The Book of Ecclesiastes is a unique book in the Bible that is delighted and confused Christians throughout the years.

Where scripture relies on ancient wisdom as core to understanding God's world, Ecclesiastes

bases its wisdom off of experimentation.

There's no other book like it where you have this first person voice who's telling you about

a lifetimes worth of experiment.

The book stages a big experiment where I tried this and I went and learned about this and then here's

what I concluded.

The conclusion of Ecclesiastes is that life is heaven, heaven, heaven, everything is heaven.

And while modern translations typically translate that Hebrew word into the word meaningless,

in Hebrew it's literally the word for smoke or vapor.

Smoke is real, like when you see it a cloud of smoke you look at it and go oh that's a thing.

Look at it. I can see it, I can point at it but smoke has this unique quality that when I

reach out my hands to grab onto it there's nothing there.

This metaphor that life is like smoke is lost in the translation that life is meaningless.

Because what the teacher isn't saying is I know all the answers and I declare to you that life

is meaningless. What he's saying is I've discovered there's a glitch in the system and things that

I thought were certain and true aren't always certain and true.

Hevel, hevel, everything is hevel.

He uses the word 38 times in this short 12 chapter book.

Michael Fox, my doctoral advisor, he thought the best English word to capture it is absurd.

Or I've come to prefer the word enigma or paradox.

The wisdom of Ecclesiastes. The second book in our Wisdom series. Let's go.

...