Apologetics Conference with Dr Ravi Zacharias and Michael Ramsden
Sat: What is Worthwhile under the Sun?(Ecclesiastes 2:1-11)
(By Dr Ravi Zacharias)
Preamble
The word “apologetics” comes from the Greek word “apologia”, which means “to give an answer to”. Dr Ravi Zacharias added another dimension to this, that is “to make clear”, “to clarify truth claims”. On the day of Pentecost in the book of Acts, the Bible says that Peter stood up and said, “Let me explain”. That is the word “apologia”. 1 Peter 3 also says to always be prepared to give an apologia to anyone who asks of you, the reason for the hope that is within you. Apologetics is the twin task of responding to the hard questions of life that are posed to the Christian faith, and to present those answers as clearly as possible. Apologetics deal with questions all the time.
Two guys were sitting around, whiling away their time. One looked at the other and said, “You know, I’m thirsty, so let’s have a bet. I will ask myself a question, and if I answer it, you will buy me a Coke.” The other guy said, “That’s ridiculous! What kind of a bet is that?” The first guy continued “Then you will ask yourself a question, and if you answer it, I will buy you a Coke. And we will keep going until one of us asks a question that we cannot answer. The second guy then said, “This is the strangest bet I have ever heard of but since you proposed it, why don’t you go first?” Then the first guy said “Alright, this is the first question to me. How can a rabbit burrow a hole into the ground without throwing mud into the outside? And my answer is, it should burrow from the inside.” Then the second guy said, “How can it do that?” The first guy said, “I do notknow, that is your question.”
Sometimes, we ask ourselves questions that stump the questioner.
The Question of Pleasure
Pleasure. How do we draw boundaries and perimeters amongst the many options that we actually have? There is no more important question than this in our time because of the various options we have to entertain ourselves. We are a pleasure-driven culture, and we cannot dwell with the monotonous for even a moment. Variety is not just the spice of life; variety has become the most important component of life. Once upon a time, there were maybe one or two television channels. Now, there could be over 150 channels and yet people could say, “I do not know what programme to watch.” As our choices grow more and more, our pleasure quotient seems to rise with diminishing returns.
This question of pleasure was actually asked by a man who understood this predicament very well. Solomon, a man who had everything and enjoyed much pleasures in life asked, “And what does pleasure accomplish? … Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had doneand what I had toiled to achieve,everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”(cf. Ecclesiastes 2:1-11)
“Under the sun” is a very important recurring theme and phrase. In English, it may lose its poignancy, but in Hebrew,the meaning is very clear. It actually refers to a “closed system”. If you take God out of the paradigm, if you take away any input coming from the outside, and all you have is this tiny nimbus of your own little world, making your own choices, if your life under the canopy of no transcendent voice, you will come to a conclusion that it is all about chasing after the wind, meaningless and empty. It is all what Jean-Paul Satre, the author of ‘Nausea’ and a man who lived with no moral boundaries, would say, “Life is an empty bubble, floating on the sea of nothingness”.
As Christians, this is a difficult subject as with the subject on the problem of pain and the problem of origin. How often do we give guidelines to our younger ones in choosing between the pleasurable options that they now have? As adults, how do we know what lines to draw?
One of the greatest essayist of all times, F. W. Boreham had over 50 volumes of essay, one of which is on the subject of pleasure. He said:
“Laughter, merriment and fun, were quite evidently intended to occupy a large place in this world. Yet on no subject under the sun has the Church displayed more embarrassment and confusion. One might almost suppose that here we have discovered an important phase of human experience on which Christianity is criminally reticent; a terra incognita which no intrepid prophet had explored; a silent sea upon whose waters no ecclesiastical adventurer had ever burst; a dark and eerie country upon which no sun had ever shone. Dr. Jowett tells us of the devout old Scotsman who, on Saturday night, locked up the piano and unlocked the organ, reversing the process last thing on the Sabbath evening. The piano is the sinner; the organ the saint! Dr. Parker used to wax merry at the man who regarded bagatelle as a gift from heaven, whilst billiards he deemed to be a stepping-stone to perdition. The play we condemn; it is anathema, to us. The same play-or a vastly inferior one-screened on a film we delightedly admire. One Christian follows the round of gaiety with the maddest of the merry; another wears a hair shirt, and starves himself into a skeleton. One treats life as all a frolic; another as all a funeral. We swerve from the Scylla of aestheticism to the Charybdis of asceticism. We swing like a pendulum from the indulgence of the Epicurean to the severities of the Stoic, failing to recognise, with the author of Ecce Homo, that it is the glory of Christianity that, rejecting the absurdities of each, it combines the cardinal excellencies of both. We allow without knowing why we allow we ban without knowing why we prohibit. We compound for sins we are inclined to by damning those we have no mind to. We are at sea without chart or compass. Our theories of pleasure are in hopeless confusion. Is there no definite doctrine of amusement? Is there no philosophy of fun? There must be! And there is!”
Boreham is talking about how we swerve from one extreme to another, not finding ourselves on recognisable grounds. Terror incognito, terror that we cannot recognize.
The problem of pleasure is a problem of immense proportion in our time. How many times do we pause before a choice of pleasure and say, “What do you want me to do here, Lord? What is my real option here before You?” Do we really go on our knees when we are facing the option of amusement and pleasure? We have become so desensitised by television programming today, that once upon a time, certain things that we now find amusing, would have been quite shocking when we first see it.
When we take a frog and put into boiling water, it would instantly jump out. But if you take it and put into cold water and gradually heat it up, the frog would not jump out because the frog does not know that it is being boiled to its own death. That is the way the entertainment industry is today. They are gradually making us insensitive to things that were once upon a time, stunned a previous generation, and now we have just become accustomed to it. They have no definitions of pleasure except the bottomline, and we have gone along with them and not pause to ask, “What kind of havoc and destruction is this going to bring to me if I become comfortable with this kind of viewing?”
Borrowing from F. W. Boreham, there are three principles to the question, ‘what is worthwhile under the sun?’
First principle
The first principle comes from the book of Judges 7. Gideon was going to face the Midianites. And he does not know how to fight them because they are mighty. The only way he was thinking of was a massive army. As he was putting together this massive army, he asked God to help him as they were outnumbered. God told Gideon that he ought to reduce the size of his army, until about 300. Gideon asked how he to know which 300 was. God said to bring them to a stream of water, where there will be two types of ways in which they would drink. Some would drink it normally, whereas others would lap it up like a dog. Separate the 300 who can drink in this fashion, and take those 300 with him. None in the 10,000 suspected what was happening.
Incidental to this story is this principle: Anything that refreshes you, without distracting you from diminishing or destroying the final goal is a legitimate pleasure.
Why didn’t they even think that a selection process was going on? Because pausing by a stream to take a drink of water was a legitimate type of refreshment when you are going to battle. Anything that refreshes you without destroying your final goal is a legitimate pleasure. What is the catch in this principle? It is to establish the final goal. The question is how can you ever decide between legitimate and illegitimate pleasures until you have established the destiny you are trying to get to? You have to define what your purpose is in life.
Why do marriages fall apart? Marriages will implode under the weight of distractions if you do not first define what marriage is all about. In one of his books, Dr Ravi states that by saying ‘I do’ to that one person, you are implicitly saying ‘no I don’t’ to everyone else. If you don’t understand this, then marriage will become a co-habitation of convenience without a commitment of intellect, emotion, will, passion and all that pulls together to this one person to whom you have singularly pledged to love to the exclusivity of anyone else. When you come to the living God, and you make that commitment to Him, you are actually saying to Him, my purpose now is to glorify You. Once it is clear in your mind what it means to glorify God, the questions become much easier to answer.
Dr Ravi related his experience when he was in the hotel industry, where night time was a celebratory time when all sorts of liquids were consumed. Dr Ravi did not partake in all the heavy drinking sessions. One day, the GM asked him, “When are you going to become a man?” Dr Ravi then explained that every night, the GM would leave a key to him. The GM did that because he trusted Dr Ravi. If someone was able to talk Dr Ravi out of his conviction about honouring the GM’s trust, would the GM still continue to leave the key with him? The GM said,“No.” Dr Ravi then said he was going to draw a line and no one should force him to cross it. The GM backed down.
Once you have established your destination and purpose, you will have all these little derailments that will come along your way. You have to draw the line and know when not to cross it. John Wesley’s mother, Susanna, gave birth to 19 children. She herself was one of 29. John Wesley changed the world of his time by preaching 40,000 sermons in his lifetime on horseback. When one of Canada’s most famous preacher Oswald J Smith died, Dr Ravi was present at his funeral when Billy Graham preached. Billy Graham said that Oswald J Smith had preached 12,000 sermons in his lifetime. If 12,000 in the days of the electronic media is a great accomplishment, think of 40,000 in horseback!
One day, John asked his mother for a definition of ‘sin’. She said, “Whatever weakens your sense of reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God or takes away your relish for spiritual things or anything that increases the authority and power of the flesh over the spiritthat becomes sin however good that thing might be in itself”.
Where are you in your life, in terms of your purpose to honour God? Are you going to places you ought not to be going? Have you picked up habits you ought not to be nurturing? Are you in relationships that you should not pursue? Are you using language that is flirting with the profane?
When you do not establish your goal, you may find yourselves ending up like Samson with his eyes gorged out. What brought Samson to a place like that? You never destroy yourself in one step; destruction generally takes small steps into one final giant step, until the boiling point is reached and you cannot get out.
Dr Ravi’s challenge is: take a piece of paper and write down the mission statement for your life. What is the purpose you are going to give yourself? Dr Ravi quoted from a Danish philosopher: ‘I have learned to define my life backward, and then live it forward, which means I am going for my destination, and once I know my destination I will start moving towards it.” Find out your destination.
Second principle
Dr Ravi used another battle scene to describe the second principle. King David was weary from battling the Philistines, and sighed to himself that all he wanted was a drink from his own well in Bethlehem. Upon hearing this, three of his officials took it upon themselves, risking their lives, went on a cloak-and-dagger operation to get a pitcher of water from that well for King David. King David was naturally grateful for their efforts, but he realised that he could not enjoy the water at the expense of his officials’ lives, and poured the water to the ground.
The second principle is therefore this: Anything that jeopardises the sacred right of another is an illicit pleasure.
We live in a society whereby our jobs own us. We are bought, in that we want to do everything for our jobs, be it selling shirts, etc. We give to the world in its corporate pursuits, and sometimes the most valuable needs in our lives are left unaddressed. What we have done in the process is to jeopardise the sacred right of another by denying them of what was their right in our responsibility. Dr Ravi recalled during the days when his children were younger and how desperately they needed him and he was not there for them. God, in His graceguarded them and now his children are serving alongside Dr Ravi in the same ministry under the same roof.
Frank Minirth and Paul Meier wrote a book called “Happiness is a Choice”. In it, they wrote:
“As a point of clarification, many people still choose happiness but still do not obtain it. The reason for this is even though they choose to be happy, they seek inner peace and joy in the wrong places. They seek for materialism and do not find it. They seek joy in sexual prowess but end up with fleeting pleasures and bitter long-term disappointments. They seek fulfillment by seeking positions of power in corporations, in governments and even in their own families but are totally unfulfilled. I have had millionaire businessmen come to my office and tell me they have big houses, yachts, condominiums in Colorado, nice children, a beautiful mistress, an unsuspecting wife, secure, corporate positions – and suicidal tendencies. They have everything this world has to offer except for one thing – inner peace and joy. They come to my office as a last resort, begging me to help them conquer the urge to kill themselves. Why? The answers are not simple. The human mind and emotions are a very complex, dynamic system.”
One of the things that Dr. Ravi used to do and will continue to do is to speak to professional ball players.Dr. Ravi would speak to them about living their lives on the road, as he has spent more time living ‘on the road’ than they have lived. One of them was this player who was earning millions of dollars in that particular ball game season, and upon hearing what Dr. Ravi had to say, this particular player put his head on Dr. Ravi’s shoulders and wept. He sharedthat he has destroyed everything in his life because he did not live in the way Dr. Ravi has shared with the players. What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? Are you jeopardising that sacred right that God has entrusted to you? Have you lost your way in all of these? Because any pleasure that jeopardises the sacred right of another is an illegitimate pleasure. Anything that does not distract you from your ultimate goal is a legitimate pleasure.
Third principle
Proverbs 25:16 -If you find honey, eat just enough — too much of it, and you will vomit. If you have too much of pleasure without boundaries, and you will be nauseated.
The third principle is simply this: All pleasures in life must be balanced.
There is a time to get on the tennis court. There is a time to get on that golf course. There is time to put your head back and listen to some beautiful music. There is time to walk into a restaurant and enjoy a delightful meal. There is time to hold the hand of the one you love. But you do not hold the hand of the one you love while playing ball at the same time. There is time to come to worship, formally. There is time to go out and live the truth of what bound you together here in worship. There is a time to be born. There is a time to die. There is a time to love. There is a time to weep. What King Solomon ended up doing was living a life of imbalance until it sickened him and ultimately destroyed him and his kingdom. How could a man who knew so much squandered his life like that? But he did. To whom that much is given, much is also required.