Podcast Host (20:07)

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.

Tim Keller (21:07)

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.

Podcast Host (40:18)

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.