By its very nature, life confronts us with the query of our which means. We ask ourselves, as the well-known piece by Gauguin places it, “The place can we come from? Who’re we? The place are we going?” We urgently must know the solutions to those questions.
Within the Previous Testomony, “the Trainer,” who wrote the e-book of Ecclesiastes, addresses them. The Trainer (historically understood to have been Solomon) was a type of historical existentialist, clawing for the which means of life as he examined each potential supply of achievement. And as he attracts his e-book to an in depth in chapter 12, he solutions every of those questions in flip, inviting us to see what knowledge would have us do.
The place Do We Come From?
Albert Einstein as soon as acknowledged, “Our scenario on this earth appears unusual. Each considered one of us seems right here involuntarily and uninvited for a brief keep, with out understanding the whys and the wherefore.” We’re all right here, he says, unasked for, involuntarily, and cluelessly.
The Trainer provides a contrasting perspective. In accordance with him, we’re not the product of some form of probability evolutionary course of. We’re not a set of molecules held in suspension. We now have truly been created in God’s picture and with an innate understanding of eternity (Eccl. 3:11). Thus he urges us, “Bear in mind … your Creator” (12:1).
The rationale so many in our world look and act as misplaced as they do is as a result of in a religious sense, they actually are misplaced. They don’t have any notion of the artistic handiwork of God. They have no idea the place they arrive from. They’ve misplaced the image on the entrance of the jigsaw field, and so they can’t start to place the puzzle of their lives collectively.
When the apostle Paul preached in Athens to the nice thinkers of the day, he addressed individuals in an identical scenario. The answer he supplied was a data of God: “The God who made the world and every part in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made by man” (Acts 17:24). As he defined the reality in regards to the creating and sovereign God who’s a Father to all mankind, he set ahead an understanding of the world that explains the whys and the wherefores to those that, for all their worldly knowledge, couldn’t present satisfying solutions to the final word questions.
The place, then, can we come from? The Bible’s reply is as clear as it’s comforting: We now have our origin in a Creator who made us with a function.
Who Are We?
Figuring out the place we come from will assist us to know who we’re.
All through Ecclesiastes, the Trainer takes his time considering the ephemeral nature of life. Our time on this earth is transient and frail, he reminds us. The chance to know the place we come from and so dwell each correctly and vigorously quickly passes, and we’re weighed down with the burdens of outdated age. Ecclesiastes 12:2–7 particularly presents a montage of illnesses, humorously described in metaphors, from the dimming of imaginative and prescient in verse 1 to the disintegration of the entire physique in verse 7.
The rationale so many in our world look and act as misplaced as they do is as a result of in a religious sense, they are surely misplaced.
Einstein was proper about one factor a minimum of: Our keep is brief. We’re mortal, impermanent, and the day will come once we will “face the ultimate curtain.” To the youth, the aisles of the pharmacy are a thriller. As he takes his gentle drink from the sting of the shop, he wonders what goes on deep within the pharmaceutical part. He doesn’t suspect how shortly the day will daybreak when he wants most of the anodynes and antidotes on these cabinets simply to get by means of the day. He thinks himself everlasting. Maybe he doesn’t know the reality about his Creator—or the reality about himself.
And so the Trainer urges us, “Bear in mind … your Creator within the days of your youth, earlier than the evil days come and the years draw close to of which you’ll say, ‘I’ve no pleasure in them’” (v. 1). We ought to not delay looking for this knowledge, as a result of the day will come when it may well not do us any good.
The place Are We Going?
Lastly, understanding the place we come from and who we’re will assist us perceive the place we’re going—specifically, towards eternity.
The Trainer doesn’t draw back from acknowledging the fact of loss of life. There will probably be a day, he warns, while you reverse your automobile out of your storage, and you’ll by no means drive it again in once more. There will probably be a day while you put your key within the lock for the final time. There will probably be a time while you kiss your family members goodbye, and you’ll by no means kiss them once more.
The Trainer had stated in 7:2,
It’s higher to go to the home of mourning
than to go to the home of feasting,
for that is the top of all mankind,
and the residing will lay it to coronary heart.
The worldly-wise might acknowledge loss of life and conclude, “Life is brief, so dwell it up!” Such a perspective forgets the place we come from and doesn’t perceive the place we’re going. Demise shouldn’t be the top, for “God will deliver each deed into judgment” (v. 14). God will look on our lives, and if He sees that we’ve got spurned the aim for which He made us, He’ll maintain us accountable. Jesus Himself warned, “Don’t worry those that kill the physique, and after that don’t have anything extra that they will do. However I’ll warn you whom to worry: worry him who, after he has killed, has authority to forged into hell” (Luke 12:4–5).
Made for One other World
The story of Ecclesiastes is the story of a person who examined each want and located that life got here up brief. So it concludes with the admonition to recollect the place we got here from, perceive who we’re, and anticipate the place we’re going. It concurs with the remark by C. S. Lewis: “If I discover in myself a want which no expertise on this world can fulfill, essentially the most possible rationalization is that I used to be made for one more world”—that’s, made initially not for the pleasures and experiences of this life however for God.
In Christ, God has offered a technique to restore us to His function once more.
As we come to know the place we come from, who we’re, and the place we’re going, it’s pure for fears to rise in our hearts. But there may be a solution to those fears, as a result of the God who made us so needs us to dwell based on His function that He despatched His Son to die for us and restore us to that function. To be human is to know sin and loss of life—to be beneath God’s judgment for rejecting His function and to anticipate a ultimate judgment when the chance for repentance may have handed us by. However in Christ, God has offered a technique to restore us to His function once more : “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, in order that in him we would develop into the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).
Due to God’s grace, we might flip to Christ in religion, entrusting ourselves to Him because the one who can forgive us and assist us. Jesus Christ is the very picture of the Creator, revealing to us the place we’ve got come from. He’s the template of human function, exhibiting us what we are supposed to be. And in His loss of life and resurrection, He provides us the reward of everlasting life, giving us confidence about the place we’re going when this mortal life ends. As we set our hope in Him, we discover the solutions to life’s large questions.
This text was tailored from the sermon “Preaching the Gospel from Ecclesiastes” by Alistair Begg.
