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Letting Go of the Wind

Brian Messerli
07/06/25 - Praise and Preaching Service

Ecclesiastes 1:1-2, 14 - Picture this scene with me.  Two friends are sitting together on a bench in the park on a windy day.  One of the friends is totally relaxed with his head tilted back and his eyes closed, soaking in and enjoying the cool breeze on his face, but the other friend is worried.  He asks, “What if it’s not windy like this tomorrow and we won’t have this wonderful breeze anymore?”  And he tries to figure out a way to capture the wind so he can have the cool breeze anytime he wants.  He drives to the sporting goods store to buy a net, he comes back to the park and starts swinging the net around to catch the wind, but it’s not working because the wind just goes right through it.  So he drives home to get something more solid.  He gets a jar with a lid on it, drives back to the park and faces the opening of the jar toward the wind and when the wind gets in, he quickly shuts the lid.  But the next day, when he opens the jar in front of his face expecting to experience yesterday’s breeze again, nothing comes out and he’s filled with disappointment.

So now he decides, “I’m going to learn everything I can about wind patterns so I can track down all the spots where I KNOW there’s going to be a breeze so I’ll never have to be without one again!”  So he learns all about how wind works, how it’s based on differences in temperature and pressure in the atmosphere, how the wind blows differently based on whether you’re in the mountains, valleys, or coastlands, based on the time of day, he uses real time wind apps on his phone, but he finds a couple problems with this plan:  1) He’s working so hard and has to travel such long distances to find a breeze that by the time he has one, the breeze doesn’t last long enough to be worth all that effort, and he ends up disappointed.  2) As much knowledge as he has, the wind is still so unpredictable that sometimes when he gets there, it turns out the weather apps were wrong, there is no breeze, and he’s even more disappointed.

Question:  Which friend was able to actually enjoy the wind?  The answer is obvious; it was the friend who enjoyed the breeze while it lasted and didn’t try to hold onto it forever or weary himself with understanding the wind and why it was blowing and where it came from and where it was going next.  In contrast, here’s what it was like for the other friend…

Ecclesiastes 5:16b-17 - Those who chase wind are filled with frustration, vexation which is a combination of annoyance and worry, they’re filled with anger, darkness, and despair.  Chasing the wind destroys our peace and our ability to enjoy the cool breezes when they come, because we can’t predict the wind, we’ll never really understand where it comes from or where it’s going, and we can’t hold on to it forever.  Now, it’s easy to nod our heads in agreement about the wind, but the book of Ecclesiastes says something very shocking:  this earthly life is like the wind, and if we spend our lives chasing it and trying to hold on to it, it’ll destroy us.

In Ecclesiastes 1:1, the word for “Preacher” means one who gathers an assembly together to teach them something, so some translations will call him a Teacher.  The Greek word for one who gathers an assembly together is, “Ekklesiastou,” so our English title for this book is a transliteration of that word.  Ecclesiastes means one who gathers an assembly to teach.  I believe the Teacher referred to in this book is Solomon, and the author who put the book together has collected Solomon’s teachings and is telling us to gather around and listen to what he has to tell us about life!  And we should really listen closely because Solomon was the wisest, richest and most powerful man in the world!  There is NO one who has lived life more to the fullest, no one has had more money, more women, more power and status, or more wisdom, and so at the end of his life we should be eager to hear what Solomon has to say about the whole experience!  And in v. 2, Solomon tells us exactly what he’s learned about life, and it’s completely unexpected!  He says “It’s all vanity.”  The word “vanity” in Hebrew means breath, vapor, or smoke, which is why it’s synonymous with wind, and in Hebrew they didn’t have exclamation points like we do.  If we wanted to emphasize this point, we would write, “It’s all vanity!” With 10 exclamation points behind it!  But since they didn’t have those, they emphasized things by repetition!  So he not only says it’s vanity, he says it’s vanity of vanities, in other words, if you made of list of everything vain, life would be at the top of the list!  It’s the smokiest of smoke, the most vapory of all vapors, the windiest of all winds, and then he says it AGAIN, and then he says it AGAIN!

And you get the sense that this is a man who’s not merely making an observation, but who is absolutely exhausted, frustrated and vexed by it!  It’s a cry of distress from a man who spent decades chasing the wind!  And it’s so shocking because of who he was.  If a poor man whose life was filled with suffering wrote this book and said, “All is vanity,” we could understand why, but this is someone who literally had it all in life, and even HE is saying it’s all just wind.

And so the million dollar question is, “Why would he say that?”  Well, in this book, he gives us 5 reasons life is like the wind, and it’s pretty depressing, and it almost sounds unholy like Godly people aren’t supposed to talk like this, but it’s not unholy, it’s just obvious to anyone with eyes that this is the truth about life under the sun and this book was written to help us acknowledge and accept it.

1. Life is Temporary, and I Can’t Keep It

• Ecclesiastes 3:19-20 - The main reason life is like the wind and we can’t keep it forever is because of death.  One of my Dad’s favorite sayings is, “Life is short, then you die,” and it used to really bother me when he said it because it sounded so pessimistic, but then I realized that’s exactly what the Bible teaches, especially here in Ecclesiastes!
  • And when we’re young, we think, “What do you mean life is short?  We’ve got 80 or 90 years, that’s like forever!”  But 1) we’re not guaranteed 80 or 90 years, Jesus died when He was 33, and others die much younger than that!  And 2) if you were to talk to someone in their 80’s or 90’s and ask them if they think it felt like forever, I guarantee you they’ll say actually it seemed like only a moment.  90 years felt like a passing breeze, and they’d tell you every good experience they had in life was too short, and all the possessions they’ve accumulated over the years cannot be taken with them in the end.
    • Ecclesiastes 5:15-16 - Just like wind, you can’t put this life or any of the experiences or possession in this life in a jar and keep them forever.  It all passes by like a temporary breeze and then it’s over.

2.  Life is Unpredictable, and I Can’t Control It

• Ecclesiastes 2:18-19 - The question “Who knows?” Is a theme throughout Ecclesiastes because no one can predict the future.  Who knows whether the people who end up with our money after we’re gone will take care of it or blow it all on frivolous things?
• Ecclesiastes 5:13-14 - Here’s a guy who thought he could control life by saving ALL of his money so he’d be nice and safe, but then he lost it all and his safety was just a mirage.
  • Ecclesiastes 11:4-5 - He’s saying if you base your work schedule on predicting the weather, you’re not going to be productive at all!  The weather is too unpredictable, and we can’t control life’s future outcomes based on predictions about how we think things are gonna go.
  • Just think of how many INSANELY unpredictable things have happened in your life that you had NO idea were coming, many of them horrible things.  I won’t mention any names but just to list some of the horribly unpredictable things people have experienced here at PSD over the years, there’s getting laid off and losing your job out of the blue, losing a child, have a miscarriage, hitting a deer with your car, having your apartment burn down, losing a pet in a tragic accident, having Christians we thought were so faithful walk away from Jesus, facing conflicts with family members that have caused rifts in our relationships, having our hearts and our world rocked by adultery and divorce, losing a leg, and I could go on.    
    • These are things we NEVER saw coming because just like the wind, life is so unpredictable and we have no idea when the next gust is coming, where it’s coming from or where it’s headed next.

3.  Life is Baffling, and I Can’t Understand It

• Ecclesiastes 7:23-24
• Ecclesiastes 8:16-17 - Solomon’s saying it doesn’t matter how much effort and how many hours you pour into gaining wisdom and knowledge, you’ll never understand the things that happen in this life.  You can study all day and all night, to the point of never sleeping and you still won’t be able to figure it out.
  • So many of those horrible unpredictable things I mentioned before, they make absolutely no sense.  And it seems like the more you try to make sense of it all, the more frustrated you become.
  • Ecclesiastes 1:18 - More knowledge increases pain because the more we know, the more we EXPECT to be able to understand this life, but instead all we learn is how little we actually know.
    • It’s why life is like the wind, because even with our advanced scientific understanding of the way wind works, it’s still baffling.  It’s completely invisible, it’s influenced by dozens of factors that we can’t fully predict, and it changes constantly sometimes with no rhyme or reason at all.  And that’s the way life is too.

4.  Life is Broken and Unfair, and I Can’t Fix It

• Ecclesiastes 1:15 - There are so many crooked things about this world, like evil and injustice.  They’re bent and you want so desperately to straighten them out so they’re not bent or crooked anymore, but you can’t.  There are so many things missing in this world like fairness, world peace, and lasting fulfillment and you want to be an optimist and say, “Hey it’s not so bad, maybe those things aren’t lacking after all,” but you can’t count them as a part of this world when they aren’t actually there.
  • Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 - Even as the king, Solomon has no delusions that he can somehow fix all oppression on the earth.  He knows it’ll always be part of this life, to the point where he says sometimes people who are dead have it better off than those who are alive, because those who are alive are in a constant state of suffering in this broken, unfair world.
  • Ecclesiastes 7:15 - Billy Joel’s song from the 70’s made popular the phrase, “only the good die young.”  I don’t know if Billy knew this, but Solomon said that first.  He’s lamenting how unfair and broken this world is that some of the best, kindness, sweetest, most righteous people die young, but then some of the most evil, twisted, sadistic people live long and prosperous lives.
    • This is why life is like the wind, because wind can also be incredibly destructive in the forms of hurricanes and tornados that can cause the deaths of some of the most righteous people, even children.  And as desperately as we want to fix this world so there ARE no more hurricanes or tornados or evil or oppression or injustice, there’s nothing we can do to fix it.

5.  Life is on Repeat, and I Can’t Change it

• Ecclesiastes 1:3-9 - Life is a cycle that repeats every day.  The sun comes up, the sun goes down, the winds blow south, the winds blow north, the rivers flow into the sea, the water evaporates up into the clouds, the clouds drop rain that fills the rivers again which fill the sea again, and it’s all on repeat and it never ends.  Interestingly, when the sun goes down, it seems to us like the sun gets a break and it’s sleeping while we’re sleeping, but it’s not, because after it sets for us, it has to run over to its place on the other side of the world to rise for them!  The word “hastening” literally means panting.  The sun is exhausted and out of breath because it’s on an never ending circuit.
  • And we feel that in our lives too.  We wake up, have breakfast, brush our teeth, take a shower, go to work, come home, eat dinner, spend time with the kids, go to bed, wake up the next day and repeat that for 80 years until we die.  It’s exhausting and we’re panting because of it.  Then when we die, the cycle goes on without us and the next generation won’t even remember who we are because they’ll be stuck in their own repeat cycle.
  • Now of course, we try to change it up and break the cycle by going on vacation or wearing a Hawaiian shirt to work, but those things are just temporary and then it’s back to the cycle again.  People may even try to change it with new inventions like AI and rockets to go to Mars, but even if we end up colonizing Mars, the newness of that experience will wear off and we’ll realize life is still on repeat there too, so there’s still nothing really new in the end.  All of our new inventions and technology are just new toys to use while we repeat the same cycle.
    • In the bulletin, I shared a great excerpt with you from an Ecclesiastes commentary where the author compares us to Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, where he has to wake up and live the same day, February 2nd, 1993, over and over again for 30 years.  And what his character goes through in that movie is the perfect illustration of what Solomon describes.

Like Bill Murray’s character in that movie, Solomon shares with us the various ways he tried to break free from the repetitive, empty, wind-like cycle of this life and find lasting fulfillment he could hang on to.  So he tried filling his days with more pleasure than anyone could possibly experience, but he found that the pleasure always came to an end, and one of the oddest things about this life is that too much pleasure actually becomes unpleasant and you get tired and bored of it.  He tried to grab hold of the wind by pouring himself into his work and career, by amassing more riches, more women, and more knowledge than anyone in the world, and no matter what he did to try to capture the wind of life and put it in a jar so he could enjoy it forever, he couldn’t do it, and the harder he tried, the more miserable he became!

And yet throughout this book, there are 7 sections where he tells us the only solution is to enjoy life.  Which seems like a paradox, because he spends so long talking about the misery of life’s vanity, yet he also tells us to enjoy life!

Ecclesiastes 3:12-13, 22

Ecclesiastes 8:15

Ecclesiastes 9:9 - The question is, “How in the world can we enjoy life if we can’t keep it, control it, understand it, fix it, or change it?  How can we enjoy life when it’s so much like the wind?”

Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 - Now I used to think He was saying, “Look, if you fear God and keep His commandments, life won’t be like the wind anymore!”  But that’s not the true.  Solomon WAS a believer in God, yet life was still wind.  As Christians, we have a relationship with Jesus, but we STILL can’t keep, control, understand, fix, or change the repeat cycle of this earthly life!  This earthly life “under the sun” is still wind!

But here’s the crucial difference between believing in God and not.  For those who believe in God, life is still wind, but we’re letting it go and we’re not chasing it anymore.  And that’s the only path to peace and the true enjoyment of the good gifts of God in this life.  It’s the way we become like the friend in the park who’s totally relaxed with his head tilted back and his eyes closed, soaking in and enjoying the cool breeze on his face when it comes.  He’s not striving to keep the wind, control the wind, understand the wind, fix the wind or change the wind, he knows this breeze is pleasant, but it’s not going to last forever, so he’s fully present to enjoy it in the moment.  But the friend who’s out there with a net and a jar and tracking weather patterns like Bill Paxton in Twister is stressed and frustrated and disappointed and can’t enjoy any of the good breezes of life.

Life is unpredictable yes, but sometimes it’s unpredictably good and we enjoy unexpected blessings from God!  Life is broken and unfair, but sometimes that unfairness works in our favor and good things happen to us that we don’t deserve, and those are gifts from God.  Life is on repeat yes, but there are a lot of good things on repeat like delicious meals, or morning coffee, the beauty of the sunrise and sunset, the beauty of our wife and the joy of sex, and Solomon is telling us when we believe in God, we can fully enjoy all those things because we’re not deluding ourselves into thinking we can keep them forever or that they’re what’s most important.

For those who don’t believe in God, they HAVE to strive after the wind because the wind is all they have.  They have to try to make things in this earthly life last forever because this earthly life under the sun is all there is for them!  Unbelievers spend their whole lives trying to keep, control, understand, fix, and change this life, and they don’t realize they’re going to be completely disappointed in the end and say like Solomon did, “Vanity of vanities!  All is vanity and striving after wind.”  We talked last week about the slavery of lies, and if we believe the lie that there is no God or that God doesn’t matter, we’ll be enslaved to chasing the wind.  And even though the truth in Ecclesiastes is hard to hear and a little depressing, it actually sets us free!

How?  Well, believers don’t have to hold on to this earthly life so tightly, because we know there’s an eternal life after this one.  We don’t have to control this life, because we know God is in control.  We don’t have to understand this life, because we know God understands every part of it and is working to use it for His good purposes.  We don’t have to fix this life, because God will fix everything and bring every act of injustice and brokenness into judgment, we don’t have to change the repeat cycle of vanity, because in the end God is the one who’s going to put an end to it and restore all things.  And we don’t have to try to keep this life, because God is going to give us a life we can keep forever in the end.  God sets us free to let go of the wind so the bad gusts in life don’t destroy our hearts and the good breezes in life bring us joy.

Let me finish with this shocking truth.  God made this earthly life like wind on purpose as part of the curse for our sin.  It was never meant to be this way, but because of our sin, God purposely made this earthly life like a big hamster wheel that would absolutely wear us out and frustrate us and realize no matter what we do we can’t break the cycle, we can’t stop death, we can’t hold on to anything here forever, and we can’t understand any of it.  But why we He do that?

Romans 8:19-21 - Another word for futility is vanity.  God turned this world to wind, in the hope that we would long for the day when we could be set free from it all in the resurrection and restoration of all things.  God used the vanity of this world, not just as a punishment for our sin, but to show us how frustratingly impossible it is to try to find lasting fulfillment in this life without Him.  He wanted us to see that our only true and lasting fulfillment is found in Him.   And once we find our fulfillment in Him, we can finally let go of the wind, we can stop chasing what this life can never give us, which ironically sets us free to enjoy the good things when they come, to not allow ourselves to be irrevocably crushed when the bad things come, we can be content in any circumstance, and live in hope that the best things are yet to come in the next life where everything is forever and nothing good ever blows away.