The great late Greek philosopher Socrates, who applied himself to prove the immortality of the soul when the death sentence was passed upon him, not knowing for sure what awaited him on the other side, could only say:

"The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways, I to die, and you to live. Which is better, God only knows."

Christians/Messianics have a very definite answer to that question and it's not as straight forward as you might at first think. Paul struggled with this dilemma and was in no doubt as to his personal course:

"For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I live on in the flesh, this will mean fruit from my labour; yet what I shall choose I cannot tell. For I am hard pressed between the two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better" (Phil.1:21-23, NKJV).

We don't choose our moment of death, any more than Socrates did, but what we can do is choose the attitude we have to life. For as we shall see, the resurrection gives us both a future life to look forward to as well as an anointing to live this one in the best possible sort of way.

In any case, shalom and greetings in Yah'shua's (Jesus') Name and welcome to a week-long series of talks on the Resurrection of Our Messiah during the postponed assemblies planned for Passover Week of Aviv 14-21 or 7-14 April, of which this is the first day. Mishpachah Lev-Tsiyon will be celebrating a Late Passover on 7-14 May during which time we will be having the traditional moed assemblies. I will talk about the three spring festivals at that time and not now though please take a look at the festivals website if you yourself are observing it this week. I can't guarantee MLT will be opening its doors to visitors by then as we had planned - I think we will still be in some sort of lockdown at that time unless Yahweh ordains otherwise. I suggested a while back that lockdown would continue until, at the very least, mid-May and I see the Governor of Texas has ordered the lockdown to remain in force there until 20 May, so maybe that's the time-frame we can expect. What's clear is that we will be housebound for a lot longer than originally planned.

I do think it important, however, while we are all quarantined from the CoVid-19 plague that we use this week to focus on the central event of this season, and the central tenet of the Christian/Messianic faith, namely, the Resurrection which corresponds with the spring feast of Yom haBikkurim or the Day of Firstfruits, Yah'shua (Jesus) being the Firstfruits of the Resurrection. So what we're going to do over the Passover Season, starting today at Pesach (Passover), is have a kind of 'Grand Yom haBikkurim' by focussing particularly on what that day means for us!

Now I don't know about you, but I would have loved being a fly-on-the-wall in a meeting between Solomon and Socrates, arguably the two greatest philosophers who ever lived. Maybe the two have already met by now. I think the conversation would be very intersting. Solomon too, in addition to being a king, was a philosopher par extraordinaire, so they had that interest in common. I wonder what Socrates would have made of Solomon's book, Ecclesiastes? By the way, this is a book I recommend humanists and atheists start with sometimes because it's possible to find a lot of common ground with them especially if they are thinkers. I think there would have been a largish area of agreement, particularly in the simple observations of life, between these two men, even though one was a Yahwist and the other a pagan.

We all broadly-speaking live and experience life in similar ways and we can all, without too much trouble, make general observations and draw pretty inevitable conclusions from it if we're good observers. So I can picture Socrates nodding his head as Solomon concludes, at the end of a life of disappointment, dissilusionment and hopelessness, these seven things, at least - doubtless you can think of one or two more too:

• 1. Generations come and generations go, but the world stays just the same;
• 2. A man is no better off than an animal, because life has no meaning for either;
• 3. It is to better to be satisfied with what you have than to always want something else;
• 4. A working man may or may not have enough to eat, but at least he can get a good night's sleep. A rich man has so much that he lays awake worrying;
• 5. Don't be too good or too wise. Why kill yourself? But don't be too wicked or too foolish either. Why die before you have to?
• 6. Fast runners do not always win the race, and the brave do not always win the battle; and
• 7. Put your investment in several places - in many places, even - because you never know what kind of bad luck you're going to have in this world!

My mother always used to tell me not to put all my eggs into one basket because of the risk of losing everything. Itäs pretty common advice, and sound. My paternal grandfather lost his entire life's labour and wealth by investing it all in tin shares - that market crashed following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 leading to the Great Depression which really didn't end until after World War 2 in 1945. He had been a successful architect. When his fortune vapourised overnight, he lost his mind as and wandered around aimlessly the rest of his life. It broke him and influenced my own father, I suspect (who was also an architect), never to take financial risks. My grandmother - his wife - from being from a well-to-do upper middle class lady living in a beautiful house built by her husband, ended up destitute, living in a one room apartment above a shop. My own mother's family was working class. They worked hard, were thrifty, and followed Solomon's advice, forging their way into the lower middle classes. We were never wealthy but we always had enough. We were always safe economically. I have pretty much followed in her footsteps in that respect: work hard, save half - spend half, don't borrow money if you can at all avoid it, and don't put all your eggs into one basket.

All of this is very sound worldly wisdom, the kind of wisdom that is accumulated from living life in this turbulent and unpredictable world, where Old and New Creations intersect, irrespective of what you believe or don't believe about God. The Book of Proverbs is similar, containing as it does both spiritual and worldly wisdom, much of it garnered from Egypt and elsewhere in the ancient world. There's a lot of Wisdom Literature in the Bible of this kind, including the Apocrypha which some Bible canons include, such as Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) and the Wisdom of Solomon which you'll occasionally hear me quoting. Indeed, after the Torah (Law, Teaching) and the Nevi'im (Prophets), it's the third most important category of four kinds of literature in the Tanakh or Old Testament, the last being the Kethuvim ('Writings') containing mostly historical material. What makes it particularly important is that it is shared wisdom of all humanity, enabling you to relate to people of all sorts of belief systems and to find fellowship with them that way. We all of us have that common ground together.

The great poets and writers like Alfred Lord Tennyson have said similar things, some of which have passed into the Anglophone culture, just as Solomon's words have. Consider these, for example - I'm pretty sure you'll recongise the first one, at least:

• 1. 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" (In Memorial);
• 2. Authority forgets a dying king (Morté d'Arthur); and
• 3. Our little systems have their day, they have their day and cease to be.

These three men could equally have lived in our age and arrived at essentially the same conclusions, remembering that Solomon had a long bout of apostacy in which he turned away from Elohim (God) which in part is what furnished his writings in Ecclesiastes. These three men would recognise in 21st century attitudes pretty much the same as in their own eras. For instance, by observing life from a non-resurrection perspective, whether as a theist or an atheist, you are pretty much guaranteed to arrive at these different philosophies just by looking at the normal course of human events:

• 1. Fatalism: whatever will be, will be;
  
• 2. Existentialism: live for the present moment, for who knows what the future will bring;
  
• 3. Hedonism: live for pleasure - eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die;
  
• 4. Cynicism: even good things aren't what they seem; and
  
• 5. Pessimism: things are bound to get worse.

No doubt you can think of some others. We live in a nihilistic, post-modernistic age where such philosophies are common and readily embraced by the majority. And if we're totally honest with ourselves, when we're going through bad patches and our faith in Yahweh weakens - when we take our eyes off Him - we too turn to these philosophies for false comfort and wonder why get so miserable. Yes, unfortunately, we Christians and Messianics succumb too, for longer or shorter periods of time. All of these dark philosophical attitudes arise from the flesh...which is where our eyes have, in fact, turned to when we lose sight of the Saviour. I've been there, far too often, I'm ashamed to admit. These, and others, form the 'cocktail-philosophy' of fallen man who cannot see beyond the veil of mortality with his natural eyes, so 'naturally' he comes to the sometimes desperate conclusions about life that he does. He knows only the Old Creation life, which has little going for it.

That's where Ecclesiastes can come in handy because the wisest man of his day - Solomon - took his eyes off Yahweh and became one of the most foolish, only to come to his spiritual senses right at the end. For 11 chapters he leaves 'God' out of the equation of life and draws the inevitable conclusions in the 12th and final chapter. That's why he begs his readers:

"Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them'" (Eccl.12:1, NRSV).

You do not want to have regrets at the end of life when "all must go to their eternal home" (v.5b, NRSV) which is why making right choices early is the best thing you can do. Choose to live for Yahweh right away even if you have come to Him late in the day of mortality.

We have speculated what a conversation between Socrates and Solomon would have been like, but I wonder how it would have been on the other side of the cross? What if Solomon or Socrates had met Peter, John or Paul? Or better still, Yah'shua (Jesus) Himself! How would Solomon's hope, and indeed his witness, have been shaped by the resurrection? We'll talk more about that tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you are celebrating Pesach today, I pray you have a blessed seder. Yahweh bless!