Ecclesiastes: Living Life Backwards - The Problem with Pleasure [Ryan Ashley]

Ecclesiastes 2:1-11

“Compassion is allowing someone else’s heart to walk around in your chest”.

Two Assumptions the Teacher has:

1. I can’t find it here… then I have to go there!

2. If I find it, he will be full and content.

“We are unhappy and we are generally unhappy about being unhappy, but it’s fine.”

Jonathon Haidt - The Happiness Hypothesis

“[You are] a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonize, whose desires deep down are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to at the very same time.  You’re equipped, you realize, more for farce (or even tragedy) than happy endings.”

Francis Spufford - Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense

“The best anyone can do is to reach a balance of discontents.”

Sigmund Freud

1. Pursue it!

2. Become a Cynic 

3. Become Moralistic… 

So how do we move forward?

Objects must be sacramental

Relationships must be covenantal

“He wants us to see how far from Eden we have come. Once it was enough for a man and a woman to have God and the good gifts that God gave, even if it meant that there was a tree and a fruit that existed but not for them. Now, even though we are surrounded by opportunities to laugh, or drink, or work, or make money, none of it is enough, we are not satisfied, and death stomps on all of it. Even our marvelous moments of good work and good intimacy will one day become only a memory and then be gone forever in the world. Death did this to us. We did this to us. God let it be. He will have to take care of death and all that has flown from it. In time the promised One will come. A cross will come. A tomb will empty. Death will die.”

Zack Eswine – Recovering Eden