What Is Your Endgame?

So, it’s a privilege to be here, and I want to set the context for my remarks in the book of Ecclesiastes and in chapter 12. And I’m going to read it because I’m going to assume that you haven’t memorized it and that you don’t have your Bibles with you or that if you do, you couldn’t possibly see them. In any case, here is Ecclesiastes 12:

“Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they[’re] few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low—they[’re] afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets—before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.

“Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care. The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth.

“The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they[’re] given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there[’s] no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.”

Amen.

Just a brief prayer:

Father, what we know not, teach us. What we have not, give us. What we are not, make us. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

I want to gather my remarks this evening around a simple statement or a phrase, and that phrase is the endgame. The endgame. I recognize that this is a peculiar gathering of individuals—not a gathering of peculiar individuals—because you are charged with a strategic role in helping people think about time and talent and resources from a kingdom perspective. And I wouldn’t be surprised if in the course of your activities, when you sit, perhaps, with another client, you may not use this exact terminology, but you will be seeking to find out just what the expectation of your client is. And you may actually say to him or to her, “What is your endgame?”

I looked up endgame for a definition, and the best I could find was this: “the specific role that a nonprofit intends to play in the overall solution to a problem.” Translated to this evening: how to think Christianly about saving, investing, and giving money. It hasn’t passed my attention that for a third time you’ve asked a Scotsman to come to a gathering like this—not only a Scotsman but a Scotsman with the name of Begg of all things! And you can’t imagine the delight that is mine to immediately receive a free book. I mean, even if I don’t like the book, I’m taking this book. This is just—it’s a fantastic evening so far.

But you know, the songs we’ve just sung are crucial to the program, aren’t they? Because any endgame that fails to take into account he who is the giver of “every good and perfect gift”[1] is ultimately futile. And that word actually turns me to the book of Ecclesiastes, and even in a quick scan, I realized that you can find on page 43 Ecclesiastes 5:10: “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this [is] also … vanity.”

And what we have in Ecclesiastes… I think many of the commentators have assumed that this was written by Solomon. That may be the case. It’s actually not identified for us in specific terms. But what he is doing is he’s considering life, as he puts it, “under the sun.” To consider life “under the sun,” he clearly was not living in Cleveland, Ohio, during the winter, because there would be no sun to consider life under. But where he was, he’s saying, “I’m looking at, under the canopy of things, life as it presents itself, life as it exists.” Or, to put it another way, he ransacks the world in seeking to solve for himself the riddle of life. And if I was giving a homework assignment, I would say to you, “Perhaps, if you have opportunity over the course of these days in conference, you might read the book of Ecclesiastes all together.”

Forsaking the Dead-End Streets

Three ways that I want to consider this—first of all, by recognizing that he is encouraging his readers to forsake all the dead-end streets. To forsake the dead-end streets. And there are many of them. One—which, again, is actually very quickly identified in your book—is the dead-end street of self-indulgence. He says, “I applied my heart to seek and to search,”[2] and “in much wisdom I’ve discovered that there is much vexation.”[3] “Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep [them] from [me].”[4] And so he tells us he had houses, vineyards, parks, pools, gold, silver, servants. And he said, “When I’d amassed it all, it was like smoke in the wind.”[5]

The dead-end street of wisdom and folly—intellectualism (the pursuit of being as bright as you can possibly be), discovering at the end of that rainbow that even people who are not as bright as you sometimes seem to enjoy life much more. “I’ve discovered,” he said, “that in finding out all these things, it vexes me.” Einstein said something pretty similar when he said, “I’ve discovered that the men who know the most are in fact the most gloomy.”[6] If you’re of a certain vintage, you know that there was a program in Britain called Monty Python’s Flying Circus—some of the craziest things you ever saw in your life, and most of them you ought not to try and remember. But they were the paradigm of the combination of foolishness in the minds of great intellects. They came from the Cambridge Footlights, and eventually, they could pursue it no further, because they discovered that when everything is funny, nothing is funny, and it’s ultimately a vanity.

The dead-end streets of acquisition. The dead-end streets of folly and wisdom. The dead-end street of building a business only to end up leaving it to somebody else. “My eyes,” he says, “are never satisfied with riches. And I ask: What am I living for?”[7] Anybody who has lain in their bed of an evening or at three o’clock in the morning, irrespective of their social status or their financial background, is confronted with that question—in fact, confronted with the most foundational questions.

Gaugin, in his great painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts now, he on that great painting there wrote three questions on the canvas:

D’où Venons Nous
Que Sommes Nous
Où Allons Nous

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” And the writer of this book scrambles to unscramble these very things.

Now, I’m a child of the—born in the ’50s; therefore, a child of the ’60s; therefore, I suppose, a bona fide baby boomer. What a dreadful group we are! But in any case, if you, like me, can go back to 1966, when I was fourteen and you were then just consumed with the lyrics of Paul Simon, then you know that he was writing about these things just as a young man. In his song “Patterns,” in the second verse, he says,

Up a narrow flight of stairs,
[To] a narrow little room,
As I lie upon my bed
In the early evening gloom,
Impaled on my wall
My eyes can dimly see
The [riddle] of my life
And the puzzle that is me.[8]

That’s what the writer is saying. And he says it’s a dead-end street of acquisition.

Well, Ray Stevens got that also in the ’60s, didn’t he?

Itemize the things you covet
As you squander through your life:
Bigger cars, [better] houses,
Term insurance [on] your wife.
Tuesday evenings with your harlot,
And on Wednesdays it’s your charlatan,
[Your] analyst [is] high upon your list. …

Spending counterfeit incentive,
Wasting precious time and health,
Placing value on the worthless,
Disregarding priceless wealth,
You can wheel and deal the best of them
[And] steal it from the rest of them;
You know the score; their ethics are a bore. …

You better take care of business, Mr. Businessman.[9]

I say to you again: Any endgame that leaves out the reality of the fact that we are made in the image of God, for God, sustained by God, to give glory to God is an exercise in futility. And that is exactly what he’s saying here. [The audience applauds.] I’m not used to that, so… But it was quite nice!

So, first of all: forsaking the dead-end streets.

Facing the Final Curtain

But it gets worse. ’Cause he then quite dramatically brings the reader to what we’ll refer to as facing the final curtain. Facing the final curtain. And in the seventh chapter he says,

It is better to go to a house of mourning
 than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of everyone;
  [and] the living should take this to heart.[10]

It’s an amazing statement! What he’s saying is it is actually better to go to a funeral than it is to go to a Super Bowl party. Because death is inevitable. It is unavoidable. It is inescapable.

Any endgame that leaves out the reality of the fact that we are made in the image of God, for God, sustained by God, to give glory to God is an exercise in futility.

Now, immediately you’re saying to yourself, “Goodness gracious! This is the first evening. It’s supposed to be lighthearted and a happy beginning to our conference time, and they brought in this fellow Begg—morbid soul. He’s got an unhelpful interest in bones or something. I don’t know what is possibly wrong with him.” No, don’t play that game. You can’t function in your task apart from actuarial tables! That’s what he’s saying.

Now, how are we going to deal with the inevitability of this—the fact that one out of one dies? Well, since I’m in the ’60s, I’ll just stay there with Joe South. “Joe South? Who’s Joe South?” says someone. A wife, not just her husband, says, “You remember Joe South”:

Oh, the games people play now,
Every night and every day now,
Never [thinking] what they say now,
Never saying what they mean.

And they wile away the hours
In their ivory towers
Till they’re covered up with flowers
In the back of a black limousine.[11]

“Na-na-na na-na-na na-na.” There you go. You knew that part. You just didn’t know the words! Okay.

But what are the games that people are playing? I can’t tell you where I’ve just come from, except it was further south. But I’ll tell you the games down there at the moment: croquet, pickleball, tennis, golf, backgammon. You want to spend your life doing that? You’re going to end your life doing that? You mean you had somebody control your portfolio so that that could be your destiny? So that you could play games and hide from realities?

Hides behind humor. It’s a thin disguise, isn’t it? Woody Allen, who’s the patron saint of nihilism, puts it perfectly when he says, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. … I want to achieve [immortality] through not dying.”[12] “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment.”[13] Makes sense, doesn’t it?

But of course, the New Age and Eastern mysticism has baptized the main streets of small-town America with absolute nonsense. Go to the average yoga park and listen to the oms and the ows and ask the people, “What is it you’re actually on about?” They’ll tell you, amongst other things, that there is no reason to be concerned about the eventualities of life, because death is natural. That is a great lie. A great lie. One of the gurus of this kind of thinking describes in one of his journals that he counsels the people who come to him for advice in the face of the eventuality of death to view it as simply “a calm fall into a cosmic sleep.”[14] “Oh, you shouldn’t be at all concerned.”

Did you see that the ninety-three-year-old once-prime-minister or president of the Netherlands held his ninety-three-year-old wife’s hand two days ago as they did a dual euthanasia and were taken out into eternity under the dreadful lie of the Evil One that it is simply “a calm fall into a cosmic sleep”? Now, if we’re going to be “kingdom advisors,” then we have to give the advice of the kingdom. The way we give advice of the kingdom is we give the advice of the King. And the Bible makes it perfectly clear that death is an alien intrusion. It’s an alien intrusion into the beautiful world that God made. It’s not part of God’s original design for humanity. In short order, we were not made to die. But “the wages of sin is death.”[15]

You see, we need our Bible to understand who we are and what we are as well as understanding who Jesus is and what he is—to understand that we are rebels against God; that we are by nature alienated from God; that we are, actually, spiritually dead. You don’t hear that usually on the news. Frankly, you don’t hear it in many churches.

When the Bible speaks about death, it speaks about it in three ways: obviously, physical death, when our soul is separated from our body; spiritual death, as our souls are by nature separated from God; and eternal death, when the reality of our spiritual death combines with our physical death, and we face eternal death.

Made to love God, made to trust God, made to glorify God, we turn it upside down. We seek to put ourselves where God exists to be. And only in Jesus has he provided the answer to the eventuality. When Jesus says, “I am come that [you] might have life,”[16] and you’re talking about that with a friend, perhaps over coffee, and he says to you or she says to you, “What does he mean, ‘You might have life’? Wasn’t he speaking to people who had life?”—“Oh, yes,” you have to say. “But you see, we are by nature the walking dead. We are the walking dead.”

Again, you see, the alienation, or the sense of alienation, that exists within the framework of our culture at the moment, in a deepening way—again, this is just the end product of what was going on, again, in the ’50s and the ’60s. Let’s go to Paul Simon again. Remember:

“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
“I’m empty and aching, and I don’t know why,”
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.
[We]’ve all come to look for America.[17]

He’s looking out the window of the Greyhound bus as he rides with his girlfriend Kathy, who’s now fallen asleep. It’s got great lines in it: “I said, ‘Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera’”—that kind of stuff, when words were actually important, before we got to 2023, where we’ve just turned “Na na-na-na na-na-na-na” into the program.

But here’s the reality of it: Jesus is the one who creates the reconciliation. Well, you know this from your job. See, I’m not here to tell you something you don’t know. If I have any part at all, it’s to remind you of things, to remind myself of things that I mustn’t forget.

Fearing God and Keeping His Commandments

What’s your endgame? Forsaking the dead-end streets; facing the final curtain; and then, finally, fearing God and keeping his commandments.

You would notice that that is exactly how the whole book ends, with that amazing statement: “[Here is] the end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments.” And the twelfth chapter is so wonderful, isn’t it? It’s an amazing poem. I mean, you would be pleased with this if you were able to pull it off at school in the English class. Because what he’s really doing is saying this: “I mentioned death quite a bit,” he says, “earlier on, but death hasn’t reached us yet. But just let it rattle its chains and stir us into action.” That’s why he says, “Remember.” “Remember.” It’s not just like, “Oh, yeah!” No, it means a deliberate and intentional focus. “Remember the fact that you were created by God, put together in your mother’s womb. Remember this. And you can never begin too soon,” he says. “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth.” You never can start too late, either.

Made to love God, made to trust God, made to glorify God, we turn it upside down. We seek to put ourselves where God exists to be.

And what he does then (as you would have noticed, I hope, as I read it, perhaps familiar with it): He then gives us this picture. He pictures our lives like a house. And he says, “Listen. I want to describe for you the fading of physical and mental powers.”

November 5, 1994, the then-once-president Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to the American people. I have it in my study. The sentence begins, the letter begins, “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.”[18] Would that other presidents could actually go as gracefully as that!

I figured it out. It goes like this: conception, birth, growth, decline, decay, dissolution, causing us to face the fact that the aisles of drugstores that so far we’ve been able to avoid without any sense of compunction at all have now become places for many of us to visit. And the house of our lives has begun to make strange sounds in the night—according to my wife, at least. And the same house thwarts us during the day.

And that’s what he’s describing here. He says, “Here’s the deal: When the keepers of the house tremble…” You suddenly find: How did that start to happen? When “the strong men”… When they tell you… When you go to your doctor, and your physical is pretty good, and then he says, “Alistair, don’t fall.” I said, “Hey, it’s not my dad that’s here. It’s me.” He says, “No, I’m telling you: Don’t fall.”

Smugly, I said to myself, “I don’t fall.” And then on Christmas Day two years ago, going to get something out of the garage, I did a complete, magnificent piece of work—fell over, split things open, halfway over here, and ended up at two o’clock on Christmas afternoon having my fingers put back together again. And all I can hear was the guy going, “Don’t fall, Alistair. Don’t fall.”

The reality of it is, unless you’re doing squats right now, you’re going to fall. Because your legs are not as strong as you thought they were. And your “grinders.” Your “grinders.” This, for the dental group, is inadequate occlusion. You don’t have sufficient on the top to meet the insufficient group on the bottom, and you’re asking for things like pasta and soup and things like that.

“Those … look[ing] through the windows are [dim]”—your eyes. “The doors” are closed—your ears: “Pardon? What?” I don’t know if I am deaf or I just like asking my wife to say everything twice, but it’s a whole new feature for me. You can’t hear what you need to hear, and yet birds can wake you up in the morning. You’re fearful of heights. You never used to be fearful of heights! I used to be able to jump down off… I’m not doing that! No. So did you! You don’t like getting jostled in a crowd. You leave the game early just so we can get out. And look at your hair, for crying out loud! Like an almond blossom! That’s a nice way of putting it. And, he says, you will begin to move around like a grasshopper.

This is some realistic stuff here. Don’t kid yourself. Catch yourself in a mirror as you’re going. It’s fantastic! And I’m not getting into this in mixed company, but he says, “And desire fails.” Okay? Some of you are checking your email in a way that—on your honeymoon, you can forget emails! That’s what he’s talking about. The Bible’s real clear about things. Give yourself a shake, gentlemen.

You’ll be as fragile as earthenware, like a golden bowl, like a wheel at the well that used to work. And what he’s really saying is this: You better make sure you’ve got an endgame. Because there will be a last time for every journey. There will be a last time that we put our keys in the ignition. There will be a last time we pull the car into its parking spot. Of that we may be sure.

And so he says, “Here’s the end of it: Fear God. Fear God.” You say, “Wait a minute. ‘Fear God’? That doesn’t sound right, does it?” Listen: To fear God is to trust God, is to know God, is to love God. To fear God is actually to be called to a fear that puts every other fear in its place.

And in fact, the fear of which he speaks is a fear that is only known by those who are the children of God. Hence Newton: “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.”[19]

You remember when in that amazing scene, as the thieves are on the cross on either side of Jesus, and the one is railing against Jesus, and his friend calls to him at the other side, and he says, “Hey, I think you should cut that out,” he says, “By the way: Don’t you fear God?”[20] “Could you be this close to eternity and still be like this?”

To fear God is to trust God, is to know God, is to love God. To fear God is actually to be called to a fear that puts every other fear in its place.

Do you fear God with a love that cancels everything else out, in the awareness of the fact that Jesus is the only one who is able to say, “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death,”[21] never face the power and the reality of it all in the judgment of God? You are in the most privileged of positions, because the arena in which you work is inevitably an arena that is set within the framework of the endgame.

And I’m sure you quote old C. S., as I do in my final moments:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there[’s] such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there[’s] such a thing as water. … If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does[n’t] prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably [the] earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. … I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find [until] after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that … country and … help others to do the same.[22]

[1] James 1:17 (NIV).

[2] Ecclesiastes 1:13 (ESV).

[3] Ecclesiastes 1:18 (paraphrased).

[4] Ecclesiastes 2:10 (ESV).

[5] Ecclesiastes 2:11 (paraphrased).

[6] Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, et al., “The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto. Paraphrased.

[7] Ecclesiasts 4:8 (paraphrased).

[8] Paul Simon, “Patterns” (1965).

[9] Ray Stevens, “Mr. Businessman” (1968).

[10] Ecclesiastes 7:2 (NIV).

[11] Joe South, “Games People Play” (1968).

[12] Woody Allen, quoted in Eric Lax, On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy (New York: Charterhouse, 1975), 232

[13] Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Björkman, interview with Stig Björkman (New York: Grove, 1995), 105. Paraphrased.

[14] Mark Starmach, “How to Die Well, According to a Palliative Care Doctor,” Forge, January 18, 2019, https://forge.medium.com/what-really-happens-when-we-die-95a34bba8669.

[15] Romans 6:23 (ESV).

[16] John 10:10 (KJV).

[17] Paul Simon, “America” (1968).

[18] Ronald Reagan to the American People, November 5, 1994, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan/reagans-letter-announcing-his-alzheimers-diagnosis.

[19] John Newton, “Amazing Grace” (1779).

[20] Luke 23:40 (paraphrased).

[21] John 8:51 (ESV).

[22] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), bk. 3, chap. 10.