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- [00:04]
Podcast Host
Welcome to Gospel and Life. Have you ever found yourself asking, what if nothing I do really lasts? Is this all there is? In today's podcast, Tim Keller looks at how Ecclesiastes helps us face our doubts, fears and uncertainties, and points us to the lasting hope and significance we have in Christ.
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Tim Keller
Let's take a look at this passage now. We're about to read from Ecclesiastes and last Last year, last fall, I did one sermon on Ecclesiastes, and ever since then, I wanted to come back. And in the month of September, we're going to be looking at some of the basic themes of this book. And right away, as we read it, you're going to see it's different. It's so different than other books of the Bible, it'll strike you right away. Ecclesiastes, chapter nine. We're going to read verses two to 16. All share a common destiny, the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean. Those who offer sacrifices and those who do not. As it is with a good man, so with a sinner. As it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun. The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil, and there is madness in their hearts while they live. And afterwards they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope. Even a live dog is better than a dead lion, for the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. They have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate, and their jealousy have long since vanished. Never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun. Go eat your food with gladness. Drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do. Always be clothed in white. Always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love. All the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun. All your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. For in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working, nor planning, nor knowing, nor wisdom. I have seen something else under the sun. The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong. Nor does food come to the wise, or wealth to the brilliant, or favor to the learned. But time and chance happens to them all. Moreover, no one knows when this hour will come, as fish are caught in a cruel meadow, birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them. But I also saw under the sun an example of wisdom that greatly impressed me. There was once a small city with only a few people in it, and a powerful king came against it and surrounded it and built huge seed works against it. Now there lived in that city a man, poor but wise, and he saved the city by his wisdom. But nobody remembered that poor man. So I said, wisdom is better than strength. But the poor man's wisdom is despised and his words are no longer heeded. This is God's word. This is God's word. There's never been a time where in the last few decades, at least in America, maybe even the west, where people have been searching more, doing more spiritual searching. And there's no better place to go do spiritual searching than going to the book of Ecclesiastes. The word Ecclesiastes is the Latin translation for the Hebrew word, for the author. And the Hebrew word, what the author calls himself is koheleth, which actually means it's very hard. A public teacher or a commentator. Some people have actually called him a pundit, a public teacher, a commentator, a person who's commenting on the way things are now. There is no better place to go if you or you know somebody. No better place to go if you're on a spiritual search, if you're trying to find faith or trying to find God, or trying to find what's out there. There's no better place than the book of Ecclesiastes. Because in the entire Bible, this is the only book written from the viewpoint of a skeptic, written from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't believe, written from the viewpoint of someone who's a practical secularist. Let me take a second to explain that. For example, unless you understand that, that this is the only book like that, it's going to be very confusing to read. Look at verse five, for example. It says the dead know nothing. Is that what the Bible teaches? I mean, is that the overall whole? Is that what the Bible teaches about the afterlife? No. Well, what's it doing here? Because the key phrase which comes up several times in this text and it comes up dozens of times in the book of Ecclesiastes, it comes up nowhere else in any book of the Bible. In fact, it comes up nowhere else in any part of literature is the term under the sun. And what this means is he does not say, this is true. This Is true. This is true. This is a fact. This is a fact. He says, this is a fact. Under the sun. This is true. Under the sun. Under the sun, this life is meaningless. What? Not just life is meaningless. This life is meaningless under the sun. What does that mean? It means this life, understood, without any reference to life above the sun or beyond the sun. In other words, this life without reference to there being an eternity or heaven. This life, if this life is all there is, that's what life under the sun means. And what's so helpful about this guy is the point of view he takes is not a philosophical atheism, but it's very much, frankly, it's very much the practical secularism of the average New Yorker and increasingly the average Western person. When I say practical secularism, notice he uses the word God a couple times. He talks about the meaningless life that God has given us. But you see, in the book of Ecclesiastes, God is not the biblical God, the judge of heaven and earth, the lover of our souls. If you ask the average New Yorker, do you believe in God, there's very few atheists, there's very few rigorous, philosophical, doctrinaire atheists who said there can't be a God. The average person says, yes, there's probably some kind of supreme being, but we can't know what that God thinks, or we can't know that God. We can't know the will of God. And therefore, essentially this life is all there is. We don't know why we're here. And after you're dead, that's it. And therefore, you've got to kind of make the best of it. That's practical secularism. And the book of Ecclesiastes gets into that position and says, okay, you practical secularists, how does life really look? And then he goes after in the book, and we're going to take these next three weeks on these three, he says, let's take a look at the three basic projects that all human beings have got to do if you're going to live the basic projects that you can't avoid. And even if you don't think you're doing them, you have to do them because you can't live without avoiding them. And the three basic projects are justice, pleasure, and achievement. Achievement is what is worth doing in my life. What am I going to spend my life doing? You know, what should I be doing? Pleasure is, where will I find happiness? What will satisfy me really? And thirdly, how do I deal with the injustice and the evil and suffering I see in the world. You can't live without asking those questions or essentially answering them. Even if you don't think you're answering them, you are answering them. And he says, all right, let's just say here's the reason that the book of Ecclesiastes is so unusual and is so helpful and why a book eventually brings you to God. Because the book of Ecclesiastes is not just doubt, belief, the great thing about the book, and it's so democratic when you think about it. The Ecclesiastes writer also doubts unbelief. Now, this is something that almost nobody does. In other words, people know what. Yeah, well, yes, let's doubt belief, but let's not doubt. You see, it wouldn't be fair, would it, to only doubt belief, Only doubt faith. Surely if you're going to doubt faith and ask very hard questions about faith, wouldn't you doubt your doubts? Shouldn't you doubt your doubts? Shouldn't you ask hard questions about unbelief? You see, you're standing someplace. Even when you doubt, you can't doubt without standing someplace. And a practical secularist says, this life is all there is. Okay, says the writer, let's ask a few questions about that position. And the first one is, how do you deal with justice, the injustice of life? Now, when he does this, some of you today, this is the main spiritual issue you've got. This is the main problem. This is the main problem with God, with faith, with everything. Because you have seen or you've experienced this kind of suffering. For some of the rest of you, it's not maybe the main problem. That's what we're going to do some other weeks. But it's still very important. How do you deal with injustice? Now, here's what this guy does. And I'm going to only be able to outline three things he does. First of all, he refuses to let you avoid the question of injustice. And then secondly, he gives us two answers, clues to two answers. First of all, he refuses to let us avoid the question. He puts the question in front of us. He refuses to let us tune it out. And then second. And then he gives us the clues for two answers. Two answers for how to deal with injustice. Okay, first of all, let me show you. Look how he makes sure you do not avoid the question. This is very easy to tune out in verse 11 and 12. First of all, he's talking about the random general injustice in life. And he says what? He says the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor does Food come to the wise, nor wealth to the brilliant or favorite of the learned. But time and chance happens to all. And moreover, as fish are caught in a cruel net, birds are taken in a snare. Men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them. One writer I was reading preparing for this one night just took down the first couple sentences of every news story on this TV news. And here's what he got. There was trouble in Middle east again tonight. Today three terrorists commandeered a school bus and set off explosives that killed both themselves and all the children. A major storm hit Bangladesh. Thousands were drowned, tens of Thousands are homeless. Four car pileup on Route 261 resulted in five deaths. In the Bronx, a five year old girl in her mother's lap was killed by a stray bullet. And here is one that's a little more of a research thing. Thousands of two thirds world children died daily from largely preventable diseases out of complacency and selfishness. Invincible ignorance that people with the power to treat them simply fail to do so. Now what is that saying? It's what the Ecclesiastes writer is trying to say. Doesn't matter who you are, where you are. It doesn't matter whether you're good or bad. Horrible things happen constantly. Random, without, just. It's crazy. Can happen to anybody. Suddenly beautiful little children blown up, suddenly this, suddenly that. It's like. And as he says, it can happen to anybody. It can happen anytime. You never know. You can't avoid it. And you never know when. It's the random misery and cruelty of the world. The injustice of life. That's the first thing he brings up. He says, look at that. The race is not to the swift, you see. You may be swift but you may lose. You may be brilliant, but you may may not succeed. Because frankly, life is a crapshoot. You think you're under control. If you think you're under control. You think if I just do this and do this and this, things are going to go well for me. You're very, very young. I mean it's interesting. I do that every two months. I say that somehow and everybody laughs because you are young. Or maybe it's only the old people laughing. I better watch. Careful next time. You are not in control. One of the ways that young people tune out the injustice of life is they say it's those people. It's not going to happen to me. I'm going to watch my back, I'm going to be very careful. I'm going to discipline myself. I'M not going to ride on school buses in the Middle East. I'm going to have all sorts of things. But he won't stop there. He goes on. Now, when he goes on, I want you to know right away some of you are going to start to defend yourself against what he says here. Because you're going to say, he's just being gloomy. I'll get back to that. He's going to say, oh, yeah, there's people like this. He's just. But here's what he does. He goes on and he does. He goes on past the random general injustice that happens to so many people, and he moves to the absolute ultimate injustice that happens to everybody. And back in verse three and four, as it is with a good man, so with a sinner, as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them. This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun. Now look down at verse five. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. They have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. Their love and their hate, their jealousy have long since vanished. Never will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun. Here's what he's saying. He is not just saying here that good people have it bad and bad people have it good. That's injustice. And that often happens, that sort of random thing. He's saying something else, something deeper. He says, no matter what you do in life, whether you live a life of look, a life of love, verse six, or hate, whether you are the terrorist or the child, everything you do will vanish. But worse than that, even the memory of what you do, even the effect of what you do will be forgotten at the end of the road. For every human being, if this life is all there is, there is a nothingness that if you're willing to think about it at all, and I'm making you, he says, makes everything you do meaningless. Everything you do. Kathy and I recently watched on video one of the latest John Sayles movie called Men With Guns. Powerful movie. And in the movie it's about a doctor in a Latin American country who has trained a bunch of young doctors and they have gone up into the hinterland, they've gone up into the. Into the parts of the country that are very remote and very poor and. And those doctors were going to give health care to people who desperately needed it. And when he came to understand that virtually every single one of the people that he had trained and set out there had been Killed either by the army or by the guerrillas almost immediately, so that everything he'd done and all that they had put their lives into was gone. He goes, the whole movie is basically about him going into one incredibly dangerous place after another to just find every one of those young people, and he never can find them. And in the very end, he dies. His last words are, a man should have a legacy. And at one point in the movie, he says, I'm not a religious man. I'm not a religious man. I'm a scientist. I'm a doctor. But I want to know that I've done something to make this place better. I've got to know that, or my life is absolutely meaningless. Well, the Ecclesiastes writer says, wake up. What if they didn't die yet? Listen, if you build the pyramids, you'll be remembered for a while, longer than the rest of us. But eventually, if. When you die, you rot. And when the sun dies, everything rots. Cosmic forgottenness lies at the end of every person's life. It doesn't matter what you've done. It doesn't matter who you are. The same destiny. And that makes everything you do pointless. Everything. Now, somebody saying. I know what you're saying. You're saying, oh, I've heard this stuff. I had to take Philosophy 101. I've heard this sort of thing. This person's just being gloomy. I want you to know. You say that even if you think about that and see if you're a practical secularist, you say, of course, if you think about that, you're going to be depressed all the time. But, hey, there's Central park, there's the theater, there's sex. There's incredible restaurants, there's wonderful clothes. And you know what? He's heard this from you. And in verse seven, look, he goes, right on. He's heard this. He's heard it a hundred times. He heard people say, oh, yeah, sure, it's meaningless if you're going to think philosophically, but let's go out there and really be normal people. And he goes on, he says, okay, sure, fine. So verse seven, go eat your food with gladness. Now, I don't want to get into my next two sermons here. Go eat your food with gladness. Drink your wine with a joyful heart. Be clothed with white. You know, good food, parties, look great, feel marvelous. Okay, See? Enjoy life with your wife. Have sex. All the days of this meaningless life. He says, listen, it's meaningless anyway. It's going to keep breaking through. It doesn't matter. You see, he's really saying, don't you dare tune this out. All the great ones are like this Buddha, Siddhartha before his became Buddha, before he became the old story that he was raised in a palace and he hadn't really seen suffering. When he finally went out, the first day he saw an old man, and the second day he saw a sick man. And the third day he saw a dead man. And he realized this was coming to everybody. And the way the legend goes, at one point he turns to his charioteer, he turns to his servant and he says, the hearts of men must be hard to be self composed before such a situation. He starts to cry out, he says, old age. Well, the charioteer says, well, of course old age. I mean, everybody knows you lose all your beauty eventually. You lose all your memory, you lose all your sensation, you lose even your. He says, everybody knows this. But see, Buddha says, you know this and you're not crying out, you're not wrestling with it. You know, doesn't this make everything meaningless? We have to do something. We have to come to grips with it. See, the great ones always say that. The great ones refuse to tune it out. What do you do with the evening news? I know what I tend to do. Another bomb. You know it's on. Another bomb. Hmm. A flood. Hmm. Okay, kids, dinner's on the table. Turn off the news, you tune it out. Ecclesiastes, writer says, don't you dare. You want to lose what little humanity you have left now? He refuses to have you let you out from under the question. The question of injustice is injustice in this world. And especially the ultimate injustice of radical and cosmic nothingness and forgottenness makes every single thing meaningless, everything pointless, everything vanity. But in this text we also have, and we're going to be looking at this more in the next three weeks. In this text, we also have the clues to the two biblical answers to this question of injustice. Now what I mean by that is the Bible says, don't tune out injustice, but don't go into despair. There's a third way. Don't tune out injustice, but don't go into despair. There's a third way.
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Podcast Host
You may know the story of the prodigal son, but it's not just about a wayward younger brother. In fact, Jesus tells this story to speak both to those who run from God and to those who try to earn his love by being good. In his book, the Prodigal God, Tim Keller shows how this well known story reveals the heart of the gospel a message of hope for both the rebellious younger brother and the judgmental older brother, and an invitation for all to experience God's prodigal extravagant grace. Whether you're a Christian or you're still exploring faith, the prodigal God will help you see your relationship with Christ in a whole new way. The prodigal God is our thank you for your gift this month to help Gospel and Life share the hope and joy of Christ's gracious and relentless love with people all over the world. Request your copy today@gospelandlife.com give. That's gospelandlife.com give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the rest of today's teaching.
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Tim Keller
What is that Third Way? Over the years, it seems like increasingly I found that the Bible's answer boils down to two. And I'm going to call them a cool answer and a hot answer. One is an answer for the mind. That's the cool one. And one is an answer for the heart. That's the hot one. All by themselves they don't work, but together they're remarkable. And the Ecclesiastes writer, because he's Ecclesiastes, because he's different than any other book in the Bible, does not tell you but clue you. He does not see the Ecclesiastes is not a lecture. It's a seminar. It's almost a bull session. He goads you. He role plays, he pushes you with questions. He gives you clues. And here are the clues to both the cool and the hot answer. I will be brief, but here's what I wanted to tell you, even though I'm going to be brief. When we go through the cool answer right now, I want you to be patient. If you are not suffering, the cool answer is very interesting. But if you're suffering, the cool answer is very inadequate. Okay, but you have to have them both. What's the cool answer? All right, the cool or the answer? Actually, it's not called cool, called the answer for the mind. He gets at that in verses 3 and 4. In verse 4, he says something terrible about dogs. Now, my wife is a dog lover, and I promised her that I would not, I would put this into context. But in verse four, he says it's better to be a live dog than a dead lion. Now, when you think of dogs, you think of beagles and collies. But when the ancient people thought of dogs, they did not. Because to ancient people, dogs were were the lowest form of animal. Dogs were the scavengers. Dogs were wild, dogs lived on garbage, and dogs Ate cadavers. I mean, when Jezebel, the great Queen, the evil queen, Jezebel, is thrown into the street back in the Old Testament, what happens? The dogs come and eat her, you see, because, well, because, of course, she deserves the dogs, they say, because she's so evil. And the dogs deserve her, you see, because they're so low. But the lion, ah, to the ancients, the lion was the greatest noble beast, just as we see him now. But now listen, what is he saying in verse four? Astounding. In fact, if it wasn't linked with verse five, we would have to back away. What he says in verse four is fairly simple. He says there, it's better to be a liar, a murderer, a scavenger and save your skin than be a noble person who dies. It's not worth it to live for anything anymore. What he's really. And you say, what is he saying? Yes. He's saying something so shocking and so vicious, he says, it no longer matters. It's better to save your skin, be a liar and a murderer and a thief, than it is to be a noble person and die for it. And if you say, is he saying that? It's in verse five, the word for, you see, the word for this is the reason. And go down in there. And he says, because love or hate, in the end they vanish. And what he's saying is something very, very, very up to date. And the philosophers are saying it now. And what is it? What they are saying is this. If this life is all there is, if when you die, you rot, if we are just. We just accidentally have evolved out of the collocation of accidental forces, then there is no such thing as a right and wrong. There can't be. All moral distinctions are pointless. Why? Well, Alasdair MacIntyre, great philosopher, has done this very, very well in a couple of his books. He says, here's the reason why. He says, there's no such thing as abstract goodness. Goodness is always relative to purpose. What if somebody gave you a watch and you'd never seen a watch before in your Life? This is MacIntyre's illustration. What if somebody gave you a watch and you'd never seen this watch, a watch before, and somebody says, is it good? You'd say, I don't know. What is it for? There's no such thing as abstract goodness. Is it? Is the watch for hammering a nail? It's bad? Is the watch for. You know. You know, what is the watch for? Until you know what something is for, you don't know Whether it's good or bad, things are only good or bad in relation to the purpose. What makes a good human being. MacIntyre says, if we are accidents, if there's no purpose, then it's ridiculous to say it's bad to hurt people. You're just here to survive. The strong eat the weak. You're just here to survive. Better to be a live dog. Better to trample on people. I mean, how dare you say. Who are you to say. There's no warrant to say that anything is good or bad. If this life is all there is, there is no good or bad. But now, here's the other part of this weird argument. In verse three, in spite of the fact that he says vanity, meaningless. It's all meaningless. It's all meaningless. Up in verse three, he says, but men are evil, and this is the problem. Derek Kidner, one of my favorite commentators on this verse. Derek Kidner says something extremely interesting. He says, what we may not notice about verse three at first is that this sense of outrage is just as much a fact about us as is our mortality. The fascination of this book of Ecclesiastes throughout its length arises largely from the collisions of observation and equally obstinate and opposed intuitions. So it pushes us toward a synthesis that is largely beyond its own pages. Here's what he means. If you don't believe. If you believe this life is all there is, then there's no such thing as injustice, right? And yet, deep inside, you know there is. On the one hand, he says, vanity, meaningless, pointless. But then he also says, and yet it still is evil. And there is an incredible contradiction in the heart of being a secular person. At the heart of unbelief, it says this. I don't believe really in a God because of the injustice. But if there is no God, there's no basis for being outraged. I'm going to put it to you two ways. It'll be on tape, so you can always listen to it again. If there's a God, evil is a problem. It's a big problem. He's got reasons for why he's allowing it, and we don't know what they are. But that's not. That really hurts. It still doesn't really make it better. If there's a God, evil is a problem. But if evil is a problem for you, there must be a God. Do you see that? If evil is a problem, if you are outraged and yet your own worldview gives you no basis for the outrage, what it means is your worldview is wrong. If you know there's an injustice, even though if there is no God, there shouldn't be an injustice, then you know there's a God. Put it another way, it's a problem for belief. Evil is a problem for belief, but it's a bigger problem for unbelief. It's a problem if you believe in God, but it's a bigger problem if you don't believe in God. Because if you don't believe in God, then the original reason for disbelieving in God is gone. You can't even define injustice. There's no basis for it. That's the cool argument. It's a very strong argument. It's being made by Christian philosophers all the time. And that is evil is a problem for belief, but it's a bigger problem for unbelief. And that's your only two alternatives. So why not believe? You have no basis for outrage, no basis for working against injustice. Unless there is a just judge. We don't know why he's not acting. But if you get rid of him out of your mental furniture, you got a bigger problem than if you keep him. Now, didn't I warn you, if you're not suffering, if you're kind of intellectual type, and there's lots of you out there like that. I know that's intriguing, that's interesting. You'd never thought of that. That's helpful, maybe even. But if you're suffering right now, it's just cold. It's cold comfort. There's a place in C.S. lewis's book a Grief Observe, where he says, the thing I'm afraid of. And when his wife died, Joy Davidman Gresham, who went to Hunter College, by the way, when his wife died, he says, the thing I'm not so much afraid of is that there is no God. I am afraid of who he might be. I'm afraid of meeting a God that I don't. Like Christianity, it doesn't just give you one. One answer. The one answer is there. We just gave it to you. Lots of religions have it. There is a God. If there is no God, you have a bigger problem with evil than if you don't have a God. But Christianity gives you another one. It's the hot answer. It's the personal answer. It's the answer for the heart. And what is it? Well, the clues for it are in this last little vignette. What a weird story. When he says, I saw one more thing and it impressed me. In Hebrew. That's too weak a word. The word impressed Means it amazed me, it confounded me, it mystified me. I don't know what it means, and here's why. He saw a kind of wisdom in this little story. This little thing he saw. He saw a kind of wisdom beyond any wisdom he knew. There was once a small city with only a few people in it. And a powerful king came against it, surrounded it, and built huge seed works against it. And now there lived in that city a man, poor but wise. He saved the city by his wisdom, but nobody remembered that poor man. But the poor man's wisdom was despised. Now, there's three things about this wisdom he'd never seen before. First of all, it was a saving wisdom. Look at a little city, few people versus a great king. Huge seed works. It was absolutely overwhelming. The city was absolutely doomed. There was no way out. We don't know exactly how he did it, but there was a wisdom that was so incredibly powerful that it was able to save that city. That's incredible. But that's not all more than that. Secondly, it wasn't just a saving wisdom. It was a serving wisdom. One of the things that is so weird and so unusual about this, at least in the Old Testament, is the wise man is poor. Now you know Ecclesiastes is a wise man. And if you read the whole book, you'll see he's a king. You'll see that he's rich. Because frankly, if you're really wise, if you're really smart, of course you're going to get up in the world. Of course you're going to make some money. Of course you're going to get ahead. How could a wise man be poor? But suddenly he's confronted with the fact that this wisest of men, this person with almost a supernaturally saving wisdom, has not used his wisdom to dominate or get up, but to be a servant. He's used it in a humble way. And then lastly, the most astounding thing of all, anybody who has that kind of power and wisdom and that kind of form of serving, servanthood and wisdom, he was not just forgotten. Look, he says nobody remembered him, but it says he was despised. It was a vicious. It was a deliberate forgetting. The people turned on him. They hated him. Now, my friend Sinclair Ferguson wrote a book on Ecclesiastes some years ago. He called it Pundit's Folly because he uses the term pundit for the writer of Ecclesiastes. And this is what he says. He says God has placed testimonies to his presence throughout our lives. There is no safe Haven. There's no place we can escape his reality. And the words of Ecclesiastes 9, 13, 16 read almost like a prophecy whose name most naturally comes to mind when we hear of a poor man full of wisdom, who became a savior but whose life and teaching were rejected. The man the pundit saw was just a reflection of a wisdom beyond philosophical arguments. Wisdom himself, the true poor wise man who would become the savior, as Paul describes him. Christ crucified was a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks, but to those who Christ has called both Jew and Greek Christ the wisdom of God and the power of God. Now here's why. This is the hot answer, and this is a clue. The Ecclesiastes writer sees a kind of wisdom and he's moved by it. And we know why. Because it's just a. It's just an echo, a pattern of the great wisdom. And this is this. We do not just have a God who's simply up in heaven and he says, I've got reasons why I'm not dealing with evil. You're just going to have to accept them. And that's all you've got. That's all you've got. You're in worse shape if you reject me. So there you are. You're stuck with me. Tough. Is that what God says? Not the Christian God. The Christian God has done something unbelievable. Here's the gospel. We've forgotten God. It is he who has made us, and not we ourselves. We've forgotten Him. That means we go our own way. We doff our hats to him. But in general, every day we don't remember him. We forget Him. We act as if we're our own gods. And because we have turned away from the only permanent thing, we have stopped. We've become temporary. Because we've turned away from the only thing that lasts forever. We are going to be forgotten. And we know it. And deep in our hearts we know it. The Ecclesiastes, writer and Buddha and all the great ones are trying to push you to say, look at it. You know, the worst thing in the world is to be forgotten. To have people forget you, to have people forget who you are, to have people forget that you were coming. I mean, even in the micro, that's horrible. But in the macro, it's even worse. And here we're told we deeply inside know that what's coming is cosmic forgottenness, cosmic nothingness. And we can't handle it. But God has done something about it. He sent his son into the world and on the Cross. He did not give us a philosophical argument when he was on the cross, which is the wisdom of God. When he was on the cross, he did not say, let me explain to you why unbelief has more of a problem with suffering than belief. No, what he said is, my God, my God, why have you forgotten me? What was happening on the cross was God was pouring out the cosmic forgottenness. He was turning his back on his son. He was giving to him what we deserve and what we know is coming and what is making our lives meaningless. Even though it's only half conscious, even though it's unconscious. He got forsaken by his friends, forsaken by his enemies, but even forsaken by the Father, he got the cosmic forgottenness that the Ecclesiastes writer says is coming to everybody. You know it's coming to everybody, and it makes your life meaningless. But it went into the heart of Jesus. That poor man was forgotten so that you will not be. Why do you think God can say in Isaiah 49, can a woman forget the baby that nurses at her breast? Yea, she may forget, but I will not forget you. Behold, you are engraved on the palm of my hands. How can he say he'll never forget you? He'll never, ever, ever forget you, that you will be remembered and loved forever and ever. How can you walk out of the world knowing that that cosmic forgottenness is not yours anymore? And therefore you can walk out in the world and truly, finally enjoy what's there? Because your forgottenness was put on Jesus. And therefore the Christian can sing. And though I am despised forgot, yet God, my God, forgets me not. And he is safe and must succeed. For who Christ promises to plead. If you are not a believer today, but you're a searcher, I beg you. You've got a hot and a cold answer. You not only have to think it out, but you have to get to know this one, this person, a God who came into suffering and received the suffering and injustice of this world in a more deep way than anybody else has ever experienced it. If you're a Christian, let me tell you what your problem is today. You know what your problem is? I'll tell you what it is. You've forgotten the poor man. Some of you are here today and you're upset. You know what you've forgotten? The one who died for you, though you forgot him. Bless the Lord, O my soul, says the psalmist. And all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not his benefits. The psalmist gets up every day and says, my big problem is I've forgotten what he's done for me. I've forgotten the forgottenness that he took upon me. If you're here today, for example, and you feel rejected by somebody and you're in despair, you've forgotten the fact that the only person whose opinion counts, the only one who's permanent, the only one whose love will last forever, loves you now because your forgottenness was thrown on Jesus. If you're a Christian today, your whole problem is, your main problem is you've forgotten the poor man, you've despised him. You need to fill your heart again with the knowledge of what he did for you. Don't you see this? Remember the poor man and you'll live forever. Remember the poor man and you'll be loved forever. Let's pray. We thank you, Lord God, that because of who you made your son, the Son of God, who loved you forever and knew you forever, and then what you did to him, you poured out our forgottenness on him. Because of that, we can know that you will never forget us. Lord. When it comes down to it, philosophy can bring us to the brink, can even give us some intellectual answers. But it's only a knowledge of your Son that can help us to move out into the world and deal with the suffering in a way that is neither tuning it out nor falling into despair. Ah, we thank youk, that only at the cross do we get to the place, do we get the resources for dealing with the injustice of life. We pray, Lord, that those of us who are experiencing injustice now would know what your son experienced for us, that we can forgive and we can be strong. And I pray for those here who don't know who he is yet, that through the despair that they may be feeling, which is really a gift of your Holy Spirit, they may come to see who he is and what he's done for them. I pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
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Podcast Host
Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it helped you apply the Gospel to your life and share it with others. For more helpful resources from Tim Keller, visit gospelandlife.com There you can subscribe to the Gospel and Life Quarterly Journal. When you do, you will also receive free articles, sermons, devotionals and other great gospel centered resources. Again, it's all@gospelandlife.com you can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X. Today's sermon was recorded in 1998. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2016. 17 While Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.