There’s a tradition in Polish Seventh-day Adventism that my family kept: when you get baptised, you get a Bible verse. Before my own baptism I was incredibly excited to learn what verse I would get. My dad was baptising me and my parents chose Ecclesiastes 12:1: “Remember the Lord in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say ‘I find no pleasure in them.’”
I was 11 and took this verse very seriously. I was determined that while I was young I would hold tight to my faith and never let anything get between me and God. I was also glad to get a verse in Ecclesiastes because chapter 12 had long been a favourite Bible passage of mine. My sister and I would get our dad to read it out loud—we loved the line about the grasshopper dragging himself along, and we’d make him read it in a croaky voice as if he were really old.
When I was young, Ecclesiastes was easy to understand. Love God, nothing else matters. What could be confusing about that? I read the whole book a couple times in my early teen years and thought it was great. But I think a lot of it went over my head. As I grew older, my views around it changed. It became a bit more challenging to understand, and I thought Solomon was a cynical old crank who just thought life was bleak and joyless, and I stopped reading Ecclesiastes. How could everything be meaningless? I understood that God was what mattered most in life, but I didn’t understand how everything else could be meaningless—things that brought me joy, all the good things that I thought weren’t directly connected to God.
You would think that the wisest man in the world, King Solomon, would be able to come to a conclusive point about God providing meaning in life. Instead, Solomon seemingly veers off into nihilistic and hedonistic territory. Nihilism argues that everything is meaningless—that life has no purpose or value. That sounds about right: “‘Meaningless, meaningless’, says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless’” (Ecclesiastes 1:1).
Hedonism, on the other hand, is the idea that pleasure is what we should aim for above all else. “I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God” (3:12,13). At face value, it would appear that Solomon has wracked his larger-than-normal brain and come up empty with meaning in life, instead pointing his readers towards finding pleasure where they can and just accepting that there is no meaning.
Depressing, right? But there’s a lot more to this book than meets the eye.
First of all let’s have a look at the word “meaningless”—lacking in significance or having no purpose. Some translations use the word “vanity”—empty or valueless. Both of those words are pretty bleak. But the original word used is havel, which means vapour, or breath. That’s a little different to the modern definition of the word meaningless.
Have you ever gone outside on a cold morning and seen your breath in the air? When I was a kid, I would force as much air out of my lungs as I could to make the cloud last as long as possible, but it would disappear in a matter of seconds. It was temporary, fleeting, one second hanging in the air before me like a cloud, the next second gone. Everything is breath. Everything is vapour. Nothing lasts, everything in our lives is temporary, “under the sun”.
The phrase “under the sun” is used 27 times throughout Ecclesiastes and basically means everything that happens on earth. Some scholars believe it means a life without God. Without God, we are nothing more than smoke in the wind, our short lives coming and going, then forgotten by later generations. We are haunted by time and death, things humanity has wrestled with since the beginning of, well, time. There’s a reason that they’ve been popularised into famous fictional figures: think Father Time and the Grim Reaper.
No-one likes to ponder the fact that the seconds, days and years tick by and you can never get them back. Even less fun is thinking about death—coming to terms with the fact that your own life will end one day—and dealing with the grief of losing loved ones.
Humanity wasn’t originally created to experience such things, but because of sin, we were born into a life under the sun. Time and death will leave their mark on us. And as Solomon wrote, poverty, oppression and lack of justice affect many who toil away under the sun.
It is bleak. But Solomon isn’t as cynical as I once thought he was. Being the king of Israel and the wisest man on earth he saw a thing or two (or thought a thing or two, one thing more than the rest of us), and he came to some pretty good conclusions: one, life is going to hurt. There’s no way around that, not while we live here “under the sun”. Two, searching for wealth, status and power does not bring contentment. It’s all temporary—even wisdom itself is temporary.
Solomon’s antidote to this? Apparently, hedonism! But a closer look reveals something entirely different. This is what Soloman says he has “observed to be good”: “that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labour under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot” (Ecclesiastes 5:18).
There’s a difference between searching for pleasure and finding pleasure in what you already have. Being content with your everyday life and finding joy in the day-to-day small moments is what Solomon calls “the gift of God” (3:13).
We can go in search of status and wealth, or spend money bioengineering ourselves to try and stop the ageing process, but none of that brings true joy, and none of it lasts. 1 Timothy 6:7 says that “we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it”.
While the big moments in life can be important and bring temporary joy, they will inevitably fade to memory. But it’s possible to find contentment in the simple joys of life. When I find joy in the little things—a stunning sunset, a smile from a stranger or laughing with friends—I imagine God smiling along with me, happy that I’m delighting in this life He’s given me.
True meaning, however, in the modern definition, does come from God, a relationship with Him and the acceptance of His grace. He has “set eternity in the human heart” (3:11). We long for more, because we were made for more, but that more is found in God, not in chasing earthly things that don’t last.
Life is going to hurt. We deal with grief and the unforgiving passage of time, and people and things we love vanish like smoke, but we have Someone who knows that hurt. Someone who doesn’t want us to bear it alone, who will give us strength as we walk through our valleys of the shadow of death. Someone who left heaven and joined us here, under the sun, so that one day we might have a life beyond the sun.
Ashley Jankiewicz is an assistant editor for Adventist Record.
