The Vanity of Sandcastles at Low Tide
February 26, 2023
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Ecclesiastes 1:1-18
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.
12 I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 14 I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
15 What is crooked cannot be made straight,
and what is lacking cannot be counted.
16 I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” 17 And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.
18 For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
“After being in a dark cave for nine months, you are born. You scream. You cry. Strangers shine a light in your eyes. Perhaps they turn you upside-down, and you get spanked. You are given shots. You scream some more. And then, eventually, after many years of suffering and strife, you die. ‘Meaningless,’ says the Preacher.”
Twelve years ago, while at another church, we printed those words on a poster advertising a Sunday School class of study the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. I wrote those words to be intentionally provocative. Because so is Ecclesiastes.
Since that class a dozen years ago, I’ve thought it would be nice to try again, in part because when I first taught the book, I was a rookie pastor but also because we’ve never studied the book since I’ve been here. So that’s what we’ll do for the next seven weeks of Lent (both in the sanctuary during the service and in the café during adult Sunday School), the time we journey through the cross to the hope of resurrection. Let’s pray again as we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
In the fall a few of us were at a conference where speakers preached to us. One of those speakers gave the strangest, most unhinged sermon I’ve ever heard. I was sitting with a friend who pastors at another church, and he leaned over to me and said, “Who’s he mad at?” I honestly didn’t know if the speaker was well. When all seven of us drove together back to Harrisburg, I asked one person for her impressions of the Preacher’s sermon. She said, “It was striking.” We all laughed because we all knew striking, in that context, while kind, also wasn’t necessarily a compliment to that guest preacher.
Last week, our passage spoke of Jesus as a visiting rabbi speaking at a synagogue, as a guest preacher if you will (John 6:59). Jesus was often a striking, uncomfortable guest preacher—but not for the same reasons as the guy we heard last fall.
As we open the Old Testament wisdom book of Ecclesiastes, we’re confronted again with another preacher. Although he’s polished and articulate, he, too, begins in a striking manner.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun? (Eccl. 1:2–3)
Not your typically introduction, is it? Not, probably, what you’d expect a biblical author to proclaim. Surely, you think, he can’t really mean what he says.
Well, he may not mean here exactly what we think he means. The fullness of what the Preacher means across his whole sermon will take seven weeks for us to explore. But this Preacher, I believe, does want to confront you with the vanity of all your efforts. He wants to disabuse us of the American dream. That’s a fancy way to say the Preacher wants you to stare wide-eyed into the futility of not only your strongest efforts but the futility and vanity of the efforts of all the men and all the women of all the generations who ever lived and who will ever live. “All is vanity,” says the Preacher.
Striking, isn’t it? You may wonder who he’s mad at? In a sense, he’s mad at no one. In another sense, everyone—including himself. But if you and I have the courage to listen to his sermon, we’ll see that by lowering certain expectations about reality, the Preacher wants to save our expectations or, even better, to save us. He doesn’t want us to give up. Instead, he wants us to discover the only place hope and happiness can be found.
I’ve been thinking about the best way to introduce this book to you, questions of what I should say first and where I should begin. The best way for us to begin, I think, is to begin where the author begins. On this first Sunday we just need to get to know this Preacher and the kinds of truths he’s preaching. And just so you don’t get worried about time, I’ll tell you that I’ll go slowly through each of the first three verses. Then, I’ll finish much more quickly. Each of the first three verses requires more time.
The Preacher, 1:1
Let me read the first verse. “The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.” Here the author tells us that he’s a preacher. And not just any preacher, but “the son of David.” Let’s talk about this. If you’re using one of the pew Bibles, you can see a footnote that says the word for “Preacher” is the Hebrew word Qoheleth, which means convener or collector. Other resources add that Qoheleth means one who convenes an assembly gathers people. The title of the book comes from the Greek translation of Hebrew, which is Ekklesia, meaning assemble, which is the NT word for church. Ekklesia is also where we get our English title Ecclesiastes.
Let’s talk about that line, “the son of David, king in Jerusalem.” King David had many sons. Sometimes the “son of” language can mean grandson or great grandson or great, great grandson. In other words, “son of” can just mean a descendant of David (cf. Matt. 1:20).
However, the son of David most often associated with this book is King Solomon. He seems to be the son who best fits many of the descriptions in the book, a description of someone wise and wealthy, someone who also had a long season of not following God. It’s possible that Solomon didn’t write Ecclesiastes but rather that someone many years later wrote the book as though he were Solomon. So, either Solomon wrote the book or someone wrote it the way Solomon could have written it, which means, either way, we come back to the King named Solomon. Who was Solomon?
Recently, the new memoir Spare by Prince Harry got a lot of publicity. It makes sense. Harry, according to Wikipedia, is “a member of the British royal family. He is the younger son of King Charles III and Diana, Princess of Wales. He is fifth in the line of succession to the British throne. . . In 2018, Harry was made Duke of Sussex prior to his wedding to American actress Meghan Markle.” So, you can see why a tell-all memoir from a man with such a royal pedigree might be of interest to a lot of people. I’ll tell you, however, that Solomon’s life was far more interesting and dysfunctional.
Solomon’s father, King David, used his power as a king to rape a woman named Bathsheba. Then David had the husband killed through battle so he could marry Uriah’s wife. David and Bathsheba’s first child died. Later, Bathsheba and David got married, and they had other children together, one of them being Solomon.
When Solomon took the throne, God came to him asking what one thing he needed to rule well. Solomon asked for wisdom and because he did, God also gave him riches and power and wealth. Solomon ruled during forty years of relative peace, and under this leadership the kingdom expanded larger than ever before or after. He built an extravagant temple for the Lord and an extravagant palace for himself. He had nearly limitless wisdom, servants, and pleasure. The Queen of Sheba visited Solomon and could not believe the extent of his wisdom and wealth.
However, Solomon turned away from the Lord. He took many, many wives, and had many, many girlfriends he didn’t marry but would spend the night with—all of which God expressly forbid a king to do (Deut. 17:17). And, big surprise, those wives and their foreign God’s turned Solomon’s heart away from the Lord. You can read about it 1 Kings 11 (full story from chapters 1–11). Additionally, Solomon instituted an excessive tax system. When Solomon died and one of his sons took over, the people begged the new king, Solomon’s son Rehoboam, to reduce the taxes and the entire system of servitude. Solomon’s son did not do that; instead, he tried to make taxes more intense. The nation split into two nations, north and south Israel. Not the best legacy.
That’s a short introduction to this man Solomon. One final detail to note. In the historical books, we do not have a record of Solomon repenting from these many sins. Some like to think, and I’m included in this, that Ecclesiastes was written later in his life and is his book of repentance.
Vanity, 1:2
Let’s keep going. Look at v. 2.
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
The word “vanity” is variously translated. Some say vapor or mist. The NIV overstates the case by translating it as “meaningless.” In the pew Bible there’s another helpful footnote. It says, “The Hebrew term hebel, translated vanity or vain, refers concretely to a ‘mist,’ ‘vapor,’ or ‘mere breath,’ and metaphorically to something that is fleeting or elusive . . . It appears five times in this verse and in 29 other verses in Ecclesiastes.” That Hebrew word Hebel, as the note says, means something light and wispy, something ephemeral like smoke. Hebel is your breath on a cold day. When we talked about it in the preaching meeting last week, someone said we should get a fog machine on stage as we preach through the book. We’re not going to do that, but it would help us remember the Preacher’s point.
Maybe some stories of vanity will help better explain the meaning. A few years ago we bought new vehicles and sold our old vehicles. Our old minivan wasn’t, shall we say, the cleanest on the inside. Candy such as Sour Patch Kids that had fallen between cushions and had likely melted in the summer and froze in the winter and remelted and refroze so many times that new periodic elements were being created, substances previously unknown to mankind. This sort of thing. My wife, bless her heart, spent like two weeks in the afternoons cleaning and cleaning and cleaning the van. So we’re sitting at the table with the car salesman, and we tell him we want to know how much we’ll get for the van. I expect him to go outside, look around, drive it a bit, kick the tires—you know, car buying stuff. Instead, he leans back so he can see it in the parking lot and goes, “I’ll give you $300 to haul it to the salvage yard.” I’m thinking, “What? It still runs. I drove my whole family here in that super clean car.” Vanity of vanity. All is vanity.
Here’s another one. The other year, after a long and faithful career with a company, a man in our church retired. Yet everything about the social element of his retirement was messed up by Covid. And as if that was not bad enough, on the day he goes to retire, they are doing construction in his office, so it’s super noisy and disruptive. Our church member has like 30 minutes of work left to prepare his office and his work so he can leave everything perfect for his boss, who didn’t even stick around. A construction worker knocks on his door and says, “Hey, I’m going to glue carpet squares down, so if you want to leave, you have to do it now or you have to stay in your office two more hours.” He got up and left. Vanity of vanity.
One preacher describes this book by saying, “Think of Ecclesiastes as the only book of the Bible written on a Monday morning” (Philip Graham Ryken, Ecclesiastes, 14). Before we’re done will have plenty more illustrations of vanity.
Under the Sun, 1:3
Look now at v. 3.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
We’ve met the Preacher. We’ve heard about his summary word vanity. Now we come to a key phrase in the book. The phrase “under the sun” is used twenty-nine times. It’s the way of describing the harshness of this life. It’s a way of pointing out the injustice in the world, a way of describing life when we don’t have a view to God.
I’ll put it like this. Many good movies that also have happy endings also have a lot of hard things that happen along the way. Ecclesiastes and the phrase under the sun is the Preacher’s way of saying that if you hit pause during those movies and described what’s happening at that moment, and you did so apart from knowing how the movie ends, that would be the meaning of “under the sun.” Life under the sun is the way life often is. And life under the sun is often unfair, unforgiving, and unfortunate.
Introduction to “the Vanity of Life Under the Sun,” 1:4–18
Then comes the rest of chapter 1. Let me read these Preacher’s words and offer just a few comments. Just how much vanity is there, and just how unfair, unforgiving, and unfortunate is life under the sun? The Preacher tells us.
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.
That’s a bleak poem, isn’t it? Wind and waves come and go. The sun rises, and the sun sets. Again and again. Rain falls, rain goes into streams, which flow into oceans, which evaporates under the sun and wind and becomes clouds, which becomes rain again, and it never never never stops. And that grind, that unrelenting cycle of nature, will grind away the memory of everything that has ever come. All your achievements, all your glory, all your work, all your artistic designs, all your words, all your efforts toward a cause, will one day be eroded away to such an extent that it will be like you never existed. It will be like America never existed.
This is why I titled the sermon “The Vanity of Sandcastles at Low Tide.”[1] Build a sandcastle as fast and as big and as beautiful as you can, but high tide is coming—and, the Preacher says, tomorrow the glory of your effort will be gone.
But you say, “Wait, wait, wait. Surely this is overstated. There is some remembrance, right?” Many of us could say who won the Super Bowl this year. Who won the Super Bowl seven years ago? And who is the MVP? Who won the Super Bowl seventeen years ago? Who was that MVP? What was the name and number of the second-string offensive lineman? Where did he go to elementary school? Who made the big field goal or missed the big field goal. We have no idea. And of the 8 billion people on the planet, many don’t care about one of the biggest sporting events in the world, even the one from two weeks ago. Some of you in this room didn’t care.
Or consider not just a positive thing like the Super Bowl but a tragedy like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig collapse, what became the BP oil spill in the Gulf, the largest spill of oil in the history of ocean drilling. In the collapse, eleven people died. Can you tell me the name of the widow of the eighth worker who died? Can you tell me the middle name of the second son who’s now growing up without his father? No, we can’t.
The Preacher in Ecclesiastes wants to persuade us of the vanity of our visions of grander and limitlessness. Jesus did the same thing with a question. Jesus put it like this, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:34).
Let me read the end of the chapter, vv. 12–18.
12 I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 14 I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
15 What is crooked cannot be made straight,
and what is lacking cannot be counted.
16 I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” 17 And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.
18 For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
We might bristle at the line about what is “crooked” not being able to be made straight. But it can’t be made straight, not under the sun. If a drunk driver kills your child, and the person goes to jail and you get a settlement from the courts, that might—in a very very small way—make it better, but it doesn’t make it right. Ecclesiastes is a book about the things under the sun that can’t be healed, can’t be mended, can’t be made straight.
Full disclosure: This will be a challenging book for us because we probably have more of the book of Proverbs in us than Ecclesiastes. We were talking about this among our preaching team, and one of us mentioned that we largely have a book-of-Proverbs view of the world, the view where hard work is rewarded with positive results. But is that always the case?
Yes, opioid addicts do tend to become poor and sometimes die. But is it always the case that when people are poor or die young, it’s their fault? No. Do only bad people get cancer? No. Are the refugee and immigrants here in the city of Harrisburg poor because they are morally responsible for the war-torn countries they had to flee? No. The book of Proverbs speaks to God’s general way of “sowing and reaping,” the general way that God created the world. Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, gives us the exceptions—which, as the book points out, are not so infrequent.
Conclusion: A Savior Above the Sun
So what shall we say, then? I told a friend we’d be preaching this book as we move toward Easter and he joked about us having a happy congregation that I was going to just make sadder and sadder. Well, that’s not the goal. But I do admit that the Preacher is offering us strange medicine. As I said at the start, if you and I have the courage to listen, we’ll see that by lowering certain expectations about reality, the Preacher wants to save our expectations, or even better, to save us. He doesn’t want us to give up. Instead, he wants us to discover the only place hope and happiness can be found.
In fact, that is what the author went on a quest to find. You see that in the language of vv. 13 and 16. “And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven . . . . I said in my heart . . .” That language becomes the narrative that runs through the Preacher’s sermon, the language of quest. I sought, I applied, I looked. He’s going to walk as far and as intensely as he can in every direction to try to find out the meaning of life. He’s running, we might say, an experiment on himself. And what the Preacher learned from his experiment, he wants to preach to us. God wants him to preach it to us. Remember, the book of Ecclesiastes is a sober book of repentance.
But before the Preacher can give us the cure, and before he can fix us and point us in the right direction, he needs us to appreciate how flawed our world is—and, indeed, how flawed we are as humans.
The book has good news too. There is more to life than life under the sun. Later in the book the author will use the phrases “hand of God,” “gift of God,” and “Fear of God” to describe a view of the world that’s better, a view of the world that includes God, a view of the world that sees the happy ending. We might call that view “above the sun.” It’s like the book of Ecclesiastes is a black-and-white movie, except for a few scenes where radiant, spectacular colors take it over. That’s what those phrases are. The “above the sun” message will shine to us in time as we move through the book.
And let’s not forget that Ecclesiastes fits within the larger story of the Bible, the story of redemption. Ecclesiastes shows us the vanity of our efforts. Why? Why would the author do that? Why would the author rub our noses in the things that don’t last? Is he cruel or a cynic of cynics? No, not at all. He shows us the vanity of things that don’t last so that we can better appreciate the things that do: God.
Jesus Christ comes from above the sun, to live under the sun, and to die in our place. He rises again. He ascends above the sun and promises to come again. And if we have that view, rather than merely seeing life under the sun as meaningless, everything instead becomes infused with meaning. Or to say it the way I’ve been saying it, by lowering certain expectations about reality, the Preacher wants us to discover the only place hope and happiness can be found: life lived as a gift from God.
I’ll invite the music team forward as I pray. Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father. . .”
[1] After I had written this title, I’ve seen several authors and preachers who use a similar image.
Sermon Discussion Questions
Have you ever read through the book of Ecclesiastes? What stood out to you? What stands out to you now?
How does the realism of “the Preacher” make you uncomfortable?
Look up some of the verses that speak of life “under the sun.” What does that phrase seem to mean?
Look at a few of the verses that speak of “hand of God,” “Gift of God,” and “fear of God.” How do these paint a different picture of the Preachers message?
How does the book of Ecclesiastes stir our longings and affections for the person and work of Jesus?
