The Bible says “man in his best state is altogether vanity,” and the book of Ecclesiastes is written specifically for the intent of fully examining this issue.

Ecclesiastes, written by Solomon, son of David, will, in fact, be used by the nation Israel in the ‘last days’ to educate the believing remnant about the satanic attack against them and the things they shouldn’t believe.

While Solomon wrote this book as Jerusalem’s king, he identifies his work in the first line as being “the words of the Preacher.”

As my pastor, Richard Jordan, explains, “He’s going to proclaim a message for his people and that’s why he’s called the preacher. The word ‘ecclesiastes’ is the Latin form of the Greek word for ‘preacher,’ and he’s got a message for Israel.

“Now, we know from the last few verses of the book he already came to his conclusion before he wrote the book, but he’s going to go back and talk about how he came to this conclusion, which is, ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’

“Vanity, as someone once defined it, is ‘emptiness that leads to disappointing misery,’ and, boy, you can’t read the book of Ecclesiastes without seeing that as true in Solomon’s life.

“Solomon was a man who came to the conclusions he came to through personal, thorough examination. He didn’t come to these things through just reading books. This book is the last word on human philosophy because it’s a book written by a guy who had thoroughly and completely examined all of the positions of philosophical thinking, examined them, evaluated them and dismissed them. Every major philosophy that’s been developed from the time of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato finds its origins of the book of Ecclesiastes.

“Solomon was in his day the wisest man on the earth. You remember how he got that way? God says He gave him that wisdom. And he was this God-made wise man. He was wise in every area of life, not just spiritual things.

“He was wise politically; take the story about the two women with the baby—I mean you’d have never thought about doing it that way, would you? He was a wise man governmentally, he was a great business leader. . . he’ll tell you about some of this in this book.

“He had one point in which he wasn’t so wise—he had 1,000 wives—but you’d get a little experience doing that. Obviously he had to be wealthy—in his day, or any day, if you’re going to have multiple families like that you have to have the ability to provide for them.

“He was a man of great intellectual prowess: political prowess, human prowess, fleshly prowess, etc., and he wrote a book about all of it.

“In verse 1:3, he writes, ‘What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?’ That’s what he’s looking for. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle—in the whole evaluation process in life, the first question they had to come up with is, ‘What are we looking for?’

“You know what they decided they were looking for? They were looking for good. ‘What’s the good, what’s the profit in life?’ I wonder where they got that from? Well, you just read it in verse 1:3. The wisest man who ever lived said when you evaluate life you need to look for the profit. ‘What’s the good thing in life, what’s the value in life?’

“Solomon says, ‘I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven,’ and when he did that, he had the ability to do it pedal to the metal.

“In verse 2:10, he says ‘whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy.’ Now there’s not a philosopher who ever lived on the face of the earth who could say that! They all had restrictions.

“Socrates, for example, was a homosexual. One of the great quotes they use of him is him going to a party and he writes in his journal about having been able to see the underwear of a young boy he was trying to seduce and how, to quote Socrates, ‘It lit the flame in me.’ You read that and you think, ‘Maybe I don’t want my kids reading this kind of stuff.’ Understand, he’s the guy everybody thinks is the one who ought to tell you what the good in life is!

“Solomon said, ‘I didn’t have any restraints; I didn’t have anybody telling me I couldn’t do something.’ Socrates had to go hide that stuff; put it behind the door. He couldn’t do it out in public because it wasn’t exactly the public kind of thing. Solomon said, ‘I had nothing that I wanted to do that I didn’t do to the fullest. My heart rejoiced in all my labor.’

“From Chapter 2:1 (‘I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity’) we know Solomon would go out and just party.

“Solomon’s saying, ‘You want to party; you never met a party animal like me! You think you partied. I been there. I put the parties on! I did all that. But you know what I found out at the end of the day? I still had that same emptiness down inside that I was trying to get rid of. I said of laughter it is mad.’

“ ‘I went out and said, ‘Hey, let’s go to the comedy club. Let’s see the funny side of life. Let’s don’t be serious all of the time. Let’s have some fun.’ But he said when it was all over, ‘I still had that same problem.’ ”

“Verse 2:3 says, ‘I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life.’

“What he’s saying there is, ‘I went out and did these things but I was watching what was going on while I was doing it.’ He’s literally making notes on what’s happening. He said, ‘I’m going out here doing this stuff and I’m looking at what’s really going on.’

“Most people who do those things don’t pay any attention to what’s going on. Solomon, though, says, ‘I’ve evaluated it. And to lay hold of folly, ’til I might see what was the good of the sons of men, which they should do under the heavens all the days of their life.’

“He didn’t find any good so he said, ‘Okay, I’ll quit the folly, and the dissipation, and the tearing myself down.’

“He writes, ‘I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards.’ He’s saying, ‘Hey, I’ll get busy and go to work.’

“The passage in Chapter 2 goes on, ‘I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me: I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces: I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts. So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me.”

“He’s saying, ‘Hey, J Lo came and sang for me, and Brittany was trying to get on my docket, and Ernest Tubbs wanted to come and play. P. Diddy even tried to show up. Whatever and whoever they were, I got ’em. I had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing for me.’

“He said, ‘I had them all. I was at the point where they just wanted to come and be with me. I had money running out my ears. The kings and the queens of the earth were coming to my door and whatsoever my eyes desired, I got it all.’

“Now, look down at what he says the result is. Starting in verse 15, he writes, ‘Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool. Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.’

“How does he die? As the fool. You know what he saw when he looked at the vanity of human wisdom? He wrote the proverb, ‘The rich and the poor, rags and riches walk together.’ You know why they all walk together? There’s a hole in the ground and they all wind up there.

“And every time he’d go through one of these things, he’d say, ‘You know, there’s really not any difference; if it’s human labor, the worker’s not really any better off than the shirker because they all wind up in a hole in the ground.’ Well, you name what it is? Is it fame? It’s brief, it doesn’t last, it’s uncertain. You’re soon forgotten and then there’s a hole in the ground and they die.”

In Chapter 2:24, in which Solomon writes, “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour,” he is addressing the hedonists.

From verses like 2:25 (“For who can eat, or who else can hasten hereunto, more than I?”), it shows Solomon sort of invented egotism, explains Jordan. Pragmatism is on display in the very next verse: “For God giveth to a man that is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy: but to the sinner he giveth travail, to gather and to heap up, that he may give to him that is good before God. This also is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

Verse 3:11 offers a classic statement on agnosticism. 3:14 is a classic statement on theism. In 3:18 is naturalism. Verse 3:19 is positivism. With 3:20, the first part is pantheism and the last part is nihilism.

“He’s got them all named; all registered right down through there,” says Jordan. “In 5:2 there’s deism. 7:3 is stoicism. In chapter 7:16-17 there’s Aristotle’s Golden Mean. Aristotle is one of the most famous people in Western civilization and he took those two verses and developed what he called the Golden Mean; the good in life, the pleasure in life. The Golden Mean says the way to have pleasure is to avoid the excesses of the extremes and stay in the middle, and he got that idea from Solomon.

“You want any of the philosophies, Solomon’s got them: stoicism, empiricism, egotism, pragmatism, pantheism, nihilism, naturalism, positivism, theism, agnosticism, deism, paganism, fascism, capitalism, socialism. . . That’s just a list I made sitting in my office two weeks ago, just reading through Ecclesiastes and writing the things down. The philosophies that make up history come out of this book and I’m saying all this to you because I want you to see the conclusion. By the way, there are 10 vanities he lists in the book and every one of them comes to the same conclusion.

“Each one of those philosophies in Job, whether it was Eliphaz with his realism or Bildad with his pragmatism or Zophar with his idealism, you find it in Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes 1 and 2 he uses realism, in 3-5 he uses pragmatism, and in 6-8 he uses idealism, and he works through these things under the same categories back in the Book of Job. Why do you think Solomon would have done that? He knew the book of Job. He knew how to figure out and categorize what he needed to study out there. He came to a conclusion.

“He does it several times in the book, but this is the one conclusion (in Ecc. 9:1) I wanted you to look at: ‘For all this I considered in my heart even to declare all this, that the righteous, and the wise, and their works, are in the hand of God: no man knoweth either love or hatred by all that is before them.’

“You know what the one thing in the passage is that comes to all men no matter who they are; big shot or little shot? Whatever you did, you couldn’t put off death.

“Solomon writes in chapter 12:13-14, ‘Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.’

“You can save yourself from wasting a lot of your life. . . Everything you’re going to learn as you study philosophy from the guy who already examined it, evaluated it and came to a conclusion, is just that: ‘Fear God and keep His commandments for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every work into judgment with every secret thing whether it be good or evil.’

“You know what Solomon said? ‘You better not make that mistake of (the Gentiles) in Romans 1:21 where you don’t glorify God as God and neither are you thankful but you become vain in your own imaginations and your foolish heart’s darkened.

“Solomon’s saying, ‘You know what? Been there, done that, it don’t work. There are no answers to the questions of life.’ Now, sometimes you and I get so petty with our lives that the only questions we see are the ones we’ve got to face tomorrow. The washing machine’s leaking. . .

“We get caught up in those little things, but when you back up a little and catch your breath, and you try to look for, ‘How do I get out from under all this stuff? Isn’t there something more?’ there are no answers out there for that.

“You know the only answer? The only answer is, ‘The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life.’ The only answer for death is from women coming to an empty tomb one morning and an angel saying, ‘He’s not here for He’s risen.’ There isn’t any other answer beyond that.

“I was watching on C-Span the other day Brian Lamb in a replayed interview with Milton Friedman, the economist who just died. He asked him, ‘Well, how you doing?’ and Friedman’s wife, Rose, spoke up and said, ‘We’re getting old.’ And you know what, they put him in a box this week. There it is.”

“Socrates was supposed to be the originator of modern philosophy and he said the unexamined life is not worth living. Well, that’s as good as far as it goes but then he didn’t know how to examine life. He’s the guy who came up with the brilliant statement, ‘The only thing I know for sure is that I don’t know anything for sure.’ Okay, well you’re the guy wanting to teach me. You take your car to the mechanic and the only thing he knows for sure is that he doesn’t know what the problem is.

“There’s not any real answer for finding meaning and purpose in life outside of Jesus Christ. You know it’s Paul who tells you, ‘For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.’ That’s the answer.

“It’s not money, not partying, not fame, not having a good time. It’s not having the accolades of the world and all of the political, and financial, and religious and social world at your feet. Solomon had all that and said it’s just nothing.

Go to I Corinthians and Paul’s warning you, ‘For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.’ In I Cor. 1:9 he says, ‘For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.’

“How’s he going to do that? Paul says, ‘It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.’ The world looks at you and says the idea that a dead Jew on a Cross could make a difference is foolishness. That would be true if that dead Jew hadn’t been God.

“When He said, ‘I’m the truth,’ He’s not saying two and two equals four and not three or five. Truth is more than just being right; truth is the ultimate source of all reality. What’s really real in life? That’s what Solomon was getting after: What’s the good, what’s the profit, what really makes life live? Jesus said, ‘I’m the way for you to go because I’m the truth. I’m the ultimate source of all reality.’

“You know, Buddha would have rolled over in his grave today if anybody thought he said that. Mohammed wouldn’t even have dared written something like that about himself. Confucius would have scratched his head and thought you fell out of a tree on yours if you said that about him. Jesus Christ said, ‘I’m the source of all reality. The real world wouldn’t even exist without me. Now He’s either a mad man, or a bad man, or He’s the God-man, but He can’t be all of those.

“People say, ‘Well, He’s a good religious teacher.’ No, no, He’s either a mad man or a bad man; He’s not a good religious teacher. He either is who He said He was or He’s out of His gourd. ‘I’m the truth.’ How do you know? ‘Because I’m the life.’ You see, everything about the gospel; everything about Christ dying for your sins; everything about Him giving you His life through His resurrection, is based upon the historically demonstratable fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“I sat with a young lady recently who just graduated from a university in her home state and while she was there, she said she lost her faith. She said, ‘I don’t understand how you can say the Bible’s right and everybody else is wrong. I just don’t see it. They’ve got all these arguments.’

“What I’ve been trying to say to you, they’ve got arguments, they just aren’t good ones. They’re wrong. And I said to this young woman, ‘Can I tell you about the time I thought about that same thing.’ I said, ‘You know, the one thing you haven’t examined, that if you will examine it, it will make a difference in your life? And that’s the historical evidence for the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, because our faith doesn’t rest on the coffin lid of our founder.’

“Jesus Christ is not the pathetic echo from the bygone past who’s with us in our thinking and in our spirit. He’s an ever-living, everlasting Saviour and that empty tomb proves it and, folks, if He can come out of that tomb. . .just the fact that He did, you can prove it in a court of law better than I can prove you’re sitting here this morning. If He did, then when He said, ‘I’m the truth,’ you can believe it. And when He said, ‘Thy Word is truth,’ you can believe that because He knows something about it, and so you can trust Him to be ‘the way.’ ”