“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
Have you read Ecclesiastes? It’s not what you would call light reading. It is eleven chapters of making sure we understand that without God, life is pointless… The last chapter gives us the solution… but it takes a while to get there. So, why did God include this book in the Bible?
Perhaps it is because disloyalty and distractions are our greatest temptations. We constantly chase false gods who compete for our devotion. We search for idols in our lives to give us significance. That is problematic because as Spurgeon says: “If Christ is not all to you, He is nothing to you.”
Is Christ everything to me? Or do I have little deities I pursue to make me feel important? Is growing my relationship with God my primary goal? My calendar and checkbook would argue against that. The time I spend meditating on scripture, compared to time spent pursuing the next dollar or accomplishment, would indicate that there is competition for my allegiance.
So, Ecclesiastes provides research data for me to contemplate. The richest, wisest, most powerful king who ever lived methodically evaluates every possible angle to worldly fame, pleasure, possessions, and power… Read his report, examine the data, and contemplate his conclusion. His examination is comprehensive and exhaustive and concludes that the world is unable to provide any true meaning. Nothing this planet offers can compete with what Paul calls “the surpassing greatness of knowing Jesus Christ.”
The summary is that the grief and pain this world thinly masks with trinkets and baubles is ever present - and unless there is something more - we are gerbils running on our little wheel, and it is meaningless.
So, God includes this book and demands we choose our compass... Ecclesiastes is saying “Fish or cut bait”. Is Jesus everything to you? God’s offer is to be your King… not an additive used to achieve your goals. Abandon your idols and follow Him - or quit talking about it. If you choose Christ, commit to Him completely and stop chasing the wind.
It is really pretty simple. We were created to worship God – We are here to bring as many people as we can to Heaven … everything else is redundant.
“Your commitments can develop you or destroy you, but either way, they will define you.” - Rick Warren
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