[The word futile or vanity] is used in reference to the wind, man’s transitory breath, evanescent vapor… it is often a synonym for breath or wind… (1) breath/vapor/wind is nonphysical, evanescent, and lacks concrete substance thus, the connotation unsubstantial, profitless or fruitless, worthless, pointless, futile, (2) breath/vapor/wind is transitory and fleeting—thus, the connotation fleeting or transitory and (3) breath/vapor/wind cannot be seen thus, the idea of obscure, dark, difficult to understand, enigmatic
– NET Bible translators’ notes on Eccl. 1:2 (reformatted, Scripture citations omitted)
Ecclesiastes is one of the Bible’s most surprising books. At least at a surface-level reading, it’s so cynical and negative that it’s hard fit with the rest of Scripture. What are we to make of it?
I’ve heard a variety of approaches to Ecclesiastes. This is probably appropriate, since Ecclesiastes is part of the Bible’s wisdom literature. Wisdom means, roughly, “skill at living life,” and life can be complicated. Consider a college history exam: if you get a question like, “What novel did philosopher Jean-Jacque Rosseau write?” there’s only one right answer. (It’s Julie.) If you’re really lucky, you get a study guide, telling you what answers to focus on for the test.
By contrast, consider Proverbs 26:4-5:
Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest you be like him yourself.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
lest he be wise in his own eyes.
Answer a fool? Don’t answer a fool? Which is it? Maybe it depends on the circumstances. Maybe it’s a no-win situation. There’s no one right answer! If you tried to document it all, you’d perhaps end up with something like this.
Systematic Theology, by Wayne Grudem, is perhaps the de facto standard theology textbook in evangelical circles. It’s about 1,200 pages. That’s not enough, because Grudem added 400 pages in his second edition. He also has a 600 page book on politics, where he tries to answer questions like whether the stealth bomber is biblical, and a 1,300 page book on Christian ethics.
I appreciate the work of theologians and writers like him, but there’s a reason why the Preacher in Ecclesiastes says, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
As I understand it, part of the goal with the wisdom literature is to spend time wrestling with it, thinking through it, instead of just giving the answers. So here’s my attempt to do that.
Ecclesiastes is a depressing book
From my perspective, Ecclesiastes is depressing. For example, consider Ecclesiastes 1:2 (NIV):
Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
Or 3:19-20:
For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.
Or 4:2-3:
And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.
You get the idea. And we’re not even a third of the way through the book.
What are these verses doing in the Bible? Some commentators explain it by emphasizing “under the sun” - this is what life apart from God looks like, but with God, everything is different and better. Some view the Preacher as a cynical sage whose words are in Scripture but not endorsed by Scripture, like Job’s friends. In my opinion, both of these are perhaps avoiding the question - if the Preacher’s words are challenging to us, maybe wisdom involves spending time approaching Scripture on its own terms and wrestling with the challenge instead of dodging or dismissing it.
What do we do with this?
Sometimes I think I’m not an especially happy person. To some extent, that’s a matter for growth – growth in perspective, growth in gratitude and in joy. But, to some extent, I think different people are just wired in different ways, and some periods of life are harder than others. We’re never commanded to be happy – happiness is the same root word as happenstance, what happens to you, not necessarily something we can control.
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
– James 1:17
Sometimes we act like life is always gumdrops and unicorns if you’re a Christian. Sometimes this takes very obvious forms – the TV preachers who promise you’ll be rich if you just give some seed money. A local Knox area church used to do radio spots promising physical healing for believers. They had their verses they quoted as prooftexts – James 5:15’s “Prayer will make the sick person well” and Psalm 103:3’s “Bless the Lord who heals your diseases” and so on – but the obvious implication of that is, if you’re not physically healed, you’re not a very good believer. That’s all prosperity gospel.
There are less obvious examples. Sometimes we act like, if you’re a serious Christian, you won’t have serious problems. Or, if you make enough right parenting, your family will turn out the way you want. Or social media that’s always #blessed and never talks about the struggles. Sometimes I’d participate in a Sunday morning worship service and feel like I didn’t really belong, because all the songs were about how great life with God is, and I just wasn’t feeling great. This is prosperity gospel, too, just less obvious.
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Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. – James 1:17 |
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lᴏʀᴅ, do all these things. – Isaiah 45:7 |
I appreciate that the Bible is more honest than that.
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The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; – Psalm 16:5-6 |
I am weary with my moaning; – Psalm 6:6-7 |
The Psalms have beautiful words of praise about how good God is to us, but they also show us how to lament when things don’t go how we want, when we’re faced with the world’s evil and suffering.
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Whoever pursues righteousness and kindness – Proverbs 21:21 |
Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. – Ecclesiastes 9:11 |
And, here, in Ecclesiastes. (One of my good friends in college was named Chance, and this was one of his favorite verses.)
Sometimes hard work pays off; sometimes life goes the way we want; sometimes you do good and get rewarded. Other times, it’s just time and chance. Sometimes we can’t see any reason why.
Tim Keller says that, if all you had was Proverbs, you’d have the prosperity gospel. If all you had was Ecclesiastes, you’d have nihilism. You need them both to balance out.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
– Ecclesiastes 3:11
I appreciate that Ecclesiastes is honest about the mystery in life. We’re made for more than life under the sun – we have eternity in our hearts – yet there are real limits to how much we can understand and how much we can find out and figure out.
The just-world hypothesis
This idea that there isn’t a mystery – that you always get the Proverbs-style results of your actions – can be very damaging. Psychologists call this the just-world hypothesis or just-world fallacy – the belief that people get what they deserve. It shows up in cases like blaming the victim. Researchers told the same story to two groups of people, with one group hearing a neutral ending and one group hearing a bad ending, and the group that heard the bad ending thought the person deserved it. They reinterpreted the story in light of the ending.
Some of this comes from a good cause. God made us to want fairness and to want justice. We long for the day when Jesus will return and make all things right.
But some of it comes from a much less good place. We want to believe that we can be in control of the world, and being reminded that we aren’t, that sometimes our good actions can’t guarantee good results, is an offense to us.
In Christian terms, this is really just another way of saying the prosperity gospel – the belief that, if we do the right things, God will automatically bless us.
Dr. Bess Stillman, writing one year after the death of her husband and ten months after the birth of their baby:
People, I think, are afraid of me. I walk into a room not as Bess, but as a reminder that awful things can happen randomly to any of us. When people first found out about Jake’s tongue cancer, they often asked what his risk factors were: did he smoke heavily? Was it HPV-positive? Did he chew tobacco? They needed to reassure themselves that their own lack of similar risks made them safe. And yet, Jake had no risk factors, which made askers visibly uncomfortable. I remember the way their faces strained to find a plausible explanation that, at the very least, excluded them from the horrible randomness of an impersonal universe.
I watch people perform the same futile calculations when they find out that I was widowed two months before the birth of my daughter. But what could the risk factors have possibly been for such a fate? What could I have done or not done that made me more susceptible to marrying a man who was dead by his 40th birthday?
Sometimes the just-world hypothesis is a fallacy. Sometimes a husband and new father dies, or a four-year old gets cancer, or a business fails, or your spouse leaves you. Sometimes you do everything right and your kids still go their own way.
We live under the sun. We live in time, as mortals in a fallen world, and time and chance do still happen to us all. That doesn’t mean that the universe is random and impersonal, as Bess Stillman says, but it means that there’s mystery, that there are things we can’t understand. Sometimes people don’t get what they seem to deserve. Sometimes things are – not “meaningless,” that’s not the best translation of Ecclesiastes 1:2 – but things are as transitory and hard to grasp as a puff of smoke, and trying to make sense and take control is like chasing after the wind. We know that God is good and God is in control. (The point of God’s speech in Job, another part of the Bible’s wisdom literature, isn’t, “I’m much bigger than you, so be quiet,” it’s “I’m much bigger than you, so trust me.”) But God operates on his timescale, not ours, and sometimes we don’t understand, and sometimes it’s hard.
I’m glad we have Ecclesiastes to tell us that it’s okay to feel this way, to explode the just-world fallacy and the prosperity gospel that we seem so prone to.
Nothing new under the sun
Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.” At first glance, this seems incorrect, because there’s quite a lot new under the sun. But our new technology isn’t as new as we sometimes think. For example, Hamlet’s BlackBerry, by William Powers, talks about how people in the 16th through 19th century used writing tables – pocket-sized books with wax- or plaster-covered pages, so you could inscribe on them with a metal stylus when you’re out and about, then transcribe the notes someplace more permanent later, and wipe the wax or plaster smooth to reuse it. Our smartphones are new, but the concepts and core practices are centuries old.
One of my favorite sci-fi book series is The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey. One of the recurring themes of that series is, even as humans are terraforming Mars and colonizing the asteroid belt and encountering wondrous and horrifying alien technology and so on, just how much of the action is driven by the same human greed and fear and ego and insecurities that have been driving us since we were bashing each other with clubs and stones many thousands of years ago.
I’ll be honest - I think that our modern technology has gotten so good that we’re really, really bad at remembering that there’s nothing new under the sun.
When Isaac was old and his eyes were dim so that he could not see, he called Esau his older son and said to him, My son; and he answered, Here I am. He said, Behold, I am old; I do not know the day of my death. Now then, take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field and hunt game for me, and prepare for me delicious food, such as I love, and bring it to me so that I may eat, that my soul may bless you before I die.
– Genesis 27:1-4
Consider, for example, the story of Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing. It starts of by setting the scene with Isaac’s blindness.
He probably had cataracts. Nowadays, if you get cataracts, doctors can use ultrasound to break apart the old lens in your eye, suction it out, implant a new artificial lens, and send you home the same day.
And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need.
– Luke 15:14
In the middle of the parable of the prodigal son is a detail that most Americans forget when we’re retelling the story, because famines are so foreign to us.
After thousands of years of subsistence-level farming, we now have combines and harvesters and AI-powered crop management that lets one farmer feed 160 people or more. If we don’t get enough rain, we just pump the aquifers harder.
On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, May no one ever eat fruit from you again. And his disciples heard it.
– Mark 11:12-14
Remember the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree? It’s kind of an odd story; I’m not going to get into it now. I don’t know about you all, but this idea of “not being the season” for a fruit is really foreign to me.
We basically never have to worry about what season it is, because if the climate’s wrong here or something isn’t in season here, we can just ship it from somewhere else in the world. Or use greenhouses. Or store food with modern technology – apples, for example, can be stored for months in a nitrogen-gas warehouse to keep them fresh.
A voice cries:
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.– Isaiah 40:3-4
I’m told that the historical background behind this famous prophecy is how ancient people would build new processional avenues for visiting royals.
I can easily think of three or four construction sites within a 15-20 mile radius of my house. Isaiah and John the Baptist talk about filling valleys and leveling hills for a coming King; we do it for apartment complexes or landfills or shopping centers.
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, And who is my neighbor? Jesus replied, A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.
– Luke 10:29-33
15-20 miles, incidentally, is the approximate distance from Jerusalem to Jericho, the road taken in the story of the Good Samaritan.
15 miles is also the distance of the average American commute. So, 2,000 years ago, it was enough of a journey that you risk getting robbed, beaten, left for dead, and turned into a permanent object lesson for loving your neighbor. Now, many of us drive it twice a day as part of the 9-5 grind.
We’ve gotten so good at controlling so much, I think sometimes we think we can control everything.
To reuse Ecclesiastes’s language from another context, “it is not from wisdom that we think this.”
Sometimes life knocks us down as a society and reminds us that’s false. Hurricane Melissa did that in October in Jamaica and Cuba. No amount of meteorology and construction technique lets you shrug off 174 mph winds and 13 foot storm surges.
The COVID pandemic did that, before we turned it into yet another culture war battle. Thomas Joseph White wrote, a couple of weeks after the lockdowns started:
Christians ought to treat this pandemic as an opportunity to learn more about God. What does it mean that God has permitted (or willed) temporary conditions in which our elite lifestyle of international travel is grounded, our consumption is cut to a minimum, our days are occupied with basic responsibilities toward our families and immediate communities, our resources and economic hopes are reduced, and we are made more dependent upon one another? What does it mean that our nation-states suddenly seem less potent and our armies are infected by an invisible contagion they cannot eradicate, and that the most technologically advanced countries face the humility of their limits? Our powerful economies are suddenly enfeebled, and our future more uncertain… If we simply seek to pass through all this in hasty expectation of a return to normal, perhaps we are missing the fundamental point of the exercise.
And sometimes it happens in our individual lives – the death of a husband, the separation of a wife, a business failure, a cancer diagnosis.
In Living Life Backward, David Gibson’s study on the book of Ecclesiastes, he writes:
We long for change in a world of permanent repetition, and we dream of how to interrupt it. We long for lives of permanence in a world of constant change, and we strive to achieve it. We spend our lives aligning our better selves with a different future that we envisage as more rewarding. And in it all we are simply trying to make permanent what is not meant to be permanent (us), and by constant change we are trying to control what is not meant to be controlled (the world).
People often say that experience is the best teacher. But someone else’s experience is an even better teacher. Learn from Ecclesiastes. Learn that we’re not in control – that there’s nothing new under the sun – despite all our powers.
Ecclesiastes is an uplifting book
David Gibson’s book Living Life Backward has a much more positive interpretation of Ecclesiastes than I’d seen before. In the forward, he writes,
To my wife, Angela; my sons, Archie and Samuel; and my daughters, Ella and Lily; what can I say? You are the ones who helped me hear the Preacher of Ecclesiastes laughing as he shows how shoulders are meant for abundance and mayhem, not the weight of the world. You’ve always been laughing, and now we’re in on the joke together. I can’t remember not being so tired or ever so happy. I wish we could stay forever this young.
One day we will.
If you don’t believe that Ecclesiastes is uplifting, look at 2:24-25:
There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?
Gibson explains, “Some say ‘eat, drink, and be merry’ because that’s all there is; the Preacher says, ‘eat, drink, and be merry’ because that’s what there is. God has given the good things of this world to us, and they are their own reward.”
Or Ecclesiastes 3:12-14:
I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.
I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him.
Or Ecclesiastes 5:18-20:
Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God. For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.
Or Ecclesiastes 9:7-10:
Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.
Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.
Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.
Gibson explains that this is the “heart” of Ecclesiastes: “Gift, not gain, is your new motto. Life is not about the meaning that you can create for your own life, or the meaning that you can find in the universe by all your work and ambitions… You find meaning when you realize that God has given you life in his world and any one of those things as a gift to enjoy” (p. 112-113). He gives the analogy of a loving parent giving their adult children gifts they don’t need as an expression of love.
Ecclesiastes 11:9-10:
Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.
Remove vexation from your heart, and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are vanity.
What I said earlier about us not being commanded to be happy was not entirely correct. Ecclesiastes 9 commanded us to “go” and be “merry.” Here, we’re commanded to rejoice. The reference to “judgment” is often understood as a caution against letting our pleasures tempt us into sin, but Gibson reinterprets it: “The Preacher is actually including our enjoyment of God’s world, or lack of it, as one of the things that God will call into account in his final reckoning… It is precisely in enjoying the world God has made that we show we have grasped the goodness of the God we say we love. Failure to enjoy is an offense, not merely an oversight” (p. 136).
Ecclesiastes 12:10-11:
The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth.
The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd.
The Preacher calls Ecclesiastes “words of delight.” It’s not intended to depressing.
All that talk of nothing new under the sun, of not being in control, can be uplifting, not discouraging. It’s immensely freeing to remember that we’re creatures, not the Creator. We don’t have to be in control. We don’t have to exhaust ourselves trying to build some permanent gain by chasing after the wind.
Remembering that we’re going to die doesn’t have to be depressing. It’s Gibson’s idea of “living life backward” – let the awareness of our mortality, of how transitory our actions are, shape us into living well.
Beth Moore talks about how she had planted a little vineyard, then, due to surgery, was unable to tend to it for several months. “Everything I feared had come to pass… the wires that protected it had all been torn down by deer, by all sorts of critters. About a third of the vines were dead. The weeds were almost waist high. Anthills everywhere. It was destroyed. It was absolutely destroyed. I went home from there dashed… I felt like the biggest failure… I had worked so hard on it.”
She goes on to explain that Ecclesiastes says that we’re finite. We’re creatures. There’s a time to uproot – in life under the sun, we won’t be able to do everything, we won’t even be able to do everything that we need to do. “But the Lord in his timelessness knows what season it is.”
It’s freeing to recognize that we’re going to die and be forgotten – we don’t have to worry about trying to do something big enough or splashy enough or attention-grabbing enough to make some permanent name for ourselves. Beth Moore, again: “It will all be forgotten except the glory of God… It says in Hebrews chapter 6, God will remember… The Lord will remember your sacrifices. He’ll remember what you did for the service of the saints. He won’t forget it, but let everyone else forget it.”
Christians sometimes act like the point of life is going to heaven. This life is hard, and we shouldn’t expect to enjoy it, but it’s all worth it, because we’re going someplace else that’s much better. That’s not true. Jesus talks about how we have abundant life, starting now. I’m really looking forward to the new heaven and the new earth, but God gives us gifts to enjoy now, and Ecclesiastes emphasizes that. If there is nothing new under the sun, if life under the sun just repeats, then learn to enjoy life!
Gibson’s acknowledgements state, “I wish we could stay forever this young. One day we will.” As G.K Chesterton put it:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
One day, we will be renewed and live forever with God and put our mortality behind. But, under the sun, we can learn from Ecclesiastes to accept our limits, to enjoy the times and seasons and food and drink and work and family that God gives us, to say “Do it again.”