- There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity. And I commend joy, for man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun. -
I know we’ve discussed this, but it is good to remember. The themes in Ecclesiastes are repeated throughout the book.
Now, in one sense that is not surprising at all as that repetition is indeed what makes them themes. What I am actually saying is a bit different that.
Ecclesiastes repeats almost word for word the themes it wishes to discuss. In our verses today, we see two of them.
The first is the idea that the wicked live in luxury while the righteous live in squalor. The second states that nothing is better for mankind than to feast and be merry.
We’ve talked about these ideas a lot through our study. In fact, we were even in the past couple of weeks discussing how the good have a better life than the wicked.
If you are feeling confused, I think this an understandable time to be a bit muddled.
This tension when Ecclesiastes appears to be saying the opposite, even changing its point from paragraph to paragraph, is by design.
Think about it. How could a culture claim to have the wisest king to ever live and have a book of his writings filled with obvious contradictions?
Solomon repeats his themes to make us reconsider them. He does this next to his counterarguments to make the dichotomies easier to see.
In addition to that there is another voice, the one saying there is nothing better than to eat and be merry. If you remember, this is an old literary technique used to introduce another view.
This person is essentially stepping into Solomon’s work and saying, “All God requires of us is to eat and labor. This is the best we can hope for.”
Remember how this book started. Right, it shows how we have no guarantee of anything good or meaningful in our life.
All is vanity.
Sometimes when we realize this thought, we think through elaborate tricky arguments to prove that our lives do have a purpose.
Although we can do pretty good job of arguing, Ecclesiastes is written to show how impossible that problem is to resolve logically.
One thing we fail to see is how dismal the life is for the person who agrees to live with no meaning. The wicked man may be praised in the temple, but it’s a farce.
Worse, he never gets the opportunity in this life or the next to worship before God.
This is what we saw in the verses from last week. Why then does Solomon follow this with the previous theme that the wicked get the rewards of the righteous?
To show us that even if that is true, even if it’s wrong and goes against our logic, it is not the full story.
This is one of the reasons I love this book. It shows the limits of human reason and is honest about them. It teaches us we need something more than just rationality to live a meaningful life.
The answer? Meaning requires faith.
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