From Dust to Dust

Passage: Ecclesiastes 3:16-22; Ecclesiastes 4:1-3

The Preacher has been showing us the clash between life under the sun and life above the sun, between the temporal and the eternal.

I had a most profound experience of this clash in my first year of ministry in Wisconsin.  As the new pastor in town I was invited to give the baccalaureate sermon at our local high school.  I decided that if you were inviting a pastor I was free to give them the Gospel, so I did, pure, plain, simple and clear.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the revelation of God concerning our lives.

When I finished a trio of high school students got up to sing a song, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  They sang the popular song by the band Kansas, “Dust in the Wind.”

All we are is dust in the wind.  All we dream, all we do, it all slips away, and all we are is dust in the wind.

Under the sun you won’t come to the conclusion there is a good and loving God in control.

If you rely on experience as your guide you are going to come to wrong conclusions about life under the sun and you will not be able to make sense of it and you will end up in despair, frustration, vanity.

In our text Solomon answers three of those faulty conclusions, three objections to his conclusion that God is sovereign over everything.  Injustice, death and oppression.

If there is wickedness in the courts and if death comes to everyone, and if there is oppression all around us, how can there be good judge and a loving, caring God in heaven?