Lessons in
living from Ecclesiastes Part 2
Ecclesiastes 12:13-14
Chapters 5 – 8
Specific verses to highlight
Chapter 5; 1-3; 5; 10-11;
18-19
Chapter 6: 1-2; 6; 9-10
Ecclesiastes
6:9 (The Message
Ecclesiastes 6:9-10
Chapter 7:1-2; 5-6; 8-10;
13-22;29
Ecclesiastes 7:21-22
Ecclesiastes 7:29
Chapter
8: 2-5; 8; 12-13; 15
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.
[1]
Thanks for
All
David
[1]Peterson,
Eugene H.: The Message : The Bible in Contemporary Language.