Ecclesiastes 9

Sermon Notes

“It’s a book about a character who wants to find out why he’s alive, why he was created. He tries knowledge. He tries wealth. He tries experience. He tries everything. You hurry to the end of the book to find out why and it says, ‘Remember your Creator.’ In a way, it’s such a letdown. Yet it isn’t.”
Bono

1. The unavoidable certainty of death.

“So much of our worship is cover-up: pretending to have emotions we don’t really feel, or smothering the emotions we do. That is not praise. It simply leaves us to pick up our suffering again on the way out—without bringing it into God’s presence or hurling it at him in questioning (but trusting) protest.”
Christopher Wright

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead
1Peter 1:3

“The reflections of the sage in Ecclesiastes unmask the myth of human autonomy and self-sufficiency and drive us in all our frailty and inability to find meaning in a crooked world in the Creator-creature relationship — the ultimate polarity.”
D. Brent Sandy and Ronal L. Giese,
Cracking Old Testament Codes: A Guide to Interpreting the Literary Genres of the Old Testament

2. The frustrating unpredictability of life

“But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
Matthew 5:44-45

“History is not a random series of meaningless events.  It is rather a succession of periods and happenings which are under the sovereign rule of God, who is the God of history.”
John Stott

3. The unique fullness of joy found in God (and now realized through faith in Christ)

“These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33

“The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.”
C. S. Lewis

“The resurrection is the ‘first fruit’ of the age to come, the sign within history of the transhistorical purpose of God. By this power alone are we enabled to confess the faith of Christ crucified on our behalf and in our place.”
Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion