Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 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.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome back to Ecclesiastes.

Last week I preached my first sermon on Ecclesiastes. In it I tried to give you all the lay of the land in order to set you up well to get the most out of our time in this book. To that end, there were three main parts to the sermon. First, concerning the author, “the Preacher,” I said that the book is purposefully anonymous, certainly in the voice of King Solomon, and ultimately from God (12:11). The second section concerned the main themes of Ecclesiastes. Those are vanity (usually referring to mystery), the sovereignty of God (which is true, but also makes the mystery of life even more mysterious), and under the sun (life on earth, under the curse). And third, I mentioned that the main message of Ecclesiastes is that all of life appears mysterious, but there is more than meets the eye. I attempted to sum all of all of that up with the simple phrase: Vanity below, glory above”.

This morning we’ll get into the text itself. More specifically, we’ll get into some of the details of the vanity observed by the Preacher under the sun.

The big idea of this passage is that there is great mystery in understanding how life can have real meaning when there is nothing new under the sun and everything comes back around again. Above the sun, though, we’re able to see that God is making all things new and the rhythms of this world are profound means of grace. The main takeaway is to enter into the rhythms of God’s design as the means of grace they are.

THERE’S NOTHING IS NEW UNDER THE SUN

The main vanity banner over this section is the simple fact that no matter what we do, life just keeps moving on in cyclical fashion. In that way, in a certain under-the-sun sense, all of life is a treadmill; always moving, always working, not really getting anywhere. The Preacher insists that our own lives and bodies and nature all point to the around-and-around-and-around way things work. There is nothing truly new under the sun. Everything that we experience is simply a “coming back around” of older stuff.

Consider Your Life (3-4, 11)

For many people, two of the main areas of life are work and family. The Preacher invites us to consider the cyclical vanity of each.

Consider your work (3).

³ What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?

We spend so many hours, over so many days, for so many years working. Sometimes we do so for pay and sometimes for free. But what do we really gain from any of it?

The treadmill runs constantly and quickly at our house. We cut buckthorn, spray the stems, and burn the branches; only to have it pop up in another location soon after. I spend a couple of hours mowing the grass every week or so and it just grows back. We shovel the snow, only to have it snow again. We cut vines, only to have them spring up ten feet away. We plant new trees each year, only to have emerald ash boar and oak wilt take out half of the existing trees. We pick the Japanese beetles off our raspberry bushes and apple trees only to have them come back with a vengeance the next day.

How about your work? I know several people at Grace who get paid to experience the same kind of cycle that we do at our house. I know others of you who work in the tech industry. You generate report after report after report; or write code, fix code, write code, fix code; or install software, address the new issues the new software creates, maintain the software, and then start all over. Others experience the same cycle driving packages around; fill up a truck, deliver the contents of the truck, go home, and start all over again tomorrow; always more packages, never less. Moms, how many diapers have you changed, messes have you cleaned up, and exact same instructions have you issued, day after day after day. And on and on and on.

Very little of what we produce under the sun lasts for long and none of it lasts forever. The best of our efforts require constant maintenance and most require regular replacement.

And what is gained in all that cyclical labor? A paycheck to buy stuff, which requires another paycheck to maintain the stuff. A paycheck to buy enough food and drink to eat until our next paycheck comes to buy more food and drink. A paycheck to go on a vacation to rest up so we can go back to work to save up for our next vacation. A paycheck to save up for kids’ college, so they can get a job, to save up for their kids to go to college. A paycheck to allow us to get into a bigger house, with more room, only to require more paychecks to fill those rooms and repair more things that break in them.

Under the sun, our labor is a treadmill that never stops and never really gets anywhere.

Consider your family (4).

⁴ A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

Older folks, look around the room. Unless you’re behind a pillar, it should be pretty easy to see that there are several pregnant women. I’m might seems otherwise, but on the grand scale, it wasn’t that long ago when your home was your mother’s womb. Likewise, it wasn’t that long ago that you were struggling to learn how to walk and talk; run and read; play sports and make friends. Look around the room again. You’ll see a gaggle of distracted, naïve, invincible teenagers. You were just there too. And then came early adulthood where everything was new and exciting and a bit scarry. Most of you dated, married, and had kids, then older kids, then empty nest, and then your kids had kids. Your body slowed down, retirement neared, retirement past. Soon, most of your life was behind you. And then, one day, as the Preacher will soon explain, you will return to dust even as the cycle of life continues on without interruption without you, just as it has for generation after generation after generation.

Very few of us have clear memories of just three generations before us—our great grandparents. Almost none of us know anything significant at all about the generation before that, much less the hundreds of generations that we came from before that. As hard as it might be to hear, in 75 years, the memory of nearly all of us will be basically gone from the earth. And around and around it goes, even as it has gone and will continue to go.

That’s the essence of the final verse in our passage.

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.

Under the sun, our families are in a cycle that never stops and never really gets anywhere.

Consider the World Around You (5-7)

It’s not just our lives though that run on a cycle. Consider the world around you as well, says the Preacher.

Consider the sun (5).

⁵ The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.

Day after day after day we look to the east to see the sun come up, and it does. The angle varies throughout the year, but day after day and month after month, we watch it move across the sky toward the west only to see it eventually disappear behind the horizon. And then it begins again. Always moving, never getting anywhere. Lap after lap after lap.

Consider the wind (6).

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.

The wind functions in much the same way. It is always blowing and never getting anywhere. Even as we watch the jet stream on a weather website, there is no end to the cycle. The arrows move to some degree, but eventually it always ends where it started.

Consider the rivers (7). They too prove the Preacher’s point.

⁷ All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.

The sun, the wind, and the rivers of earth—nature itself—testifies to the cyclical nature of the world under the sun. In the Preacher’s context, Jerusalem, the Jordan River poured gallon after gallon after gallon into the Dead Sea. Day and night, week and month, year and decade of wa...

There Is Nothing New Under The Sun