Recovering Eden

The Gospel According to Ecclesiastes

Zack Eswine

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781596386495
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Ecclesiastes shows a frank, unafraid familiarity with transparency, beauty, and ugliness. Eswine's study helps us address these topics boldly ourselves and grounds them in the person and work of Jesus.

chapter one

An Unexpected Voice

“A long moan answers, rising in our talk.”1

When readers in the early 1960s first perused the book A Grief Observed, many found comfort but some felt troubled. The troubled ones were accustomed to hearing solid strength, strong faith, formidable apologetics, and credible worship from the pen of C. S. Lewis. Suddenly now, to read his doubts and questions so raw and transparent was unusual, strange, and befuddling. This widower’s voice, like his aging head, his dripping nose, and his heaving shoulders, leaned heavy onto the chest of the page, and some who held him there as they read his grieving words became restless, frightened, and disconcerted. “It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap,” Lewis wrote. “The drill drills on.”2

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.3

Meanwhile, where is God? . . . Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.4

Lewis’s readers did not expect someone like that to talk like this. The book sat on their shelves next to Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, and The Weight of Glory, but some felt less certain about their desire to read it and how or if they were meant to use it.

Many people who cherish the Bible express a similar reaction to the book of Ecclesiastes. We do not expect the words we find there. What many of us have come to expect from the Bible in general and this messenger in particular, doesn’t match. Yet, the same God who inspired the Psalms and the Gospels speaks here too. These inspired words which disturb us reveal aspects of God too often neglected by us. If one has only driven a car with automatic transmission, driving manually will take some getting used to. What do we need to know in order to “get used to” the way this book functions in its attempt to get us from one place to another?

Seeking Double Knowledge

The pastor and theologian John Calvin believed that we discover wisdom and life by means of double knowledge: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.5 Accordingly, if we want to know God, we must learn moment by moment to furnish our mind with the contemplation of God.

The books of the Bible invite us to this double knowledge. Some books, like Romans, put God center stage. We learn about him mostly by contemplating him directly and less by paying attention to ourselves.

But one of the ways that God leads us to know him is by making us pay attention to ourselves. He reveals himself by recovery of our humanity. He shows us what we were made for and then bids us to look at what has become of us. This is what you will want to admit about Ecclesiastes. In the same way as books such as Ruth or Esther, in Ecclesiastes God intends you to know him by requiring you to look plainly and without polish at yourself, your neighbors, and the world in which you and I live. God puts himself in the background, as it were, in order to place self-concern front and center.

“We are prompted by our own ills,” says Calvin, “to contemplate the good things of God.”6 In the Spirit’s hands, Ecclesiastes confronts us with our own ills in order that by knowing ourselves as we are we might come to know God as he is.

The Perspective of This Voice

The one whom God has designated to tell us about ourselves is “the Preacher” (Eccl. 1:1). The word translated “Preacher” refers to “the gathering or assembly of a community of people, especially for the worship of God.”7 Therefore, the king of Israel, the son of David, is “like a pastor in a church,”8 preaching. In that light, Ecclesiastes “is a sermon with a text (‘vanity of vanities,’ 1:2; 12:8),” an explanation of that text (Eccl. 1–10), and an application of what that text then means for our lives (Eccl. 11:1–12:7).9 But this sermon unsettles immediately, for what the Preacher does is step to his pulpit and shout at us, “Vanity! Everything is vanity!” (see Eccl. 1:2).

But this Preacher-king takes up the title “son of David” and identifies himself as the heir to the psalm-singing, sling-shot-hurling, shepherd-king, whom God said was “a man after his own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14). Even more, “son of David” signifies the mantle that God’s promise would in time place upon Jesus (Matt. 1:1). Such credentials promote our expectation of a powerful and uplifting biblical sermon. Yet, the Preacher-king steps up to his pulpit and tells us that what God gives us in this life amounts to little more than “an unhappy business” (Eccl. 1:13).

Furthermore, Ecclesiastes lets us hear the voice of an older pastor/disciple-maker. He is a sage mentor speaking to his students not only as a giver of words, but also as a companion for living so that the young can learn (Eccl. 12:1). Like the wise before him (Prov. 23:26), and the apostles after him (2 Tim. 2:1), and Jesus with his followers (John 13:33), we are to hear the Preacher too, as offering affectionate speech, like a spiritual father instructing his dearly loved spiritual children (Eccl. 12:11).

Similarly, like David the king who preceded him (Ps. 23) and the Lord who came after him (John 10:11), we are meant to hear the Preacher’s words as if we who listen are a flock under the care of one Shepherd (Eccl. 12:11). He intends that we will hear something resonant with the voice of this one Shepherd in the midst of his human voice. We are surprised then when this sage mentor tells us that he “hated life” (Eccl. 2:17) and that gaining wisdom and knowledge does nothing but stress us out and make us sad (Eccl. 1:18).

Like those who were bothered by C. S. Lewis’s book on grief, we too might wonder how a spokesman for God could talk like this in God’s name and whether or not we should listen to a preacher who sermonizes in this way. We might think to ourselves, “This guy just doesn’t sound like Isaiah, Jeremiah, or John or Peter. More importantly, he doesn’t sound like Jesus.”10

These thoughts make sense when we recognize that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes offers a different category of sermon than what Isaiah, Jeremiah, John, or Peter offered to us. (We will come back to the question of whether or not the Preacher sounds like Jesus in a moment.) Most of us have not encountered this kind of wisdom preaching or sage pastoral perspective before. So, we do not know what to make of it. Like an American driver in New Zealand, we need to switch our sights to a different side of the road than we are used to and to a different vantage point in the car, in order to navigate these opposite streets. Sometimes making this switch takes a little time and feels quite scary.

A Wisdom Voice

Making this switch begins with recognizing what kind of terrain we are traveling. The neighborhoods of Ecclesiastes are filled with wisdom streets. Many Christians have grown up traveling the prophetic roads of the Old Testament and the Pauline highways of the New Testament. Wisdom highways are less traveled. The Song of Solomon is like a back-road brothel to us. (As a young man, I was told by a pastor not to read this book until after I was married!) Job is like a long stretch of desert road with no night light and no gas stations or rest stops for miles. People can get stuck out there with no help, so we rarely travel there without a great deal of preparation. James is like an old law building that doesn’t seem to fit the gospel landscape. We drive around it and wonder if we should bulldoze it. Ecclesiastes sounds like a crazed man downtown. He smells like he hasn’t bathed—looks like it too—and as we pass by he won’t stop glaring at us and beckoning to us that our lives are built on illusions, and that we are all going to die. So, most of us choose to get our lunch at a different shop on a less dreary corner of town. Meanwhile, we usually like our visits to the Psalms, except for the ones that we feel we need to rewrite or edit because of how uncomfortably raw the emotions they express are. Their moodiness can ruin a good time.

In short, most who have grown up in the Christian community have very little acquaintance with the neighborhoods of wisdom. The wisdom books are like those neighbors at which we smile but with whom we rarely converse because they live on the “other side of the tracks.” No wonder Ecclesiastes sounds foreign to us.

But, as J. I. Packer once said, “The Bible is God preaching.”11 Though this voice in Ecclesiastes is strange for many of us to hear, the biblical Wisdom Literature reminds us that God (unlike many of us) has not been squeamish about speaking with riddles, maxims, metaphors, or poetry to his people. God has not been afraid of transparency, mystery, emotion, appeals to nature, or an intimate familiarity with the beauties and messes of people and things.12 Like two acquaintances who as they get to know each other say, “I didn’t know you could talk like that,” the biblical Wisdom Literature in general, and Ecclesiastes in particular, show us more of God than perhaps we knew or are comfortable with.

Voicing the Exceptions

As we think about this wisdom approach, we can meditate on the fact that if Proverbs focuses on the norms and rules, “Ecclesiastes focuses on the exceptions.”13 As students, many of us hate learning about exceptions. It takes so much effort just to learn the rules. When we finally do master the rules, the teacher then says, “It does not always work according to the rule you’ve just learned.”

For example, as a child learning how to spell in English, it can take a while to learn the helpful rule that “i comes before e.” This rule helps us to correctly spell words like believe or grieve. We receive a gold star on the spelling paper that suggests we’ve mastered the rule. But then, the teacher introduces words such as neither or neighbor or receive. She then writes down several exceptions for us to learn. She expands the rule to account for exceptions and says, “I before e except after c and sometimes y and in words that sound like a such as neighbor and weigh.” A student who cannot overcome her impatience with the exceptions and who remains hasty to avoid anything but the rule will struggle to spell. So it is in life.

The Wisdom Literature needs Ecclesiastes then, in order to keep us from entrusting ourselves to trite formulas under the sun. It is not that Proverbs ignores exceptions. It too makes plain that rules aren’t enough and that context matters for how we apply wisdom...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. An Unexpected Voice
• 2. An Unexpected Method
• 3. Finding Gain
• 4. Handling Our Pleasures
• 5. Hating Life and Being Wise
• 6. Death and the Joy of an Ordinary Life
• 7. Knowing the Times
• 8. Church, under the Sun
• 9. Kept Occupied by God
• 10. Leadership
• 11. Recovering Our Purpose
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture