The Message Remix (193 page)

INTRODUCTIONECCLESIASTES

 

Unlike the animals, who seem quite content to simply be themselves,
we humans are always looking for ways to be more than or other than what we find ourselves to be. We explore the countryside for excitement, search our souls for meaning, shop the world for pleasure.
We try this. Then we try that. The usual fields of endeavor are money, sex, power, adventure, and knowledge.

Everything we try is so promising at first! But nothing ever seems to amount to very much. We intensify our efforts—but the harder we work at it, the less we get out of it. Some people give up early and settle for a humdrum life. Others never seem to learn, and so they flail away through a lifetime, becoming less and less human by the year, until by the time they die there is hardly enough humanity left to compose a corpse.

Ecclesiastes is a famous—maybe the world’s most famous—witness to this experience of futility. The acerbic wit catches our attention. The stark honesty compels notice. And people do notice—oh, how they notice! Nonreligious and religious alike notice. Unbelievers and believers notice. More than a few of them are surprised to find this kind of thing in the Bible.

But it is most emphatically and necessarily in the Bible in order to call a halt to our various and futile attempts to make something of our lives, so that we can give our full attention to God—who God is and what he does to make something of us. Ecclesiastes actually doesn’t say that much about God; the author leaves that to the other sixty-five books of the Bible. His task is to expose our total incapacity to find the meaning and completion of our lives on our own.

It is our propensity to go off on our own, trying to be human by our own devices and desires, that makes Ecclesiastes necessary reading. Ecclesiastes sweeps our souls clean of all “lifestyle” spiritualities so that we can be ready for God’s visitation revealed in Jesus Christ. Ecclesiastes is a John-the-Baptist kind of book. It functions not as a meal but as a bath. It is not nourishment; it is cleansing. It is repentance. It is purging. We read Ecclesiastes to get scrubbed clean from illusion and sentiment, from ideas that are idolatrous and feelings that cloy. It is an exposé and rejection of every arrogant and ignorant expectation that we can live our lives by ourselves on our own terms.

Ecclesiastes challenges the naive optimism that sets a goal that appeals to us and then goes after it with gusto, expecting the result to be a good life. The author’s cool skepticism, a refreshing negation to the lush and seductive suggestions swirling around us, promising everything but delivering nothing, clears the air. And once the air is cleared, we are ready for reality—for God.

 

 

[“Ecclesiastes” is a Greek word that is usually translated “the Preacher” or “the Teacher.” Because of the experiential stance of the writing in this book, giving voice to what is so basic among men and women throughout history, I have translated it “the Quester.”]

 

From:
Without coming right out and saying so, the Quester hinted that he was King Solomon. Fabulously rich, internationally famous, and with hundreds of women in his harem, he was now an old man who saw how little his “success” counted as he looked his approaching death in the eyes. After all his hard work building an empire, he was about to leave it to his morally puny son Rehoboam. Israel’s ten northern tribes made no secret of the fact that they didn’t trust Rehoboam. It didn’t take Solomon’s genius to see that the country might soon fall apart (as in fact it did).

 

To:
Whatever Solomon may have realized about his life, the ambitious young people of Jerusalem saw nothing but the glitz: money, brains, sex, power, everything they admired and wanted. Wisdom, they thought, was a tool to achieve success. Nothing was further from their minds than the idea that real wisdom might send the myth of success up in a puff of smoke.

 

Re:
Shortly before 930 B.C. Chinese philosophers of the Zhou Dynasty came up with the doctrine of the “mandate of heaven” to explain why the Zhou had the right to wrest power from the previous regime. They said the Zhou’s success proved that heaven was behind them. Success, they said, was proof of heaven’s favor.