The Final Advice of a Skeptic, but Read the Fine Print

You can turn your Bibles to Ecclesiastes 11 if you're visiting. We've been going through this book, and we're coming down to it now. On April 1, 2010—if you can remember—a UK video game store called Game Station quietly added one line to their online terms and conditions. Anyone who bought something from them that day, in their own words, would have to agree to a "non-transferable option to claim now and forevermore mortal soul." They added an opt-out box: "Click this if you'd rather keep your soul." And if you clicked it, you got a five-pound voucher. It was an April Fool's joke, and it was an experiment. Now, we all know that no one reads the terms and conditions of anything; they just click "I agree." And that day, 7,500 people made a purchase. 88% of them turned their souls over to Game Station. Nobody read the fine print. Somewhere on your phone right now, there are a few apps, most likely, and I'm just going to wager a guess that you have never read the terms of service of anything you have ever downloaded. You just click agree as fast as your thumbs move because you want to use it.

So I promise this will connect. We come to the last words of the preacher in one of the craziest books of the Bible. No matter where you land and how you interpret it, it is relentless. It starts in chapter 1 with the motto: "Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless." That word is hevel—breath, mist. That thing you see on a cold morning in Bozeman, that's gone before you can put your hand around it.

Then Qohelet in chapter 1 says generations come and go. The sun is just on its same circuit. The earth goes around it. The streams go into the ocean, and the ocean never fills. No one is remembered that ever is here. It's motion without progress. The world is on a treadmill, and you just keep running, running, running, running. And you get off and you're like, "I'm tired, and I've gone nowhere."

Chapter 2, he tries to build something. He runs this experiment with every resource that anyone could ever want, and he searches wisdom and pleasure and building projects and wealth. He has singers and concubines and total indulgence. Refuses his eyes nothing. And where does the quest end? Nowhere—dead end. Wisdom increases sorrow; pleasure increases madness. Wisdom's advantage can only survive for a little while, and then you die. Welcome to our church, by the way, if this is your first time—sorry! And the legacy he builds with his own hands, he could hand over to a fool. You know your heir is a fool and you lose everything. Then he stumbles into joy that maybe God gives, but then he can't help himself—he goes, and it's all vapor.

Chapter 3, he turns from something he can't build to something he can't schedule: a time to be born, a time to die—14 pairs, 28 times, none of it arranged on his program. And then in the middle of that poem, there's that line: God has set eternity on the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. That's not a coffee-mug Bible verse; it's a wound. You were built for permanence, and there's no way to reach it. There's nothing better for a man than that he should enjoy the work of his hands, for this is his lot. Here's the resolution: the best you can do when you've decided everything is a dead end is just enjoy your work. For he says, who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward? So he's a skeptic; he's not orthodox.

Chapter 4 through the opening of chapter 5, he has this same kind of intensity. Now he's going to do suffering and work and worship. He sees suffering, and he sees the tears of the oppressed. Two times he says, "There is no comforter for them." He looks at work and he says, well, the dead are better off than the living. Then he goes to worship, and he's like, "Guard your steps. Don't let your words be few. God is in heaven, you are on earth." A wounded man's theology. He's protecting himself from a God he's decided is dangerous rather than near.

So then he turns to money. Surprise, surprise, there's nothing there either. The system is rigged all the way up. Injustice is everywhere, and the appetite for money is never satisfied. Naked he came into this world, naked he goes; he takes nothing with him. And so he reaches the end of everything. He goes after wealth and possessions and 100 children and many years, and he lands the line: it's better to be a stillborn child than to have all this. Six chapters of testimony, and he sits down. In the end, he's like, "You can't know." Can a person tell what happens to them after they're gone? Can I tell you what the good is for a person? He says he can't.

So he pushes wisdom to the limit, but life's too difficult to control. There's wind and death and war and wickedness, and none of that bends to you, friend. Life is too deep to explain. The wicked are honored in burial; the righteous are forgotten. Qohelet has his Sunday school answers, and then he has what he sees with his eyes, and he can't put them together. The wise cannot comprehend what God is doing. Though God is unmistakably at work, every channel he keeps turning to is silent and on mute.

So by chapter 10 he just goes, everything is dead—flies in a perfume. A little folly outweighs a little wisdom and honor. Fools sit on thrones, the wise are slaves. Wisdom is better than folly, but even wisdom can't save you from death. Every quest under the sun—knowledge, pleasure, work, wealth, legacy, justice, and even wisdom itself—terminates. There's nothing under the sun that satisfies. So he is a person who is consistent, really; in the end, he just works his skepticism all the way out.

And so what are his last words? Chapter 12, verse 8: "Hevel! Hevel! Everything is hevel! Everything is meaningless," says the teacher. That's the motto of the book. That word NIV translates as "meaningless" in the Hebrew is hevel. It shows up 30 times. It's the breath on the bathroom mirror; it's there for a second and then it's gone. It's what you reach for, your hand closes, and it's air. And he says everything is hevel; nothing is left out. He can't find meaning in anything.

Several years ago, Mariah Carey, having achieved more number-one hits than anyone in history except the Beatles and Elvis, was asked, "What is the goal you have left to achieve?" And she said, "Happiness." Every person you meet, every person you wish you could meet, is fighting a battle. And the battle is what? To be happy. Every person feels this book. No matter if you've lived a few years, you can't deny life is hard. Who wants to listen, though, and invite Qohelet to a party? Don't we want to sit with our parents who told us to look on the bright side, or sing the song everyone knows, "Don't worry, be happy"? Do you think Qohelet could sing that?

Every offer this world makes has fine print. Usually you just don't find out until later. Thankfully for Ecclesiastes, he puts the fine print right in the text. In this final stretch, you see asterisks. You have the closing argument where the skeptic turns to the young people in the room, and he gives them three pieces of advice: sow boldly, enjoy everything, and remember your Creator. You could stitch those onto a pillow and send it as a gift to your grandchild, who will hide it in their dorm room so no one sees it. Our job today, though, is to read the footnotes. It's to read the fine print.

Sow Boldly (*You Can't Know)

So, sow boldly, but you can't know—that's chapter 11, verses 1 through 6. Here's the advice right off the bat: "Ship your grain across the sea; after many days you will receive a return." That's the language of trade. You send your goods out in ships, you take a risk, and the profit may come back to you. Verse 2: "Invest in seven ventures, yes, even eight; you do not know what disaster may come upon the land." So diversify. If one venture sinks, the other one may come home. And then verse 4, the opposite temptation: the farmer who watches the wind never plants; the person who stares at the clouds never has a harvest. In other words, if you wait for perfect conditions, you'll be waiting a long time. You know that person, right? "It's just not the right time." Verse 6: "Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let your hands not be idle." Get up, take a risk, want to be successful. Don't sit around and wait for things to happen, and don't go out there blaming others or your situation. You don't walk around this world telling everyone you're a victim with an excuse.

Some of you know I coach high school basketball. When players start telling me, "Oh, we can't do this," or "This is why this happened," I just go, "Excuses falling from the rafters, boys! Excuses falling from the rafters." Nike had a great ad campaign in 2008: "Yesterday you said tomorrow." "Tomorrow I'll start; tomorrow I'll make a plan; tomorrow I'll make the right decisions; tomorrow I'll read my Bible; tomorrow I'll eat well; tomorrow I'll get it done; tomorrow I won't speak like that anymore." Has anyone ever started a diet on a Monday 10 weeks in a row, and on Sunday night you're like, "This is the last time I'll eat this"? You guys who are laughing, you're the guilty ones.

In 2002, entrepreneurs flew to Dallas to pitch their very small DVD-by-mail company to Blockbuster. For you young people, Blockbuster was amazing: you could rent video games and play for 40 hours over three days and then return it. Blockbuster owned the market—thousands of stores, billions in revenue. And they offered to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50 million, and Blockbuster laughed at them in the meeting. That small little company was Netflix. Blockbuster doesn't exist anymore; Netflix is now worth over $100 billion. You know, sowing boldly didn't guarantee Netflix's success any more than playing it safe guaranteed Blockbuster's success. Nobody in that room on either side could see five years out.

And that's the fine print now of Ecclesiastes. Count the refrain in six verses: "You do not know" four times. You don't know when disaster is coming. You don't know the path of the wind. You don't know how a body is formed in a mother's womb. And at the center of it, verse 5: "You do not know the work of God." Now, he's talked like this four different times in Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes 3: God has made everything beautiful in its time, and He has set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. This whole book: no one can know God. Chapter 8: "Then I saw all that God had done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all the efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot comprehend." Verse 12 of chapter 9: "No one knows when their hour will come." Think of what Qohelet says over and over in this book: give up trying to fathom God's way; rather, seize the day.

That's chapter 2. He raises the possibility of enjoyment—eating, drinking, working hard—and immediately, because he's Qohelet, "This also is meaningless, a striving after the wind." Someone told me in between services they wished he would have listened to his own advice in chapter 10 when he says, "More words is more folly." Like, the longer he talks, the worse it gets! It's always "read the fine print." Chapter 8, he says God's work is real, constant, and ongoing, but it's utterly inaccessible. You apply your heart, you lose sleep over it, you're the wisest person in the room, and you can't see it or understand it—not because it's not real, but because you don't have the equipment to reach it on your own. It's like the Tolkien quote: when you're inside the story, you can't see the whole story.

Qohelet's boldness, I think, is a gambler's boldness. Spread the chips across the table because the house is unreadable. His advice looks like faith, it looks like honoring to God, but it's actually risk management. Faith, rightly defined, says: "I don't know the future, but I know the One who holds it, so I'll act." Qohelet says: "I don't know the future, and I cannot know the One who holds it, so I'll hedge." And those two sentences can produce identical behavior—same investment, same planning, same busy hands—and they're totally different foundationally. Two completely different ways of looking at the world. Are you living as a Christian sowing out of trust, or are you just diversifying against a God you treat as unreachable? Sow boldly (*Asterisk: You're betting blind). He can't get out of his own way.

Enjoy Everything (*But the Darkness is Coming)

Enjoy everything, but the darkness is coming. Thanks, Qohelet! So you can't know the future, the skeptic reasons, but at least you can enjoy the present. And you get the single most optimistic line in 12 chapters: "Light is sweet, and it pleases the eye to see the sun." Just being alive, being conscious, is amazing. It is. "Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and follow the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes."

There is a man in California right now who has built his whole life on this verse. His name is Bryan Johnson. He sold his company for roughly $800 million or so, and he has spent years pouring $2 million a year into a project called "Don't Die." Hundreds of supplements every morning, blood plasma exchanges, full body scans. He eats his last meal at 11 in the morning—that sounds miserable—and he sleeps alone at 8 at night. By his own measurements, he has pushed his body back to the biological age of a teenager. His stated goal is to make death optional.

And you know, there's something wonderful about life that makes that appealing. You know that feeling every spring when it finally hits 40 degrees, and you feel the warmth and you just go outside and it's like you're a solar-powered battery and you feel the darkness lift off of you? There's something wonderful about that. There's something wonderful about living on a perfect sphere that goes through space at 67,000 miles per hour, spinning at 1,000 miles an hour, all the while being tucked into a hurricane of stars. We live in a place where water turns into symmetrical, beautiful crystal flakes, with purple mountains and pink sunsets and flamingos—and earwigs. Light is sweet. This world really is something.

And youth really is something to be enjoyed: the free time, the flexibility, the ability to commit to something on the same day, the ability to never plan for anything and then say yes because you've got nothing else. There's no need to recover. I look down at the ground and I think, "That's a long way down." Someone younger looks at the ground and goes, "I'll get back up." Qohelet, though, can't write a single verse without an asterisk. And here comes the asterisk in order.

Verse 8: "However many years anyone may live, let him enjoy them all—oh, great, great, great—but let them remember the days of darkness, for there will be many. Everything to come is meaningless." So you optimize every meal and every supplement, but the days of darkness are still coming, and they're more than the days of light. Verse 9: "Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see"—that's the opposite of what Scripture teaches—"but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment." Okay, this is the same man who told us six chapters ago there is no justice, there's no life beyond the sun, who knows what happens after we leave? Then verse 10: "So banish anxiety"—and that always works, right? Just do it!—"banish anxiety from your heart and cast off the troubles of your body, for youth and vigor are meaningless."

So Qohelet is like: "It's amazing! Youth is great! Youth is meaningless!" You can't biohack your way out of this. Bryan Johnson's not fighting cholesterol; he's fighting Ecclesiastes 11:10. And the irony of this whole thing is that recently Bryan Johnson is losing—he's been diagnosed with a nasty autoimmune disease that's eating his stomach, $2 million a year or not.

So read the fine print. This is why you've got to be careful of just quoting one verse in Ecclesiastes. This is pleasure in order to numb yourself to what is ahead. And it's done over and over again in the book, all the way back in chapter 2: just enjoy your work, for everything is meaningless. That's the functional theology of many people you know, and maybe even you: "You only live once; grab what you can before the light goes out." Anyone nearing retirement age just thinking, "We need to try and enjoy as much as we can; we need to go on as many trips as we can; we need to seize the day, the final bell is coming soon." The Christian who enjoys God's gifts and Qohelet who's trying to enjoy God's gifts might look the same to the outsider, but one side is trying to consume as much as they can to numb themselves to what is ahead, while the other is receiving a gift from God, being thankful, and knowing that darkness has its days numbered. So, enjoy everything, Qohelet says (*Asterisk: Terms and conditions may apply; the lights are going to go out).

Remember Your Creator (*But the Dust Wins)

The last one: remember your Creator, but the dust wins. Chapter 12, verse 1: "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth." Anyone seen that at the front of youth camps? Isn't that great? "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth. Amen!" But watch what he does. Before he follows that, he lands four "befores": before the evil days, before the sun goes dark, before the silver cord snaps. It's a countdown.

In 2011, Glen Campbell—one of the greatest musicians ever, who sold 70 million records—announced he had Alzheimer's disease. And then he did something no sane person does: he went on tour with it on camera. Some nights were great; some nights he read the lyrics off a teleprompter of a song he'd sung thousands of times. But here's the strange thing: he remembered all the music, even his hands doing all the solos, even when he couldn't remember the words. And then in 2014, he wrote his last song to his wife as the disease got him, and his last song was "I'm Not Gonna Miss You." It contained this devastating line in it: "I'm still here, but yet I'm gone." If you've met anyone who's aged, you have seen this happen to them; maybe this is happening to you.

And this is what Qohelet's poem in chapter 12 is about. The command is to remember, and then the whole poem is a countdown of not being able to: eyes, ears, hands, mind. So he contrasts youth and old age. Youth is a time to enjoy life and the possibility of connection with God, and old age is "days of evil"—not a time you can enjoy things. "I have no delight in them," Qohelet says, so his characterization of old age is not wisdom and grace or anything like that; it's evil. And we find out why in verse 2: the sunlight, moon, and stars grow dark; the clouds return after the rain. Getting old is like having weather front after weather front, and it doesn't relent; it only gets worse.

Verses 3 through 5 give a picture of a great estate that is failing. It's poetry, so you've kind of got to go out on a limb, but here's the best guess: the guards of the house tremble—that's your limbs shaking. The grinders cease because they are few—that's your teeth. The women looking through the window grow dim—that's your eyes fading. The doors on the street are shut—the ears close forever. You wake up at the chirp of a bird—why? Because sleep is hard when you get older, and outside, the world carries on without you. The almond tree blossoms white—your hair goes white. The grasshopper drags itself along—your stride gets slow. And then desire itself dies—the sexual desires that have driven youth decisions and youth struggles are gone, dead, lost. And then you go to your eternal home, and there are mourners on the street.

It's hard getting old. Weird things happen in your body when you sneeze; you carry reading glasses everywhere. Weird things grow out of your body you didn't know existed. You don't know if your body hits the ground if you'll get back up, or how long it will take. You sit down and stand up making sounds in both directions. Bible studies become prayer requests about doctor appointments. I remember reading a diary of a pastor's dad at the end of his life: "Keep me from the sins of old men: the tendency to look backwards and idealize the past; the temptation to resent younger men coming along who are more successful than I am; too quick to turn on the television because I'm lonely; insufficient intercessory prayer for my grandchildren."

Qohelet needed that prayer, but notice he's not praying—instead, he just keeps writing. Verse 6: remember Him before the silver cord is severed and the golden bowl is broken, the lamp falls, the light goes out, the jar is broken, the cistern breaks. It's a picture of water and light cut off. And then in verse 7, you hear the echo back to Genesis: the dust returns to the earth, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. That's Genesis 2:7 in reverse—God forms man out of dust and breathes the spirit into him, and now man goes into dust and the spirit is taken back. Creation undone. Naked he came, naked he goes; you carry nothing out. One day you're young and fun, and the next you're making sounds just to sit down.

And you weigh the whole clause now: "Remember your Creator"—but he can't tell you why. There's no prize for remembering, no reunion, no morning after. God gives the breath, He takes it back—end. It seems odd, even forced, for Qohelet to reference God here as Creator, because all he does after that is describe death. God doesn't have a prize for those who remember Him at the end of their life, so he's just reciting a creed on the way to the grave. And we shouldn't be surprised, because this is how he talks about God the whole book. He goes up to the temple in chapter 5 and doesn't say "Come worship the living God"—he says "Guard your steps; He's dangerous." He doesn't say "Father," he just says "He's up there." Qohelet is telling you to remember a God who is up there listening and irritated, a God who is far away and will not remember you when He takes your breath back.

The Ending Qohelet Missed

And that's really the saddest thing. What's the logic of Qohelet in the end? Verse 8: "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the teacher; "Everything is meaningless." Remember your Creator (*Terms and conditions may apply; the dust wins anyway).

Let's be fair to the old man here, because here's the unsettling part: he's accurate about what he's describing. You can't know the future, darkness is coming, and your body will fail and go into dust. Qohelet's not wrong about the world, but he just misses the ending. Because after the skeptic finally falls silent and proclaims everything is hevel, someone else steps forward—the narrator—and says: "Fear God and keep His commands... for God will bring every deed to judgment." Judgment beyond the grave means there is something beyond the grave.

And then you come to the New Testament, and it goes even further. You're betting blind and taking a risk? Yes, but you're known by a God who knows the future. The lights are going out on you? They went out at noon on the cross—three hours of darkness so darkness couldn't hold Him. The days of darkness don't get the last word. And does the dust win? No, because one Man's dust got up on Easter morning!

Which is why Paul—at the end of the great resurrection chapter of 1 Corinthians 15—contradicts the author of Ecclesiastes: "Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not hevel."

So those who are young, sow boldly in trust, enjoy everything as a gift, and remember your Creator now while the house is strong. And if you're at the other end of this poem, hear the word: in Christ, you are remembered even when you can't remember. You could sing, "I'm still here and yet I'm gone," but that's not the last word, because you are still His.

Sixteen years ago, a video game company hid a joke in fine print: "We own your soul." But the gospel in God's fine print is: You are not your own; you belong wholly to God. You were bought with a price. So come to Him.

transcribed by Sermonspark.ai