Episode 394: Great Enemy Two: Endless Cyclicality | Tim Henderson

Introduction

Appreciate both of our readers here, and a very happy birthday, Joe, to your sweet wife. Happy birthday today. I don't even know if my son Max is in here. Today's Max's birthday. So everybody's having a birthday today, but we love you. The McClears are godly, prayerful people and dear friends, so hope today is a sweet celebration for you.

And Bob, thanks for acting like a deacon one last time before we make official what has long been true. So you guys, on Wednesday, Bob is going to be ordained as a deacon at our church. And if you want to come and celebrate with us as we lay hands and make official what is long and true, we'd love you to come. It's Wednesday at seven. We love your great.

Now, hopefully, when you came in, you got one of these — a little information about Blue Ridge Fellows, pictures of all our beautiful, lovely fellows. This is the time of year that I kind of take a deep breath and then ask a whole bunch of people to welcome the stranger in.

The Hospitality of the Blue Ridge Fellows Program

One of the most extraordinary things about the Blue Ridge Fellows program is that Church of the Holy Spirit is so outrageously hospitable and generous to our fellows. Every year the fellows move into town, they live here for nine months at least, but during those nine months they live with a family who doesn't know them, who provides housing and food. It is just an extraordinary act of hospitality.

But every year it happens, and every year a number of you step up and say, sure, we'll walk them in. Great relationships are formed. We talked about this in the first hour, and already three people have come up to me and said, hey, yeah, we'd be interested in hosting a fellow. That gets us roughly, you know, halfway there ish.

And so I would really be grateful if you would think about what would it be like in your family to have a 22-year-old that could live with your family. All they need is basically a private bedroom and access to a bathroom, kind of free rein in your kitchen. That's kind of what we're talking about.

All the details are in this packet. If you're intrigued, if you think maybe, just maybe, then text the word maybe to me. My phone number's on there — it's (814) 280-3771. You'll find my number on that packet, and we would be so thrilled to hear if you think, what would it be like?

And you're not committing to anything. Maybe it's a soft, soft answer, but we'll see where we go. We've had so many families that have hosted, but a number of families that have hosted many, many years need to take a break for this particular year just as things line up. So there's a kind of fresh opportunity for families to step in and both be a blessing — which you absolutely are — but also to experience the blessing of having a fellow in your home.

So I'd love to hear from you about that as we go on with it. If you have questions, grab me. My number's on that sheet. Otherwise, though, we're going to continue our series on Ecclesiastes.

The Series on Ecclesiastes

We've been studying Ecclesiastes all summer long. We will be in it — this is three of, like, 12, I think. This is probably the longest series Quigg, Lawrence has. It’s our — we're on number three, and he's like, are we done yet? You know, Quig doesn't like doing things long, but it's going to be great all summer long.

And so we're in Ecclesiastes. If you want to turn to the passage that Joe read, it's Ecclesiastes chapter one. If you want to get your Bible there, I've probably mentioned to you guys in the past that when I was graduating from college, my closest friends and I formed a covenant with one another.

Right as we were leaving school, we made the decision to make a promise that we would be friends with each other for the rest of our lives, and we've done it. We write regularly — write letters throughout the year, and then every year, we get together for a reunion.

And these are my closest friends in all the world. And whenever we get together, we laugh a ton. There's I mean, you can imagine thirty years’ worth of inside jokes that just get richer. And we laugh, and it's incredibly fun, but there's also really substantive benefit to these friendships.

One thing that we — I don't think we were smart enough when we were 22 to know what would happen is that we have become for one another somewhat of a mirror. Because we're all in the same age, the same life stage, we're walking through, you know, different phases together.

When I mentioned a couple weeks ago in Ecclesiastes, we talked about death, and I said, all my friends' parents are dying. That was these guys I was talking about. These guys, and then Kelly's got a similar circle of friends. Their parents are dying too. And so we walk through life together.

There was a time when the thing that we all had in common was that our wives hated doing laundry. I remember specifically this year, we went to Wintergreen for our kinds of annual gathering. We stayed at some condo or whatever there.

And, as each guy kind of tell the story, the thing that we all had in common is that we all had young kids and our wives were just tired of the mundane, repetitive nature of parenting young children. Does that ring a bell for anybody else?

Has anybody ever walked through that? Right? I mean, it's like you could just do all the laundry, spin around in a circle, and bam, the laundry baskets are full again. Right? You can feed everybody, and three hours later, everybody's hungry again. Right? You can clean the house and blink, and it's a complete disaster.

I mean, it's over and over and over again. Right? And if you've never raised children, to be sure, your life has similar fruitless repetition. Right? You weed the garden, you go to bed, and in the night, an enemy sows seeds in the garden, and the weeds come right back up. Right? You clock in at work, you put up with all of the nonsense, you clock out, and then you go home, and tomorrow, you just do it all again.

I remember one day I was in State College and I was fertilizing my grass, and this old man was walking his dog. He just kind of walks by, he looks up and he sees me fertilizing the grass, and he just says, you keep doing that, you're just gonna have to cut it more. And he looks back down and just keeps walking. He's like, alright. Thank you for that. Right? Life is full of that stuff. It just really is.

And Ecclesiastes actually talks about this. So if you were here a couple of weeks ago when we kind of kicked off the introduction, I'll let you guys know that, essentially, what he's doing is the big argument is that life is filled with what's our word? Hevel. It's meaningless, fruitless, vain futility. Right? And he laments a handful of specific things that make life hell. Death, we talked about.

So this week, we're going to talk about the fact that life is filled with cyclicality. Next week, Quig's going to pick it up and talk about just random injustice — all these things.

Listen to what he says. This is laundry, okay? Ecclesiastes 1:2.

Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless. What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and sun sets and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the South and it turns to the north. Round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place where the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear is full of hearing. What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, look, this is something new? It was here already long ago. It was here before our time.

The Repetitiveness of Life

Right? Does that resonate? I know I already stole a bunch of the good examples of repetitious life, but you guys, what is it in your life? You go ahead and shout it out. What makes you feel like you're on a treadmill? Dishes. That looks like no progress. Dishes. Dishes. Don't you hate dishes? I do. Like, just buy paper plates and throw it out every meal. Right? You could do dishes forever.

What are your mundane repetitions? What is it? Clutter? Yeah. Cleaning up a room. Surfaces. I love bare surfaces. Right? If I could ever find one. Right? You know that feeling? You go into the family room and it's a mess. You go into the kitchen and it's a mess. You go into the sunroom and it's a mess. I just need one spot in the universe that’s clean. Right? What else? Taking out the trash? The dumpster? The trash to Over all these things, you just gotta do it. You gotta do it again. And then tomorrow, you know what there is? More trash. Right? This — what is it? Personal hygiene? Personal hygiene. Quig does not like to floss his teeth. Right? God bless him. Right? There are just so many things. You just gotta do it again. Why do you bother making your bed? You're just going to get, you know, a mess again.

Okay? So when this guy and the teacher of Ecclesiastes, he — this is the first one that he mentions. We did death last week because I think it's more important, but this is where he comes out of the gate. And he's going to basically observe two things about this that he really finds hell about this nature.

Number one, nothing is ever really satisfied. And number two, nothing is really new. Take a look at verse 8. This is where you get the satisfaction stuff.

All things are wearisome. More than one can say, the eye never has enough of seeing nor the ear, it's full of hearing.

What he's basically saying is that everything works sort of for a little while, but it's never really permanent. Nothing is ever once and for all. It's always, oh, that'll do for now. And then you're going to have to paint it again. Right? You paint the Golden Gate Bridge, and as soon as you're done, you’ve got to start painting again.

If you came to my house — in fact, the fellows know this, and they’re probably embarrassed for me — but if you come to my house, over our kitchen, we have these three pendant lights, and they're kind of pretty. They're blue. They're nice. But one of them is always out. Always. And if you came to my house a couple of times, you might think, hey, why don't you change that light bulb, you idiot? Well, I did change that light bulb. Okay? And you know what happened? It blew out again.

So I waited, like, after three days it pops, then I put a new one in, and after a week it blows, and after another few days, then it blows again. And finally, I caught on. I'm, like, it's just going to break again. Something's wrong with it. And so I just live with it. It’s just like missing a tooth — it's just there. Just out. There's a dead light bulb in my kitchen. Right? Until I can't stand it anymore, and then I put in a light bulb. And then it blows out. And so I alternate between — have you noticed this? Are you embarrassed for me about this? — like, it's either darkness or, or, or I'm wasting light bulbs. That's just the deal.

There are people in this world perhaps that would know what to do, like how to fix the wire. I don't know what it is, so I just live with it, but I hate it. Okay? You have things like this in your life that just don't get better. Right? Not only are there things that just stay and stay and stay, they're never really fixed, but there are things that just — they're just never new. It's just recombined leftovers. Look at that in verses nine and ten.

He says, what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. Look, is there anything of which one can say, look, this is something new? He's right. All we're doing is recombining the pieces over and over again.

One of the ways that we tend to state this, just kind of almost the idioms in our culture, is to say that, quote, history repeats itself. You've heard this phrase. Right? I actually looked up, like, who coined that phrase? Because we say that in that exact language, and it was actually a female English writer, he used the pen name George Eliot who coined the phrase in, like, in the mid 1800s in a book that she wrote. But that term, the history repeats itself, has been co-opted over and over again by lots of different people.

So Karl Marx, he said, history repeats itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce. George Bernard Shaw said, if history repeats itself and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience? That's a good point. And Mark Twain may or may not have said, the past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. And that's actually a pretty good point.

But in any case, mankind, we've just noticed — it's been going on for a long time. Like, yeah. You know what? Everything just keeps coming back around. It's the same thing all over again, and we're stuck in a cycle that repeats.

Now, I don't know if you've caught on already to this pattern. This is our, I think, our third week in Ecclesiastes. And what we're doing every week is we look at what he says, what the teacher of Ecclesiastes says, and it's essentially that life is meaningless. And then he drills in on some particular thing that makes life meaningless, and he's right.

Under the sun, in the physical universe, in a functionally atheistic world, he is right. There's all sorts of vanity chasing of the wind. But what we've seen every week so far, and we will see every week for the rest of the summer, is that Jesus upends the heaven. He enters this world, this broken world, and then he changes the game. He does it over and over and over again. You'll see it here. You'll see it again.

So let's take a look at this pattern here. Think about vain repetition for just a second. Okay? Probably, I think, the principle example of vain repetition in the entire Old Testament is the sacrificial system. Just think about how this thing worked out. There was a constant recurrent killing of sheep and goats and bulls day after day, year after year.

The book of Hebrews in particular really drills down on this, and it makes a point of the heaven-like nature of the sacrificial system. Listen to this. Tell me this doesn't remind you of Ecclesiastes 1.

Unlike the other priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, then for the sins of the people. He was nine. Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again the way the high priest enters the most holy place every year with blood that's not his own. By the way, do you know why they had to do it again and again according to Hebrews? Because it didn't work. Right?

Look at Hebrews 10. The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming, not the realities themselves. For this reason, it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. Otherwise, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all and would have no longer felt guilty for their sins. But these sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins. It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Then skip down to verse 11.

Day after day, every priest stands and performs his religious duties. Again and again, he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.

Yes. That is exactly what Ecclesiastes is talking about. You do it. You do it. You do it. You do it, but it doesn't ever work. Bulls and goats cannot cleanse you. It would never work. They're just paying the interest on a loan, but they never get to the principal. They're just deferring payment. They didn't solve the problem.

You guys, every one of those passages in Hebrews, it just happens throughout Hebrews — he's driven this point home. Every one of those is a setup for the thing that does work, for the thing that can work, for the only thing that actually has worked.

Listen to them again, but this time I’ll add their concluding context. Hebrews 7:

Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins and then for the sins of the people, because, here it is, he sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.

Can you hear that phrase probably in the voice of Quig or Brian? Because these two say this constantly every time we come to the table. Right? You're going to hear Brian say it today. He offered this sacrifice once and for all.

In Hebrews 9:

Nor did Jesus enter heaven to offer himself again and again the way the high priest enters the most holy place every year with blood that is not his own. Otherwise, Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world, but he doesn't. Instead, he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.

What bulls and goats cannot do, Jesus does.

In Hebrews 10:

Day after day, every priest stands and performs his religious duties. Again and again, he offers the same sacrifice, which can never take away sins.

Here it is.

But when this priest had offered for all time, one sacrifice for sins, he sat down because the work was completed.

He sat down with the right hand of God. And since that time, he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool.

Because the most important act that happened all through the centuries of that sacrificial system was the sacrifice. Those sacrifices did keep the wrath of God at bay, but only barely. And they never really worked. And so it was repeated endlessly until Jesus finally came and offered himself as a sacrifice once and for all.

Because what he did actually worked, your sin has been permanently and irrevocably atoned. Praise his name. He is the great interrupter of the endless cycle, and that was the great interruption.

The Newness in Christ

And what about the lament that there's nothing new under the sun? That's also true. It is. Everything's just a remix. But you guys, did you know? Have you ever noticed that newness is Jesus' specialty?

Have you ever noticed the number of times throughout the New Testament that the adjective "new" describes the work of Christ? Just think through your mind. What has he done? Here’s what he's done:

When the people who heard him speak, do you remember their response? It says that they were amazed because he came with a new teaching, one with authority. And he gave a new command that we would love one another. And he brought a new covenant in his blood, which is poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sin. And his message was about new life. And in his mercy, he's given us new birth into a living hope. And in him, we have been released from the law so that we can serve in the new way of the Spirit as we enter the new and living way he opened for us through the curtain that is his body. And if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. He's a new creation. The old is gone, and the new has come.

And he is making in himself out of the warring factions of humanity one new man. And he has made it possible for us to put on the new self, which is being renewed in the knowledge and image of his creator.

As we look forward to new heavens and a new earth, we will, where we will each get a new name and sing a new song, and where Jesus will sit enthroned as king over the cosmos and declare, I am making everything new.

Application

You guys, Jesus upends the heaven. You are not imagining the apparent meaninglessness in this world, the vain repetition of your life. It's the same stupid thing over and over. It doesn't really work. It doesn't really satisfy. Nothing is truly new under the sun. But Jesus fixes it all. He flips it all.

In Christ, you guys, there is and there will be real satisfaction and real newness. This is what he does.

In the passage that Brian read, think about this. This woman, she bled every day. Every day, it's the same thing day after day after day. Every doctor's got some bogus solution that doesn't work. Maybe it works for three days, but it doesn't actually work. And then Jesus shows up and she just touches the hem of his robe, and there is newness. There's healing. It actually worked.

You guys, this is what he does. What we have seen and what we're going to continue to see throughout the summer is every lament in the book of Ecclesiastes. You guys, they're all resolved in Christ. He has come to solve the deepest problem. Death? He defeated death. Pointless repetition? He solved that.

I don't know where Quig's going to go next week, but somehow Jesus is going to have to enter into injustice. I don't know. Good luck making that work. Right? Like, you guys, he fixes it all. He flips it all.

In Christ, it is almost as if, when the book of Ecclesiastes was being written, it wasn't just being written by some human being, but it was being written by the Spirit of God who foresaw — like, point by point — what Christ would do, what he would fix when he came.

It is uncanny. He is the fulfillment of every promise. He is the solution to every problem. He is all that we need in all ways at all times.

Today, right now, to be sure, some of you are struggling. There is a rut that has been worn in your life by the same stupid thing over and over. If there's something you want to process with him, these rails are open for you to come alone, spend time with Jesus, and ask his intervention. Maybe to give you grace in it for as long as he wills it to persist, or maybe to once and for all take it away.

But whether he does right now or does so later, we are looking forward to the day that he says and he will keep the promise: behold, I am making everything new.

Closing Prayer

At the Straight Real Estate Friends, we pray you, whatever burdens you carry, and it would be our pleasure if we can help you live in this world marked by heaven with an eye to the one who solves all things. What a joy it would be.

Lord Jesus, we love you. We lift you up. How could one man be so good at so many things? How could you fulfill every picture, every promise, solve every problem, resolve every tension? Who are you? We bow before you. We worship you. We honor you.

Would you give us the grace to keep our eyes fixed on you while we live in a world filled with heaven? That we would worship you and honor you, delight in you. Lord, come soon. We love you. Amen.