Searching for Meaning?

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome. It's good to have you here as we start a new series today called Catching Smoke. Have you ever tried to do that? Yes, you have. When was this? When you were a kid? Yeah, you know, I've been in a lot of smoke, by the way. You know, a lot of campfires and a lot of grill fires. Smoked a lot, but you can't really catch it. It kind of goes right through your fingers, and that's kind of the metaphor that's being used here. We're starting a new series today called Catching Smoke. We're going to be looking at the book in the Old Testament called Ecclesiastes. That's kind of the Latin-ish version of the word. The Hebrew word is koheleth, which is kind of an interesting word, right? Hebrew goes right to left, by the way, so that's the kof at the beginning, then the heith, and then the lamed, and the tau. Okay, koheleth, which is a question of what that means, right? What is koheleth? And it's the preacher, or it can mean the teacher, or it can mean the philosopher, or maybe the researcher, actually. If you've ever done research, it's somebody who's looking into things and trying to figure it out and trying to figure out what's going on. So the whole book is about this guy, which we'll get into more, trying to figure it all out. Now, to follow along with all this, and to even get that little Hebrew name there, so that you can impress your friends, I'm sure you'll bring up Ecclesiastes in some conversation this week, right? Why this title? Well, it's really, I think, the metaphor that's behind the translations that we try to figure out of the main theme of this book, which is not really uplifting, okay? I don't know if you've ever read Ecclesiastes. But it's just one long, I think, thought experiment. It's one case study after case study. And the main point comes out in Ecclesiastes 1, verse 2. Here, this is in the New International Version. It is meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless. Now, the New American Standard Bible translates this word that we're looking at today. Futility of futilities, says the preacher. Futility of futilities. All is futility. King James may be the one that you've heard before. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity. But I have a feeling the best translation, actually, a paraphrase of all things, the message. So Eugene Peterson wrote the message, and he says this, smoke, nothing but smoke. That's what the quester says. There's nothing to anything. It's just all smoke. And that's what gets to that Hebrew word, hevel. Okay? Can you say hevel? Hevel. That's the word. And it means vapor, breath, smoke, illusion, kind of the mirage. It's something you can't grasp. It's what's really going on. It's actually used 38 times in 12 chapters in this book. Isn't that amazing? You'd think that's maybe a main theme. It's kind of the human experience that the preacher, the quester, the researcher, the philosopher, the teacher, whatever you want to call him. It's how fleeting and fickle and how impermanent that nothing lasts. Nothing is fully satisfying. Nothing is complete. It just keeps happening again and again, and it's never quite what we need. And you might be going, like, why in the world? At the start of the academic year, and at this stage in our culture and time, why, John, would you ever think that Ecclesiastes is a great sermon series? We're already depressed. We don't need more depressing words. I would say, here's the reality. I think we need to go all the way down. We need to go to the whole bottom of things. We need to take it to the extremes as this guy does in our text. We need to say, okay, let's not just dabble in it. Let's not just go, hmm, maybe. Let's not avoid it. But rather go all the way down and see the logical outcome to the extreme of trying to pursue a life in one direction or another. And the case study after case study, this Koheleth will look at pleasure. Let's go all the way in with wealth, with trying to become famous and having something last and significant, with building buildings to everything else you can think of, learning, rationality, everything. And what does he find? Well, he finds Hevel, emptiness. What's interesting is the book actually has a prologue, verse one, which we haven't read yet, and an epilogue in chapter 12. And in between, the preacher, who is named also the king of Jerusalem, so we believe Solomon, he's basically giving his best. And so the beginning of the whole book says, look, here's the best you can get from philosophy. Here's the best you can get from research. This is the best you can do in terms of human wisdom and searching for meaning in life. And he's the best of the best, and it's not enough. And at the end of chapter 12, we also have this epilogue, chapter 12, verses 9 to 13. It says, besides being wise...