God's Problem (27 page)

This response of God from the whirlwind seems to get God off the hook for innocent suffering—he can do whatever he pleases, since he is the Almighty and is not accountable to anyone. On the other hand, does it really get him off the hook? Doesn’t this view mean that God can maim, torment, and murder at will and not be held accountable? As human beings, we’re not allowed to get away with that. Can God? Does the fact that he’s almighty give him the right to torment innocent souls and murder children? Does might make right?

Moreover, if the point is that we cannot judge the cruel acts of God by human standards (remember: Job was
innocent
!), where does that leave us? In the Bible, aren’t humans made in the image of God? Aren’t human standards given by God? Doesn’t he establish what is right and fair and just? Aren’t we to be like him in how we treat others? If we don’t understand God by human standards (which he himself has given), how can we understand him at all, since we’re human? Isn’t this explanation of God’s justice, at the end of the day, simply a cop-out, a refusal to think hard about the disasters and evils in the world as having any meaning whatsoever?

It may be that Job’s problem is that he has read the Wisdom literature (Proverbs) and the Prophets, and thinks there must be a connection between sin and punishment—since otherwise it doesn’t make sense to him that he is suffering. Maybe he should have read the book of Ecclesiastes instead.
⁴
For there we find the view that suffering does not come for known causes or known reasons. Suffering just comes, and we need to deal with it as best we can.

Ecclesiastes and Our Ephemeral Existence

Ecclesiastes has long been one of my favorite books of the Bible. It is normally included among the Wisdom books of the Hebrew Scriptures, because its insights into life come not from some kind of divine revelation (in contrast, say, to the Prophets) but from a deep understanding of the world and how it works. Unlike other Wisdom books, such as Proverbs, however, the wisdom that Ecclesiastes imparts is not based on knowledge acquired by generations of wise thinkers; it is based on the observations of one man as he considers life in all its aspects and the certainty of death. Moreover, like the poetic dialogues of Job, Ecclesiastes is a kind of “anti-Wisdom” book, in the sense that the insights it gives run contrary to the traditional views of a book like Proverbs, which insists that life is basically meaningful and good, that evil is punished and right behavior rewarded. Not so for the author of Ecclesiastes, who calls himself the Teacher
(Hebrew:
Qoheleth
). On the contrary, life is often meaningless, and in the end, all of us—wise and foolish, righteous and wicked, rich and poor—all of us die. And that’s the end of the story.
⁵

There is no better way to identify the overarching message of the book than simply to consider its powerful opening lines. In them the author identifies himself as the son of David and the king in Jerusalem (Eccles. 1:1). The author, in other words, is claiming to be none other than Solomon—known from other traditions as the “wisest man on earth.” Scholars are reasonably sure, however, that whoever wrote this book, it could not have been Solomon. Just on the linguistic level, the Hebrew of the book has been influenced by later forms of the Aramaic language, and it contains a couple of Persian loanwords—plausible only after the thinkers of Israel had been influenced by the thinkers of Persia (i.e., after the Babylonian exile). Usually this book is dated to about the third century
BCE
(some seven hundred years after Solomon himself). In any event, its opening statement virtually says it all:

The key term here is
vanity.
All of life is vanity. It passes by quickly, and then is gone. The Hebrew word is
hevel,
a word that can also be translated “emptiness,” “absurdity,” “uselessness.”
Hevel
literally refers to a mist that evaporates, so that its root idea is something like “fleeting,” “ephemeral.” The word occurs about thirty times in this relatively short book. For this author, everything in the world is ephemeral and destined soon to pass away—even we ourselves. Placing ultimate value and putting ultimate importance in the things of this world is useless, vain; all things are fleeting, ephemeral.

In the guise of Solomon, this author indicates that he tried everything in order to make life meaningful. He sought for great wisdom, he indulged himself in pleasure, he engaged in large building projects, he accumulated masses of possessions (Eccles. 1:16–2:23); but then he reflected on the meaning of it all: “I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun” (Eccles. 2:11). Despite being rich, wise, and famous, he “hated life” (Eccles. 2:17) and gave his “heart up to despair” (Eccles. 2:20). In the end he drew his conclusion: “There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil” (Eccles. 2:24). It is not that the Teacher (Qoheleth) had given up on God or on life; on the contrary, he thought that enjoying the simple things of life (your food and drink, your work, your spouse) comes “from the hand of God” (Eccles. 2:24). But even these things are fleeting and ephemeral: “vanity and chasing after wind” (Eccles. 2:26).

Here is a biblical author I can relate to. Look around and consider everything you work so hard for, everything that you hope to accomplish in life. Suppose you pursue wealth and become fabulously rich. In the end you die, and someone else inherits your wealth (Eccles. 6:1–2). Suppose you want to leave your wealth to your children. Well, that’s fine. But they too will die, as will their children, and the children after them. What’s the point of devoting your life to something you can’t keep? Or suppose you decide to spend your life on intellectual pursuits. You will eventually die and your brain will stop working and then where will your wisdom be? Or suppose all you want in life is great pleasure. It too is completely fleeting—you can never get enough of it. And then your body grows old, wracked with pain, and eventually ceases to exist. So what, actually, is the point?

Moreover, for this author “traditional” wisdom was inherently flawed—another reason I like him so much. It simply is not true
that the righteous are rewarded in life and the wicked perish: “In my vain life I have seen everything; there are righteous people who perish in their righteousness, and there are wicked people who prolong their life in their evil doing” (Eccles. 7:15); “there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity” (Eccles. 8:14). The reason it is all
hevel
is that everyone dies and that’s the end of the story: “Everything that confronts them is vanity, since the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice. As are the good, so are the sinners…the same fate comes to everyone” (Eccles. 9:1–3). Even in this life, before death, rewards and punishments are not meted out according to merit; everything is dependent on chance.

Nor, for this author, should it be thought that there is a good afterlife for those who have been good, wise, faithful, and righteous or punishment for those who die in their sins. There are no rewards or punishments after death—life is all there is, and so it should be cherished while we have it. In the Teacher’s memorable phrase, “a living dog is better than a dead lion” (Eccles. 9:4). And he explains why: “The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already
perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun” (Eccles. 9:5–6).

You might think that all this thought about the fleeting character of life would lead to utter depression and suicide. But not for this author. It is true that he is pessimistic and claims that he “despairs” of finding deeper, ultimate meaning. But suicide cannot be the answer, because that puts an end to the only good thing we have: life itself. Moreover, his constant refrain throughout the book is that given the ultimate impossibility of understanding this world and making sense of what happens, the very best thing we can do is enjoy life while we have it. On seven occasions in the book he tells his readers that they should “eat, drink, and be merry.” And so he says:

This strikes me as some of the best advice to be found in any ancient writing. Even though there are people (lots of people!) who claim to know what happens to us when we die, the truth is that none of us knows, and none of us ever will “know” until it’s too late for our knowledge to do us any good. My own suspicion is that the Teacher was right, that there is no afterlife, that this life is all there is. That should not drive us to despair of life, however. It should drive us to enjoy life to the uppermost for as long as we can and in every way we can, cherishing especially the precious parts of life that can give us innocent pleasure: intimate relationships, loving
families, good friendships, good food and drink, throwing ourselves into our work and our play, doing what we enjoy.