Good Morning, Everything is Meaningless. . .

Everything is Meaningless: Ecc 1:1-11 

Go ahead and start here: http://biblehub.com/nasb/ecclesiastes/1.htm

Vanity of vanities… All is vanity.

Imagine opening a new piece of exercise equipment and seeing a note from the manufacturer which says, “Suggested garage sale price…”So begins the book of Ecclesiastes, easily the most misunderstood and under-appreciated volume of the Wisdom literature.

At best, what drives us today is a romantic, “carpe diem” approach to life, a Hawthornean mandate to “suck the marrow” out of life. At a more mundane level, there is the desire to pay the bills, to simply survive. This can manifest itself more selfishly as raw materialism, as conspicuous consumption (perhaps the great open sin of the Western church). From the first time we tell our preschool teacher that we want to be an astronaut, we want to “be somebody”.

Yet, instead of starting with “big dreams” or “vision casting”, Quoheleth (“the preacher”, traditionally king Solomon) gives what is arguably the most de-motivational speech of all time. “Your life? It will be hard. At times it will seem to drag on forever and when you die it will feel too short. And in the end it is extremely likely that no one will even know you were here.”

Is he trying to clip our wings? Let’s get this straight; life was never about making ourselves great. It is about making God’s name great. Stated another way, we are not here to make a name for ourselves, but to make great the name of God. Life is filled with joy and wonder; but also has a droning back beat of monotony that will not be overcome until the clock ticks for us from time in to eternity.

Some cannot receive this message and so simply refuse to read Ecclesiastes, asserting it is too bleak. Yet it was written to be read. If we turn to the Bible only hoping to sip some chicken soup for our soul, we will miss the soup for the noodle. Scripture is a wonderfully diverse library delving into the spectrum of human experience. Ecclesiastes, serves as a grand leveler, admonishing us to snap out of it, to see life in all its transience, see ourselves through that lens, and ultimately see ourselves in light of the intransient and eternal God who not only gives meaning, but perhaps is best understood as meaning.

But now we are getting ahead of ourselves.

For now, get your head out of the clouds, and your feet on the ground. And if we can read this right, knowing that we are not likely to be the link between epochs, it can actually take a bit of the pressure off.