Living Life Backward E-Book

David Gibson

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 280

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

What if it is death that teaches us how to truly live? Keeping the end in mind shapes how we live our lives in the here and now. Living life backward means taking the one thing in our future that is certain—death—and letting that inform our journey before we get there. Looking to the book of Ecclesiastes for wisdom, Living Life Backward was written to shake up our expectations and priorities for what it means to live "the good life." Considering the reality of death helps us pay attention to our limitations as human beings and receive life as a wondrous gift from God—freeing us to live wisely, generously, and faithfully for God's glory and the good of his world.

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“The past two decades have witnessed quite a number of popular expositions of Ecclesiastes—and this one by David Gibson is the best of them. It follows the line of the book in a believable and compelling way. Its applications and reflections are cogent and telling, and the writing is characterized by grace and verve. Moreover, the questions found at the end of each chapter make this volume suitable for small-group Bible studies. Highly recommended.”

D. A. Carson, Research professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; president, The Gospel Coalition

“David Gibson’s expositions of Ecclesiastes are like Ecclesiastes itself: sometimes shocking, often tantalizing, always refreshing. He deftly combines serious stuff with a light touch, clear style, and gospel relief. You will repeatedly run into ‘think-stoppers’; he will make new grooves in your gray matter that weren’t there before; and you will often admit, ‘I wish I’d have thought to put it like that!’ I think the writer of Ecclesiastes would be pleased with David’s work.”

Dale Ralph Davis, former professor of Old Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary

“If Ecclesiastes is a book for our times, then this is the book to unpack it. Beginning with the paradigm shift that embracing death is essential for life, I was intrigued from the start. Utterly counter to a modern worldview, the truths of Ecclesiastes are woven with ease into a narrative that rightly makes sense of why we are alive. Bold and beautiful in style, this book promises to jolt the mind and shake us out of our complacencies. I couldn’t put it down!”

Fiona McDonald, director of national ministries, Scottish Bible Society

“Every reader of David Gibson’s steady and reverent progress through the book will reap wonderfully enhanced understanding and rich insight into divine truth. Those who have benefited from David’s work in the foundational book From Heaven He Came and Sought Her will rush to enjoy the same values here of profound scholarship and covetable clarity of presentation.”

Alec Motyer, author; Bible expositor

Living Life Backward

Living Life Backward

How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End

David Gibson

Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End

Copyright © 2017 by David Gibson

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

Originally published by Inter-Varsity Press, 36 Causton Street, London, SW1P 4ST, England. Copyright © 2016 by David Gibson. North American edition published by permission of Inter-Varsity.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Tim Green, Faceout Studio

First printing 2017

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-5627-2ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-5630-2PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-5628-9Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-5629-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gibson, David, 1975- author.

Title: Living life backward : how Ecclesiastes teaches us to live in light of the end / David Gibson.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016049758 (print) | LCCN 2017009548 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433556272 (tp) | ISBN 9781433556289 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433556296 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433556302 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Death—Biblical teaching. | Life—Biblical teaching. | Bible. Ecclesiastes—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BS1475.6.D34 G53 2017 (print) | LCC BS1475.6.D34 (ebook) | DDC 220.8/3069—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049758

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-03-02 03:12:35 PM

For Trinity Church, Aberdeen

This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that the same event happens to all.

Ecclesiastes 9:3

Nothing brings such pure peace and quiet joy at the close

as a well-lived past.

James Russell Miller

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

 1  Let’s Pretend

 2  Bursting the Bubble

 3  Doing Time

 4  Living a Life Less Upwardly Mobile

 5  Looking Up, Listening In

 6  Learning to Love the Limitations of Life

 7  From Death to Depth

 8  Things to Know When You Don’t Know

 9  One Foot in the Grave

10  Getting the Point

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Preface

I am going to die. By the time you read these lines, I may even be dead.

It’s not that I have a virulent disease or a terminal illness. A doctor has not pronounced on how I am going to die. I don’t know when I will die. I just know I will. I am going to die, and so are you. But here is why I wrote this book: I am ready to die.

In his beautifully written memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens quotes the words of the Scottish poet William Dunbar: “The fear of death distresses me.” Hitchens comments, “I would not trust anyone who had not felt something like it.”1 I know what he means, and you probably do as well. There are certain ways in which we would rather not meet our end. I do find myself worrying about what would happen if my wife were to die, or one of my children, or others closest to me. But I myself am not afraid of dying. There is nothing about my own death, or the state of being dead, that distresses me.

I can understand if you share Hitchens’s distrust and find this way of thinking rather odd, morbid even. But I would like to try to change your mind. I am convinced that only a proper perspective on death provides the true perspective on life. Living in the light of your death will help you to live wisely and freely and generously. It will give you a big heart and open hands, and enable you to relish all the small things of life in deeply profound ways. Death can teach you the meaning of mirth. All this I have learned from Ecclesiastes, and the chapters of this book consist of reflections on that strangest of Old Testament books.

Ecclesiastes has changed my death. But it is an enigma. It has baffled scholars and pundits with its repeated refrain: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” In my opinion, part of the brilliance of Ecclesiastes is that it teaches us that life often slips through our fingers and eludes our comprehension by being itself elusive and perplexing. Is there a better way to explain how life can leave you scratching your head than by writing a book that leaves you doing the same? The message of the book is mirrored in the effect of the book.

Yet Ecclesiastes also makes a very simple point: life is complex and messy, sometimes brutally so, but there is a straightforward way to look at the mess. The end will put it all right. The end—when we stand before God as our Creator and Judge—will explain everything.

Left to our own devices, we tend to live life forward. One day follows another, and weeks turn into months and months into years. We do not know the future, but we plan and hope and dream of where we will be, and what we would like to be doing, and whom we might be with. We live forward.

Ecclesiastes teaches us to live life backward. It encourages us to take the one thing in the future that is certain—our death—and work backward from that point into all the details and decisions and heartaches of our lives, and to think about them from the perspective of the end. It is the destination that makes sense of the journey. If we know for sure where we are heading, then we can know for sure what we need to do before we get there. Ecclesiastes invites us to let the end sculpt our priorities and goals, our greatest ambitions and our strongest desires.

I want to persuade you that only if you prepare to die can you really learn how to live.

Acknowledgments

Blaise Pascal said that the more intelligent a man is, the more originality he finds in others. That is my excuse for the number of people I have leaned on in different ways to bring this book to completion. Many of them don’t even know it.

Nathan D. Wilson’s Death by Living (Thomas Nelson, 2013) was published when I was halfway through my writing. I knew before opening his book that it might mean I’d never finish mine. It is an arresting treatment of a viewpoint I’m proud to share, but, with wit and elegance, Wilson shows how time is grace and generations are a gift, and in so doing lights up the landscape of a life well lived. Perhaps my work can trace a more expository line of thought to function as an uninvited companion to his. Certainly I hope all who read me also read him.

I am indebted, in a different way, to Iain Provan’s commentary Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs (Zondervan, 2001). He has produced that most endangered of species, a commentary immediately useful to preachers. Zack Eswine has followed his profound pastoral theology, Sensing Jesus (Crossway, 2012), with a similarly rich and thoughtful treatment of Ecclesiastes, Recovering Eden (P&R, 2014), and both have helped me here. Worthy of special mention as well are Craig Bartholomew’s commentary (Baker, 2009), and the meditations by Douglas Wilson in Joy at the End of the Tether (Canon Press, 1999). Andrew Randall and the blog of Tim Challies introduced me to the writings of James Russell Miller (1840–1912), and the archivists at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia helped me track down the source of his essay, which I quote in chapter 9.

Peter Dickson and I preached through Ecclesiastes together at High Church, Hilton, in 2009. For that—and for more things than I can count—I owe him a very great deal. I am thankful for his permission to use some of his ideas in these chapters. I taught Ecclesiastes to Cornhill Scotland students in 2010 and benefited from their interaction and from the kindness of Bob Fyall and Edward Lobb. Some of my material first appeared in The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (Baker Academic, 2015), and I am grateful to both the publisher and to the editors, Owen Strachan and Kevin Vanhoozer, for permission to reproduce it here.

Thanks are due to Ken Morley and to David and Laura Muirhead for the stay at fabulous Downingford in Strathdon, which helped me to finish and provided refreshment. A cadre of friends, postgraduate students, and colleagues read all or parts of the manuscript and helped to improve it substantially; others shouldered my responsibilities while I shirked them to write. I want to express my thanks to Taido Chino, Andrew Errington, John Ferguson, Nicola Fitch, Ian MacCormick, Andrew Randall, Andy and Cara Ritson, Ben Traynor, Drew Tulloch, Martin Westerholm, and Adam Wilson.

I am especially grateful to my fellow elders at Trinity Church, Aberdeen—Simon Barker, Lawrie Fairns, and David Macleod—and the trustees of The Cruden Trust, for their support and care, which enabled writing time to be carved out of otherwise pressured time. It is a great joy to dedicate this book to the wonderful church family I am privileged to serve. Their encouragement, fortitude, vitality, and love for Christ are a rich delight.

Sam Parkinson and Eleanor Trotter at Inter-Varsity Press graciously granted a faraway contract, then patiently accepted further delays and never once said that everything I told them was vanity of vanities.

To my wife, Angela; my sons, Archie and Samuel; and my daughters, Ella and Lily: what can I say? You are the ones who helped me hear the Preacher of Ecclesiastes laughing as he shows how shoulders are meant for abundance and mayhem, not the weight of the world. You’ve always been laughing, and now we’re in on the joke together. I can’t remember not being so tired or ever so happy. I wish we could stay forever this young.

One day we will.

1

Let’s Pretend

Preach the gospel. Die. Be forgotten.

Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf

The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,

vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

3 What does man gain by all the toil

at which he toils under the sun?

4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,

but the earth remains forever.

5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,

and hastens to the place where it rises.

6 The wind blows to the south

and goes around to the north;

around and around goes the wind,

and on its circuits the wind returns.

7 All streams run to the sea,

but the sea is not full;

to the place where the streams flow,

there they flow again.

8 All things are full of weariness;

a man cannot utter it;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

nor the ear filled with hearing.

9 What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done,

and there is nothing new under the sun.

10 Is there a thing of which it is said,

“See, this is new”?

It has been already

in the ages before us.

11 There is no remembrance of former things,

nor will there be any remembrance

of later things yet to be

among those who come after. —Ecclesiastes 1:1–11

The Explosive Gift

The development of imagination is one of the most intriguing things that happens as little toddlers begin to explore their world. Suddenly, in just a matter of weeks, the sitting room or garden in which the toddler plays becomes a zoo, a garage, a farm, a hospital, a palace, a tea party, a battlefield, a sports stadium. A world of “let’s pretend” opens up to inspire and to cultivate real understanding of the world. The toddler is ushered into new relationships and creative language by pretending to be someone he is not. If you manage to eavesdrop, you will hear all sorts of conversations as the toddler scolds and pleads and says “sorry” and “thank you” to a host of imaginary friends.

But learning the difference between the pretend world and the real world can often be a confusing process. In the real shop you can’t just buy whatever you want. In the real hospital people are actually in pain, and the doctors can’t always make everyone better. In the real world making amends is sometimes the hardest thing possible. Real tears take longer to dry.

The book of Ecclesiastes is one of God’s gifts to help us live in the real world. It’s a book in the Bible that gets under the radar of our thinking and acts like an incendiary device to explode our make-believe games and jolt us into realizing that everything is not as clean and tidy as the “let’s-pretend” world suggests.

Ecclesiastes is the words of “the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem,”1 and he begins with shock tactics. The very first thing he wants to tell us is that “all is vanity,” “vanity of vanities.” If you want readers to wake up and stop pretending about what life is like, that’s a pretty good way to get their attention.

The Meaning of “Vanity”

Of course, to commence in such a direct and stark way poses its own problem. What does it mean to say everything is “vanity”?

I want to propose that many well-intended Bible translations have actually led us astray by translating the Hebrew word hebel as “meaningless” in this context. We tend to read this word as if it’s spoken by an undergraduate philosophy student who comes home after his first year of studies and confidently announces that the universe as we know it is pointless and life has no meaning. But that is not the Preacher’s perspective. He will later make statements such as “Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil” (4:6). If one course of action is better than another, then clearly not everything is “meaningless.”

In fact, the Hebrew word hebel is also accurately translated as “breath” or “breeze.” The Preacher is saying that everything is a mist, a vapor, a puff of wind, a bit of smoke. It’s a common biblical idea:

Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths,

and my lifetime is as nothing before you.

Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath [hebel]!

Surely a man goes about as a shadow!

Surely for nothing [hebel] they are in turmoil;

man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather!

When you discipline a man

with rebukes for sin,

you consume like a moth what is dear to him;

surely all mankind is a mere breath [hebel]. (Ps. 39:5–6, 11)

O Lord, what is man that you regard him,

or the son of man that you think of him?

Man is like a breath [hebel];

his days are like a passing shadow. (Ps. 144:3–4)

The Preacher’s portrayal of life is this: “The merest of breaths . . . the merest of breaths. Everything is a breath.”2 He will take the rest of his book to unpack exactly what he means, but here are some ways to think about it.

Life Is Short

You know what happens when you blow out a candle. How long does the puff of smoke last? You can smell it and see it. It’s very real. But it is also transient, temporary, and vanishes quickly. It comes and goes without a permanent impact or a lasting impression on the world.

You have found yourself saying exactly what you used to hear older people saying all the time: “Time flies the older you get.” Your grandparents say it’s as if they blinked, and now here they are in an old person’s body. We are born, we live, we die, and it all happens so quickly. Nothing seems to last. “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting [hebel]” (Prov. 31:30 NIV). Joan Collins said that the problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and then becoming poor.

The book of Ecclesiastes is a meditation on what it means for our lives to be like a whisper spoken in the wind: here one minute and carried away forever the next.

Life Is Elusive

But the smoke in front of your eyes is not just transient; it is also elusive. Try to grab the smoke, put a bit in your pocket, and keep it for later. You can’t get your hands on it. It is a real, physical thing, and yet it dodges your fingers as soon as they get near it; your very attempt to get hold of it blows air at the smoke and speeds its disappearance.

Ecclesiastes is a meditation on how life seems to elude our grasp in terms of lasting significance. If we try to gain control of the world and our lives by what we can understand and by what we can do, we find that the control we seek eludes us.

Consider knowledge and understanding. In some measure we can understand how the world works, but why does it always rain on the days when you don’t bring your umbrella? Why is the line you don’t join in the supermarket always quicker than the one you do? Why do you feel low, even when you can’t really put your finger on a specific cause? Why do people you know and love die young or suffer long-term ill health while the dictator lives in prosperity into his old age?

Or consider what we do with our lives. We can pour our whole life into something, and it might succeed, or it might fail. You might land the big job in the city, and the bank might go bust the next month—you never know. How much control do you really have over whether your job is secure, or how healthy you will be, or what will happen to interest rates and house prices, over whom you will meet and what you will be doing in ten years’ time?

Not long ago I was building sand castles on the beach with my daughter. With some success we built a large castle, dug a moat around it, and surrounded it with smaller castles and turrets decorated with shells. She was proud of her work, and we enjoyed being absorbed in our task. But eventually—and to her great surprise—we had to retreat as the tide encroached and the waves engulfed our handiwork. The foaming water returned our project to a knobbly patch of ordinary beach. How long do sand castles last? And how much control do we have over the castle we have constructed? We build for a short time only, and always subject to forces beyond our control. That is what our lives are like. Instead of sand and sea, the Bible uses grass and wind to make exactly this point:

As for man, his days are like grass;

he flourishes like a flower of the field;

for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,

and its place knows it no more. (Ps. 103:15–16)

These pictures hit home. When we consider the brevity of our lives set against the millennia of the earth, we know that what the Preacher says is true. Except, of course, in everyday life we pretend it isn’t. We imagine we will live forever, or at the very least that someone else will get cancer, not us. We think our lives are built with granite, not sand. We pretend we’re in control. We imagine that we can make a difference in the world and accomplish things of lasting significance. After all, that’s why we go to work each day. It’s also why we have a midlife crisis when we look back and see that who we are and what we’ve done doesn’t seem to amount to very much.

And so Ecclesiastes sets out to demolish our pretense by confronting us with reality. The Preacher begins the process with a question:

What does man gain by all the toil

at which he toils under the sun? (Eccles. 1:3)

This question is the key to the opening section of the book. Everything else that follows in verses 4–11 is intended as the answer. The responses to questions are often implicit and indirect in Ecclesiastes because it is part of the Bible’s Wisdom Literature. This kind of writing mixes bald, direct statements (v. 2) with indirect analogies and pictorial representations (vv. 4–8), since the aim of the writing is to reflect on the complex reality of the world as we find it.

Wisdom Literature asks, what does it mean to fear the Lord in the world the Lord has made? Along with Job, Proverbs, and Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes is a meditation on what it means to be alive in a world that God made and called good, yet which has also gone so very wrong, often in catastrophic ways. The Preacher experiments with everything around him and similarly wants us to reflect on our experience of the world. Look at your life and what’s happening to you. What does that tell you about life in general? How should we make sense of it? Can we ever make sense of it? Wisdom Literature uses proverbs and pithy sayings, riddles and provocation, question and answer, prose and poetry, to force us to look at things from a different angle. Its aim is to “wound from behind.”3 Like a punch in the back, it makes painful points we didn’t see coming and which leave us blinking in surprise.

That’s exactly what is happening here. The implied answer to the question of verse 3 is “nothing.” From a life full of labor and toil under the sun, people gain absolutely nothing. The word gain conveys the idea of something left over, remaining at the end. It refers to “the human desire to show a profit, to be in the black, whether financially or otherwise.”4

This is what’s at stake in the question of verse 3: at the end of my life, what will the surplus be? What will I leave behind that will count as a lasting monument to all my effort?

The Preacher provides the answer by painting an incredibly stark picture. He sketches humankind’s place on the canvas of the entire universe to show, in graphic terms, just how and why there is nothing to be gained. I leave only one thing behind, and that’s the earth I used to live on, remaining right where it was when I first arrived, only now it spins without me. My life will come and go. If I leave children in the world to carry on my legacy, they themselves are simply part of the generations who will come and go, and all they will leave behind is the universe carrying on as before. We haven’t altered the cosmic merry-go-round. Nothing we do changes the fact that we labor and toil and then die, and the earth just stays there.

Everything is a breath, our lives the merest of breaths.

Life Is Repetitive

The Preacher pictures the momentary and elusive nature of human life with a beautiful rhythmic pattern to his poetry. Read Ecclesiastes 1:4–10 aloud and feel the lyrical tilt with its tidal ebb and flow. That’s the point. Everything either goes around and around, or comes and goes; it rises and sets; what has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; what is present will soon be past.

In verses 5–8 the Preacher focuses on a threefold pattern in the world that is matched by a threefold pattern in human experience. The activities of sun, wind, and water follow the same course as the activities of speaking, seeing, and hearing. The point is that the world itself doesn’t seem to go or get anywhere, for everything is cyclical rather than linear, so why should humans get anywhere?

The sun chases its tail. The wind goes to the south and comes back around again to the north. Streams flow into the sea, and the water evaporates, and then streams flow into the sea again and it is never full. So is the world, and so it will always be. So is humankind, and so we will always be. People are like the insatiable sea. Just as water pours into the ocean again and again without ever filling it, so the things of the world pour into human beings via their eyes and ears and back out through their mouths, and yet they never reach a point of complete satisfaction:

The massive reality of creation thus critiques the aspirations of all those tiny mortal beings who stand within creation as transient creatures. There is no reason to assume that individuals should “gain” from their toil when creation as a whole does not.5

The experience of observing constant motion without lasting achievement is so wearisome that no amount of speech can catalogue it. The eye “never reaches the point that it cannot take in more, nor does the ear become so filled with sound that it cannot accept any more impulses from the outside world.”6 Humans never finally think, “This is it. I’m full. I have seen it all, said it all, and heard it all. I have given out and taken in all that I can.”

This language could, of course, be extremely positive. Taken on their own, these words about the limitless capacities of the human body might point to endless potential, healthy curiosity, and childlike wonder at the world in which we live. There is always so much to see and hear. But they are followed by perhaps the most famous words in the book of Ecclesiastes:

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done,

and there is nothing new under the sun. (1:9)

The Preacher’s perspective is this: humans long to come across something in their lives that will break the constant repetitive cycle, something to say or see or hear that will be truly new and therefore significant—but there is nothing. No such thing exists. Whatever we see and hear has already been and gone, covered by the sands of time and simply rolling around again, perhaps in a different guise but fundamentally the same as before.

In Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers argues that our constant connection to digital media and screen-based forms of communication is suffocating our ability to be people of substantial depth. Perhaps if anything in the world is new, then surely it’s our technology, with rapidly evolving ways of sending messages and forming virtual communities, such that we seem to be presented with new challenges for what technology means for us as persons. Not so, according to Powers: “Though we barely realize it, every day we use connective tools that were invented thousands of years ago.” He consults seven thinkers throughout world history who each “understood the essential human urge to connect and were unusually thoughtful about the ‘screen equivalents’ of their respective epochs.”7 Human beings have wrestled throughout the ages with constantly changing forms of communication. There is already a rich seam of reflection on what human beings need to preserve about themselves as they interact with others. What seems new is in fact old. Hamlet used the BlackBerry of his day.8

The point Powers makes about the digital age applies to everything under the sun. A new government is still a government, and we’re all familiar with those. A revolution heralds a new era, and we’ve seen it all before. A new baby is still a baby, and the world has always been full of them. Even landing on the moon is still a form of adventure and exploration that has been with us since humans have walked the earth. Indeed, space travel is a good example of precisely the Preacher’s point. He doesn’t mean no “new” things are ever invented in the world, for clearly that is not true. He means there is nothing new we can ever discover to break the cycle and so satisfy us. When we conquer our solar system, humanity will then try to conquer the galaxy beyond it. We never have our fill, and that basic human impulse that led us to space in the first place “has been already in the ages before us” (v. 10). There is nothing new about humanity in the unfolding of all our progress.

Remember the Preacher’s aim. He is showing that at the end of the day, human beings gain nothing from all their toil under the sun. There’s no surplus because they are never full enough to have something left over. There’s no gain because the universe itself is cyclical and everything that is comes and goes. There’s no profit because whatever is has already been. If there’s “nothing new under the sun,” what’s the point in toiling to make or find or leave something new? It simply can’t be done.

You gain nothing from grinding your fingers to the bone, because the world will go on impervious to what you’ve done, and it will not remember you anyway. It will not even remember the children we are yet to have (v. 11). How’s that for perspective when your daughter graduates from college and your son clinches that multi-million-dollar deal?

No one will remember them.

Prepare to Die

The Preacher has answered his own question by pointing to the cyclical comings and goings of the world. His answer is that people do not gain from their labor and toil because ultimately they are going to die and be forgotten. Life stretches ahead of the young employee with dreams of a fulfilling career and a happy family; but it will all come and go. She is going to die and will not be remembered.

Many interpreters of Ecclesiastes suggest the Preacher is simply presenting something that is true only if life is lived without God. They understand the phrase “under the sun” to signify the secularist’s perspective. If we consider life without God in the frame and look at the world as we see it, that is, under the sun, then there is no alternative but to say that everything is a mere breath. The Preacher, however, wants us to know that “under the sun” is not all there is. And so we may well want to ask: surely the Christian way of looking at life is different? If I’m a follower of the Lord Jesus, doesn’t that change everything?

Well, it is true that knowing Christ does provide a whole new angle—the true angle—on what it means to be alive. We will see how Ecclesiastes points us to this. It’s certainly true that for the Preacher the world under the sun is not all there is, and he has things to say that will radically alter our perspective on this life.

But in the poetry that opens his book the Preacher is not commenting on what life is like without Christ. He is not saying this repetitive roundabout is what life is like from a secularist perspective. This is not what the world feels like from the viewpoint of existential