Exalting Jesus in Ecclesiastes

Dr. Daniel L. Akin, Jonathan Akin, Tony Merida, David Platt, Dr. Daniel L. Akin

• Publisher: Holman Reference
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780805499599
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Edited by David Platt, Daniel L. Akin, and Tony Merida, this new commentary series, projected to be 48 volumes, takes a Christ- centered approach to expositing each book of the Bible. Rather than a verse-by-verse approach, the authors have crafted chapters that explain and apply key passages in their assigned Bible books. Readers will learn to see Christ in all aspects of Scripture, and they will be encouraged by the devotional nature of each exposition. Projected contributors to the series include notable authors such as Russell D. Moore, Al Mohler, Matt Chandler, Francis Chan, Mark Dever, and others.

Ecclesiastes

Everything Is Meaningless without Jesus

Ecclesiastes 1:1-18 and 12:8-14

Main Idea: Everything is meaningless without Jesus.

I. Everything Is Meaningless Because All of Our Activity Is Pointless (1:3-11).

II. Everything Is Meaningless Because Nothing Satisfies (1:12-18).

III. Everything Is Meaningless Because Our Frustration Is Meant to Drive Us to Christ (12:8-14).

Bill Murray plays the main character, weatherman Phil Connors, in the comedy Groundhog Day (1993). His character relives February second—Groundhog Day—over and over again in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the main festival takes place. Some obsessive viewers speculate Phil might have relived the same day for three decades. What does Phil do to cope with this monotonous prison? What does he do to try to find meaning when it seems like nothing he does really matters from one day to the next? He looks for happiness in different experiences. He tries all kinds of things in his quest for some semblance of meaning.

Phil turns to hedonistic pleasures and denies himself nothing. If it feels good, he does it! There’s one scene in the diner where he gorges himself on a table full of food, drinking coffee straight from the pot and smoking a cigarette. He punches out a guy who really annoys him. He seduces women into bed with him. When that fails to satisfy, Phil turns to greed. He robs an armored car and uses the money to buy the car and the clothes he has always wanted. He tries to live out the life he could not before. Next, Phil turns to despair. Faced with the reality that he cannot escape from this curse, Phil takes his life multiple times, but he wakes up again every time right back in Punxsutawney. Finally, Phil turns to knowledge. He tries to learn and better himself. He takes up piano, ice sculpting, French poetry, and more to become an educated, well-rounded man.

Phil does not wake up on February third until he finally reaches contentment in his current circumstance. Only then is the curse lifted. The last time he relives February second he looks into the eyes of a woman he has fallen in love with, Rita, and he says, “I don’t know what will happen tomorrow; all I know is I’m happy right now.” That’s kind of the point of the book of Ecclesiastes. We are stuck in a monotonous prison where nothing we do really changes anything, and the only way to live a meaningful life in this meaningless existence is to find satisfaction and contentment in what God has given us.

There is a really interesting scene in the movie, early on in Phil’s experience, when he is trying to figure out what is going on. He sits at a bar in a bowling alley with two local guys who are drunk, and he asks them this question: “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was the same, and nothing you did really mattered?”

One of the men stares into his beer mug and says, “Yep, that about sums it up for me.”

As Matt Chandler said, “Life is more like Groundhog Day than we want to admit,” and to prove the point, Chandler walks through a person’s typical day asking, “What will you do on Monday?” (Chandler, “Sixth Sense”). Your alarm will go off at 6:00 a.m., you will hit the snooze to sleep ten more minutes, and then you will stumble into the bathroom to brush your teeth and shower. You will get dressed, jump in your car, sit in traffic, and then finally get to work at your business or classroom or factory. You will work for a few hours and then take a break to eat lunch. Then you will get back to work for a few more hours, punch out, maybe hit the gym on the way home, and then eat dinner. You will sit on the couch and watch TV for a little bit, and then you will hop in bed. Guess what you will do Tuesday?!

We are stuck in a rut going through the motions trying to figure out what all of this means. There is a monotonous drudgery to life. Supervisors understand this reality, so they try to break the monotony with Hawaiian-shirt days or casual Fridays. And people deal with this reality in many different ways. I remember one of my college professors describing a factory job that he worked in college to pay tuition. He was surrounded by men in their 40s and 50s who had worked the same job in this factory for decades, standing on the assembly line doing the same thing hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and decade after decade. He said the men would talk all week about how they could not wait to punch out on Friday so they could go to the bar, get smashed, stay drunk all weekend, sober up by Monday morning, and get back to work. The only way they knew to cope with the redundancy and boredom of their lives was to distract themselves for a short while, so they lived week to week for the escape. Some people look to substances; others look to pleasurable experiences; others pour themselves into their jobs, hoping success will make their lives meaningful; others turn to romantic relationships or accumulating possessions. Some even look to religion, hoping these rituals will give their life a semblance of meaning or transcendence or purpose.

In Ecclesiastes we find a guy faced with the monotony of life who tried to find meaning in all of those things and more, and in the end he concludes that everything is meaningless. Ecclesiastes was written by the “Teacher” or “Preacher.” The Hebrew word denotes the leader of a congregation—a Pastor (Eswine, Recovering Eden, 3). Who is he? He is the “Son of David, king in Jerusalem” (1:1). Solomon is the only candidate because he is the only one of David’s sons who ruled over a united Israel from Jerusalem (see Eccl 1:12; 1 Chr 29:25). Plus, Solomon’s life experience matches the experience of the author. Solomon’s responsibility for this work should not be surprising.1 When David died, he handed the kingdom of Israel over to his son Solomon. God came to Solomon in a dream and told him that anything he asked of God would be granted to him. Solomon was young and inexperienced, so he asked for wisdom in order to have the ability to rule the nation well and uphold justice (1 Kgs 3:5-15). God granted Solomon’s request, and Solomon used his great wisdom to rule the kingdom. One of the ways Solomon established a glorious kingdom was through his thousands of wise sayings and songs that people from all over the world came to hear (1 Kgs 4:29-34). Much of his wisdom is now contained in Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes.

However, the wisest man in the ancient world became a greedy, lustful, power-hungry, idolatrous fool. He violated the kingly commands of Deuteronomy 17 and accumulated possessions as well as women for himself. He had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines (1 Kgs 11:3). The foreign women he married pulled his heart away from Yahweh to false gods (1 Kgs 11:1-8). He did not deny himself anything he wanted. As a result he ruined his kingdom, and God told Solomon that following his death his kingdom would be divided during his son’s reign (1 Kgs 11:9-13).

Tradition says that Ecclesiastes reveals an older, repentant Solomon contemplating his mistakes and what he has learned. Johnny Hunt says Ecclesiastes appears to be the kind of book a person would write near the close of life, reflecting on life’s experiences and the lessons learned (Hunt, Ecclesiastes, 2). We have no way of verifying whether this is the case, but the book at least seems to take on that tone. And in the conclusion the father warns his son not to follow in his footsteps (12:12).

Solomon’s message in Ecclesiastes is just as relevant today. People think to themselves all the time, If I could just have more money, more pleasure, or more success, then I would really be happy. Solomon had everything and tried everything, and in Ecclesiastes, perhaps at the end of his life, he tells us, “No! All of that is meaningless.”

Ecclesiastes 1:2 gives the main point of the book when it states that everything in human existence is “hevel of hevels.” To say that life is as meaningless as it could possibly be, it uses the Hebrew superlative form. For example, the “holy of holies” is the most holy place on the planet. The “Song of Songs” is the greatest song Solomon ever wrote. Thus, hevel of hevels means “as meaningless as possible.” The word is used more than 30 times in the book, and it literally means “breath” or “vapor.” The vapor connotation carries the idea of fleeting. When you breathe on a cold day, you can see your breath for a moment, and then it vanishes. James gets at a similar idea when he says life is mist that vanishes tomorrow (Jas 4:14). Metaphorically the word hevel is used over and over again in Ecclesiastes to express the idea that life is vain or meaningless or futile or absurd. So basically the word carries the concept that life is meaningless, pointless, worthless, or frustrating because it is frail and fleeting. It can carry all of these connotations, and context really must determine which specific nuance of the word the interpreter chooses (see Garrett, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, 282–83).

Often in the Bible, the word is used in ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Ecclesiastes
• The American Dream Is Meaningless without Jesus 2:1-26
• Time Is Meaningless without Jesus 3:1-15
• Politics and Justice Are Meaningless without Jesus 3:16–4:3; 5:8-9
• Religion Is Meaningless without Jesus 5:1-7
• Money Is Meaningless without Jesus 4:7-12; 5:10–6:12
• Wisdom in a Meaningless World 7–11
• Death Is Meaningless without Jesus 9:1-10
• Aging Is Meaningless without Jesus 11:7–12:14
• The Preacher on Preaching (Wisdom from a Wise Wordsmith) 12:9-14
• Works Cited
• Scripture Index