John Bytheway:               00:01                   Welcome to part two with Dr. Adam Miller in the book of Psalms and Ecclesiastes.

Dr. Adam Miller:              00:07                   Let me offer you a little summary of what I see going on here in Proverbs, and then we’ll turn left into Ecclesiastes. We don’t want to make people wait too long for that. They’ve been on pins and needles, I suspect. Right?

John Bytheway:               00:20                   They’re just dying. Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller:              00:24                   We’ve seen, as I’ve emphasized, that according to Proverbs, happiness doesn’t depend on getting something. It’s allure, it’s a false path, but it depends instead on knowing something. It depends on wisdom, it depends on seeing the truth, on not falling from the self-deception that follows when we quite naturally but wrongly try to interpret reality in light of our desires, expecting reality to match up with and satisfy our desires. That’s how a child thinks, but it’s ignorant and it’s unserious and it’s not sober and it’s not fearful. Where faith is fear of the Lord, because faith requires us to steer into what we are afraid to see. It requires us to steer into what we don’t want to see and then do what Jesus does, which is to sacrifice what we are afraid to sacrifice. Turns out that in some sense, the Lord is terrifying because the Lord is on the side of reality.

                                           01:29                   The Lord is on the side of sacrifice. But seeing what’s real, accepting reality, then sacrificing what must be sacrificed is in fact the only place to find joy because of the way that is the only way to express love. Fear of the Lord, get to steer into that fear, all the things that we’re afraid to see and feel and recognize and sacrifice, that left turn will get you to where you actually wanted to go.

Hank Smith:                      02:03                   Yeah, so it seems ironic that someone who loves being duped never really experiences love.

Dr. Adam Miller:              02:10                   Yeah, it’s a way of avoiding what’s actually at stake in love. To love being duped is to love the idea of being loved, but not to love loving, which is always the kind of trap we fall into as human beings. As you reminded us, Hank, that’s what it means to think that love is a reward rather than a law, to think that it’s something that you could get rather than something that you need to do and join and participate in.

John Bytheway:               02:39                   When I tried studying Jesus’ parable of the sower years ago and I thought, “Wow, there’s so much you can learn from the four types of soil.” And I saw this in Proverbs and I thought, “I wonder if this was in the Savior’s mind.” But look at Proverbs 24, start of verse 30, “I went by the field of the slothful and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding,” a little couplet there. “Lo, it was all grown over with thorns and nettles had covered the face thereof and the stonewall thereof was broken down.” And then you get, “Then I saw and considered it well. I looked upon it and received instruction” or maybe even reproof.

                                           03:22                   Because Jesus is like, Are you overgrown in your soil? Are you rocky? Are you deep? I looked and I went, Huh. So I thought that sounds like somebody learned from looking at a garden and it was useful for maybe interpreting where the parable of the four types of soil came from. What you said earlier, Adam, is that look at these scriptures feeding into other places in the standard works. Here, Old Testament, New Testament maybe. Do you guys see that in there maybe?

Hank Smith:                      03:55                   Yeah, I like that. It’s almost as if Jesus read that and said, I’ll try that.

John Bytheway:               03:59                   Yeah, I can do that.

Hank Smith:                      04:01                   I’m going to go look at a garden and see what I can learn.

John Bytheway:               04:04                   I received instruction by looking at this messed up garden and I thought, huh.

Dr. Adam Miller:              04:09                   I think that’s very much the case. Jesus’ parables come in all different shapes and sizes, some of which are very short, like two-liners as if they were proverbs themselves. Some of them are much longer sprawling narratives. But the basic building blocks for all those parables are already here in the Old Testament. To be able to see and feel the way that Jesus is picking up and repurposing and transforming the tradition that he’s inherited, the tradition of scripture that he’s inherited and has internalized, that adds a lot of depth and power to the parables when you can make those connections.

John Bytheway:               04:50                   Yeah. And when Jesus read the scriptures, what was he reading? Reading this stuff maybe.

Dr. Adam Miller:              04:56                   Yeah, it was his native language, essentially, right? When Jesus thought about God, these were his raw materials for thinking about God. All right. Ecclesiastes?

Hank Smith:                      05:06                   Okay. I am ready.

Dr. Adam Miller:              05:09                   Ready or not?

Hank Smith:                      05:10                   I’m ready to turn left to go right.

Dr. Adam Miller:              05:13                   All right, so Ecclesiastes, one of our four wisdom books, also interested in the nature of wisdom. In some ways, the book of Proverbs, if going back all the way to the 10th century is probably some of our oldest material, literarily speaking in the Old Testament. Where Ecclesiastes almost certainly comes on the opposite end. It’s probably composed as one of the latest of the books that makes it into our Bible. Third or fourth century is a common estimation, third or fourth century before Jesus is born. So probably some of the latest material that had a chance to see and internalize and respond to a lot of the tradition that had already begun to accrete and gather. So I think it’s especially helpful then to see Ecclesiastes, not as a kind of outlier, but as in active conversation with the rest of the biblical cannon. It’s ascribed to a solomonic-like figure, but the speaker goes only by the name of the preacher or the teacher or something like that and is never explicitly identified as Solomon himself.

                                           06:30                   Though certainly a solomonic type figure the preacher is meant to be. That’ll figure into the story that the preacher tells us about his own experience. It’s pretty short, just 12 chapters. Those chapters are themselves pretty brief, breaks it down into four basic sections. You get the very famous prologue in chapter one, you get the kind of epilogue in chapter 12. The remainder of chapter one through chapter six, you get the preacher’s account of his search for meaning and satisfaction with negative results reported on either front. Then you get some practical advice in chapters seven through 11 in light of what he thinks he’s discovered about the nature of the world. So if I were to offer a kind of a general description of what I think the preacher is offering to us in Ecclesiastes is we might contrast Ecclesiastes here with something like the book of Lamentations, where what you get in the Book of Lamentations is after the Kingdom of Judah has been thrust into exile by the Babylonians and they’ve lost everything, you get in Lamentations a series of poems that just capture the utter despair experienced by these people having lost everything that they ever thought was worth keeping.

                                           08:03                   Lamentations is heart-rending in that respect to read, to feel with them the despair that comes with having lost everything. Ecclesiastes is also a cry of despair, but it’s a cry of despair that comes not from having lost everything, but a cry of despair that follows from having won everything. It’s a kind of cry of despair that follows the preacher having succeeded in every possible way, won every possible prize, gotten everything he ever thought he wanted, and then still not finding what he was looking for. It’s a kind of cry of despair from the opposite end of the spectrum of human experience, not from having lost everything, but from having gotten everything. And it still didn’t work according to the preacher.

Hank Smith:                      08:57                   I remember one celebrity saying, “I wish everyone could be rich and famous to find out how meaningless it is.”

Dr. Adam Miller:              09:05                   Yeah, that’s exactly the book of Ecclesiastes. You and I tend to suffer from the fact that unsuccessful as we are, we are able to maintain the fantasy that if we had gotten what we wanted, we would be happy. But the preacher is here to report that even if you got everything you wanted, you would still be sad. Because that’s no road to happiness. Happiness doesn’t work like that. It comes through sacrifice, comes through love and selfless service, and you can’t get there through wealth and success and power no matter how much of it you have. In fact, you’ll even be stripped of the one thing, the one consolation that we have from not having succeeded and being able to pretend that we would have been happy had we got it. They don’t even have that, the people who are rich and famous. They can’t even pretend.

Hank Smith:                      09:56                   I’ve read some of the social research on money and when you take someone out of poverty, that does have an impact when they can get medicine and they can have somewhere to live. But there does reach a point and no one really wants to accept it where more money does not equal any more happiness, any more satisfaction.

John Bytheway:               10:18                   And what you obtain, you have to maintain and suddenly you’ve got a lot more. Hank, I’ve told you about this book I heard about called Money for Nothing, about people who won the lottery. It was like, “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.” Somebody said, I spend my days with lawyers and lawsuits because he made some bad investments and I thought, wow, isn’t that interesting? Fiddler on the Roof when his future son-in-law said riches are God’s curse and he said, “May God smite me with it and may I never recover.” Remember?

Hank Smith:                      10:52                   I think I quoted some of those studies. I was speaking once and a woman raised her hand and said, “Those people just don’t know where to shop.” Right. If I had that, I would be happy.

Dr. Adam Miller:              11:07                   Ecclesiastes, I find it spiritually valuable because I think of it as a sort of exorcism. It performs exorcism for us. I’ve often felt like all my life that I’ve been haunted by the ghost of a special Adam who follows me everywhere and shadows me with the promise that if I could only work hard enough or be smart enough or be handsome enough or be spiritual enough or whatever, special Adam is perfect Adam who would get what he wanted and deserved getting it. If I could only be special Adam, then I would be happy.

John Bytheway:               11:53                   I’m sorry I’m laughing. It just sounds familiar. It’s, I think I have a special John.

Dr. Adam Miller:              11:58                   Have you met special John?

John Bytheway:               12:00                   He’s a dupe, but I follow him sometimes. Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller:              12:04                   Exactly. The special Adam is what the dupe loves being duped by. The idea that there’s some version of me out there that could or should get what they wanted and deserve getting it, that they would be happy as a result.

Hank Smith:                      12:18                   It’s a siren. It’s a, “Come over here. You will be happy.”

Dr. Adam Miller:              12:23                   Yeah, and that’s, special Adam is not the thing that the gospel promises me to live up to. Special Adam is the thing that the gospel is trying to free me from. The whole idea that I should be special in that way, get what I wanted and be loved and be more important than other people or whatever. And Ecclesiastes performs a kind of exorcism performed here by the preacher as he says, “No, look, here’s the ghost of special Adam. He’s a sham and he’s a lie. It can’t work and it won’t work. And you can’t get there that way. Here’s why.” I’ve always found it very powerful and very liberating, very salutary in that respect. I’ve always been grateful for Ecclesiastes.

Hank Smith:                      13:10                   It just seems very liberating.

Dr. Adam Miller:              13:12                   To put special John to bed and to just go about the business of living your life and caring for other people. That’s the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s the kind of freedom and joy that it promises. You have to cut that guy loose. You can’t cling to that duping fantasy. You have to let him go.

John Bytheway:               13:32                   Those first 11 verses of Ecclesiastes 2, I built this, I built this, and all was vanity. It was nothing. No point. No profit under the sun, I mean.

Dr. Adam Miller:              13:47                   You might also think about Ecclesiastes as something like medicine. It’s hard medicine that I might need to take in order to feel much better.

John Bytheway:               13:56                   To get it.

Dr. Adam Miller:              13:57                   Ecclesiastes is not food. You can’t live on Ecclesiastes. But especially if you’re a certain kind of person who is attached to the idea of your being someone special, which afflicts some of us more than others, then Ecclesiastes could be just the kind of medicine that you need in order to be well enough to eat the real food that the gospel offers. You might need Ecclesiastes, but you’ll want to keep it in conversation with Jesus Christ and his teachings. I’ve often thought, for instance, that the book of Ecclesiastes is an essential pairing with the book of Romans, that if you want to understand what Paul means by grace and the grace of God and how that results in our salvation by way of Jesus Christ, you read Romans against the backdrop of Ecclesiastes and you see the absolute vanity of attempting to save yourself and be someone special, then you pair that with the corresponding offer of adjoining Christ in the work of sacrificing all things to find love and grace. They’re two sides of the same coin, Ecclesiastes and Romans, but you need both sides of the coin, or at least most of us need the Ecclesiastes side in addition to the Romans side.

Hank Smith:                      15:18                   I’ve read your Grace is Not God’s Backup Plan. That was a paraphrase of Romans, was it not?

Dr. Adam Miller:              15:24                   I’ve got a couple of these little paraphrases. One is that paraphrase of Romans, that grace is not God’s backup plan. One is my paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, which is called nothing new under the sun. Or I have a third little paraphrase like that, that’s a paraphrase of the Song of Songs, of the Song of Solomon. If people want kind of a way into the song of Solomon, they might try that too.

Hank Smith:                      15:49                   And those were written by Adam, not special Adam, right?

Dr. Adam Miller:              15:53                   Well, special Adam is always lurking. He’d like to get special credit for doing these things.

John Bytheway:               15:58                   Brought to you by special Adam. Special Adam.

Dr. Adam Miller:              16:02                   I didn’t even actually write those books. They’re just paraphrases. Yeah. Let’s take a look at chapter one verse two, Ecclesiastes.

John Bytheway:               16:10                   There it is again.

Dr. Adam Miller:              16:12                   You just get the superscription in verse one, the words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, hints at a kind of Solomon-like figure here without coming right out and claiming that it’s Solomon himself. But the persona is Solomon-like, and the persona refers to himself here as the preacher. He’s going to preach a sermon here to us whether we want to hear it or not about the nature of reality. And the nature of it, as the King James has it, is vanity of vanities saith the preacher, vanity of vanities. All is vanity. Or as the New English translation has it, futile, futile laments the teacher. Absolutely futile. Everything is futile. Or as the NIV has it, meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. Or as Alter has it, merest breath. All is mere breath. The word here in Hebrew that gets translated in this whole variety of ways is the word hevel, which the root meaning is something like breath, as Alter gives it here.

                                           17:29                   It’s a word used to describe a kind of insubstantial mist. It’s a word that’s used to describe not breath when you inhale, but breath when you exhale, the kind of waste carbon dioxide that comes out when you exhale, that’s hevel. That’s what we’re talking about here. This is what life is according to the preacher. Everything that’s involved in the world, as you and I know it, is in some sense this insubstantial vapor that’s a waste product of life that you expel when you exhale your breath. You can’t keep it, you can’t hold it. It’s never going to satisfy you. It’s never going to be what you want. It will always slip through your fingers. That’s the nature of life, the preacher says.

Hank Smith:                      18:27                   Such a fun way to start.

Dr. Adam Miller:              18:29                   Can you imagine someone up bearing, someone standing up on the fast Sunday and just bearing their testimony? “I know that life is meaningless and futile and everything that we do is vain and mere breath.” But in some ways that should be a really important part of our testimonies. It’s hard or maybe even impossible to have real hope in Christ, as Paul puts it, unless we’ve first become hopeless about everything else. We have to put the whole of our heart and mind into our trust that we place in God and stop reserving parts of it or some of it or even the bulk of it for things other than God, hoping that they might be able to make us happy with or without God’s intervention, hoping that they might be able to rescue us and satisfy our desires. But at the end of the day, nothing can. The only possible route to happiness is to surrender those desires and love and serve the world as it is the way that God does. Those are the opening lines. Memorable. All timers.

Hank Smith:                      19:40                   That’ll get your attention at least, right?

Dr. Adam Miller:              19:42                   Vanity’s not a bad translation. You do get the sense, as John noted earlier, of vanity in the sense of a mirror, in the sense that the whole thing is just a hall of mirrors. It’s just a game of reflections without any real substance in the sense of a mirror, but also vanity in the sense of things just being futile, like you did that in vain or you took God’s name in vain, that sense of vanity as well, where you did it without real, it didn’t have any real meaning or substance or intention behind it. All those things combining here in that one same little word, which is the kind of key word at the heart of the whole of Ecclesiastes. Here’s what we get in verses 3 through 11 then in this opening section after that initial cry of despair. The preacher says, What benefit do people get from all the effort which they expend on earth?

                                           20:43                   A generation comes and a generation goes, but the earth remains the same through the ages. The sun rises and the sun sets. It hurries away to the place from which it rises again. The wind goes to the south and circles around to the north. Round and round, the wind goes. And on its rounds it returns. All the streams flow into the sea, but the sea is never full and to the place where the streams flow, there they will flow again. All this monotony is tiresome. No one can bear to describe it. The eye is never satisfied with seeing nor is the ear ever content with hearing what exists now is what will be, what has been done is what will be done. There is nothing truly new on the earth. Is there anything about which someone can say, look at this, it’s new. It’s already been done long ago before our time.

                                           21:34                   No one remembers the former events, nor will anyone remember the events that are yet to happen. They will not be remembered by the future generations. That in cosmological terms is the initial argument where the preacher says, look just at how the world in general works. The sun just goes round and round and it never gets anywhere. The wind just blows in circles and then it leaves and then it comes back again and nothing ever changes. The rivers endlessly empty into the sea, but the sea never gets any more full than it was before that water went in. That’s just how life is in general, he says. Nothing new is going to happen here. Whatever it is you do is not going to make any difference with respect to the overall structure of the world. It may feel sometimes like you did something new, but that’s just because we have such bad memories that we don’t remember what anybody did before, which is really fine because nobody’s going to remember what you did anyway.

Hank Smith:                      22:37                   You’re right. This preacher. Not normal for the Bible.

Dr. Adam Miller:              22:44                   But it is good medicine for special Adam. You can see how it’s meant to perform a kind of exorcism here. If something good happens, as Jesus will say, it’s because God did it, not because I did it. If there’s something worth remembering here, it’s remembering how God delivered us, not that I did something to deserve being delivered because I’m different or special or better than other people. That’s not how it works. That’s not what memory’s for. That’s not how satisfaction or joy or happiness is found.

John Bytheway:               23:18                   It’s great because it’s so different.

Dr. Adam Miller:              23:19                   You guys are a closet iconoclast. Let me give you one other verse here from chapter one. Then we’ll look at what I think is his most wrenching and personal set of confessions in chapter two, then we’ll do chapter three. In chapter one, well, it’s going to be 14 and 15. The preacher says, I reflected on everything that’s accomplished by man on earth, and I concluded, everything he has accomplished is futile. It’s all like chasing the wind, or as Alter has it. It’s all like herding the wind. What is bent cannot be made straight and what is missing cannot be supplied. It’s all like herding the wind as if the whole of life were like herding cats, but the cats weren’t even cats. They were just wind.

John Bytheway:               24:16                   You don’t even get the cats in the end of it, right?

Dr. Adam Miller:              24:19                   It’s all just everywhere all the time and it’s constantly slipping through your fingers and never goes where you want it. If you think that your happiness depends on getting it to go where you want it to go, good luck, the preacher says. It’s not going to happen. Then we get in chapter two, almost what we could describe in philosophical terms as a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Are you familiar with this term? A reductio ad absurdum is the argument in which you prove that something cannot be the case by showing how absurd it would be, were it to be the case. You prove the contrary by the absurdity of the proposed example. So he’s going to give us an example of that here now. He’s going to offer us a little case study that will put all of our fantasies to rest by showing us what would happen even if all of our fantasies came true.

                                           25:17                    You think you’re sad because you’re not getting what you wanted, but let’s say you did get what you wanted, the preacher proposes. What would happen then? And then he runs us through what happened to him when he did get everything he wanted. That’s chapter two. I’m just going to give this to you more or less straight here. I think it’s worth the investment. Verse one, chapter two. “I thought to myself, come now, I will try self-indulgent pleasure to see if it’s worthwhile.” And he did, but I found that it is also futile. I said of partying, it’s folly and of self-indulgent pleasure, it accomplishes nothing. I thought deeply about the effects of indulging myself with wine. All the while my mind was guiding me with wisdom and the effects of behaving foolishly so that I might discover what is profitable for people to do during the days of their lives.

                                           26:14                   I increased my possessions. I built houses for myself. I planted vineyards for myself. I designed royal gardens and parks for myself. I planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I constructed pools of water for myself to irrigate my grove of flourishing trees. I purchased male and female slaves. I owned slaves who were born in my own house. I possessed more livestock, both herds and flocks than any of my predecessors in Jerusalem. I also amassed silver and gold for myself, as well as valuable treasures taken from kingdoms and provinces. I acquired male singers and female singers for myself. What gives a man sensual delight, a harem of beautiful concubines.

                                           26:57                   So I was far wealthier than all my predecessors in Jerusalem, yet I maintained my objectivity. I did not restrain myself, he says, from getting whatever I wanted. I didn’t deny myself anything that would bring me pleasure, so all my accomplishments gave me joy. This was my reward for all my effort, yet when I reflected on everything I had accomplished and on all the effort that I had expended to accomplish it, I concluded all these achievements and possessions are ultimately profitless, like chasing the wind. There is nothing gained from them on the earth.

John Bytheway:               27:35                   Well, clearly he just didn’t try hard enough, right?

Dr. Adam Miller:              27:41                   The 10 verse long litany of all of the pleasures and toys and satisfactions and successes that you could possibly earn or achieve or acquire or amass as a human being, he lays it all out for us and he says, look, I had it all, doesn’t work. It’s as futile and vain as any of the rest of it, and it all slips through your fingers just as surely as just a small portion of it would. And if there’s any happiness to be found, you’re not going to find it here. Of course, we don’t believe him.

Hank Smith:                      28:17                   Yeah, I was going to say, “Well, then let me try this experiment. Give me all the money in the world and let me…

Dr. Adam Miller:              28:23                   We would all be happy to rerun the experiment back. See for ourselves, but his testimony is, no, it’s all vain. It’s all futile. It’s all meaningless.

John Bytheway:               28:35                   What’s the old saying? The tragedy isn’t that you failed. The tragedy is that you succeeded at something that doesn’t matter.

Dr. Adam Miller:              28:45                   Yeah, that’s a lot of our lives. Number one, we don’t succeed. Most of us just fail most of the time, in large respect. But even when we do succeed, the things that we tend to succeed at don’t actually matter at the end of the day and didn’t deserve what we invested in them.

Hank Smith:                      29:02                   You climbed the ladder of success only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall.

Dr. Adam Miller:              29:10                   Yeah, that’s the message here. Wrong wall. Doesn’t matter how good you are or how fast you climb or how much you get. It’s the wrong wall.

John Bytheway:               29:17                   On that happy note.

Hank Smith:                      29:21                   What did C.S. Lewis say that it’s not even getting stuff that we love, it’s having more of it than other people?

Dr. Adam Miller:              29:28                   The more stuff you have, the more obviously true that becomes to you. Really, all you care about is the fact that you have something that other people don’t, not the fact that you have it. It’s a real indictment, but this is meant to be good news. If you pair it with what Jesus Christ has to say as an alternative, the preacher does not lay out the alternative here, which is why we tend to find him so hard to bear and so distasteful. He doesn’t say, look, there’s a whole separate thing you can do. It’s called gospel of Jesus Christ, in which instead of losing everything inevitably, you sacrifice everything on purpose willingly. That’s the gospel of Jesus Christ, but he doesn’t lay that out. All he points out is the fact that you’re going to lose it all inevitably, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ in part. But you have to pair that kind of world with then a certain sort of religion that Jesus is advocating in response. But you can’t get there without realizing that the preacher is also right. Then you need that medicine. You have to take that medicine first. You have to be hopeless about everything but Jesus in order to put all of your hope in Jesus.

Hank Smith:                      30:42                   Adam, as we move into Ecclesiastes chapter three, I figured out sometime in high school, maybe it was in college, that if I didn’t have time to read my scriptures, at least I could turn on the song by The Byrds, right? Turn, turn, turn. And I thought, that whole song is scripture. I read some scripture today as I listened to Ecclesiastes chapter three. It actually got me interested when I first heard that song. I was interested in, what is this? I found out it was in the Bible.

Dr. Adam Miller:              31:16                   Did you know that as a teenager, that The Byrds song Turn, Turn, Turn was from Ecclesiastes?

Hank Smith:                      31:21                   When I figured that out, I figured it would be scripture study. It took me a second before I thought.

Dr. Adam Miller:              31:26                   You were way ahead of the curve as a teenager.

Hank Smith:                      31:28                   Yeah. I was like, “Oh, I’m going to go find out where this came from.” And that was without the internet.

Dr. Adam Miller:              31:33                   You had to do actual research?

Hank Smith:                      31:35                   I had to do some work, yeah. Because I just thought the lyrics were so odd to this song. Found out it was scripture.

Dr. Adam Miller:              31:41                   There are two poems embedded here in Ecclesiastes. One we get here at the beginning of chapter three, which is then becomes the lyrics for that famous song by the Byrds. And then the other we’ll come to in a minute here, we get in the final chapter of Ecclesiastes. But yeah, those famous lines from the opening verses of chapter three, “To everything, there is a season, a time to every purpose under heaven, a time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill, a time to heal, a time to break down, a time to build up, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.

                                           32:31                   A time to get and a time to lose. A time to keep and a time to cast away. A time to rend and a time to sow. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time of war and a time of peace. That’s the song. Especially out of context, it seems like the preacher’s going a little soft on us here as he reminisces nostalgically about how everything has a time and a season and it all has its place and it all has its moment in the sun. But that’s not actually what he’s after here at all.

Hank Smith:                      33:08                   I was going to say there’s something coming.

Dr. Adam Miller:              33:11                   Yeah. His point in running us through all these continual transformations of one thing into its opposite, love into hate, getting into losing, keeping into casting away, being born into dying. His point in running us through that whole circular litany is to draw the conclusion that he does in verse nine. What profit then hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboreth? Because everything, as he outlined in the opening verses, everything comes back to the place where it started. Nothing changed and nothing mattered and it didn’t make any difference. It’s such a happy, cheery song, The Byrds song, especially when you hear the music in the back of your head as you run through the lyrics. But that’s not what the preacher had in mind with those verses.

Hank Smith:                      34:08                   He wouldn’t love the song. He’d be like, “Wait, wait, wait. Tell the end.”

Dr. Adam Miller:              34:11                   Yeah. I don’t think verse nine is in the song, is it?

Hank Smith:                      34:14                   Yeah, it’s not. Everything just goes back to the way it was. I love it. Those stones that you threw, they all gathered together again at some point.

John Bytheway:               34:24                   And maybe the newspaper, The Times and Seasons in Church History was drawn from this phrase at the beginning.

Dr. Adam Miller:              34:32                   Oh, that’s a good question.

Hank Smith:                      34:34                   Yeah. Times and Seasons.

Dr. Adam Miller:              34:37                   Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know where that phrase came from for the newspaper. The end of chapter three, verses 18 to 22, the preacher goes out of his way here to point out something that is obviously true, like so many of these things that we really tend not to like to hear, but is perhaps quite important to hear. He says in verse 18, “I also thought to myself, it’s for the sake of people so God can clearly show them that they are like animals. For the fate of humans and the fate of animals are the same. As one dies, so dies the other. Both have the same breath. There is no advantage for humans over animals, for both are fleeting. Both go to the same place, both come from the dust and to dust both return. Who really knows if the human spirit ascends upward and the animal’s spirit descends into the earth?

                                           35:39                   So I perceive there’s nothing better than for people to enjoy their work because that’s their reward for who can show them what the future holds.” This too, I think, harsh but perhaps helpful medicine to reckon with the fact that in some weird, strange way, what it means to be a son or daughter of God, at least in part, means being a mammal. That what I am is an animal. I’m a kind of animal. It’s true that I have a divine nature, but this divine nature is of a peace somehow with the fact that I, like an animal, am made of dust, am born and will die, get hungry, get thirsty, have instincts, suffer all manner of biological processes and indignities and hormonal pushes and pulls that I didn’t ask for and can’t control.

                                           36:47                   Part of what it would mean to reconcile with the reality of what I am as a human being, instead of just being duped by the fantasy of what I think I ought to be instead would be to reckon with the truth of how my being an animal is not incompatible with my being a son of God, that I have to understand the truth and reality of both of those things in order to understand the truth and reality of either of them. That’s something I think we’re often quite reluctant to do because we’re so attached to our fantasies of a special Adam who would not be an animal and suffer all the indignities that go along with being an animal when the reality is get rid of it or be ashamed about it.

Hank Smith:                      37:32                   It seems that in a way, the preacher is describing the fall of Adam, that we now experience this world and it’s very fleeting. And President Benson, he said, “Just as man does not really desire food until he is hungry, so he does not desire the salvation of Christ until he knows why he needs Christ.” Maybe Ecclesiastes is doing that for me, helping me understand why I need Christ. No one adequately and properly knows why they need Christ until they understand and accept the doctrine of the fall and its effect upon all mankind. Maybe that’s part of what Ecclesiastes does is it shows me what the fall really is, what reality really is.

John Bytheway:               38:19                   What is vanity and what is lasting and eternal and permanent? What is lasting? If all this is vanity, well, what isn’t vanity then?

Hank Smith:                      38:29                   Yeah, Adam said he doesn’t give us the alternative.

Dr. Adam Miller:              38:33                   Yeah, he doesn’t sketch that out for us here. But it’s easy, of course, as fallen people who suffer from our own ignorance and our own love of our own ignorance, it’s easy to fall in love with a false idea of what salvation would look like. It’s easy to fall in love with a false idea of what salvation itself would involve. It’s easy to think that, well, if the problem here is that I suffer from my unsatisfied desires, then the solution must be that God will satisfy my desires.

Hank Smith:                      39:08                   It’s why we talk about mansions, right? And streets paved with gold.

Dr. Adam Miller:              39:12                   Exactly. When it turns out as Jesus describes it, the only adequate response to our losing everything is to just go ahead and sacrifice everything. That’s tough medicine piled on top of tough truth, but it turns out works and is salvific and is redemptive and is profoundly liberating and deeply joyful and avoids all of the problems that come from trying to solve things in a backwards way that defies the truth about God and that defies the truth about the world.

Hank Smith:                      39:45                   Adam, that actually brings me to my second question I had quite a ways back.

Dr. Adam Miller:              39:51                   Foreshadowed.

Hank Smith:                      39:52                   Yes, yes. When you started to tell us about, you know, Ecclesiastes and how fleeting and vain and meaningless, what we’re chasing, what, you know, what we think will make us happy, then you said the antidote or the answer is the gospel of Jesus Christ. It makes me think of the Savior’s calling, seeing it in a different way. So when the Savior, you gave the example of He says to the man, “Will you sell all that you have, give to the poor and come follow me?” By the end of Ecclesiastes, wouldn’t the preacher say, “Sure,” because all of that is meaningless anyway. Almost the Savior is saying, “Do you see those things for what they really are? Because if you do, this is not a difficult question. I’m actually offering you substance.”

Dr. Adam Miller:              40:46                   I think that’s exactly right. It’s the kind of test to see if the young man can look beyond his desires to see the truth of the world and the truth of himself as part of it. And he can’t, at least not yet. But who’s going to pass that test? I’m doubtful. I don’t think I am passing that test as we speak. It is being given to me. I’m not passing it, but that is the test, yeah.

Hank Smith:                      41:14                   There does seem to be a wisdom at the end of life, which is kind of sad, but President Oaks, Good, Better, Best. He talked about breadwinning. He said, “Many breadwinners worry that their occupations leave too little time for their families. There’s no easy formula for this contest of priorities. However, I have never known a man who looked back on his life and said, I just didn’t spend enough time with my job.” It does seem at the end of life, there’s at least a wisdom of where I wished I would have spent my time.

Dr. Adam Miller:              41:47                   With all of your getting, get understanding, you may have to get other things along the way, but at least with that getting, still get understanding. You may have to go to work, but you can still perform even that professional work as an act of love and sacrifice and consecration, not as an act of acquisition in the hope of satisfying your desires. All of that’s hopeless. Even if you succeed, it’ll be more hopeless than you thought it ever was.

Hank Smith:                      42:16                   The despair of getting everything you ever wanted. I wrote that down.

Dr. Adam Miller:              42:21                   Yeah, please. That’s Ecclesiastics.

John Bytheway:               42:24                   I’m thinking of Job again who said, “Naked came I into this world and naked I’ll go out.” And then what do you have at that point? I like that there’s been kind of more of an emphasis, at least I perceive it, on becoming, not just what we know, but what we have become. It’s the thing that beats me up. My, what did you call it?

Hank Smith:                      42:45                   Special John.

Dr. Adam Miller:              42:46                   The ghost.

John Bytheway:               42:48                   My special John beats me up. My special John reads the first three verses of 1 Corinthians 13 and says, Okay, you’ve read more books. You’ve served in more callings, but are you more charitable? And I’m not sure if I am. So that idea of what have I become, that’s all you got when you leave because all the rest Ecclesiastes is teaching me is vanity. So Job says, Okay, now I leave, now what have I actually. Where was my ladder leaning and all that stuff? That’s a good place to be, but it’s a little frightening to me. Yeah. If I could move mount- what does Paul say if he had, could move mountains and had all knowledge and faith that you could move mountains and you gave your body to be burned but you didn’t have charity, that’s the one that pushes me against the wall.

Dr. Adam Miller:              43:40                   It’s hevel. It’s vanity. It’s futility. It’s meaningless. Yeah, 1 Corinthians 13 is an excellent companion here for the book of Ecclesiastes. Paul is making the exact same point that the preacher is making, but in a deeper, fuller context.

Hank Smith:                      43:54                   Adam, you said earlier that wisdom is loving your enemies. Can you talk about that a little more? How does Ecclesiastes get me there? Well, with its compliment or with its answer, the gospel.

Dr. Adam Miller:              44:09                   John noted early on in our discussion today that as useful as the book of Proverbs can be, it also can be a trap because it can build into your way of thinking about the world the expectation that if I do X, Y will for sure happen, that there is a mechanical quality to the world and perhaps even especially a mechanical quality of quid pro quo to the gospel, such that if I obey X or Y or Z, I will get the thing that I wanted, A, B, or C, money into the vending machine, object of desire out of the vending machine. Exactly. It’s easy to fall into that trap when we’re thinking not just about worldly things, but thinking about religious things. The expectation that there’s a kind of symmetry between my actions and the possibility of satisfaction. The point of the book of Ecclesiastes is to disabuse you profoundly, deeply, repeatedly.

Hank Smith:                      45:17                   It’s the exorcism.

Dr. Adam Miller:              45:18                   Without mercy. To disabuse you of the idea that any such symmetry exists between how the world is and what you want the world to be, which can be profoundly liberating and useful. It breaks that set of expectations that I could treat the laws or commandments of the world or of the gospel as a way of getting the reward that I wanted, to bring it back to that way of framing. I can’t treat obeying the law of love as a way of getting the reward I wanted, even if the reward I thought I wanted was love because God’s law does not have that structure of quid pro quo. God’s own law has the same asymmetrical structure that the preacher is showing us is at work in the world. That asymmetrical structure is captured by Jesus’s commandment to love our enemy. If you do good, good may happen in response to your doing good, but it might not.

                                           46:20                   Even if it doesn’t, you are still commanded to do good. And if someone hasn’t done good to you, if someone has actively done evil to you, you are still commanded to respond with good. You are still commanded to love in response to that. There’s a kind of asymmetry at the heart of this kind of unconditional gesture of love and sacrifice and forgiveness and surrender that can easily be obscured by the fantasy of there being some kind of controllable symmetrical balancing of the scales when really what’s called for here is sacrifice, not just of some things, of everything, not just in the hope of getting what we’ll want, but for the sake of loving everyone else. That’s the gospel.

Hank Smith:                      47:10                   Correct my thinking here, both of you. When the Lord says, give your life, give up your life and you’ll find it, it’s not even the same life that you think you want when you get it back. It’s like give up your desires and you’ll have them and you find out your desires have changed.

Dr. Adam Miller:              47:28                   The trade on offer is give up your desires and you can have mine instead. That’s also the trade on offer with respect to our lives. Give up your life, Jesus says, not that you’ll get your life back, but that if I give up my life, he says you can have mine. Then I take up his life. I take up his name. I live my life as if I were him. Then he takes care of whatever was me, quote unquote. He’s not offering here the opportunity for me to save my life. He’s offering me the opportunity to live his life. That offer always stands and is always available and it’s unconditional. Join him at any moment. He’s ready and able and willing.

Hank Smith:                      48:12                   When I get to heaven, I think, oh, finally I get all my desires fulfilled. He says, oh no, that wasn’t.

John Bytheway:               48:18                   Not so fast, my friend.

Hank Smith:                      48:19                   That was not part of it.

Dr. Adam Miller:              48:22                   No, that’s not what he was offering at all. What will you do in heaven? You’ll spend eternity ministering to other people, which is what God does. You won, you were saved, you became just like God. Congratulations. It will forever and always never be about you. Dislike it forever and always is never for God about God.

John Bytheway:               48:43                   You’ll bring to past the immortality eternal life of others.

Dr. Adam Miller:              48:47                   Yeah, that will be your whole souled work forever without a thought to yourself.

Hank Smith:                      48:55                   Being a philosopher has to be so unsatisfying.

Dr. Adam Miller:              49:00                   Yes. Right? Yeah. But the thing is that I tried not being a philosopher and it’s also unsatisfying.

Hank Smith:                      49:05                   Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller:              49:09                   You have to give up, you have to give up on the idea of satisfaction.

John Bytheway:               49:13                   The reducto absurdum, whatever that was.

Dr. Adam Miller:              49:17                   Yeah, exactly. Reductio ad absurdum. Would you like this closing poem from Ecclesiastes? This is originally the closing words here of the book, chapter 12 verses one through eight. They go like this. “Remember you’re a creator in the days of your youth before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, I find no pleasure in them before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark and the clouds return after the rain, when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags itself along and desire no longer is stirred, then people go to their eternal home and mourners go about the streets. Remember him before the silver cord is severed and the golden bowl is broken, before the picture is shattered at the spring and the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Meaningless. Meaningless, says the teacher. Everything is meaningless.

Hank Smith:                      50:35                   I can hear the silence in the room after he gives this. And I can see someone being uncomfortable enough to stand up and say. And moreover, because the preacher was lies, right?

Dr. Adam Miller:              50:49                   The member of the bishopric adds a little grace note.

Hank Smith:                      50:54                    A member of the bishopric gives his concluding thoughts. Oh, that’s funny.

John Bytheway:               50:58                   Did you have anything, President? Yeah, just a minute.

Dr. Adam Miller:              51:01                   But there is something to be said for what Mormon calls sobriety, for a capacity for a certain sort of soberness, for being able to look all of this loss and suffering and death in the eye rather than avoid it and pretend it’s not the case. Or there’s something to be said for what in that same spirit we might call a kind of divine melancholy that doesn’t succumb to hopelessness because it retains hope in Christ, but still with clear eyes sees the hopelessness in all the things that we normally place our hope in. That is an important divine attribute that I think God himself embodies, this capacity for divine melancholy that tinges and colors everything that he sees and understands about the world because he has absorbed and experienced the whole of all of the suffering and all of the universe from beginning to end without avoiding it or running from it or imagining that it wasn’t the case, but took it on and changed it, transformed it, redeemed it by sacrificing in response to it. That kind of divine life is hard work, but it’s also at the end of the day, as the preacher says, the only kind of life that would be possible that was worth living.

Hank Smith:                      52:30                   Adam, Dr. Miller, thanks for your time today.

Dr. Adam Miller:              52:33                   My pleasure.

Hank Smith:                      52:33                   Thank you. It’s always. John, what’d you call it? Mind expanding, soul expanding?

John Bytheway:               52:38                   Yeah. I want to talk again.

Dr. Adam Miller:              52:40                   Patience testing.

John Bytheway:               52:41                   It’s been great. Yeah. No, I’m going to have a talk with special John, but yeah, this has been great.

Hank Smith:                      52:48                   Yeah. You’ve got to go away for a while. With that, we want to thank Dr. Adam Miller for joining us today. It has been beautifully difficult, good, harsh medicine. We want to thank our executive producer, Shannon Sorensen, our sponsors, David and Verla Sorensen. And every episode, we remember our founder, Steve Sorensen. We hope you’ll join us next week. The timeout is over and we head back in to the Old Testament on followHIM. As a thank you to our wonderful listeners, we’d love to gift you the digital version of our book, Finding Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. It offers short, meaningful insights drawn from our past Old Testament episodes. Visit followhim.co, that’s followhim.co, to download your free copy today, and you’ll also find the link to purchase the print edition. Thank you for being part of our followHIM family. Of course, none of this could happen without our incredible production crew. David Perry, Lisa Spice, Will Stoughton, Krystal Roberts, Ariel Cuadra, Heather Barlow, Amelia Kabwika, Sydney Smith, and Annabelle Sorensen.