Meaningless! Meaningless!”, says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
Ecclesiastes 1:2
“You have to love the book of Ecclesiastes. Here is the second verse after the introduction; “Meaningless! Meaningless!”, says the Teacher. “Utterly Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” Wow! How is that for an uplifting sermon! No wonder we only ever hear the one verse, “To everything there is a season,” quoted from Ecclesiastes. No one wants to hear that life is meaningless. This reminds me of a conversation that I had with my husband a few months ago. We had just gotten home from a lovely, weekend-long marriage retreat and were unpacking and getting ready for the upcoming week when some of those lines from Ecclesiastes floated through my mind about how meaningless the substance of this life is. Then I remembered Paul’s words in I Corinthians 7:7-8 “I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.” He wishes we could all be single, and therefore better able to focus on God’s work than this temporal relationship! He then goes on to list a bunch of guidelines that the church had requested to help them get along and live in God’s plan for them.
All this was going through mind and since I am prone to speak my mind in all things, I promptly said to my husband who was still basking in the glow of what a nice relationship-focused weekend it had been, “Do you ever think about how pointless this all is? We spend all this time and effort—in the case of marriage, a lifetime to maintain a good relationship and then we die and there isn’t marriage in Heaven as far as we know so all of this doesn’t even really matter. We could just save ourselves all this trouble by never entering into these earthly relationships to begin with.”
He was visibly, and understandably alarmed with where this all this could be going. Luckily for him, that was the end of my deep thoughts and I had no more such “encouraging” words to pour into our relationship at that time. My husband is much more optimistic than I am. He is a ‘let’s look on the bright side and see what kind of fun adventure we can get into today’ kind of guy. None of this is meaningless—it all matters! Me—I’m more like the writer of Ecclesiastes.
There are so many things of this life that seem so mundane and pointless. At the end of my life when I look back I will wonder why I ever thought they mattered. I can relate to the author of this book when he cries that everything is meaningless! Riches are meaningless, the vigor of our youth is meaningless, laughter is meaningless! The author concedes that food is for our enjoyment and we should take pleasure in eating. But as we read on, everything is still meaningless.
In chapter 3 verse 11-13 things get a little brighter: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.”
The book of Ecclesiastes concludes by saying, “Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.”
So what are we to make of all this? Basically I’m right! And my husband is right too! This is all pointless; and it all matters. There are things of this life that won’t matter in eternity but were put here on this earth for our enjoyment. Fearing God and keeping His commandments are what will matter in eternity. Part of keeping His commands is to be loving and to build relationships with others. Another part of keeping his commands is being good stewards of what we own and taking care of our possessions. Striving for excellence in all we do is following His commands. The day-to-day things won’t matter in eternity, but the culmination of all these things will.
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