. One of the most common ways that it's translated into English is the word vanity. Do you know why our English Bibles translate the word Havel as vanity? Because of Saint Jerome. So, Jerome was a 4th century, 5th century monk who translated the Bible into Latin, right? That's the Latin Vulgate, Jerome's Vulgate. And of course, what was Jerome? Jerome was a monk. Jerome was committed to a life of asceticism. And so one Old Testament scholar says, so Jerome interpreted Ecclesiastes as a treatise aiming to show the utter vanity of all earthly enjoyment and hence the necessity of betaking oneself to an ascetic life devoted entirely to the service of God. So, what I want to say is, the translation vanity comes to us from the Latin Vulgate, which comes to us from a monk who was devoted to not enjoying life. Others have translated Havel as empty, some futility, I believe it's the NIV that says meaningless. So you get the idea. It's not just simply a matter of life sometimes feels meaningless. It's meaninglessness of meaninglessness. Meaninglessness of meaninglessness. Everything is meaningless. Now, these translations not only don't work in the book, they also don't have a corner on the market, so to speak. So Jerome translates the Vulgate, so I know it's after dinner, but just stick with me for a second here. Jerome translates the Vulgate, the Old Testament part, from the Septuagint. The Septuagint was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures which was accomplished somewhere between 200 to 150 BC. But understand this, the Septuagint was not the only Greek word or translation that was out there. Now, the Septuagint that Jerome operated from came to this word Havel and they put in the word mateotes, which could mean empty. But here's the thing. There were three other Greek translations at the time of the first century. All three of them translate the word hevel with the Greek word hotmos. You say, why is that important? It's important because that word is used in James 4.14 when James says, do you not know that your life is what? A vapor. So three out of the four Greek translations understood Havel in terms of vapor, but the guy that does the Vulgate, which ends up influencing the Western church for the next thousand years, decided to pick vanity. And so what I want to suggest to you is that the word Havel, by the way, the word Havel in Hebrew actually just means mist or breath or vapor. And what it does is it captures the brevity and the transience of life. Sometimes Sometimes Havel will have implications for the transience of life or the vaporous nature of life. But understand this, it is always at the core. So, ever heard of Cain and Abel? Abel's name in Hebrew is Avel. which is the same root as breath. Do you want to take any guess as to why Abel ends up getting the name breath in the Bible? It's because his life was cut short. His life was brief. Alright? So, think about this with me just for a second. Contrary to the notion that everything is meaningless, or everything is futile, or everything is vanity, Havel as vapor is actually consistent with the rest of Scripture. Pastor Scott read from Psalm 39 tonight, which uses the word Havel twice. Right? So if you want to just flip back there real quickly, and I'm assuming, brother, that was pretty intentional, right? This is the message of Scripture over and over and over again. Psalm 39, verse 4. Lord, make me to know my end, and what is the extent of my days. Let me know how transient I am. Behold, you've made my days as hand-breaths." Right? So a hand-breath is just a span from your pinky to your thumb, and it's a small measure, right? You've made my days as hand-breaths, and my lifetime as nothing in your sight, Surely every man at his best is a mere chavel, a mere breath. Drop down to verse 11. With reproofs you chasten a man for iniquity, you consume as a moth what is precious to him. Surely every man is a mere breath." Verse 6, "...surely every man walks about as a..." How does the ESV do that? NAS says phantom, which sounds spooky, right? A phantom, right? "...surely every man walks about as a..." literally, a shadow. Now, I'm still not switching to the ESV, but that is better. By the way, chavel, breath, and shadow are often used together in Old Testament poetry because a shadow is passing, it's fleeting, just like breath. I have about 15 passages here. We're not going to look at all of them, obviously. But consider what Job says. Job says, my days go by faster than a weaver's shuttle. So you've got this wheel that's spinning, and you've got the thing that stretches the wool out, and it's just as fast as it can go. And that's what your life's like. That's what your days are like. Now, if you're young, it doesn't feel like that. It just doesn't. But one of these days, when you're actually still young, you'll realize, wow, time really does go by fast. That guy they brought from Nevada was telling the truth. Of course, the scripture tells us over and over that life is a breath. I mean, I just quoted the James passage. Don't you know your life is a vapor? Think of it like this. So in Nevada, we're high up in elevation. We have virtually no humidity. It's kind of like here, you know? And I mean, for us to reach humidity during summer of 20% is like, woo, it's hot outside, right? But in the winter, that lack of humidity, you go out on a cold morning, so high elevation, it's very cold, your breath goes out, and it's gone almost as soon as it leaves your mouth. The message of the Bible is this, that's your life. That's your life. One of the things that I've noticed about funerals is that having a slideshow of the person's life is more and more common. I find those slideshows moving, but you know how those slideshows go, right? They show pictures of babies, the person as a baby, and then the person in grammar school, and then the person in high school, the person in the army, and then the person married, and then the person as a grandparent, and then the person in old age, and it strikes me every single time. One of these days, you'll look back on your life, and you'll be able to reduce it to a few snapshots. And it will seem to have gone by quicker than that slideshow. And so that's the message. And so I would encourage you to read Ecclesiastes, and when you see that word vanity or meaninglessness, remember, forget that, read vapor, read mist, read breath. Look over at Ecclesiastes chapter 6. Look at verse 12. Who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime? During the few years. If you have a marginal reading, look at what that marginal reading says there. It's not years, it's days. During the few days of his chavel life, not empty life, not vain life, but his brief life. He will spend them like a, what, shadow. Who can tell man what will be after him under the sun?" Sometimes the translators are actually left with no choice and will often translate Havel as fleeting. Because there's nothing else that makes sense. But if you look at this passage, here's the pain of Ecclesiastes. Life is just a few days. And it goes by so quickly. And at the end, you know, what you have is this breadth of a life and you just ask yourself, where in the world has the time gone? Now let me just say real quickly, since I have plenty of time. Sometimes in the prophets, you can check this with Pastor Scott, he'll verify this for me. Sometimes in the prophets, idols are said to be Havel. And you know how our English translations almost always translate those statements regarding idols? They're vain. You know the Hebrew word for glory? is kavod, and you know what it means? Heavy. The true God of glory is weighty. Idols are vapors. There's no substance, there's no weight to them. So even in translating Havel related to idols, I still think breath ends up having a much more significant meaning, especially compared to the fact that the true God is weighty. There's a gravitas with the true God that the idols simply do not have. And so if Havel is mistranslated, it drastically affects the book. And so what can we say about Havel? So maybe Havel is just like what unbelievers experience. Well, I want to say just a few things about Havel as we wrap up this session. First of all, Havel is a constancy of life. One writer puts it like this, the verdict of Havel is consistently maintained whether God's involvement with the world is in view at a particular point or not. Belief in God does not relieve the observed and experienced fact of Havel. So here's the reality. Havel is a constancy of life. Faith does not make Havel disappear. It's not as if you have faith, all of a sudden, your life seems like it's really long. In fact, if you want to make your life seem long, be miserable. Misery will slow down the time for you. If you're enjoying life, guess what's going to happen? The more you enjoy it, the faster it goes. But here's the thing, is that everybody is subject to life as a breath. It's not as if the believer somehow escapes Hevel, but here's the advantage, is that the believer Although he doesn't escape Havel, what he does is he has a perspective on Havel, and he learns how to live with it, and cope with it, and even thrive in the midst of it. So that's the beauty of being a believer, is that the constancy of Havel is for everybody, but you and I, so I'll steal some thunder from tomorrow. So, think of it this way. Life is a can of peaches. Everybody gets a can. Christians get a can opener. Okay? You're like, okay. That'll make more sense tomorrow, Lord willing. There's also a sense in which Havel is God's judgment. It's part of the curse. It's part of the fall. We live in a fallen world in which sin and death has been introduced, and of course the pain of Havel in Ecclesiastes is that this short life always ends the same way, in death. So in case I don't get to it, you will die. you will die. There is no escaping that day. And the pain of death is exasperated by the brevity of life. That's what makes Havel a painful reality, is that it ends, and it ends in death. And here's the thing, you can die at 5 years old, or 50 years old, or 95 years old, and the reality is your life was still a breath. This is a part of God's judgment on a fallen world, is this Havel. But there's something else about it, and that is that God is sovereign over Havel. So there's absolutely no mistaking Ecclesiastes' message that is going to teach us that God is sovereign over the breath. He's sovereign over every breath. And I'm not just talking about the breath that you breathe in order to stay alive. I'm talking about the vaporous nature of our lives. God is sovereign over each and every vapor. Life is just a series of short breaths. God is sovereign over all of them. And this is what Kohelet's going to do for us. He's going to observe life. He's the consummate observer And as he observes life, what he's going to do is he's going to point out the frustration of Havel. He's going to observe and he's going to bring out not just the frustration, but it's constancy, even at times it's pain. He's going to do experiments on is there a way to actually get gain that ends up somehow mitigating this brief life. And so he makes all of these observations, but when he stops observing and begins to instruct, you know what he does without fail? Is he points us to God. He points us to fearing God and to trusting God. Now to be sure, from Kohelet's perspective, fearing God and trusting God does not make Havel any less Havel, but what it most certainly does is it gives you a rock to stand on and a viewpoint from which you can actually enjoy this puzzling, transient, vaporous life. Why? Because God is not a vapor. Because God is not transient. Because God's works last forever. Alright? So, I told you I wasn't going to preach. This is just teaching, alright? We ain't even got started yet. Let me say one other thing and then we'll take a break according to Warren, right? Okay. The gospel of time, according to Warren, all right? You said 715 was about the time, right? Okay. So, Havel, I said, is used 37 times. There are other phrases in the book of Ecclesiastes that are used a multitude of times. And we're going to look at those, but I want to give you one more because it is often coupled with Havel, and that is chasing the wind. Chasing the wind. So you've seen that before, right? Chasing the wind. It's used a number of times. It's a difficult phrase. I'm going to give you three options and I'm going to tell you that depending on how Havel, the implication of Havel impacts the way you understand chasing the wind. So it could be something like the whim of the wind, which of course is Unpredictable. So is this short, vaporous life exasperated at times by its unpredictability? Most certainly. You think back to the worst day of your life when you woke up that morning, you were not planning for that worst day of your life. This short life actually is subject to trying to chase after the the whim of the wind and it's absolutely unpredictable. You don't know where it's going. The other imagery that is often suggested under this is shepherding the wind. Or think of it this way. So we're from out West, right? So we have wild horses everywhere. It's wonderful. We have cows everywhere. We have more cows than people. And so, So we still have cowboys that run ranches, right? Think of it as this. Instead of shepherding the wind, think of it as herding the wind or roping the wind. Guess what? It's impossible. It's absolutely impossible. You cannot rope the wind. Sometimes the phrase is used with this idea of vexation or the affliction of spirit, which of course would underscore the idea of the troubling aspects of life. And so Solomon's going to wrestle with this painful reality that life is really short, and then there are these painful afflictions that take place in this short life and it seems to exasperate the brevity of life all the more. And so Havel and Chasing the Wind are often joined together at the hip to communicate the brevity of life and the impossibility of roping the wind. Well, let's pray and then we'll take up the next part at 7.30 as per Warren. Father, we thank you for your word. And we pray that you would just help us tonight, Lord, to maybe think about this book differently than we have before. And we pray for your help. We pray for grace. And Lord, as we go into the next hour and have a little more weariness, we pray especially for the grace of being able to listen and understand. In Jesus' name, amen.