Navigate Podcast
Welcome to Navigate, we are two long term friends doing life and ministry together. I got tired of the same ole answers when I started looking for help when it came to my walk with God. So together we go deeper than most would on topics that most people have heard or were taught but never fully understood. It is our way of simplifying concepts that we may have over complicated throughout our lives. Bringing theology and life experience into each episode. It is our hope and desire to help Navigate your Christian walk with you
Navigate Podcast
Ecclesiastes: Finding Meaning in a Seemingly Meaningless World
Meaninglessness haunts our hyper-connected yet spiritually adrift world. Why does Solomon, history's wisest and wealthiest king, begin Ecclesiastes with the jarring declaration that everything is "meaningless"? Our exploration of this ancient wisdom reveals a startlingly modern diagnosis of our existential emptiness.
We discover that meaning requires direction – like ladder rungs connected to sides rather than clanging uselessly in the air. Solomon's exhaustive experiment with fulfillment (detailed in chapter 2) reads like a billionaire's bucket list gone wrong: pleasure, laughter, substance experimentation, building projects, material excess, entertainment, sexual indulgence, and even achievement. Each pathway led to the same conclusion: vapor, emptiness, nothing substantial to grasp.
What makes Ecclesiastes uniquely powerful is its unflinching honesty about reality. Good people die young. Wicked people prosper. Chance happens to everyone. These observations resonate deeply with those who've found themselves "at the bottom of the glass" wondering what it all means. Solomon doesn't offer platitudes; he acknowledges the world's brokenness while pointing toward what's been lost.
guys, welcome back to navigate trust and here with me. Yeah, how are you, buddy?
Speaker 2:I'm doing pretty darn good. I'm getting over a slight cold Tim yeah, this is the season, so if I, if I sounded a little nasally, is the season. I showed up for you today. Okay, because I want you to hear well thanks and no, no, not, not you. Tim the listener, oh the listener.
Speaker 1:Oh, the listener, the listener. Yeah, that makes more sense, whoever you are Not, tim, though. That makes more sense. I wanted to talk today excuse me of one of my favorite books in the Bible. Can you guess what it is?
Speaker 2:Ecclesiastes, ecclesiastes, not Ecclesiasticus. For the record for you Catholics out there Ecclesiasticus, yeah.
Speaker 1:Is that an actual name?
Speaker 2:It's another book, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a book. Yeah, it's like shoot, have a son.
Speaker 2:I know what I'm going with.
Speaker 1:What do you call him? Get over here, get over here, ecclesiasticus.
Speaker 2:Khaleesi, khaleesi, khaleesi, khaleesi, khaleesi, khaleesi. Oh my God, no, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I remember reading this book back when I got saved. After you go through the Proverbs, the Psalms, the Songs of Solomon, Khaleesi's hit and it's a very different tempo than you would get from like Proverbs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it is, this is 12 beers deep solomon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, that's a good point. Um, I remember reading this because I went through this super, like depressed state in high school, like before I even knew what depression was. People were just calling me that. You know what I mean, yeah. And then you get over that hump, got saved all that fun stuff, started reading this, like, yeah, no, like yeah, no. Because the very first line in this book is meaningless, Life is meaningless says the preacher.
Speaker 2:This is an important reminder. Man I'm like, do I go? Down the wormhole already Tim.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Do you want me to jump in? I think it's important to realize that meaninglessness ultimately comes from not having a direction or a particular focus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like a vision. Yeah, I mean, we find meaning when we know what we're trying to accomplish. There is no meaning if you have no idea what you're trying to accomplish. So imagine having rungs for a ladder but no sides. What do I? Great, I accomplished this step. Where does it go? What am I doing with this? Like, where do they? You just clang them in the air together.
Speaker 2:What is the point of having these if you don't have a direction, of having these if you don't have a direction? And especially in the book of Ecclesiastes, everything that you know Solomon is writing is ultimately like for his sons, so they could understand how to perceive wisdom, how to get what to do, how to like actually live your life. And he's pointing in this direction and saying listen, this is, these are all the rungs on the ladder. Things come and go to create something more than just this vapid, random experience that you can have outside of that. But meaninglessness ultimately is ultimately means I don't actually have a focus or a direction, and so what I see in the world is chaos instead of order. I can't make sense of it. I can see fragments and small vignettes here and there of maybe things that were supposed to be something. This is the postmodern art movement. You know what I mean. Who's the guy Picasso? You know what I mean? It's like, okay, there's something there, I know there is.
Speaker 1:What is it? What is it I?
Speaker 2:think it's a face, but also it might be something grotesque. You know, yeah, if you don't have a clear direction, you end up with meaninglessness. And this book really resonates with people who have found themselves at the bottom of the glass, yeah, who are like I don't know what I'm doing, I don't really know where I'm going. In fact, all the things that I thought were solid have kind of evaporated. Yeah, they've fallen apart and they start to read this book and they're like finally, somebody else agrees. Yeah, they're seeing this.
Speaker 2:And you know we love the terminology of woke or un-woke or whatever. But ultimately, when you have a moment in your life that's, um, I'm trying to get the best way to say this some catalytic moment, it usually starts with your brain changing the way it fundamentally perceives life. And at some point in your life you're going to have this moment where you're like okay, I don't get it. What I thought was the direction I was going, what appeared to me like the right thing to do, or how I was going to do it, or God, where are you? You know what I mean that kind of moment.
Speaker 2:Ecclesiastes is a fantastic book and oftentimes I'll recommend it to people who are. You know, if you want to say looking for God or not quite in the faith. You know what I mean, especially if they're a little bit more on the intellectual side, because if you plumb the depths of something but don't have a direction for it, you feel like you just are spiraling down this meaningless staircase. The only thing that is not the only thing that seems to be something you can actually grasp is meaninglessness itself, and so you just, you know you walk down that staircase again and again, and again. So this book is a great way to help people connect with the reality of something that the smartest guy on the planet is saying.
Speaker 1:I think that's why I like this book so much, because I hear a lot of pastors talking spiritual most of the time. But I like this book so much because I hear a lot of pastors talking spiritual most of the time? Yeah, but Solomon in this book really kind of brings it down to a level of understanding of this is real life. Yeah, this is what's really going to happen. And like he talks about, why do wicked people prosper? Good people die, right? Yeah, he's like this is a mystery. What's the point? Chance happens to us all. Yeah, you know there's no labor under the sun. It hasn't already been done. You know your hard work is going to go to the person who did not work for it.
Speaker 2:when you die Like he talks about all these, and even that it doesn't matter, because what does it matter? What does it matter?
Speaker 1:It's all the yeah it gets into. You know, eat, drink, be merry. You know I quote that a lot.
Speaker 2:All of Ecclesiastes, chapter 2, tim is fascinating to me. All right, because he basically goes through this. Let me tell you what I did, like it's his accolades, if you want to think about it this way. Verses 1 through 11, he references himself 42 times. Okay, wow.
Speaker 2:So he says I said to myself uh, enjoy yourself. I said to myself and to my body and to my mind, and this was guiding me and my mind and myself, and myself, and myself, and also I, and like he goes through this massive list of trying to explain to people everything that he did, and and he there's probably roughly nine categories that you could put those verses in from. I would say pleasure, like he's. Like food, fun, I just, I just tried to enjoy myself, didn't work. Laughter, okay, I tried comedy. You know, I just tried to enjoy myself, didn't work. Laughter, okay, I tried comedy. You know what I mean. Like I, I, I, I tried to laugh away these things and see all of it, the, the T losses is humor. The point of it all is is humor, and it's funny Cause you think about, like, how many comedians have committed suicide? You know what I mean? Um, and then he talks about, uh, substance, substance abuse. I try to drink myself away. I try to find maybe if I take something it will make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, and I see this in people who are doing ayahuasca trips and DMT and stuff. Now they're like, oh, if you take this, you can rewire your brain so that your life won't suck so bad, right. Then he talks about basically industrialism. He's well, so I builded things and I created things instead and I, I, I came up with new inventions and new stuff that I wanted to do and and that didn't work.
Speaker 2:And then he gets into materialism, like, well, and I had the greatest castles and I had the you know, the gardens and the armies, and uh, and and the gold and this. And then he talks about entertainment, like, so I try to distract myself with other, maybe other people are the point, and it's not myself and you know. And then he gets into, of course, his, his specialty, immorality, which is, you know, I had all the women wives, concubines, it was uh, you know, he basically drowned himself in a, in lascivious living, and that doesn't work. And then he talks about accomplishment, like, okay, so the life that I now have, well, look, at least other people respect me, at least other people see my achievements and my titles and my degrees and my awards and look how many followers I have. And then he gets to this place at the end, which I think is fascinating, he basically says did I increase more than blah, blah, blah? All my eyes decided not to refuse them. I did not withhold anything from my heart. My pleasure, my heart, was because of the labor. Okay, for my heart was pleased because of all my labor and this was my reward for all my labor. Thus I considered all my activities, which my hands had done in labor, which I had exerted.
Speaker 2:So what? What is he saying? Well, all the sin, all the things that I did. Ultimately I should get those things and it should be okay because of all the work that I put into them. All right, it's a kind of rationalization. Okay, so I would say the last thing that he does is basically look at his life and try to atone for his sins by saying well, I did all the work and I accomplished all these things and I made it happen. So that that basically makes the sin and the wrong things I did, okay, yeah. So from this spectrum of pleasure, laughter, substance, industrialism, materialism, entertainment, immorality, accomplishment, atonement, he walks through every possible lens or you could say it this way every possible set of bars on the side of the rungs of the ladder, and none of them work, none of them fit, and he's trying to explain to them how freaking frustrated he actually is. And I get it. Yeah, I mean, I get it. Yeah, you know. Don't you think that people try to pursue those things though? Oh, 100%.
Speaker 1:Like I read you that list 100%. You know, and I just and what I find more fascinating with this is that what Solomon potentially gets through too, is that you can do all the right things and you won't find success.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, it's not guaranteed to you. And what is success?
Speaker 1:What's the success?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what, what. This is why I was saying that, the whole meaningless point, what are you actually trying to accomplish? And his point was like I can accomplish lots, but what am I ultimately? What is it for? Yeah, yeah, what is the purpose of anything? And you can distract yourself with pleasure, laughter, substance, et cetera. You can do all of that. But it's not going to fix like the, it's not going to help. You feel like you're actually getting to a place where you have done the thing that you were meant to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not going to cast a vision that you want for your life.
Speaker 2:And meant right is a root for meaning. You know, yeah, it's not going to cast the vision that you want for your life, and and and meant right Is a is a root for meaning. You know, yeah, but why am I going this direction? Okay, I think what's fantastic in this book of Ecclesiastes is he's trying to dissuade people from this idea that you can recreate yourself or that you can make yourself into whatever you want yourself to be. All right, I brought this up on the show, I think, before, but we've talked about Tim, like the idea of being preceding essence, or essence preceding being, is who you are, something that is actually set in stone and then that comes out of you, who you are, comes out of you or are you something, and then you create your own being. I become the thing that I want to be. This is Walt Disney's idea that you can be whatever you want. You can become whatever you want. You are not restricted by the physicality that you have. You are ultimately becoming whatever you want to be. And I think, when we talk about meaning and when we talk about this idea of like the T, loss of our existence, why am I here, unless we have a, why the what's don't matter Unless you have and I would say this too if you have a good why you can walk through a lot of pain and still feel like fulfilled, yeah, and you know what you're doing matters and you're going. This is why you know.
Speaker 2:You can see some people who have everything and are absolutely miserable, and one guy who has nothing and an incredibly hard life, with a smile on his face. This is the classic picture of the Christmas Carol. This is the classic picture of the Christmas Carol Tim. You got Ebenezer Scrooge, who is wealthy beyond anyone's dreams, hobbled over. Basically, you know, might as well be a corpse now, stingy with every penny, everything and every person. And then you have Bob Crotchet, who has a little crippled son who is happier with his whole family that he's struggling to feed than the guy who literally could do anything that he absolutely wanted. Why one has meaning and knows why he exists. The person who doesn't could have everything that he wanted and would feel like he was in uh, he would feel like he was in his own coffin.
Speaker 1:Yeah you know yeah so so I mean, is this all about the pursuits of what you're trying to gain out of life here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, the whole book of Ecclesiastes is this giant reminder to people, ultimately to establish the reason for life and living in something. Or you can accomplish anything you want and you will find that it is a vapor that just disappears. It doesn't matter it. Literally it will be. Where did the money go from this person? What did they leave behind? What did they actually? What was it for? We don't know. Well, did they enjoy themselves? Does it matter that they enjoyed themselves? What is the? What is the point of any of this?
Speaker 2:He's trying to tell his sons hey, and this is why the last chapter of this book hammers on remember your creator before it is too late. The beginning of this book tells people here's the problem. The end of the book actually gives him the answer, which is you, you have to remember God before you get to the day when the grasshopper drags himself along and the almond tree doesn't bloom anymore and people are singing and the glass bowl is shattered. And he's basically saying before everything falls apart in your life and tastes like ash in your mouth, remember who made you. Well, what is he actually saying? Remember that you have an identity and a purpose before you accomplish anything. That God is calling you to walk out, Lest you live a life that is totally disconnected from the meaning that it is meant to have. You cannot create your own meaning apart from God. You can't do it. It, yeah, yeah, you know what that's called Tim Exhaustion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Tell me about, I think, pursuing that meaning in someone's life, that can also drive you freaking crazy.
Speaker 2:Just finding meaning. You mean, yeah, I agree, I agree, I think sometimes we want specific details, not about the meaning of our life, but whether or not we deem it as worthy. Yeah, you know, I said it earlier. Right, like, if you truly know what God has created you for and why this matters, then you can endure almost anything. Like Jesus says, for the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame. Well, what does that ultimately mean? If you have something worth dying for, it makes the dying I don't want to say less painful, but you're able to walk through it because you can see to the other side. And ultimately, what is that? Well, it's hope, right, if I have hope that something beautiful is coming, that I can walk through whatever I need to walk through today to actually get there.
Speaker 2:Um, people that are depressed, frustrated, anxious usually are people who have lost hope, and they think it's just hope in one of these categories that I just gave you. Well, if I just had more laughter in my life, if I just had the right relationship, if I just had the right money, that's their hope is that I'll get one of those things tomorrow, and the problem is they'll get it and it doesn't work. And now they're thinking, oh, the problem is existence itself, it's just, it's just me, but but it's not. What you're ultimately experiencing is the problem in the garden? It's not that my soul died, my personality, it's not that my body will die, but because, ultimately, I've been disconnected from God, who is the telos of my very existence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right, we see this in adopted kids. Adopted kids, especially, have this existential crisis. Almost every single one of them, at some point in their life, have this existential crisis of who are my parents and why did they not want me? Yeah, and they can go. I mean, it can spiral. It can be really bad. Some of them come out of it and it's okay, some of them it's. It jacks them up for the rest of their life.
Speaker 1:My little. My older brother adopted. You know that? Yeah, and he reached out to his birth parents years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's actually a good thing for him, because he's like no, I had it better off with you guys than I did with whoever my real mother is.
Speaker 2:That's cool, that's cool, yep. Which is pretty neat, which is cool for you guys, but actually almost worse for him. Yeah, in a way Right, because for him what he just realized is oh man, what I'm made of my substance, where I've come from, is that what is actually deeply connected to me internally is actually far worse.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't blame you right now. Yeah, and it's like when you find out what my identity is connected to, sometimes that's worse for you. You know what I mean my identity is connected to. Sometimes that's worse for you. You know what I mean. Which is why this idea of if I'm not connected to my creator, if I'm not finding my identity from him, I'm going to try to end up creating my own, and it's not going to be pretty and it's not ultimately going to have a meaning, or I'm going to have to fool myself with positivity for the rest of my life to try to get myself to like.
Speaker 2:I don't know how people who aren't Christians do it, tim, to be honest with you, I don't know how they do it Like. I realized that it's one giant distraction, but most of these philosophers that are atheists are more depressed than anybody on the planet. Right, it's because they're like well, I'm deeply thinking about things, but it's disconnected from meaning itself. And so now I'm just. What am I doing? You know what's what's? What is the point of this? Where? Where's all this going? That's right, um.
Speaker 1:I think expectations play a part in. You're talking about anxiety and depression. You have expectations of what having kids would be like, or what your job would be like, or what marriage would be like, yeah, and those things don't work out the way you expected them to work out or or you have ideas about the feelings that they will produce in your head, that they don't produce when you have them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you ever like, uh, you ever woke up in the morning tim after you, you know, maybe you got a new car or a new job or something and you're trying to remember why you're excited. You know you're like wait, why am I? Why am I waking up so happy? Oh, I got that cool thing. Yeah, all right, you know what I mean. You're like, you're, you're uh. Your brain has to catch up to your feelings sometimes. You know what I mean and um.
Speaker 1:For me this isn't healthy in many means, but I will.
Speaker 2:It's a confession. It is what it is. It really is.
Speaker 1:But I will pretend, let's say, we won the lottery right and I will just go down that wormhole and I get super happy and super excited and then I get home I'm like none of this was true, yeah.
Speaker 2:I lived in a fiction to stimulate my brain for a little bit to get in a simulation on my way home to work from work.
Speaker 2:Honestly, what that? And I don't think you're alone, Tim. I think that's a lot of people who are trying to conjure up this idea of how they would feel if things were the way they wanted, yeah, and so they give themselves the emotions that they believe those circumstances would create. And what's two things here? One, like those circumstances don't necessarily mean you're going to conjure up those feelings, yeah, okay. Two, your brain is an incredibly powerful thing that can conjure up all those emotions all by itself, without those circumstances, right, true, and conjure up all those emotions all by itself without those circumstances, right? So, like, because we have a belief in hope, that this is a certain way, our brain will literally follow along and convince ourself okay, this happened until harsh reality hits.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what happened there? Well, I convinced myself of something that produced hope in me, and then, when the hope was taken away, it evaporated again. Well then, the goal should be to convince your brain of the thing that you actually should have hope in that is not tied to your circumstance, because, ultimately, what that reveals is we believe that our hope is tied to our circumstance, and if our circumstances don don't change, then my hope will evaporate, it will go away, yeah yeah yeah, and I I think, um, I want to walk through something.
Speaker 2:is that okay? Sure, um? When I think about this idea of what um solomon was trying to accomplish and what he's chasing after, I think about everything that we lost in the Garden of Eden. All right, so think about this being. That comes Satan. He offers this alternate reality. Instead of having to rely on God, how about you just be like God yourself? Instead of having to have a father that gives you your identity and existence and rules and all these things, how about you create yourself as that deity and live out however you want, and then you could be like him? Instead of doing this, do that. Well, the problem is for creation. That doesn't work. Imagine trying to convince a dog to be an owl. Right, yeah, and is a brain a strong thing? Is it possible to eventually convince a dog you know what I mean that he's an owl? You know. You've probably seen some of these things, tim, where it's like pig gets raised with cats. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:It's a cat.
Speaker 2:It's a kitten, right right, but does it have nine lives? No, breakfast is coming, okay, like it's a reality, but think about this. What I would say is things that were exchanged in the garden. One is this dependence on God that we're supposed to have gets exchanged for an autonomous ingenuity. Here's what I mean. Their ability to accomplish like life on their own became a necessity because I've cut myself off from God and his power and his sustaining ability and his achievement being. You know what he's created in me and how I live those things out, now that even the the ground is cursed and I have to come up with on my own, through ingenuity, ability to sustain myself apart from God. Right, I have to become this thing. I have to rely on my ability to accomplish and build and work the ground, not as an extension of the work of God, but to supplement my own identity, because I've lost my relationship with God. So, instead of building a family because God has told me to have a wife and have kids and subdue the earth, I'm building a family because I need validation and to feel like people love me. Yikes, like that's a problem, but like I've gone from.
Speaker 2:I'm doing this because I already have to. I'm doing this because I need and if, if you have ever seen a uh, maybe a good way to put this is this way Shepherds shouldn't eat their own sheep. If you need your own sheep to survive, shepherds shouldn't eat their own sheep. If you need your own sheep to survive, eventually you will have no flock. And if you are relying on relationships for your own identity, eventually you will have no relationship.
Speaker 2:But it's that autonomous ingenuity. I need things. I got to create these things to be able to sustain my own autonomy because I've disconnected myself from from the source of life. Own autonomy because I've disconnected myself from the source of life. The next thing that happens is intellectual ascent, or descent, if you want to think about it that way. Wisdom suddenly, instead of being connected to God and his understanding of the world, becomes this I have to come up with every potential idea to reinterpret the world around me. 2 Timothy 3, 7 talks about people who are always learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth. Yeah, okay. So think about Ecclesiastes. I did this, I did that, I thought through this, I thought through that. Where is the truth? What is the point? What is all this man? But he did some thinking.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean and think about how often we have to rationalize, living a life apart from God and come up with reasons for why. And ultimately it's constantly trying to void out like immovable truths. We know about ourself, but we have to convince ourself, aren't the case? So you have this. Start with okay, I will build things around me to give myself an identity, right, this autonomous ingenuity. And then that has to be followed by this intellectual descent into I will think in every other way and come up with reasons for why the world is totally different than actually how it is or how we got here apart from the grace of God, than actually how it is or how we got here apart from the grace of God. And then we pitch it as a liberation.
Speaker 2:Okay, so every blue-haired feminazi barista right, I'm always picking on them has this idea that they have to be liberated from the patriarchy, liberated from this toxic idea of God and religion and all this stuff. Why? Because I need to be God myself. Ultimately, we'll get into personal deification, which is where I started with, but naturally denying God's command as a type of oppression. I don't want to do what God said. That doesn't allow me to be God if I'm being commanded or told what to do, it makes their perfect relationship with God a type of familial manipulation. So my dad is ultimately that was just trying to oppress me. He wasn't trying to protect me in the same way that God was trying to oppress me and not protect me. And breaking the rules of their heavenly father becomes this version of freedom right. So then, breaking the rules of any father or any actual authority in their life becomes freedom. And and think about this, for a second Virtue is replaced by license in our culture and relationships based on standards, uh, to relationships based on mutual sin. So, like it used to be, you have a father and a mother and they love each other and they know who they are in Christ, and we have kids and there's rules how we play and what we do and what we don't do to support what we're trying to ultimately accomplish. Now relationships are built on. This is my sin and my truth, and you have your sin and your truth, and as long as your truth and your sin accepts my truth and my sin, then we're good. But they've changed the rules not from what I'm created to be and what I'm supposed to do. You know which is the way to go to this idea of I'm going to create myself and if you put any rules on me, I will see it as oppression and I'm the one that creates the rules. Why? Because I'm God, not you, and you can be God as long as I get to make the rules. Still, which is another way of saying not, which is ultimately why that personal deification is that it's the final state you're shooting for.
Speaker 2:Nature abhors a vacuum. That which is finite and fading must utilize personal ingenuity, intellectual assent and profane liberation to achieve a personal deification. If I kill God in my own life, I have to do all these things to create myself as God, which was Satan's lie. Right, right, you'll be just like him, yeah, and so when I do all those things, now I understand or at least if you walk through this process, you start to understand what is he getting at in Ecclesiastes.
Speaker 2:If I've lost meaning and my connection with the Father, if I've lost who I'm supposed to be and I'm pushing against any laws or anything else, what will I do? Well, I will eventually try to do everything that I can with the work of my own hands, by pushing off any rules, any law or anything that would inhibit me from getting what I want. And Solomon says I did all of it. I tried to be God and let me tell you it was meaningless. There's nothing there. It's vapid, it's a mist. You could sleep with whoever you want, you can get as much money as you want. And I'm telling you, right now there is, there's no light at the end of that tunnel, it's just more tunnel and it never stops. And I think we need to, like, get that into our bones.
Speaker 2:Um, when we think through this whole idea of what are we actually chasing? What's the point of our life? Well, what you're focusing on magnifies. And so, if you're, this is why the Bible is constantly telling you uh, look, look to Christ where he seated in the heavenlies. Look to God, get your eyes up on him, pay attention to what he's doing, what he said, why? Cause it's saying, the more you're connected to and seeing God, you'll understand how you were created and what you were meant to be. And then, when you turn and you look at the world, you'll actually begin to see the purpose and meaning and created order and what's actually supposed to happen, in a way where you can have tainted by this personal deification mentality which is perhaps best personified in the sports world.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, you know everybody. I'm the greatest of all time. I'm the best of everyone. You know what I mean. Or, however you want to do it, rock stars can have the same mentality All of them think they're God. And oh how, best day ever, what. You know what I mean. Or, however you want to go to do it, rock stars can have the same mentality All of them think they're God. And uh, oh, how far we fall. Right. But we are no different when we are conjuring up ideas in our head, right, about how things would be so much better if I could do this and do that, and then we convince our minds to do those that will. Ultimately, what are we doing? Well, we're rebelling against God's order. We're rejecting his good creation. I'm rejecting my connection with him and what I was meant to do. I'm angry at the oppressive rules and laws and that I can't go do the things that I want to do. Why? Because I want to be God and make the rules, and I would do this differently, yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, the world would be better if they just listened to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's unfortunately is probably.
Speaker 1:I think that focus part is interesting because you go down these wormholes on YouTube a lot, yeah, and I would watch all the like woke liberal freak out moments or top Karen blow ups. But the more you watch these and talking about your focus, then I start kind of I mean, I did this with cop videos too. I still I watch a lot of like cops violating people's rights, you know a lot of stuff out there and I find those interesting.
Speaker 1:But I started figuring, like my concept of police started being like, well, all cops are bad, now, right? Or all woke people are evil, right?
Speaker 2:Or like you start kind of categories start getting tighter and tighter categories now.
Speaker 1:So I had to stop because I'm like this isn't my calling for what Christ has for people. Yeah, I'm already written these people off, if I ever come across them now. Because of the video I saw two weeks ago of someone else similar.
Speaker 2:It's true. It's true. You stop actually treating people from God's perspective, yeah, but you allow other people to shape how you see the world instead. And now I'm actually, what am I doing? In a sense, you're playing God and I want to like, I want to spend, I'm like man. We could spend so much time talking about this, but ultimately, tim, like, the antidote to this, to meaninglessness, is laying some things down. All right, the world is broken. We have distanced ourself from God. We are often trying to do our own thing. We are experiencing the brokenness of everyone else also trying to do their own things, the brokenness of everyone else also trying to do their own things, and we are plagued all of us, myself included by days where I just simply believe that I, god, I probably would have had a cooler idea for my life than you.
Speaker 2:I could think of some really cool things that would be super awesome. And we believe that Not all the time Our best moments, we lay it all down, or worse, we get our way and realize, man, he really was right. This is not better. I am so sorry. I don't want this. I don't want anything to do with this. Do what you want. You know we have these again, these meaningless moments where we realize, oh, the ladder I was building was built on the wrong wall. You know what I mean. It's just not where we're trying to go.
Speaker 1:Ecclesiastes 5, he talks about that too, about not offering the same sacrifice of fools when you go into the house of worship as in don't go into worship and church and pray prayers of God. I know better than you, yeah, so fix this. Yeah, that's my prayer, totally.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just rambles Well, and he makes the point yeah he's like yeah, god is in heaven. Okay, yeah, and shut up, so yeah.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, quit demanding God, help you be God. Yeah, that's not how that works, yeah, so, so the couple of things I was going to say, tim, in light of this, in light of the kind of the four things that I was just getting at, you have to lay down your intentional distance from God. Right, to lay down your intentional distance from God, all right, if you haven't thought about this, the fact that Jesus is calling people to himself, saying come to me, all you who are weary and laden, or heavy laden, I'll give you rest. Or this idea of even I was just reading in Malachi, he says return to me and I'll return to you. Malachi, chapter three, I think it's somewhere in gosh, what is it? Verse six or seven or something like that. But he's like return to me and I'll return to you.
Speaker 2:Malachi, chapter three, I think it's somewhere in gosh, what is it? Verse six or seven or something like that. But he's like return to me, I will return to you. This idea that, hey, pay attention for a second. There's distance between us. You're not closing the gap, you're not. And what does that lead me to? Well, that autonomous ingenuity.
Speaker 1:Well, what's that return your talk? Is it like start getting back to basic disciplines here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly where I'm going. He's saying hey, you're not spending time with me, you're working really hard to build something so that you feel better. Yeah, okay, I got you. Come to me Like, this is where you get filled. You using your family to feel better about yourself actually will end up ruining your family If you're using your kids to feel better about yourself father at the baseball game, getting pissed off at the umpire and demanding your child do better. Okay, stop, you got to get that from God. And everything in scripture is trying to remind us there is a distance between us and God, and God has removed the barrier from us and him, but you're still pointed the wrong direction. You need to turn around and come to him, and so I would say one of the things to kill this desire for autonomous ingenuity we have is closing the gap between you and God. Like, shut that down, walk back towards him. The second thing is your thought life. Yeah, all right, cause. The second thing is your thought life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. Because if the second thing that you got going on is this intellectual dissent, or now I'm coming up with all these effing ideas and what if this and what if that? I make the joke all the time. Somebody comes to me and says I'm really struggling with my faith. I'm really doubting this. I'm like who's the girl? I realize she's not saved already. Who is she? Why? Because you're trying to justify living a certain way by asking questions and coming up with other hypothetical realities that make you feel better about you wanting to do whatever you want to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 2 Corinthians 2.14 reminds us that God has actually given us his mind. Like I have revealed to you how you're supposed to think, how you're supposed to process. God didn't give you a mind so that you could use it to rebel against him. He gave you a mind so that you could actually have peace, you could actually have hope, and you will punt on these things, trying to find reasons to find them in the wrong places. So you have to. You got to lay down your thought, life. You do.
Speaker 2:This is the finding that whatever is true, whatever is lovely, whatever is excellent or admirable or praiseworthy is the Philippians 4.8. Think on these things. I don't want to Right. That's the problem. I don't want to do. I don't want to lay down my thoughts. I want to continue to think the way that I want to think. And we don't like this. We don't think God has put rules on how I think. Yes, and perhaps that is where we break more laws and commandments and sin more than any other place, and we feel the best about it. Isn't that strange?
Speaker 1:It's very strange. There's a verse in Proverbs too, that always stuck with me. It was only a fool's mind wanders to the ends of the earth.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:And I correlate that with, like, all the daydreams and all the envious and just the if I won the lottery type of mentality that I was talking about earlier you know to me, it's the, it's the, it's the space thing, tim.
Speaker 2:The idea is that we're going to continue to send people into space. We're going to send them millions and millions of miles away and the hope is that we get more answers, and the irony is the answers are right here. Idiot, we're this. Look at God's creation, look at what he's done. You can look out there and learn and explore and great. But the problem is these people. This is how their minds work. I'm going to look for any other explanation than what is clearly to be seen in front of my face and I will literally search deep space for the rest of my life. Never land on a single planet and act like that was more honorable than actually acknowledging what was in the front of my face.
Speaker 2:This is from your intellectual descent. It is an endless wormhole. If you want to find other ways to get around what God has said, you can, but it's rebellion. You have to. You got to lay down your thought life. The third one, tim, is we have to lay down this idea of of license. Okay.
Speaker 2:So if you think you're being oppressed by what God is doing in your life, if you think, like I, wish God would do it this way or that way, or I wish he would let me do this. We want to push off the God who actually commands us to do certain things and live certain ways, and we want to connect it to this idea of freedom and live certain ways. And we want to connect it to this idea of freedom, all right. It's pretty wild to me how personal autonomy, you know, has become like freedom. Tim, you used to think about freedom, all right, when you were growing up and I was growing up, you hear an eagle screech in the background. You think about the 4th of July Fireworks. Yeah, you think about the 4th of July fireworks. Yeah, you think about like fighting for freedom.
Speaker 2:It meant, like, I'm going to go to war so that I can have kids in a family and plant corn in my ground. You know what I mean it was. It was drawing hard lines so that somebody could not take from you the things that you were meant to do. Okay, that's. That's actually more along the lines of virtue. I have a right to do what is right. I have a right to live the way God told me to. And when he put me in a garden and he gave me a bride and he told me to fill the earth and subdue it, and he told me to plant food in the ground and told me to live in a way that would honor him, I'm supposed to fight for that. And if somebody tries to come in and tell me not to do what God told me to do, it is virtuous to go to war against that.
Speaker 2:When we say the word freedom now, or rights now, we're talking about killing babies. We're talking about, um, you know the the transgender nonsense that's going on with our children, and how, if they think that they're a boy, then we should put them on hormone blockers or whatever. Why? Cause it's their right. They're free. Okay, freedom has become license, not virtue. Freedom has become I get to do whatever I want, because whatever I desire is ultimately something you shouldn't be able to say no to, because it's my desire. Thomas Hobbes was the guy who really put this on the map, this idea of Leviathan. Your primitive desires are who you were made to be and so, ultimately, it is your right to have everything that you desire. And then the only time we cave on those desires is when we get into a society where we will mutually agree on taming some of our desires so that we can have the other benefits that we want. It's not virtue, it's license, and it's demonic, it's not true. So whatever is in you that thinks like I have to live this particular way, or if I have this desire, I should get it, you're talking about license, not freedom. This is why I wanted to say Edmund Vance Cook, but it's Edmund Burke. He talks about it all the time.
Speaker 2:Right, our passions forge our fetters. The less pressure on the outside of somebody, the more internal pressure. He's going to have to be disciplined, because the less internal discipline he has, the more pressure on the outside. We'll have to discipline him or else he'll go wild. Though there's a, there's a law there of internal discipline, more freedom, uh, less internal discipline. More external discipline will need to be applied, because that person will go as far as they want to. This is why he says their passions forge their fetters.
Speaker 2:Your desire for things will ultimately be the things that enslave you.
Speaker 2:Jesus is trying to give you virtuous freedom and that actually happens through commands and living how he told you to command, how he told you to live, not doing whatever thing you feel like you're entitled to in the moment. Augustine, in Confessions to him, he said the more one is free from sin, the more one is free, for what is free is that which exists for its own sake. Like that's what it's supposed to look like. Listen, if you're free from sin, then you're able to live and use things to the fullness of what they were meant to be for. From sin, then you're able to live and use things to the fullness of what they were meant to be for In the, in the Summa, for freedom is not given to us that we might live in sin, but that we might live in righteousness.
Speaker 2:Right, yes, right. That's what it's actually supposed to look. Like man I want to get into, like James and stuff, but I'll just, I'll just give you the fourth. The last is is ultimately, we have to lay down our pride and choose humility, and that means you have to acknowledge that you are not God, and I think that's actually harder for us than we want to admit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the kind of thing, that kind of sneaks up on you.
Speaker 2:I'm afraid that our hearts, although longing for rest and this cessation of anxiety and depression and this meaninglessness that we can often find ourselves in, ultimately people won't find it because they have the ulterior motive of ultimately being God. This is why so many people are like they're seeking truth, they're seeking the faith, they want Jesus, but they don't really want Jesus. They want all the things Jesus can give them, as long as Jesus doesn't have to be God. So I'll come to your services. I'll accept the truths that are there, that are so good. I really love the community and fellowship.
Speaker 2:You'll hear nonbelievers say things like this but it's like right, but do you understand that Jesus is Lord, that he like gave his life? That's the part I struggle with. Why? Because they don't want anybody to be God but them. Yeah, deep down, it's the poison and the whisper from the serpent back in the garden saying if you do it this way, you'll be like God and you can use his creation, you can use the ground, you can have the world, but you get to be God and interpret it the way that you want to.
Speaker 2:And so many people are like I'll take all the good things God has created, but I don't want. I don't want him. I mean, what is? What is alcohol addiction? But an attempt to recreate the world the way that you want, simulate feelings, right? What's laziness, if not this attempt to say I'm just going to push off what God told me to do and I'm going to use, you know, license instead of freedom, and I'll call it the same thing this is my right? What's materialism, if not an attempt to create the world that I want around me in a particular way and I will make myself in a particular way and I will make myself feel a particular way?
Speaker 2:I can get into all this stuff, but Jesus in Philippians 2 tells us that, even though he was God, he didn't live like God. He didn't come down. It says that he didn't regard equality with God a thing to be grasped. What does that mean? Stop chasing after the wind. Stop chasing after the wind. Your goal is not to be God, your goal is to obey God, and that's actually the pinnacle.
Speaker 2:The difference between happiness and meaninglessness, or you could say purpose and despair, is are you trying to be God? Are you trying to obey God? Because, literally, jesus, the one who was himself God, came down and modeled for us how to find joy and all of us, to this day, still fight against it by this thing that is in our guts telling us well, yeah, but do you want to? And this is again. This is why, in chapter 12, he says remember also your creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come in, the years drawn near, when you say I have no delight in them, why? Because you tried to be God instead of obey God. Vanity, is that so, man?
Speaker 2:I realized I went on like a lot of tangents today but I was recently thinking about this particular topic and then we just like stumbled right into it and you brought up, uh, ecclesiastes. So I had to. I hope it's maybe at least a a thoughtful wormhole to take people down today.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I would think so Cool. Well, guys, uh, my hope and thought for you is this it might be good to take this podcast, check your heart, analyze some of the things that you're trying to exercise that autonomous ingenuity you know what I mean or that intellectual dissent. Am I constantly coming up with ways for why this is okay, outside of what God has actually said? Am I the person who sees freedom as license, less virtue, and am I the person who, ultimately, is trying to deify myself? I am trying to recreate the world in my image, the way that I would want, instead of living out the reality that I am made in the image of God and I need to go to him for sustenance. So just a good reminder for all of us today Awesome.
Speaker 1:Cool man, thanks man.
Speaker 2:All right, you guys have a good week.
Speaker 1:Catch you all next time.
