“Vanity of vanities, says the preacher,
Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
At which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
But the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it rises.”
With these cheery words the author of Ecclesiastes slaps us in the face with the uncomfortable truth of the meaninglessness of life. Life is vain, empty, pointless. The Hebrew word for “vanity” has the idea of mist, vapor, or mere breath. That last verse about the sun reminds me of one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs “Time” which has these lines:
“You run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking,
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way, but your older,
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.
Feel better? Why are these things in Scripture? Because without God, there really is no objective meaning to life. There is no reason for any of us to be here. That is the simple truth of it. We try to find meaning and purpose in various things; family, work, play, entertainment, art, creativity, building cities, space exploration, politics. But these are not meanings, they are just things to do; things to keep us busy so we don’t keep looking over our shoulder for the next sunrise. We invent elaborate religions and philosophies to talk ourselves into meaning. But the Bible calls our bluff. Ecclesiastes continues to pile on the futility of it all in chapter one.
“All things are full of weariness.
A man cannot utter it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
And what has been done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.”
The author is writing about “life under the sun”; a phrase he uses thirty times in this short book. It is life without God. When he refers to God, it is only in the most generic and fatalistic terms. As if God were just another character in a play. A cardboard cutout. This is not Yahweh. This is not the personal Shepherd of Psalm 23. This is not the close, intimate God who breathed into our nostrils the breath of life. The creator who loves us and gives us meaning.
Any meaning apart from Him is, at best, subjective and, at worst, a lie. You were made in the image of God. Your life has objective meaning because God is objectively meaningful; He is full of meaning. He is the meaning behind all meanings.
“The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”
-Goethe
“..this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God”
-Jesus