Sunday
Sunday
The Book of Ecclesiastes
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.
Proverbs 9:10
The book of Ecclesiastes is best known for its pessimistic refrain. In the familiar King James Version it is translated, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” But in the New International Version it is excellently rendered, “Meaningless! Meaningless! … Utterly meaningless!” (Eccles. 1:2).
This language of “meaning” and “meaninglessness” strikes a chord in many people today who are engaged in the quest for personal significance. Viktor Frankl, for example, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp as a boy and later was appointed professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna, became convinced that we human beings have a basic “will for meaning.” “The striving to find a meaning in one’s life,” he wrote, “is the primary motivational force in man.”1
The book of Ecclesiastes expresses many swings of mood and emotion, but it specially emphasizes the futility of a human life that is imprisoned in time and space and that ignores or denies the reality of God. If reality is restricted to time, to the brief human life span with all its injustice and pain, beginning with birth and ending like that of the animals, with death and dissolution, then everything is “meaningless! Meaningless! … Utterly meaningless!”
Or if reality is restricted to space, to human experience under the sun, with no ultimate reference point above and beyond the sun, then again it is all “meaningless! Meaningless! … Utterly meaningless!” Everything is futile, a chasing after wind.
Only God can give meaning to life, because only he can supply the missing dimensions. God adds eternity to time, and God adds transcendence to space. That is why “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” for wisdom begins with a humble acknowledgment of the reality of God.
For further reading: Ecclesiastes 1:1–11