People who ought to know keep saying that this year we will finally put the pandemic behind us. I’ve given up predicting myself, but I hope they’re right. If they are, I wonder how we’ll remember these last couple years.

For those who suffered the death of someone close to them, the defining experience of the pandemic may be loss. For many of us, I imagine the primary experience will be disorientation. We saw our plans upended. We felt time suspended. We saw what had been pillars in life crumble one after another — from time with aging family, to the joy of in-person worship, to a simple smile on the unmasked face of a friend.

Far beyond the physical impacts of the disease itself, the pandemic experience has exposed the fragility of so much of what we take for granted in life. How will we cope with the disorientation of the last couple years? Where will we look for stability and renewal coming out of them?

Nothing New Under the Sun

The Bible’s wisdom literature is given to help us answer questions like these. Wisdom provides proper orientation to the world. It’s a learned instinct for living in the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. And of the Bible’s wisdom books, perhaps ironically, it is Ecclesiastes that offers the perspective we badly need in responding to what we’ve been through.

“Wisdom is an instinct for living in the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

I say ironically because Ecclesiastes itself can be a disorienting book. It offers the perspective of a man called “the Preacher,” who essentially had everything he wanted in life. No one told him no. But in the end, he found it all to be nothing but vanity. A mere vapor. Meaningless. Empty.

It is striking to me how closely the list of his pursuits in life resembles the main options we have for reorienting ourselves after a difficult couple of years. We’ll be tempted to look for stability or hope in the same vanities that collapsed under his weight long ago.

Take pleasure, for example. In the earliest days of the pandemic, traffic to major porn sites skyrocketed. So did Netflix subscriptions. And now, after two years in which so many plans were disrupted, pleasure-seekers are booking luxury vacations at record pace. As one Forbes writer put it, what we learned from the pandemic is that “the future is unpredictable,” that “life is short,” and that “dreams should not be put off.” “If all goes well,” he continues, “2022 is going to be a big year for dream trips.”

The Big Quit

Some have chased dreams; others are looking to work for a fresh start. In September of 2021 more than four million people voluntarily left their jobs for other opportunities. That number broke a record set the previous month, when millions more made the same choice. It’s a trend so significant that pundits are calling this “The Great Resignation” or “The Big Quit.” Given how much of the disruption of these past years directly affected our work, it shouldn’t surprise us that so many would look to move on with a change of scenery.

Then there’s money and what it can buy. Retail therapy was a go-to treatment for months before any vaccine hit the market. With stimulus money going around, people purchased new fire pits and television upgrades, and started home improvement projects to take the edge off what had gone wrong. So many months later, retail therapy still sells. As one recent AT&T commercial put it, “I think we can all agree that after the past year-ish, we all deserve something new.” Why not reward your survival with the latest iPhone?

Still others have looked to mastery of some new skill to redeem the strange time and restore a sense of control. In April of 2020, I heard one economist talk about the loss of control as the primary stressor he was feeling since his job is to predict what’s likely to happen. His advice to others feeling that pain was to find something you can control, however small and insignificant it might be. Some learned to bake bread. Others took up a foreign language. I smoked my first couple briskets. What did you do with your pandemic? We want growth opportunities, to move from victory unto victory. If COVID was a curveball, we want to hit it out of the park.

All Was Striving After Wind

The Preacher warns us, however, that life doesn’t work this way. Ecclesiastes opens with a poem on the relentless, repetitive weariness of life under the sun. “What does a man gain,” he asks, “by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:3).

We want gain. We’d like to see life as one long process of acquisition. Where we have setbacks, we want to bounce back better than ever. We want steady upward progress. But just as the sun rises and sets (Ecclesiastes 1:5), just as the wind blows round and round (verse 6), so it is with all of life: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (verse 9).

In chapter 2, the Preacher explains how he reached this conclusion, with a catalog of where he turned for some sort of gain in this life. It’s a list that sounds eerily familiar. He looked first to pleasure (Ecclesiastes 2:1). He tried comedy (verse 2), fine wine (verse 3), entertainment, and sex (verse 8). He looked to his work, and to mastery over his slice of the world: “I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees” (Ecclesiastes 2:4–5). He built up more money and more possessions than any before him in Jerusalem (Ecclesiastes 2:7–8).

Pleasure, work, wealth, control — everything we might look to under the sun — he’s already had in abundance. We need to hear the lesson he learned the hard way: “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:11).

What We Can See Now

If you’re feeling disoriented by a difficult two years, you won’t find your footing in the same old vanities that let the Preacher down so long ago. But we do have an opportunity now for a greater clarity about the world than perhaps we could have had back when things seemed normal.

“Nothing is certain about life under the sun except the death that comes at the end of it.”

Nothing is certain about life under the sun except the death that comes at the end of it. The things we take for granted have always been fragile. Our control over what matters to us has always been severely limited. And the grip of death on what we love has always been stronger than ours. COVID didn’t cause these problems. Whatever comes next won’t solve them. That’s the perspective Ecclesiastes offers to us.

When the Preacher writes of “life under the sun,” what he has in mind is life from a strictly human perspective. As if what we see is all there is. Death really is the end. There’s no satisfaction for our deepest hunger pains. In other words, “life under the sun” is life on your own, left to your own ideas for what’s best, your own resources for pulling off your vision, and your own handful of years to make the most of it.

Ecclesiastes is a devastating critique of human self-sufficiency. We won’t find a cure for what ails us under the sun. Our only hope rests on a radical intervention from beyond.

Light from Beyond the Sun

The message of Ecclesiastes is that if God is silent, the whole world is a vapor. The message of the rest of the Scriptures is that God has spoken to us. Even better than that: the Word has become flesh and lived among us (John 1:14).

Peter Kreeft has described Ecclesiastes as “a perfect silhouette of Jesus, the stark outline of the darkness that the face of Jesus fills” (Three Philosophies of Life, 51). Under the sun, on our own, all is vanity and death has the final word. Ecclesiastes exists to make “the darkness intolerable” (Derek Kidner, The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, 103). And to prepare us for the only certain hope: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4–5).

Whatever else we may take with us from a disorienting couple of years, into another year under the sun, let’s at least embrace the message of the Preacher. We won’t find the stability we crave short of the help and hope and satisfaction that only comes beyond the sun. If we haven’t learned that lesson, we’ll be just as unprepared for the next time the world turns upside down. And there will be a next time. “What has been is what will be. . . and there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

Audio Transcript

And we are back. Good Monday morning. We enter this new week with a great topic on the table. I mentioned it on Friday. I love episodes where we just walk through several texts that have proved most helpful to you over the decades, Pastor John. We’re doing that today, prompted by this question from a listener named Greg: “Pastor John, hello to you! I’m so thankful for Desiring God and for you and for this podcast. Here’s my question: What are your favorite verses for when you fight the enemy hardest? What are your go-to verses? I love it when the verses are just there for us, but we also have to go look for them also at times.” Pastor John, what texts would you give Greg, and all of us?

Well, the first thing is, thank you very much. There’s nothing I’d rather do than go looking for my favorite verses, because I need rehearsal just like everybody else does. And so, just giving some thought to this was simply wonderful. It’s wonderful not only because I enjoy it so much, but also because I think this is just good for our listeners. I hope they tune in now for the next ten minutes or so and just soak in the glorious parts of Scripture that are so wonderfully tailor-made for living the Christian life through all of its ups and downs.

I don’t think God wants us to live our lives with a kind of vague sense of trust — like, God is good vaguely; I have trust vaguely; I enter my day vaguely. I think he wants us to have specific promises. Now, since there are hundreds of them in the Bible, you have to make choices about which one you’re going to use like a lozenge in your mouth today. I picture my heart as a mouth with a tongue, and I put a lozenge in it of some juicy promise, and I suck on it all day long. And that means I don’t suck on fifty others, because my brain, at least, will not hold fifty things in consciousness at one time.

“I don’t think God wants us to live with a kind of vague sense of trust. I think he wants us to have specific promises.”

So, here are some of my most common go-to lozenges or passages that I find help in through all kinds of situations. I’m going to just pose a question about a situation that I face and then give you the go-to promises. I think I might hit eleven of these, so I’ll try to go quick.

Lust

I’ll start with lust, the sin of lust. So here I am searching Google, or I’m on some news site, and there’s this sexually titillating link — not to pornography (that’s really not a big temptation for me; I’ve never been to a pornographic site), but just this sexually titillating picture over here where you can go and see more of what that might be about. Will you click through?

And here are my three go-to passages that persuade me, “Don’t do that. That’s not going to be good for you.” One is a warning (which is a negative promise), one is a positive promise, and one is a provision. So first, the warning, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29). I’ll tell you, that’s a very powerful disincentive from clicking through to sexually titillating stuff.

And then there’s this positive promise — and this is even more powerful: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). I want to see God. And I know if I linger over some presumably innocent sexual stimulation, the defilement of my mind will obscure the sight of the living God. I know it will.

And then the third thing is the provision: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24). And I say to myself, “Christ suffered horribly on the cross so that I would not click on sexually stimulating material, and I don’t want to hammer another nail into his hand.”

Affliction

I am facing some affliction. It’s sickness, maybe — maybe small, maybe big — or some loss. And oh, how precious has Psalm 34:19 been to me: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.” Now, the reason that’s especially encouraging is because it says that the righteous are in affliction. In other words, it’s not necessarily owing to my sin that I’m in this affliction. And it says I’m coming out in God’s good time.

Injustice

Now — revenge, anger at the way I’ve been mistreated by somebody. Somebody said something false about me. How can I have peace while injustice against me has been done? Answer: the promise that God will be the avenger. “John Piper, love your enemies. You do not need to get the last word here. God will settle things in due time.” So, here’s Romans 12:19–20:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him.

“John Piper, leave the repayment to God.” Oh, how many times I have been set free from bitterness that way.

Weakness

I feel weak. I feel inadequate. I’m facing a situation and I’m just not up to it. Isaiah 64:4: “From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you” — well, what’s so unique about him? Here’s what it says: “. . . who works for those who wait for him.” That’s absolutely amazing. Glorious. The glorious uniqueness of our God is that he works for us instead of recruiting slave labor to work for him. Amazing.

“The glorious uniqueness of our God is that he works for us instead of recruiting slave labor to work for him.”

And listen to how 2 Chronicles 16:9 says it: “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is [whole] toward him.” God is looking for people for whom, with omnipotence, he can work today. “Can I work for you today?” I’ll sign up God to work for me today. “So, I want to be strong for you today. Will you trust me?” I’ll tell you, that’s amazing.

Need

What about when I don’t have what I think I need — enough money, enough time, enough help? What if I lead a ministry, and they look to me for hope? Now there are two go-to verses I’ve used hundreds of times. Philippians 4:19: “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” That’s mind-blowing. Both the promise and the resources are mind-blowing. The “riches of glory” is how much he has with which he can help me.

Every need will be met. How many times did I say to our leaders at Bethlehem, while I was a pastor, coming to the end of a year with finances almost always falling short — and I say to them, “Guys, God will give us everything we need. He will. It says so. Period. Let’s go home and sleep.”

And then there’s Hebrews 13:5–6: “Keep your life free from the love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?’” That’s as sweet as it gets.

Anxiety

Does he care? You come into moments where you say, “Yeah, I know all the big promises: he’s powerful; he’s wise. But does he care?” Does he care about me personally? I’m such a little teeny-weeny human being, and the universe as big. How could God possibly care for me?

First Peter 5:6–7: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God” — yes, yes, of course we know that; that’s our theology — “so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.” I’ve said that little phrase walking into situations so many times. “He cares for you. He cares for you. He’s God, and he cares for you.”

There is a mighty hand, and there is a caring heart. So he says, don’t shrink back from humility, thinking that you’re going to be too vulnerable if you’re humble. But rather, remind yourself, “No, every single anxiety goes onto his broad shoulders because he cares.” He cares for you.

Insecurity

How much does he care? Is this a mild care? Is this kind of a begrudging care? “Yeah, God’s a God of love, and therefore Jesus died. So he has to care for me.” Oh my goodness, how horrible can our minds talk to us? How much does he care?

Luke 12:32: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” It’s his good pleasure. He loves to care for you. Or better than this is Jeremiah 32:41 (this is God talking): “I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.” What more can God say than that he loves, he rejoices, to do good to us with all his heart and all his soul? There isn’t anything conceivably bigger than all of God’s heart and all of God’s soul. And that’s what he says is behind his doing good for us.

Fear

Will he help me in this crisis that I am feeling very afraid of right now? This is probably the verse that I have gone to, Tony, more than any other verse in all my 76 years of life. And I’ll bet lots of people who’ve listened over the years would already know what verse it is. It’s Isaiah 41:10: “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” The reason that verse is number one for the struggle with fear, which is almost every day — something fearful happens every day (little fears, big fears) — is because it’s not general. It’s the voice of God himself speaking with a direct, “I will, I will, I will.”

Spurgeon said, “I love the ‘I wills’ and ‘I shalls’ of God.” Me too. The “he wills” (“He will help”) — those are good. But “I will” — when I step into the pulpit anxious that God act in spite of my inadequacies, and I hear him say (because I’m preaching it to myself by his authority from his word), “I will help you,” that’s just glorious, because you actually hear God by his word say it to you.

Depression

What about depression? What about melancholy? Times of deep, deep discouragement? Countless times. We used to have a sign on the side of the building because I quoted this so often — back in the days when people thought, “This is the ‘Hope in God’ church,” because of the sign. “There it is on the side of the wall. Why did they put that up there?” They put it up there because they have a depressed pastor who needs encouragement as he walks to church.

And here’s what I go to: “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” So you’re preaching to yourself, right? John Piper’s preaching to himself. “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Psalm 42:11). Oh my goodness. I have preached that to myself in low times, hundreds and hundreds of times.

Death

We’re almost done; just two more quick ones. Death. Okay, I’m old, right? Age 76 is old. I think I just read somebody died yesterday at 76. Every time I read that, or 74, or 63, or 42, I think, “Wow, I’m living on borrowed time.” It could be any night, right?

So, what do you say to yourself when that fact overwhelms you? For months I have recited this to myself before I go to sleep every night (maybe one or two exceptions). First Thessalonians 5:9–10: “God has not destined you [John Piper] for wrath, but to obtain salvation through [your] Lord Jesus Christ, who died for [you] so that whether [you] are awake or asleep [you] might live with him.” Tony, that’s going onto my gravestone, unless I change my mind.

Promise of Promises

Now, the last one. And this I’ve saved for last because it’s all-encompassing. In other words, it provides foundation for all the promises, and it is the Vesuvius of all the promises. And you probably know what it is. Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son [think of it] but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” In other words, because Christ died for us, God will give his children everything — absolutely everything — we need to be supremely holy and happy forever.

So, thank you, Greg, for the question. May the Lord grant to all of us the faith to live joyfully, boldly, lovingly by these amazing treasures.

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.