Freedom is Good News Part 95
/The opening words of the book of Ecclesiastes let us know that “everything is meaningless, yes utterly meaningless”. Verse 1 along with verse 12 gives us the understanding that it was King Solomon who penned the book. He is the man who was given great wisdom from God and yet went astray. This in itself should cause us to sit up and take notice of what could lead a man of wisdom to walk away from the true God. Something to think about!!
But as I said in our last installment, “It is my opinion that Solomon came back to his senses and saw his error. And so the book of Ecclesiastes may be seen as his book of repentance.” In his book of proverbs Solomon makes this observation “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” Solomon was trained by his father, King David, in the ways of God and when he was older he came back to it.
So why, pray tell, should a book that opens up by telling us everything is meaningless, be the one that can lift us up and help us find satisfaction is all that we do? Good question, I’m glad you asked!!
But before we tackle that issue let’s do a short outline of the first two chapters. Chapter 1 verse 1-11: everything is meaningless! Chapter 1:12-18: wisdom is meaningless! Chapter 2:1-11: pleasures are meaningless! 2:12-16: wisdom and folly are meaningless! 2:17-26: toil is meaningless! OK, enough of this Bill, where am I going to find the good news?
There is a clue to this answer in a phrase that Solomon uses 29 times in this short book of only 12 chapters. The phrase, “under the sun” is inserted by Solomon in very strategic positions to help us see where the vanity and meaningless activities come from. Let’s consider some of these examples. The first instance is found in chapter 1:3, “What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun?” Well, the answer to this rhetorical question is “he gains nothing”. In other words, you can’t take it with you. (This reminds me of the story of the rich man who meets St. Peter at the pearly gates with a wheel barrow of gold ingots. St. Peter takes a look and asks the man why he is bringing paving material into the kingdom. Ah yes, streets of gold!!!)
We are ultimately, just consumers. We earn, we spend and we leave the rest to others when we die. Jesus put it this way in John 6:63, “The Spirit gives life; the flesh profits nothing.” The term “flesh” is used here to indicate our life here on earth – it is a wonderful experience that we have been given; but without God, without the hope of eternal life, without the hope of glory, there is no profit in our fleshly existence. As Solomon put it, “no gain from labor under the sun”.
In chapter 2 Solomon writes this, “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. … yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.” We will consider this catch phrase some more in the next article.