Absolute Futility (Ecclesiastes 1:1-11) 05/17/26

Introduction

Good morning everyone! I wanted to quickly thank everyone who made it out to N2N yesterday. It was such a great day to get out and serve our neighbors, and I was so encouraged to see a lot of OGC folk there. Especially the kids, thanks for giving up a Saturday morning! I even got to see Elliot Tinley absolutely destroy a playhouse with a sledgehammer. So, that was the highlight of my week.

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I am really excited to be starting this new series in the book of Ecclesiastes today. There are a few reasons why I am absolutely pumped about this sermon series. First, Ecclesiastes is one of those books that is either someone’s favorite book of the Bible or the book of the Bible they are most confused by. Regardless of how long we have been doing yearly Bible reading plans, we can hit Ecclesiastes and can scratching our heads. And we are hoping that this sermon series helps us all look at the book with fresh eyes and hear God’s voice with open ears. This book is part of God’s Word for God’s people, so we want to better see how it speaks to us.

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The other reason I am excited about this series is because I think that Ecclesiastes has so much to say about the context we are in right now. Don’t get me wrong, God speaks through all of the Bible to His people no matter what context they are in. However, there is something specific about Ecclesiastes that can give us a look into the soul of our culture, our discontentment, and our purpose (or feeling of purposelessness). 

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What are we here for? I don’t mean in this building, I mean on this planet. Have you ever thought how strange it is to be human? Out of the over 2 million species on Earth, we are the only one that questions what we are here for. Cardinals don’t worry about that. To my knowledge, sloths aren’t having problems with their meaning in life. But, we do. We constantly wonder “What is the meaning of all this?” “What is a good life?” “How do I truly be happy?”

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Picture it like this: we all are lost in the woods. We don’t know up from down. We don’t know which way will lead us out of these woods. We all want the same goal: to get out, to find meaning. We can see different paths sprawling out, but we don’t know where they are going to lead. We need a guide, someone to show us which path to take and the dangers that are in these woods. In Ecclesiastes, we meet our guide. His name is “the Teacher.” 

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“The Teacher” went down the paths of wisdom, pleasure, money, work, and power. And now, he is telling us what he found down those paths. Did they lead him out of the woods? Did he find meaning in them? Did they finally bring him lasting happiness? Down each path he finds the same thing - nothing. There’s no meaning to be found in themselves. He calls them all “hevel” - empty, hollow, a vapor. And like a good guide, the Teacher wants to lead us down these paths to warn us of the danger and pitfalls they have. So, over the next six weeks, we will look at what the Teacher has to say about Money, Work, Knowledge, Pleasure, and Death.

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Ecclesiastes paints a pretty unflattering picture of what life looks like. The Teacher talks about things we have all seen or experienced from discontentment to work frustrations to abuses of power to death. At first blush, it can sound like a defeatist book. But, there is hope. The book of Ecclesiastes is kind of like a geode. Have y’all ever seen a geode? From the outside they look like any other rock, but once you chisel it open? It looks like you are holding your own little mutli-colored cave of glittering gems. Once the rock is open, it completely reshapes and reframes what you are holding.

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So, what is the gem of Ecclesiastes? If we are going to look at these various paths that the Teacher wants to lead us down, what do we need to keep in mind? What are the tools we need for the journey? First, we need to understand what “hevel” - futility - means. Second, we need to see how futility entered our world. And lastly, we have to reckon with the Preacher’s question, “Is anything new under the sun?”

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What is “Hevel?”

One of the tricky things about sitting down and reading Ecclesiastes is just what the heck does this word mean? The book starts and ends with an emphatic declaration about the word and then the word appears about 30x in the book. 

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“Hevel” is used throughout the Old Testament to talk about things that are worthless, vain, or empty. Things like idols - that appear to have power but are hollow. But, the word primarily means one thing: vapor, mist, breath - stuff you can only see or grasp for a moment before they are gone. Worthless things pass away quicker than hot breath on a cold morning. Vain things contain no real force or power. And think of how ominous that makes the Teacher’s words, “Vapor of vapors, says the Preacher. Vapor of vapors. Everything is vapor.” Everything can only be grasped for a moment. Everything is here for a second and then vanishes. 

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I am preferential to how the CSB translates 1:2, “‘Absolute futility,’ says the Teacher. ‘Absolute futility. Everything is futile.’” I think that “futility” helps capture that sense of vapor-ness. Bobby Jamieson in his excellent book on Ecclesiastes, Everything is Never Enough (which is currently on our resource shelf), breaks hevel into two primary categories. Uncontrollable and absurd. Both of which fit under futility.

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Life is uncontrollable. Deep down, we all know that is true, but we are constantly trying to drown out that thought during our day. Life isn’t an equation that when just get the right values for the right variables everything will work out. We know that, but in a world of self-help gurus, productivity life hacks, and modern medicine - we have a harder time admitting our lack of control than those that came before us. And, as our passage pointed out, life isn’t just uncontrollable for you or me as individuals but for all of us collectively. “A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever… 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,” (Ecc. 1:4, 9). 

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Life is absurd. And by absurd, I don’t mean that life is just a big joke. Absurd is when there’s an inexplicable gap between what we work for and what we get. Sometimes we put in tons of time, energy, and skill into a project and it just doesn’t turn out. Or, sometimes we put no effort into something and it still works out. It’s the same feeling you get when you are passed over at work and your lazy coworker gets all the credit. The Teacher summarizes it as “In my vain life I have seen everything. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man sho prolongs his life with evildoing,” (Ecc. 7:15). That’s “absurd.”

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And if we start thinking in terms of uncontrollable, absurd, and vapor, it’s like an earworm that we can’t get out of our head. We can see how much of our day is taken up by futility. I am sure that you might have experienced futility this morning. Maybe you woke up early wanting to get to church early. You’ve wanted to be able to enjoy coffee with friends, be in the service for call to worship, and enjoy that first worship song - but you hit traffic. Or maybe you’ve desperately wanted fellowship and connection at church. You’ve gone outside your comfort zone to meet new people, you’ve opened up about hopes and dreams - but friendships just fizzle out. Maybe you have been struggling through the week to make it here today. Frustrations, tensions, angst, and pain have filled your week and you just need worship with your brothers and sisters. But, you can’t seem to focus because of the problems of the week. We are so used to the uncontrollable, the absurd, and the mist of life that we have almost become numb to it. We need to be shocked out of it to realize it.

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Where Futility Came From

Futility is ingrained around us. The absurd and the uncontrollability of our lives has become so common that it is hard to focus on it. But, even though it is so common, deep down we all agree this isn’t how things should be. Futility might feel normal, but it doesn’t feel natural. So, where did it come from?

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The Teacher gives us a few breadcrumbs to follow back to the source of our futility. Further along in the book, the Teacher tells us the utter disconnect between how God made us and what we experience. “See, this alone I found, God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes,” (Ecc. 7:29). The Teacher is drawing our attention all the way back to Genesis 3 to show us where futility comes from. The sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is the crack that allowed futility into our lives. And Paul picks up on this thread in the New Testament when he says that all of creation was subjected to futility because of Adam.  

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And if we think back to Genesis 3, we see the strands that the Teacher will pick up on throughout Ecclesiastes. Because the Curse that God lays out in Genesis 3:16-19 is absolutely saturated with futility. Eve is told that she would experience pain in childbirth and it doesn’t take us long into Genesis to see that “pain in childbirth” extends to the inability to have children, the loss of children, and children leaving. She’s also told that she would experience relational friction with her husband. Adam is told that the joyous work he was created to take part in would now be a source of frustration. The ground would actively work against him, thorns and thistles would invade his work, and he would have to struggle and sweat just to eat bread.

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But, both of those pale in comparison to the ultimate futility in Genesis 3. Because no matter how many kids you have, no matter how much work you do, and no matter how much bread you get your hands on, none of those will have the final word. No matter the good you did, the positions you held, or the relationships you had, death had the final say. And the Teacher could not agree more. “It is the same for all” he says, “since the same event happens to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As the good one is, so is the sinner…” (Ecc. 9:2). It doesn’t matter who you were in life if death gets to take it all.

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From the little futilities that we encounter every day to the ultimate futility of death, something in us cries out that this isn’t right. If you are here today and you aren’t a Christian or even religious, I would be willing to bet that you have felt this disconnect - this futility. Our hearts ache for Eden, so we look for it everywhere. We, like the Teacher, have looked for Eden down the paths of pleasure, wisdom, power, wealth, work, or relationships. We hope that this next time things will be different. We think that the next pursuit will give us meaning. And by doing that, we end up crushing ourselves and whatever we put our hope in. And we end up right back where we started. We are like the sun or the wind or the streams that the Teacher talks about, going around and around.

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And that can lead us to despair and inner turmoil, because we realize that futility isn’t just a problem outside of us but straight through us. If none of the paths that life has for us will give us meaning, what does that mean for us? If none of them were enough, will we be enough? What if any work we do on ourselves is futile? What if we aren’t enough? 

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Very early on in Ecclesiastes, the Teacher makes quite the declaration. “So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is [futile] and a striving after wind,” (Ecc. 2:17). Left with emptiness and no meaning, we can turn on life. We can feel stuck on paths that don’t lead anywhere. And we can start to hate the very things we were just trying to find meaning in. So, what’s the answer? Futility has been around a lot longer than you or I and it feels like we cannot do anything about it. Does Ecclesiastes offer any hope?

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Anything New Under the Sun?

Maybe the solution to all of this is at the end of the book. Maybe the Teacher is saving the answer until the end. Let’s look at the last thing that the Teacher says in Ecclesiastes, “‘Absolute futility,’ says the Teacher. ‘Everything is futile,” (Ecc. 12:8. CSB). Seriously… that’s… it? Twelve chapters and we end right back where we started? The Teacher’s resounding answer is that all these paths lead the same way. They won’t lead us to ultimate fulfillment, ultimate meaning, or ultimate happiness. They are just vapors.

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What about the narrator, how does the book end? “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil,” (Ecc. 12:14). This verse is the crack in the geode. The book of Ecclesiastes doesn’t leave us to continue wandering the woods aimlessly. This verse is the call to stop looking down different paths and to look up. Help has to come from outside the forest. Lost people can’t lead lost people out of the forest. We need something more than the forest can offer. 

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One phrase that the Teacher loves to use is “under the sun.” He says that phrase 28x to sum up all of life. All the different paths that he wants to lead us down are “under the sun.” All the different avenues of trying to find fulfillment and meaning are “under the sun.” And in our passage today we heard his bold declaration, “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,” (Ecc. 1:9). And the Teacher couldn’t have been more spot on. From the time of the Fall up through when the Teacher wrote that book, there had been nothing new under the sun. 

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But, that’s not true for us. Something new has happened. God was outside the cycle that we created. We started the futility ball rolling, we’ve looked for Eden in all the wrong places, we brought absurdity. God, the one who is in control, is outside all of that. But, what did He do? He entered into the absurdity. Not as an emperor or a general or even an adult, but as a baby. Why would God do something so… absurd?! Catholic philosopher Percy Walker hit the nail on the head when he said, “If you are a big enough fool to climb a tree and like a cat refuse to come down, then someone who loves you has to make as big a fool of himself to rescue you.”

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If calling the incarnation foolish rubs you the wrong way, I totally get it. But, think about it, it’s absurd… and it’s the greatest thing ever. The God of the universe, the one who spoke all things into being, the one who needs nothing, the one who has all power, the one who could restart the universe as easy as we breath… knows what it's like to be tired. God knows what it’s like to take a nap, eat a meal, have friends, lose friends, and have a bad work day. God, in Jesus, knows what it is like to be abandoned, what it is like to bleed, and what it is like to die. 

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Because of His love for us, God was not content to let this spiral of futility continue forever. Death is the final word that futility had over all of us - a stomach that could never be filled. But, think about what Jesus’s death did. Death was the ultimate proof of futility. Death ended our work, our ambitions, our possessions, and our relationships. But, in Jesus’s death the exact opposite is true. His death meant the fulfillment of all His work and His ambition. His death made it so He could have us as His possession and His family. His death and resurrection made it so death would no longer have the final word. Even if He accomplished everything He set out to do but didn’t rise again, death would have the final word. The futility and the cycle would not have been broken. But, when He rose again, He definitively claims that death no longer has the final word for those that trust in Him. We no longer face God’s judgment on the good or evil we have done, but solely on the good that He has done.

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Conclusion

And His incarnation, life, death, and resurrection does not just speak to what happens after we die, but our lives here and now. Because God taking on flesh to be with us and like us shows us that life is not ultimately futile. We have just been putting our hopes in the wrong things. Jesus Himself ate, drank, had wisdom, had relationships, and did work. Those aren’t bad things! They just aren’t ultimate things. the Teacher is not trying to get us to not see the goodness in creation (he affirms that creation is good)! He’s trying to show us that all these good things make lousy ultimate things.  

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“Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil - this is a gift of God,” (Ecc. 5:19). God gives us great and wonderful gifts, but in our sinfulness we ask too much of them. We treat the gift as though it is the Giver. So we ask more and more of it. But, what the Teacher wants (and what we want out of this series) is to see how all these good gifts point back to the loving Giver. 

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Each week as we look at Money, Work, Knowledge, Pleasure, and Death, we will see how these things are meant to draw our eyes out from “under the sun” and up to heaven. We’ll see how nothing here was made to fulfill what our hearts really long for. We’ll see that none of these paths lead back to Eden. But, we will also see that we don’t need Eden. God is offering us something better than Eden. God is the Giver, the ultimate Gifter. But, He is also the ultimate Gift, and that is what He promises to give us time and time again. And He will never turn out to be hevel. 

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