What’s the Point?
Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
…
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.
…
I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
Ecclesiastes 1:3, 9, 14 (ESV)
Are you still with me? Or have you escaped to Facebook, Instagram, or even the spam folder of your email account? Anywhere but here.
I get it.
But we can’t travel to Easter without traversing some rocky terrain.
Each evening Mr. Pettit and I read a selection from God’s Wisdom for Navigating Life: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Book of Proverbs by Timothy Keller with his wife, Kathy Keller. The Kellers have made a detour into the book of Ecclesiastes this week, and their comments about the phrase “under the sun” resonated with me.
I’ve read Ecclesiastes before, but the meaning of those words had never struck home. Perhaps I was too flattened by the hopelessness conveyed by the writer to linger with his work. Or maybe I was in a hurry to get to the passage I was most familiar with in Chapter 3: “For everything there is a season…”
The Kellers assert that the author of Ecclesiastes is conducting a “thought experiment,” asking us “to imagine trying to live only under the sun—with no God or eternity beyond this world.”*
What a cruel joke if our existence were limited to our time under the sun, for that would be the definition of darkness. What would you live for? A bigger house? It will eventually fall to ruin. Professional achievement? No one is irreplaceable, and reputations fade. A family? People are imperfect and sometimes relationships end. And, if there is no eternity, then a loved one’s death means they have winked out of existence, like a star. It would be as if they never lived.
Perhaps this is why I have never understood the immense popularity of the song, “Imagine,” written by John Lennon. Consider the opening lines:
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No Hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…
“Living for today.” Can one find transcendent meaning on the Island of Here-and-Now? Perhaps it’s not surprising that Mr. Lennon also wrote a song titled, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.”
The writer of Ecclesiastes, widely considered to be King Solomon, discusses his failure to find lasting satisfaction in wisdom, pleasure-seeking, and toil. He spirals downward until he reaches this point:
For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. Ecclesiastes 3:19-20 (ESV)
Nothing “under the sun” lasts. The New International Version of Ecclesiastes 1:11 speaks plainly to me: There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.
But I am not condemned to write my name in the sand, carving as deep as I can even as the sea rushes in to erase my work. My identity is found in the Rock, Jesus Christ, my Redeemer. The pressure is off; I don’t have to do as many good deeds as Mother Teresa or sell as many books as James Patterson to attain significance. I can trust Jesus to take my meager efforts and multiply them for good just as He did the loaves and fishes millennia ago.
Paul tells us to labor “as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.” (Colossians 3:23-24, ESV)
In God’s economy, a kind word to the lonely, a cup of water to the thirsty, or shelter to the homeless carries eternal weight.
…as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:18 (ESV)
Only that done in the Son survives the fire of time.
* March 4, p. 63
