You can pick any number of quotes out of Ecclesiastes and think, "Really? That's in the Bible?"
It's a book that, on first reading, is unspeakably bleak. There's no point in anything, it says. Don't bother hoping, dreaming or trying to achieve anything. It won't last, and you'll just die anyway. Books are pointless. Wisdom is pointless. All you can do is get through each day as best you can, try to do the right thing and hope for the best.
Ecclesiastes is one of my favourite Bible books.
I love it for its poetry, its ambition, its insight and its truthfulness.
When God decided to put it in the Bible, he knew exactly what he was doing. Because this is what life looks like from below. This is the worm's eye view of the world. And this is the ground on which people who argue for a life without God can be met and matched today.
A few years ago Britain saw the famous atheist campaign in which a humanist group paid for the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" to be plastered on the side of buses.
Enjoying life in the absence of God has become the new normal. And Ecclesiastes gives a voice to this philosophy – but in a way that totally undermines it and turns the reader back to God.
Here's what it says.
1. Knowledge doesn't satisfy. "With much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief." In this internet age we're permanently wired. We have more knowledge at our fingertips, individually and corporately, than any generation before us. And we suffer from information overload, unable to process the sheer volume of data that our brains are downloading all the time – about world affairs, our friends' activities, celebrities, sports stars and work.
2. Pleasure is fleeting. The Teacher speaks in chapter 2 of his huge construction projects, his artistic endeavours and his sexual adventures. He concludes: "Everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun" (verse 11). Today, the leisure "industry" is huge. We're constantly being offered more entertainment – more TV channels, more phone data, more experiences, more everything. However much we have, it isn't enough.
3. Ambition is pointless. "I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool?" (2:18-19) Our society's success culture encourages us to want bigger and better jobs and more and more money. The Teacher says it's not worth it: "All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest."
4. People are foolish. "As dead flies give ointment a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honour" (10:1). That chapter is about how the wrong people get the good jobs and end up in charge. It happens today, too: and other people's mistakes don't just end up harming themselves but others too. We can't assume that someone, somewhere, knows what they're doing; the chances are that they don't.
5. Death is final. "The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten" (9:5). And the last chapter is a moving picture of old age, with the failure of sight and hearing, decreased mobility ("the grasshopper drags himself along") and white hair ("the almond tree blossoms") before "man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets".
It's all meaningless, says the Teacher.
But threaded through the book are pointers to something better. Our lives are lived under the eyes of God. He is never absent. It ends, "Here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man" (12:13).
Ecclesiastes gives a voice to the fear that lies beneath the surface of our technologically advanced consumer society, which is "rich in things but poor in soul". It's the fear that's expressed by TS Eliot in Choruses from The Rock: " All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,/ But nearness to death no nearer to God."
The Venerable Bede (born in 673 AD) tells the story of the conversion of Edwin, King of Northumbria. When he was considering how to respond the teaching of the missionary Paulinus, one of his counsellors said this to him: "It seems to me that the life of man on earth is like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter's day with your captains and counsellors.
"In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall. Outside, the storms of winter rain and snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one window of the hall and out through another. While he is inside, the bird is safe from the winter storms, but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came.
"So man appears on earth for a little while – but of what went before this life, or what follows, we know nothing.Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it."
And that's Ecclesiastes, in a nutshell. It's a pre-gospel look at life: dark, cold, bewildering and fleeting.
But the world-view of Ecclesiastes, in which life is meaningless, is not the worldview of the gospel. Jesus said, "I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life" (John 8:12). And he said, "I have come that they may have life, and life in all its fullness" (John 10:10).
I love Ecclesiastes. But it's not in the Bible so we can say "yes" to it; it's there so we can look it in the face, and say "no": God has something better for us, and actually, life isn't meaningless at all.
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