Is Life Meaningless? | The Writings | Ecclesiastes 1

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study

Ten Minute Bible Talks

Mental Health, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality, Health & Fitness, Christianity

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Everything is meaningless." The book of Ecclesiastes begins in such a way that you might question why it's in your Bible. Is life truly meaningless? In today's episode, Jensen shares how the context and genre of Ecclesiastes 1 helps us understand it's place in God's Word and points us to Jesus. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Ecclesiastes 1

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.
0:10.8	I'm Jensen Holt McNair. I grew up in the church my whole life, but it wasn't
0:17.0	until around middle school that I really started to understand and study the Bible on my own.
0:21.2	And despite having grown up in the church, I can still vividly
0:25.2	remember the night that I turned to a book in the Bible, started reading, and about how to panic attack.
0:31.4	That book was Ecclesiasties. You see, having grown up in the church, I knew
0:35.8	the Bible was true, the infallible word of God. I knew that God had given his purpose. I knew that the way
0:42.0	I lived my life mattered to God. And so you can
0:44.7	imagine my shock when I cracked open Ecclesiasties one day and read
0:48.0	meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher, utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless. And so began my first
0:56.2	existential crisis. Kind of joking, kind of not. You see, Ecclesiasties had, shockingly, never been the theme for VBS. I'm truly not sure if I had ever read it before in my life.
1:08.8	So when I read that verse with no context or understanding of wisdom literature, poetry, or literary perspective, I was scared.
1:17.2	I thought that this might be proof of inconsistency in the Bible, proof that God was just messing with us, lying to us, when really everything
1:25.5	is meaningless?
1:27.5	Now, lucky for me, I had a friend who had been studying the Bible a lot longer than me. I called him in a panic and he called me down,
1:34.7	whoa, whoa, what verse are you reading? And the second I said Ecclesiasties, he laughed. Oh, yeah, that explains it. And then he helped me understand a fundamental part of studying the Bible
1:46.1	that I didn't know about. Yes, all of scripture is true, inspired by God, infallible, But the word of God is also a book, written by real people
1:56.4	with real objectives and then use different kinds of literary styles to convey truth to their reader.
2:02.7	And so when you study scripture,
2:04.9	when you dive in, you need to understand
2:07.2	the context of what you're reading
2:08.9	before you ever read a verse.
	...

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