Chasing the Wind 4

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Chasing the Wind, Episode four. A man who knows everything meet Cohllet. All right, here's the central idea of this session. Koel. It's problem isn't that he isn't smart enough. His problem maybe that he thinks being smart enough is enough. He's not unlikable. He's likable, and that's important. He's funny, brilliant, observant and occasionally profound and frequently right. He's also utterly exhausting and no discernment. Well, we all know this person Q. Whatever subject comes up, they've done the research. They read the books, they read the instructions. Nutrition, Yeah, they got that, parenting, Yeah, they know what's going on. Politics. Oh man, they've definitely done the research in the politics. I'll tell you exactly what's going on. Marriage yep, Research, money, yep. Why your knee hurts? What supplements you should take? What do you think about acupuncture? You give him three minutes, No, five minutes, nah, maybe an hour? Right, And we know those people, And somewhere around twenty five hundred years ago, one of those people apparently got hold of a pen hitter. Cohllet quote, I've applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. Again, by wisdom, he lacks discernment and our interests. Yeah, good on you man, of course you did. And then he tells us quote, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me. Close quote not to mention humility. So it's an extraordinary arrogant right self presentation. Q claims exceptional wisdom and sweeping observa by the way, which is probably true. And he says I've seen everything that happens under the sun clothes quote. Really, Ladies and gentlemen, meet c Welcome to Gospel Podcast and doctor Bill Senyord YouTube channel. I'm the host, Doctor Bill Senyard. We're free wherever you get good podcast, of course on YouTube as well, so please subscribe. As always, one of the fastest ways you can help us grow is by leaving your comments below. Thanks sincerely for that. Also, thanks for making Gospel Podcast one of the top ten percent in the world and top sixty in Colorado. Christian podcast Thank you for listening every week. We hope that it helps to regularly hear about God's love that loves the unlovable and loved, unlovely, unworthy, and unlikely. Point. Don't get used to that statement. That is a stunning, stunning statement that sets Christianity apart from everything. Yeah, all right, I want to get right into it. After this brief word from our sponsors, we'll be right back. Ecclesiastes begins the words of Cohelet, son of David, king in Jerusalem, and then I cohellit was king over Israel in Jerusalem. So we immediately think Solomon. So wisdom, right, wealth, Jerusalem, son of David, great building projects, pleasure, women, gardens. Everything points in his direction. But the book never says my name is Solomon. And that's interesting. Even though many commentators, okay, most believe this has to be Solomon because of those things I mentioned, And that's interesting. It's almost as though somebody walk into a stage wearing an Elvis jumpsuit, sunglasses, sidebirms, carrying a guitar and says, you know, I'm not saying I'm Elvis. I think that's the tone here. Q has been dressed or has dressed himself in Solomonic clothing. Why, well, makes sense if you're you want to conduct the greatest experiment in human wisdom and imaginable. Who better to play than the wisest man who ever lives, because the wisdom and discernment was given to him by God. Now Q tells us what he's going to do. Think a modern documentary host or a YouTube influencer, a TikTok influencer. I'm going to investigate life. Well great, Oh what area you're going to look at? What specific? Oh? Everything, wisdom, madness, folly, pleasure, alcohol, great projects, house, vineyards, gardens, parks, money, music, sex, work, power, justice, religion, oh, and death. So he's essentially saying, don't worry, I'm going to figure out the mind of God. And then the resources available to him were absurd. This isn't some guy sitting in a monastery theorizing about pleasure. Q says, I did it. I tried it. Wealth had it, power had it? Sex apparently not, short supply entertainment, bringing on, architecture, built something, gardens planted them. This is more and more clearly fictional, hypothetical, satirical, right satirical cues, massive attempt to investigate existence, empirically, observation, experience, experimentation, accumulated human wisdom. He's running the final complete definitive, exhaustive, authoritative, and groundbreaking human meaning project. He has to be one wealthy, energetic, resourceful individual. And what could possibly go wrong? Do you see the satirical exaggeration at work? Of course, Well, now we see the most important phrase in the book under the That phrase keeps coming back under the sun, under heaven. What can I observe from here? And that's Q's laboratory under the sun. What about God in heaven? Included a little, But honestly, Q's investigation is relentlessly horizontal. He's looking around, which takes me right back to session number two where I said there's three ways of observing look around as to observe what you see, measure, compare, experiment. Reason. Q isn't an atheist. In fact, I would label him a Jewish deist. He believes in God, just doesn't seem to have a relationship with God or see God as a trusting, loving partner. God appears repeatedly in Ecclesiastes, but at a distance. Q's great experiment asked, can I understand what life adds up to from what I can observe under the sun, not above it? That's a much stronger and more defensible formulation. And there's the problem. You can learn an enormous amount by looking around. But what if the answer you're looking for isn't under the sun. How does all this work? You know? Job? The central chapter is people look for wisdom, but they can't find it. God has it right now. Ecclesiastes becomes comedy, satirical. Generations come, generation goes, sunrises, sunsets, wind goes south, wind goes north, round and round. Streams run into the sea, but the sea's never filled. Catches an almost cartoonish exhaustion of all the passages, the sun gasping as it hurries back to do the same thing over and over, you know, wishing it could retire and move to Florida. Sun comes up, Sun goes down, saying see you tomorrow, checking and checking out. Wind blows south now, oh wait, no, it's blowing north. Back around again. Rivers pour into the ocean. The ocean says, still here. Then humanity joins in born work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, have children, get old, die children repeat. Q looks around and says, does anybody else find this slightly ridiculous? And the uncomfortable thing is, yeah, we do. If we thought about it more. Now we're going to introduce one of Q's greatest questions. What does a person gain from all the toil at which he toils? Under the sun? Gang? What's the game? In the Hebrew, it's yatron or yetter. It means profit. Best understood is so, what's left over after all of this effort life and the net gain that makes the drudgery worthwhile? What's in my bank account at the end of at the end of the at the end of the day. So you worked for forty years, thousands of emails, meetings, performance reviews, mortgages, deadlines, promotions, retirement accounts, and finally you retire and someday your grandchildren are cleaning out your house saying, anybody want Graham paused air fryar. That's Ecclesiastes. Q's question isn't stupid, it's devastating. What's left? Don't we think that's kind of the point. What did all that effort ultimately produce that death can't take away? And suddenly the clown isn't so funny because Q found something real, something very very human. Let me put it another way. You retire, you go and play golf until your back gives way. You play pickleball until your knees give way. What's left. And this is why Q and Ecclesiastes is helpful, and yet it's also dangerous. Satire only works if Q is often right. People die, people are forgotten. Success doesn't satisfy permanently. Money doesn't solve mortality, injustice still exists. Good people suffer, bad people prosper Religious people can be ridiculous. I mean not me, but you know gets going around. You can spend your life building something and leave it to an idiot. Q sees things we'd rather not see, so we don't want to underestimate Q. He's not a fool. At the end of the bar, He's the professor of the philosopher, billionaire researcher, the successful pastor, theologian, the person who has lived long enough to stop believing easy answers, which makes his missing peace much harder to detect. Q's observations may be brilliant. The question is whether his observations are sufficient to support his conclusions, and what value are they to me today, to you. Now we want to talk about Havel, Q says Havel of Hal's everything is Havel Vapor breath, enigma, absurdity, futility, foolishness. It's all foolish, whatever nuance we eventually decide to emphasize. Q's verdict is bleak. Imagine walking into a doctor's office and he performs every test imaginable blood work, mri CT scan, X rays, colonoscoped genetic testing, and six hours later he walks in and sits down, looks you directly in the eye, and says, I have no idea what's going on. Well, that's approximately where we are, except Q doesn't stop investigating. Of course he doesn't. He's done the research. I like you. I suspect that's intentional from the author, the editor, because I recognize him. I want to explanations. I want God to make sense. I want suffering to fit. I want good choices to produce good outcomes. I want prayer to work predictably. I want wisdom to guarantee my success. I want enough information to make myself safe. I want the universe to explain itself to me. And perhaps that's why Q keeps chasing. He isn't stupid. He's frightened by the possibility that there are things he cannot know from where he stands, so he looks harder, So he studies harder, looks farther, experiences more things deeper, and keeps running the sound of wind begins, because somewhere just ahead of him, surely is the answer. Just one more experiment. Whew, what's next? I'll tell you after this brief word from our sponsors, we'll be right back. Well. New book, Good Enough Christians. It's getting great reviews. It's up for a few awards. Sequel to Good Enough Parent and My good Enough Christian Christianity. Here is did a press release? Let me just read it to you. I think you'll find this helpful. Could God's Love actually frighten us? New book explores why Christians struggle to experience a love they say they believe. Good Enough Christian ask a provocative question, what if God's love is so vast, unconditional and unlike human love that part of us is actually afraid to trust it? Christians routinely say God loves me, but what if some of us are subconsciously frightened by just how much he does? Author says our brains may actually resist unconditional love. God's love may simply be too good to be true. And yet it is, well, what do you think did that resonate? Was that interesting? You know? One other thing that says many Christians believe one lie about God's love. New book says that it's keeping them stuck. What if our biggest problem is that we have a subconscious fear of God's love for us. Maybe that's cohala maybe, but in the end the father will say to his son that the fear of God is important. Anyway. Thanks for listening to my series Chasing the Wind. Next time. On Chasing the Wind, Q conducts perhaps the most expensive experiment ever. If wisdom can't make life meaningful, maybe pleasure can. Wine, houses, gardens, money, etc. Q is going all in and what happens when a man who can have almost anything actually gets sick? Episode five, I Tried pleasure. Oh my, thanks for listening. Take our child of God.