Is Everything Really Meaningless?
Ecclesiastes 1:1 – 11
You cannot live in the world these days and not feel it, a sense of meaninglessness from time to time. We cannot read, watch, or hear the news these days without sensing it, a sense of uselessness. We cannot talk to our friends, family, church members or neighbors without having them describe an overwhelming sense despair, needlessness. It is everywhere.
We find it in the war in Ukraine with the utter destruction of a people and a culture, and the loss of life, we cannot help but thing it meaningless, absolute meaningless. We find it in the senseless and mind-numbing loss of young lives in Uvalde Texas. The thought of those teachers and little ones staring down the barrel of a madman’s gun is to say the very least disturbing and leaves us without words to describe our emotions.
We find going to the store or the gas station and seeing the frightening price that we must pay for the things that we need, absolutely defeating and demoralizing. Opening the mail and seeing that the propane, natural gas, and electricity is going up faster than the money is coming in leaves us with a sense of futility. The writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes speaks the words that we are unable to express any better, “Meaningless! Meaningless!” Utterly Meaningless! Everything is meaningless! (1:2).
We come into the season that I like to call, the Season of Sanctification, the extra-ordinary time between Easter and Advent. In the Lectionary, these are the weeks that we simply designate, that we innumerate as the “Sundays after Pentecost.” Technically this is the first Sunday after Pentecost, and there will be 24 Sundays after Pentecost before we get back to Advent after Thanksgiving, 24 weeks that is almost half of the year. It is during those weeks that we focus not on the events and those people that are included in those seasons.
Instead, we focus on ourselves, on maturing ourselves as Christians, as we focus on making ourselves more like the image of Christ and we learn from the words and actions of the disciples and prophets. Today, and for the next few weeks we will be reading from and learning from the book of Ecclesiastes.
There is some confusion and differing opinions as to who authored the Book of Ecclesiastes. The author doesn’t name himself but rather describes himself as a king, the son of King David, as well as teacher and preacher to the nation of Israel, he does have a tendency to talk about himself in second person and there are a few passages that certainly appear to prologue and epilogue written by other people, but on whole the words and wisdom of the book clearly come from the wisest man that ever lived, King Solomon. In fact, Solomon wrote the majority of three of the OT Wisdom books, Song of Songs, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
We do not as a regular habit spend a lot of time in Ecclesiastes, it only comes up in the Lectionary two times. But as we have seen in Bible Study over the last few weeks there is a lot of Solomon’s insights do remind us of the times in which we live today, difficulties and challenges like I mentioned earlier. Because Ecclesiastes appears to take such a gloomy view of life, there have been some people that questioned the spiritual and sanctifying value of reading it. In fact, as early church scholars attempted to gather the period writings by many different people that were deemed to be spiritually ordained and beneficial to Christians and put them into the canon of the Bible that we know today, there were questions as to whether Ecclesiastes belonged in the Bible at all. This was because the common themes of the Hebrew scriptures; a God who reveals and redeems, who elects and cares for a chosen people—are absent from it.
In some respect, that may be true, but as maturing Christians we know that life is not always easy! Consequently, we find that Ecclesiastes is honest about the troubles of life, so honest that the great American novelist Herman Melville, the writer of Moby Dick, once called it “the truest of all books in the Bible.” For our betterment and edification, Ecclesiastes captures the futility and frustration of a fallen world. It is honest about the drudgery of work, the injustice of found in society, the dissatisfaction found in foolish pleasure, and the mind-numbing tedium of everyday life, “the treadmill of our existence.”
Studying Ecclesiastes allows us to be honest with ourselves about mankind’s relationship with God and the challenges that are found in a world filled with amoral people and controlled by the Great Deceiver. One scholar (Gregory Thaumaturgos) describes Ecclesiastes as “a kind of back door” that allows believers to have the sad and skeptical thoughts that we dare not allow to enter the front door of our faith.
Hopefully, we will learn over the coming weeks what will happen to us if we choose what the world tries to offer instead of what God has to give. Solomon, the son of King David is the writer of this book had more money, enjoyed more pleasure, and possessed more human wisdom than anyone else in the world, yet he finds himself as we come to the Ecclesiastes, filled with frustration and disillusionment. As we will come to find out over the weeks, the same will happen to us if we live for ourselves rather than for God. “
In Ecclesiastes Solomon asks the biggest and hardest questions that people still have today. Despite the close connection that Solomon had to God through being the heir to King David, Solomon could not come to a rationalization and understanding of many of the same things that we struggle with today. What is the meaning of life? Is there really a God? Does God really care? Why is there so much suffering and injustice in the world? These are the questions that Solomon is struggling with, and these are the questions that we struggle with.
Solomon was gifted at his ordination as king and preacher to the Israelites with great wisdom, the wisest man in the world. But that wisdom does not insulate or isolate him from bemoaning the apparent lack of clarity and understanding over the way that the world is ordered. In these days we too struggle with meaninglessness of what God allows to happen in the world around us. So, as we will see, Solomon leaves that trust in wisdom and sets sail on a journey to understand the meaning of life. Solomon becomes an explorer of sorts, trying to use his research and insights to help him uncover what the meaning of life is
Our study of Ecclesiastes over the coming weeks will help us understand and worship the one true God because Solomon will teach us many great truths about God. Ecclesiastes shows God as the Mighty Creator and Sovereign Lord, as the transcendent and all-powerful ruler of the universe. If we are purposeful and intentional about our listening Ecclesiastes could teach us how to live for God and not just for ourselves. Back in April I talked about Dr Beanblossom telling a chapel full of college students that is ok and proper to look at our faith through agnostic lens. Ecclesiastes likewise is a book for skeptics and agnostics, for people on a quest to know the meaning of life, for people just trying to understand how to live in a world that confounds and confuses us.
Friends we see in out lesson today that Solomon is fixated on the fact that mortal life is transitory. It disappears as suddenly as it comes. Now you see it, now you do not! We are here today and gone tomorrow, our days will “vanish like a breath” “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
Solomon observes that there is not one single aspect of human existence that is not seem frustrated by futility. He suggests that it is all empty, pointless, useless, and absurd. To prove this point, the Preacher takes everything that people ordinarily use to give meaning or to find satisfaction in life, money, pleasure, knowledge, and power, and shows just show how empty it really is. Solomon will speak from experience because he had tried it all.
What makes everything even worse for Solomon is that finds that somehow God is at the bottom of it, He is the creator and practitioner of these things that distract and demean mankind. Solomon, like us, tries to never gives up his faith in the power and sovereignty of God. But rather than making him feel better, the question of God’s participation in the vexation of mankind, only appears to make things worse. Whatever frustrations he has with the world are also frustrations with the God who made it. So, what hope does he have that life will ever make sense? Anyone who has ever felt that life is not working out the way that God had promised them, and that God does not seem to be listening, knows exactly what Solomon is saying.
Given everything that Ecclesiastes says about the vanity, the purposeful foolishness of life, one might think that the book is depressing. Admittedly, some people think that the Preacher is too much of a pessimist. Certainly, the experiences of life in the world around him, have led him to take a darker view of God’s activity in the world, yet he still believes in God, he just wants to understand.
John Wesley one time endeavored to preach his way through the Book of Ecclesiastes and what he discovered was a life-changing truth which is taught by Solomon. That truth is that he teaches us is that we will never find any true meaning or lasting happiness unless and until we find it in God.
Friends if we attend to the purposes and truth of these lessons well, it will draw us closer to Jesus, the Son of God. The Bible says that because of our sin, creation itself “is subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20). This is why life is always so frustrating and sometimes seems so meaningless: it is all because of sin and its’ control over us.
Dear Ones for our ultimate benefit, Jesus suffered the curse of sin in all its futility when he died on the cross. As we have seen throughout the seasons of Lent and Easter, through the power of Jesus’ resurrection from the grave, the emptiness and futility of life under the sun can be undone. Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). So, friends as we begin our study in Ecclesiastes, let us seek to find the answer to the question “Is Everything Really Meaningless?” Amen.