A parishioner recently put me onto ‘The Bible Project’; a series of videos you can find on youtube that summarises each of the books of the Bible. I watched the one on Ecclesiastes last week and was pleased to find it’s summary of the book to be pretty much identical to what we’ve seen from our series this term. I highly recommend The Bible Project.
The mantra of Ecclesiastes is the famous ‘meaningless, meaningless’ (Eccles 1:2), which refers to all the places people look for meaning in life ‘under the sun’; i.e. if there is no God. Qohelet’s conclusion is that things like pleasure, career, materialism, love, popularity, money and even humanism (making the world a better place) will in the end bring no lasting satisfaction or fulfilment.
Yet after deconstructing all these philosophies of life, last week’s sermon showed us ‘the conclusion of the matter’ (Eccles 12:13). And the conclusion is that life is actually ‘meaningful, meaningful’ if we ‘remember our creator’ (Eccles 12:1). Qohelet says this brings 2 advantages:
The first is that ‘God will bring every deed into judgment’ (Eccles 12:14). What this means, as Andy reminded us last week, is if we don’t ‘fear’ God in this life (Eccles 12:13), we will be utterly terrified by him in the next, when he asks us to give an account for our sinful deeds. The only way to avoid meeting Jesus as our judge in the next life is to accept Jesus as our saviour in this one.
Yet Qohelet also says to ‘remember your Creator in the days of your youth’. Why? Because the second advantage of living God’s way is it’s the path to the truly happy and fulfilled life. The longer one puts off giving the reigns of their life over to God, the longer one will continue to live an empty (puff of mist) life. If you want to find try joy and satisfaction in life, then ‘fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind’ (Eccles 12:13).
