According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): Where to find satisfaction in life?

Damian Kyle: Next, on According to the Scriptures.

The solution for living an empty, frustrating life dominated by the sense that there must be something more to life than I have experienced, this eternity within my heart, but not knowing where in the world to go and find satisfaction, but to live my life kind of under the motto of, he who eats the most pasta wins.

And the means by which we enter into what life is intended to be and what we've been created for as human beings. It occurs by repenting of our sin and putting your faith, your trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins.

Damian Kyle: One of these days I'm going to see the hands that took the nails for me.

One of these days I'm going to hold the key to the mansion built for me.

One of these days I'm going to walk the streets of gold and heaven paid for me.

One of these days I'm going to see my Savior face to face.

One of these days.

Damian Kyle: Maybe, like many, there's been an emptiness in your heart, leaving you feeling like there must be something more to life than you've experienced, huh? You'd like to find satisfaction, but you're coming up short.

Well, today on According to the Scriptures, we're going to listen in to Solomon's conclusion about death. Here in Ecclesiastes, Pastor Damian Kyle will focus on Chapter 3 and verse 11, which says God has put eternity in our hearts. So what exactly does that mean? Well, we are about to find out.

Chapter 7, verse 16. He says, “Do not be overly righteous, nor be overly wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Do not be overly wicked, nor be foolish. Why should you die before your time?”

And here Solomon declares of life under the sun, if there's no ultimate reward for living a righteous and a wise life, then don't kill yourself trying to do it. Don't kill yourself to be good and to do good. It's just sufficient to live your life not being as wicked as you could be, not being as foolish as you're capable of, for that might shorten your life. And he declares as a result of his assessment of life independent of God, that the ultimate goal in life is not to live a good life, not to live a righteous life, but to live a long life, that self-preservation is the great goal in life.

There's one glaring problem with that. If one lives their life believing that there's nothing to live or to die for, then you can hardly call that life. You can call it existence, but nothing that could be described as life. And that's the point he's making.

In Chapter 8, verse 8, he writes, “No one has power over the spirit to retain the spirit, and no one has power in the day of death. There is no release from that war, and wickedness will not deliver those who are given to it.”

And here Solomon laments that no one, no matter how powerful a person is, can defeat death from their own resources, can escape death from their own resources. And he cannot, Solomon says, wicked his way out of death, no amount of lying, no amount of cheating is effective against it.

And then in chapter 8, verse 14, he goes on, and he says, “There is a vanity which occurs on Earth, that there are just men to whom it happens according to the work of the wicked. Again, there are wicked men to whom it happens according to the work of the righteous,” speaking of death. “I said that this also is vanity.” And under the sun, Solomon concluded that life is grossly unfair. Given the fact that living a righteous life as opposed to living a wicked life doesn't seem to hold any sway over death at all. And it was an affront to the sense of justice and righteousness in the heart of Solomon.

And maybe that truth about death smites your sense of justice as much as it did in him. And then in chapter 9, verse 3, he said, “This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that one thing happens to all,” speaking of death. “Truly the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil, madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.”

And here Solomon observes that everybody dies. And death treats everyone the same, whether you're good or you're evil. One thing you have to tip your hat to death about is that death is no respecter of persons. You got to give it credit for that, Solomon says.

And then in verse 12 of Chapter 9, he says, “For man does not know his time, like fish taken in a cruel net, like birds caught in a snare, so the sons of men are snared in an evil time, when it falls suddenly upon them.”

And here Solomon laments the unpredictability of death. That man doesn't know his time. You don't know when death is going to come, because there's no set pattern to it in life. No pattern that we can discover and say, if we live this way, we will live longer, if we don't live this way, we will live longer. In other words, if I always do this, or I never practice that, I will have the guarantee of a longer life.

And Solomon looks at it and he concludes that it's all a matter of chance and luck. He says, “There's nothing you can do to better your odds in the face of death.” And so he settles into this very deep fatalism. And maybe that's where you've settled in life. Just no joy in the face of death, no peace, no victory over it, you're just living waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And then finally, in verse 11, verse 8, Solomon writes, “But if a man lives many years and rejoices in them all,” has a great life, “yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many, and all that is coming is vanity.”

And Solomon despairs that even if a person lives a long, prosperous life, even if a person gets to live a dream life, what ultimate good is it if one ceases to exist at the moment of death? And there you have it. Solomon's conclusions about death under the sun in the book of Ecclesiastes.

But we return once again to Chapter 3, verse 11, which we make the focus of our study here today. And we make it the focus, that was not an introduction, by the way.

As we return to that verse 11, we notice that as Solomon is observing these things and he's coming to all of these conclusions, he hits a major snag in his attempt to accept all of his gloomy conclusions and observations concerning death with just kind of a fatalistic resignation, and noticed a truth that kept him from accepting all of these things as the ultimate truth concerning death.

Verse 11. He, speaking of God, has made everything beautiful in its time. And then for our purpose this morning, he said, “Also, he has put eternity in their hearts.” Except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

And that great truth that kept him from accepting as the ultimate truth about death, all of the things that we've read, and he wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes was the recognition of verse 11, God has put eternity in our hearts. And so we say, “What in the world does that mean?” It means that Solomon wanted to let us know way before he got to the end of the book of Ecclesiastes in chapter 12, where he, as we've seen, declared the conclusion to his search for ultimate meaning and purpose in life apart from God had not only resulted in emptiness and frustration, and that satisfaction, meaning and purpose in life, it does exist, but not under the sun. It exists in a personal, obedient relationship with God, the God of the Bible.

But he wants us to know, not in chapter 12, he wants us to know already in chapter 3, that while he wrote all of these musings about death under the sun, that he not only didn't believe a word of them, but that he couldn't believe them. Because he recognized that God has put eternity in our hearts as human beings.

And simply stated, Solomon declared that we have been made for eternity. We have been made for something beyond this life, something beyond this creation, and more than that, that we know it. That each of us possesses a longing for something more than this life, however rich and full our life might be. We possess a longing, a hunger, a thirst that cannot be satisfied by anything in this world, or all of the world rolled up in a ball and handed to us on a platter.

Because as human beings, we have a past history, and a past experience of eternity. And we know it. That knowledge is in us. And as we've seen in chapter 3, Solomon begins the chapter with “a time, a time, a time, a time, a time,” and he repeats the phrase 29 times in eight verses. But he cannot shake the feeling that verses 1 through 8 of chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes are merely pieces in life, but they cannot be the whole. And Solomon knows of himself and each of us that we've been created not only for time, but we've been created for eternity, for life far beyond this one.

I remember being in Romania after the fall of communism under the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. And Romania under his dictatorship and as a part of the Soviet Union, the for 42 years they were under that atheistic government of communism. So 42 years, that's more than two generations.

And communism had 42 years, more than two generations to dislodge any belief in God, any hunger for God, any thirst for God. And the entire population of the country of Romania, they told them in every way that they possibly could, by every lever of power that they possessed, there is no God, there is only the state.

And I was in the city of Bucharest, the capital, with my friend Gale Erwin on the first Easter Sunday after Ceaușescu's fall. And Gale had been scheduled to speak at a church in the city. And as we passed so many churches within the city in order to get to the church he was scheduled to be to speak at. As we passed those churches, the churches were overflowing with people. The crowds were out the front doors without exception, and the crowds went in both directions down the street, right and left.

And people coming to worship God, and to celebrate God's Savior, to celebrate the Gospel introduced into human history, and the death, and the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the first time they got to openly express that on that resurrection Sunday morning, they came out in mass to do so.

To Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst is attributed the observation concerning mankind that man is incurably religious. Well, I'll give him his kudos. But Solomon beat him by 3,000 years in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Karl Marx declared religion to be the opium of the people. Like opium, something people turned to to escape pain in life. And then he viewed it negatively in the sense of something that made people resistant to change. And most specifically the changes that he wanted to bring into human history and into their lives.

But Solomon sees no negative at all in man's longing for God. He viewed it as a glorious thing within us. And it's communicating something glorious to us. That we possess this longing for God because on some level we recognize it as something we once possessed in human history. And so we did.

In the persons of Adam and Eve who before their fall, or their sin in the Garden of Eden enjoyed fellowship with God in that garden. And this is one of the reasons why atheism, even today, despite every effort to dislodge people from a belief in God, and having almost limitless resources and power with which to endeavor to do it all around the world, atheism remains a very small minority in a world that is deeply and largely religious.

In a different context, C.S. Lewis described what Solomon discovered in this way. He wrote, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

And Solomon tells us that we have been created for something more than anything under the sun can offer to us. And he tells us further that we know it.

Now let me briefly close this morning by being very careful to notice Solomon's second observation in verse 11, which is that though God has put eternity in our hearts, that sense that there must be something more to life than purely a relationship with the creation, the created world. He also states that no one can find out the works that God does from the beginning to the end. And the idea is apart from God's revelation.

That is, this sense of eternity in our hearts alone would only lead us, if that's all that God did, as he put this longing for eternity in our hearts. If that was all that he gave to us, if that was all that was included in verse 11, if it were not coupled with God's revelation about how to be reconciled to him, how to be brought into the relationship with him that we've been created for, then this, this witness within our hearts, this sense of eternity in our hearts would only lead us into an even greater vanity and vexation of spirit.

And through Jesus's death and burial, and what we celebrate today, the capstone of those three greatest events in human history, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on the third day. Death is real. And it is that death and burial and resurrection that provides us with the knowledge of how to return to the relationship that we were created for.

And so Solomon says, “Death is real,” and we recognize that. But like Solomon, don't try to find an explanation for it, much less a solution to it, under the sun. From among all of the misguided notions and musings about death floating around in the world around us, and which Solomon detailed so wonderfully for us in the first part of our study.

But instead, recognize that God has put eternity in your heart, a hunger and a thirst within you that nothing in the world, not even all of the world together can satisfy. A longing for the very thing that you have been created for, and that is a relationship with God. And it is an evidence of the fact that though Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, and that though the glory that was once ours by virtue of being created in the image of God, created for eternity, created for relationship with God, that through their sin, those things were forfeited as a result, but they were not obliterated. Because eternity remains in our hearts.

And then Solomon and then as Solomon instructs us to accept God's revelation concerning the solution for death, the solution for living an empty, frustrating life dominated by the sense that there must be something more to life than I have experienced. This eternity within my heart, but not knowing where in the world to go and find satisfaction, but to live my life kind of under the motto of, he who eats the most pasta wins.

And the means by which we enter into what life is intended to be and what we've been created for as human beings. It occurs by repenting of our sin, and putting your faith, your trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins. And then the Holy Spirit will come into your life, and in the words of Jesus, you will be born again by the Holy Spirit.

And this great miracle of the Holy Spirit coming into your life will then give you the capacity for the relationship with God that you have been created for. And this morning, hear what God the Father said to Jesus, God the Son, “He said, ‘This is my beloved son in whom singular I'm well pleased.’” And then hear what Jesus says to you this morning, “For God so loved the world (that's you) that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever (that's you again) would believe in him or trust in him for salvation shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” And then hear Jesus declare, as he does, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Rest from all of the emptiness and the frustration of the book of Ecclesiastes, and so much more.

And then, as Jesus declared in the course of his public ministry to the Jewish religious leaders, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me, I will by no means cast out.” That is, in coming to Jesus, you run absolutely no risk of being rejected by him. That's a wonderful thing.

And it confirms the old saying that there are none who are so good in life that they don't need to be saved. And there are none of us who have been so bad that we cannot be saved.

Damian Kyle: You're listening to According to the Scriptures, and part of our Easter special based in Ecclesiastes. Maybe all of this talk about life, death, and eternity has got you thinking about your beliefs. We hope this message from Damian Kyle has encouraged you to place your full trust in Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Then, you can live with full confidence that an eternity with the Lord awaits you when this life is over.

Well, for resource requests, like today's message on CD, reach out to us by phone. The number is 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530. Pastor Damian Kyle's studies can also be heard online at AccordingtotheScriptures.com, Oneplace.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we also have a church app where you can listen to Damian as well. Search for Calvary Chapel Modesto in the App Store or Google Play. If you would like to partner with us financially with a financial gift, you can do that through our website at AccordingtotheScriptures.com. And thank you very much. Let me also give you our mailing address, According to the Scriptures, 4300 American Avenue, Modesto, California, the zip code is 95356.

Next time on According to the Scriptures, we'll pick up where we left off in First Corinthians. That happens to be Chapter 16. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Modesto.

Damian Kyle: One of these days I'm going to see the hands that took the nails for me.

One of these days I'm going to hold the key to the mansion built for me.

One of these days I'm going to walk the streets of gold and heaven paid for me.

One of these days I'm going to see my Savior face to face.

One of these days.