Why Everything Matters

The Gospel in Ecclesiastes

Philip G. Ryken

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781781916940

1

WHY BOTHER?

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,

Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What does man gain by all the toil

at which he toils under the sun?

Ecclesiastes 1:2-3

Sociologist Jonathan Kozol met Mrs Washington in the South Bronx, where she and her young son David were living at a homeless hotel close to East Tremont Avenue. The mother and child lived in a first-floor room with three steel locks on the door.

Mrs Washington was dying, and each time Kozol came for a visit, she was visibly weaker. But, oh, the stories she could tell about life on the underside of urban America—stories about poverty and injustice, violence and drugs. Mrs Washington told Kozol about children in her building born with AIDS and about the 12-year-old at the bus stop who was hit by stray gunfire and paralyzed. She told him about the physical abuse she had suffered from Mr Washington and about all the difficulties poor people had getting medical care in the city.

The woman and her son also talked about spiritual things. ‘I wonder how powerful God is,’ young David admitted in one interview. ‘He must be wise and powerful to make the animals and trees and give man organs and a brain to build complex machineries, but He is not powerful enough to stop the evil on the earth, to change the hearts of people.’ On a subsequent visit, Kozol looked down at Mrs Washington’s bed and saw her Bible open next to her on the quilt. The sociologist asked what part she liked to read. ‘Ecclesiastes,’ she said. ‘If you want to know what’s happening these days, it’s all right there.’¹

Why Ecclesiastes?

If Ecclesiastes could help Mrs Washington face her challenges as a single mother living at a homeless hotel in the Bronx, then Ecclesiastes can help anyone living anywhere.

Not everyone would agree with this broad claim. Ecclesiastes takes such a sober view of life that some people doubt the spiritual value of reading it, or even question whether it belongs in the Bible at all. When one of the ancient rabbis read Ecclesiastes, he said, ‘O Solomon, where is your wisdom? Not only do your words contradict the words of your father, David; they even contradict themselves.’²

Yet I agree with Mrs Washington: if we want to know what is happening these days—if we have trouble understanding why a powerful Creator allows profound evil, or struggle to resolve life’s many inconsistencies—it is all right here in this book.

There are many good reasons to study Ecclesiastes. This book helps us ask the biggest and hardest questions that people still have today—questions that lie at the heart of life in a fallen world: What is the meaning of life? Why is there so much suffering and injustice? Does God even care? Is life really worth living? The writer asks the tough intellectual and practical questions that people always have, and he is not satisfied with the easy answers that children usually get in Sunday school. In fact, part of his spiritual struggle is with the answers he has always been given. If you are the kind of person who always says, ‘Yes, but …’, then Ecclesiastes is for you.

Here is another reason to study Ecclesiastes: it helps us worship the one true God. For all its doubt and dissatisfaction, this book teaches many great truths about God. It presents Him as the Mighty Creator and Sovereign Lord, the all-powerful ruler of the universe, the only wise God. So reading this book will help us grow in the knowledge of God.

Ecclesiastes will also helps us live for God and not only ourselves. The writer had more money, enjoyed more pleasure, and possessed more wisdom than anyone else in the world, yet it all ended in tears. The same thing could happen to us, but it doesn’t have to. ‘Why make your own mistakes,’ the writer constantly is saying to us, ‘when you can learn from an expert like me instead?’³ Then he helps us with everyday issues such as money, sex, power and death, which may be the most practical issue of all. Old Testament scholar Sandra Richter describes the author of Ecclesiastes as a man who had it all, but discovered that ‘having it all’ nearly destroyed him. Fortunately for us, when he ‘climbs the golden ladder of ultimate success and looks over the brink, he actually has the wherewithal to step back from the edge, climb back down, and tell the rest of us … that there’s nothing up there.’⁴

Ecclesiastes also helps us to be honest about the troubles of life. Perhaps this explains why the great American novelist Herman Melville called Ecclesiastes ‘the truest of all books’.⁵ More than anything else in the Bible, it captures the futility and frustration of a fallen world: the drudgery of work, the emptiness of foolish pleasure and the mind-numbing tedium of everyday life. Think of Ecclesiastes as the only book of the Bible we know was written on a Monday morning, probably by a philosophy major. Reading it helps us to be honest with God about our problems—even those of us who trust in God’s goodness. One scholar thus describes Ecclesiastes as ‘a kind of back door’ that allows believers to have the sad and skeptical thoughts that they would never allow to enter the front door of their faith.⁶

Vanity of Vanities

Ecclesiastes begins with a famous refrain: ‘Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities! All is vanity’ (Eccles. 1:2). These are not only the first but also nearly the last words of Ecclesiastes (see 12:8). With encapsulating superlatives, the author takes the measure of our existence and declares that it is all meaningless.

But before we go any further, we need to define the word ‘vanity’—the ‘multipurpose metaphor’⁷ that is central to the message of Ecclesiastes. Taken literally, the Hebrew word hevel refers to a breath or vapor, like a puff of smoke rising from a campfire or the cloud of steam that comes from a hot breath on a frosty morning. Life is like that: elusive, ephemeral, enigmatic. It disappears as suddenly as it comes. We are here today and gone tomorrow. Thus, the Bible compares our mortal existence to a ‘mere breath’ (Ps. 39:5), or to ‘a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes’ (James 4:14). Breathe in. Now breathe out. Life will pass you by just that quickly—not just today, but all our days, from beginning to end.

So when Ecclesiastes says ‘vanity of vanities’ it primarily is making a comment on the transience of life. But according to some commentators, the word ‘vapor’ or ‘smoke’ also becomes a metaphor for the futility of life itself in this fallen world. The New International Version points in this direction when it offers the following translation: ‘Meaningless! Meaningless! ... Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’

Notice the vast scope of the author’s claim: ‘everything is meaningless’; ‘all is vanity’ (Eccles. 1:2). Not one single aspect of our existence—and therefore not one single thing that will happen to us today—is free from being frustrated by futility. From the injury at the fitness center to the disharmony in the board room, from the mix-up at the bank to the falling out between close friends, every day we encounter things that seem useless, pointless, even absurd.

To prove his point the author takes the things that people ordinarily use to give meaning or to find satisfaction and then shows how empty they really are. He speaks from experience, because he had tried it all: money, pleasure, knowledge, power—all the things that we try (or are tempted to try) in order to bring satisfaction into our lives.

Some people try to find meaning in what they know, but Ecclesiastes says that ‘in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow’ (Eccles. 1:18). This is hardly something that any self-respecting college would say in its promotional materials for prospective students: ‘Come increase your knowledge and add to your sorrows!’ But honestly, aren’t there some things you wish that you didn’t know about life?

Some people try to find satisfaction in all the pleasures that money can buy. The author of Ecclesiastes was rich enough to conduct a thorough experiment, but in the end he concluded that there was ‘nothing to be gained under the sun’ (Eccles. 2:11). So, he threw himself into his work, trying to do something significant. But this also proved to be vexation, because he failed to get a good return on his investment. I wonder: when you come to the end of your life, or even to the end of this year, what will you have to show for all your hard work?

Not even the life of the mind could save this man’s desperate soul. Later in the book he will give us the testimony of a frustrated philosopher: ‘When I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, how neither day nor night do one’s eyes see sleep, then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out’ (Eccles. 8:16-17). ‘Of making many books there is no end,’ he will go on to say in the final chapter, ‘and much study is a weariness of the flesh’ (Eccles. 12:12). If we doubt the truth of this statement, all we need to do is ask the nearest scholar and he will tell us the truth: Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

Same Old, Same Old

We begin to get a good sense of Ecclesiastes and its attitude about life from the question posed at the beginning of the book and the poem that is offered by way of an answer. Here is the question:

What does man gain by all the toil

at which he toils under the sun?

Then comes the answer:

A generation goes, and a generation comes,

but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises, and the sun goes down,

and hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south

and goes around to the north;

around and around goes the wind,

and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea,

but the sea is not full;

to the place where the streams flow,

there they flow again.

All things are full of weariness;

a man cannot utter it;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

nor the ear filled with hearing.

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.

Is there a thing of which it is said,

‘See, this is new?’

It has been already

in the ages before us.

There is no remembrance of former things,

nor will there be any remembrance

of later things yet to be

among those who come after (Eccles. 1:3-11).

A good title for this poem would be ‘Same Old, Same Old’.The writer is making his case for the weary emptiness of our tired existence and wondering why he should bother. In verses 4 through 7 he looks at the elemental things of nature—earth, air, fire and water—and sees no real change anywhere. Generations come and go, but the earth does not move. With weary monotony the sun rises and sets, rises and sets, rises and sets. The wind goes around and around in circles. The water flows forever into the sea. It is all the same as it ever was.

I witness the same boring cycle on the campus of Wheaton College. August rolls around and we’re back in chapel for another Academic Convocation. It may be new for freshmen, but it is not new in itself. Some faculty members start a new year at Wheaton thirty or forty times in the course of their careers, and as a college we have held an opening chapel service for more than 150 years. There is nothing new under the sun. It’s just the same old, same old. As they say in France, ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’⁸ The author of Ecclesiastes gets tired just thinking about all of this. The Contemporary English Version translates verse 8 like this: ‘All of life is far more boring than words could ever say’.

So, why bother? That is the question. Why keep running on ‘the treadmill of our existence’?⁹ In verses 8 to 11, the writer moves from the natural world to human experience and sees the same thing that he saw in nature: things are done over and over again without any real profit or genuine progress. If the sun, the wind, and the mighty rivers have nothing to show for their constant motion, then what hope do we have of ever accomplishing anything in life? Pink Floyd seems almost to offer a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes in a song from The Dark Side of the Moon:

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again.

The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.¹⁰

The spirit of Ecclesiastes 1 is captured equally well in a short poem by Stephen Crane:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

‘It is futile,’ I said,

‘You can never—’

‘You lie,’ he cried,

And ran on.¹¹

Some people try to escape life’s monotony and futility by filling their senses with what they see and hear. Today, we see an endless procession of visual images (YouTube, Instagram, Netflix) and listen to an endless stream of sounds (Pandora, Grooveshark), but we are never satisfied. There is always one more show to watch, one more game to play, one more song to listen to. What Ecclesiastes says is still true: ‘The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing’ (Eccles. 1:8). We’re insatiable in appetite. Even if we have seen before, we want to see more. But what do we really gain? What progress do we make in life, spiritually or otherwise?

We experience the same thing on the larger scale of human events: ‘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’ (Eccles. 1:9). How is that for a philosophy of history—humanity on a hamster wheel? Future generations will suffer the same plight. As Philip Larkin wrote in one of his bleak poems:

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.¹²

The writer of Ecclesiastes makes such sweeping claims about future futility that we are tempted to try and think of a counter-example. Surely there must be at least one thing that is new under the sun. For a moment, the writer considers that possibility and asks, ‘Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”?’ But just as quickly, he denies it. Whatever seems new ‘has been already in the ages before us’ (Eccles. 1:10).

By way of example, consider the so-called discovery of the New World. ...

Table of contents

• Testimonials
• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. Why Bother?
• 2. The Ultimate Quest
• 3. Meaningful Hedonism
• 4. Working Think Out
• 5. All in Good Time
• 6. Death and Injustice
• 7. Satisfaction Not Guaranteed
• 8. The Crook in the Lot
• 9. Don't Forget
• 10. The Final Analysis
• Other Books of Interest from Christian Focus Publications
• Christian Focus