Text: Ecclesiastes 4:1-16
The basic premise of this article is that life is absurd without an adequate world-view.
In Ecclesiastes 3:11, Solomon’s observed that: “He (God) has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end”.
God has set eternity in our hearts. He has made us yearn for something more…something beyond ‘life under the sun”. He has created us for eternity, and confined us to time and space, knowing that we will never be satisfied here.
God has planted dissatisfaction deep in our hearts for a reason. He has done it because He wants us to seek Him. God wants us to seek him because He wants to be found. He does not just want us to live, he wants us to think what it means ‘to be’ and come to know what life is all about. God wants us to accept the worldview set out in scripture, starting with the this one basic truth, that men and women are made in the image of God.
He wants us to know that He is God and that we must trust him to among other things, provide answers, even when we don’t even know what the questions are.
God wants our lives to make sense, and to do that, they have to be anchored in special revelation. Scripture is made up of words spoken from beyond the sun and from the place to which God ultimately calls us.
Solomon’s world view was inadequate only because it was incomplete. We would agree with much of what he said, but he lived before the coming of Jesus and without access to all of the answers that he provided.
Solomon knew about God and was a student of scripture and a staunch believer
We know that God spoke to Solomon at the start of his reign. He also opened Solomon’s mind and granted him an extra measure of wisdom so that along with the prophets, he was inspired to write. Solomon’s world-view included God, but he still wrestled with questions that God had not yet answered
If there is a lesson here, it is that God does not expect believers to “check their brains at the door”.
- He has given us ‘dominion’ over the work of his hands.
- He expects us to investigate the world that we live in and the questions in Ecclesiastes are a part of that investigation
- God wants us to seek, knowing that if we look long enough, we will always find him, even if final answers are held back in reserve.
Solomon’s search was not unbelief looking for belief, but faith searching for breadth and depth. Biblical faith must always be held with a sense of God’s divine oversight and exercised in humility.
So, in the text for this article you’ll notice a variety of subjects. They are found from Ecclesiastes 3:16 to the end of chapter 4.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s group these verses into four subject areas
- Social Injustice (3:16-17, 4: 1-3)
- End of Life issues – death (3:18-21)
- The folly of life’s paradoxes (4:4-6)
- Vanity (4:7-16)
The question for Solomon was…how do all of these individual facts fit together in to a cohesive whole? What world-view can account for them all and still make sense? And is that world-view one that is worth living for?
Chapter 3:16-17 and 4: 1-3, deal with Social Injustice, reflecting two things.
- That there is such a thing as real right and wrong.
- There is a way that things ought to be and then the way that they are.
God has put us together in such a way that something within us demands justice. After all, fair is fair. It doesn’t matter where you live in, people know justice when they see it. God has made us so that we are driven to approve of things good and right. He has placed within us, a sense of obligation to stand on the side of right and to oppose that which is wrong.
So when Solomon took stock of his world and he observed that neither justice nor righteousness prevailed, he concluded that:
- Life under the sun is not fair…
- And, that the wicked appear to be winning and that is just not right.
If it is true that ‘power corrupts then absolute power corrupts absolutely”. This is why powerful people are very rarely just, and as long as the powerful are wicked, the weak are abused.
Now you’d think that since Solomon was king, he’d be able to stop it. But he realized, that all by himself, he could not stamp out injustice. Systemic evil, tilts the scales toward injustice and there are limits to what a good king can do when he inherits an evil administration. Cleaning house may get him killed.
When Solomon came to power, his father David handed him a hit-list. There were people in his administration that had murdered and had wronged David personally, but remained unpunished. It fell to Solomon to deal with these. His nephew Joab who commanded David’s army, had murdered two men and was to be executed. The case of Shimei, a Benjamite who cursed David when he fled Jerusalem the armies of Absalom had yet to be close. And Solomon’s half brother Adonijah had tried to grab the throne out from under Solomon, just before David died.
It was all unfinished business, inherited along with the throne. The royal house had to be put in order before the nation could live at peace. Solomon knew a lot about the relationship between power and justice and the need for justice to guide and direct the power of the throne.
Skipping forward to the first 3 verses of chapter 4, there is a pessimistic tone to what Solomon says. He congratulates the dead, or better still, those who have never been born. He is discouraged – even jaded. He seems to be saying, that injustice is so universal, that death is better than life. Better off is the one never born.
In a sense, Solomon was breaking trail for the philosophers of the future. Once you start down that road, it leads to Nihilism…the view that life is meaningless – both unfair and absurd. It would be better never to have been born than to face that kind of life.
But that is not where Solomon is going. Solomon’s was not a Nihilist and for good reason. We find it in chapter 3 and verse 17 where he observed:
I said to myself, “God will judge both the righteous man and the wicked man,” for a time for every matter and for every deed is there”.
In other words, in God’s own good time, He will judge. Surely, in God’s system of justice, no one gets away with evil in the end.
Now in 3:18-21, Solomon returned to end of life issues. God has so ordered the world that death is always “in your face”. We are creatures before the creator. We are born, to die. Death and dying are all around us, as is the realization that no one is exempt. The O.T. calls it “going the way of all the earth”. Death is so universal, that every living being has to take their turn. No one gets out of life alive and of course, this lead Solomon to speculate about what happens next?
The Bible says that our bodies are made of dust and return to the dust, but what is a person’s spirit made of? And where does it go when we die? That’s his question and it is a good question. It’s a question that the whole world would like to have answered, and it does no good to interview the dead.
This question marks the boundary of Solomon’s world-view. He had no answer and neither would we, had God not given one in the resurrection of Jesus. He rose from the grave and promises the same for those who belong to Him. We now know, that there is life after death and that there is also death after death. There is judgment both in this life and in the one to come
Now in chapter 4:4-6, Solomon turns to the matter of folly. There are two kinds of folly that he talks about.
The first has to do with the nature of work. Work is a good thing. It is necessary and God-given. Without it, there would be no food on the table, clothes on our back or houses to keep us warm. Society could not exist without work.
But people have taken a good thing and made a competition out of it. It’s not enough just to have enough, we must have more than others. Solomon says, that this too is vanity and striving after the wind.
Yet if you read Ecclesiastes 2, it is exactly what Solomon did. He compared himself with everyone else and concluded that “I’m winning”. But when you are number one, there is only one way to go. This too is vanity.
So there’s the kind of work that’s done for all the wrong reasons. And then there’s the other extreme – those who just won’t work at all. They refuse to play the game and in the process refuse to do the things that are necessary to keep body and soul together.
So you have the man who says to himself “One hand full of rest is better than two hands full of wind”. But that means that he has nothing to eat and in turn becomes a burden to society and a danger to himself. Giving up is not the answer, but then, what is?
In 4:7, Solomon circles back to the subject of vanity. He sees it everywhere and he does look everywhere. Futility is a built-in feature of life. It’s not an optional extra, it is a part of the base model that everyone starts with. It is there in the very ‘nature of things’.
The exercise that follows is somewhat surprising. Solomon spends time saying ‘this is better than that’, comparing one specific to another and then declaring a winner.
But so what? He seems to say, that since I can’t make sense of the big picture, let’s just spend time on minutia, because one way or another, life goes on, with or without an adequate world-view. You still have to bake your bread, wash your clothes and earn a living.
So if we can’t answer big picture questions, then what about day to day stuff? Like which is better, a Chevy or a Ford, a Panasonic or a Sanyo, Levi’s or Wranglers?
Solomon has his own list of things. So, it is better for a man to have heirs than to have none? Why work hard to build an estate when you have no family to inherit? More than that, Solomon is saying, don’t live life without asking “why?”
Did you know that two are better than one? You’ve got someone to turn to when you need help. When you are cold, two can keep warm. When you are lonesome, two’s company and when danger comes, there is strength in numbers. It may be “life under the sun” (unfair and pointless) but you still need common sense just to get by.
Solomon concludes then that it is better to be poor and wise than rich, and foolish, for wisdom is better than riches…since power is short-lived.
The same people love a new king get tired of him just as quickly. They’ll crown you today will kick you out tomorrow. Popularity is a flash in the pan. You can’t please all of the people all of the time or even most of the people some of the time.
Now the reason ought to be obvious. You see, those who choose a king are looking for things to get better. They too are stuck with ‘life under the sun’.
So they think that a new king is the answer. They want a man who can give them what only God can, and when he can’t deliver – they get rid of him and move on. This too is vanity.
Now suppose that you line up all of these ‘better things’ and put them into practice, what do you have? Solomon says, that you still have vanity and futility
You see, there is a place for practical wisdom and God wants us to live responsibly. He wants us
- To feed our families and care for them.
- To help the poor and reduce human suffering.
- To protect the innocent and maintain law and order
- To love our enemies and to do good to those who abuse us.
But we must lift our heads above the individual things in life and understand what life on earth is all about.
There is the danger of getting bogged down in the mechanics of daily living. That we will be too busy being busy to ask the really important questions. For if we are too busy for that… then our lives are spent in vanity. Even those who only choose the better things in this life, Solomon says these are still just striving after the wind.
How then do we rise above the better things – under the sun – and take hold of the permanent ones? Here is what Solomon says in 3:14
“I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him”
The things that last are the things that God does. His work is permanent. Therefore, it is His work that ultimately counts. If ultimate meaning exists it is found in God’s work. And since God alone is eternal…meaning and purpose reside in Him.
For us, the question is: what are God’s purposes for this world? And “how do I fit into these?”
Well, as Christians, we know God’s answers. He has created us to be the objects of his love. He demonstrated his love for us when Christ died on the cross and He in turn has redeemed us from sin and has sent us to tell others. He has made us partners in the enterprise of saving the world.
Talk about meaning in life! It is the reason why God made us in the first place. It was the reason Jesus came to earth so that life ‘under the sun’ might lead to life in a place where He is the source of eternal light. This is real life. This is real life, with purpose reaching into eternity.
In Christ, life suddenly makes sense. God’s word, unfolds a view of the world – found nowhere else. But its not the novelty of it that makes it unique. It is the fact that it is true, for it is of God.
This is the good news. Its what the prophets foretold but did not understand, the things into which angels longed to look. They are now ours in Christ and ours forevermore.
Barry ON