They say that history is always repeating itself, but the problem is that no one is listening, or learning from it. As we look at the book of Ecclesiastes, we get to learn from someone else’s mistakes. This report of the Preacher’s investigations was delivered almost 3000 years ago, but it speaks directly to our situation today.
In science at High School we used to do little experiments. The ones I can remember involved Bunsen burners, boiling water, and burning magnesium. I recall something to do with sulfur—rotten egg gas springs to mind, and things to do with condies crystals, which turned everything purple. But I do remember that we had to write up reports. And I still remember the headings we had to use—Aim, Method, Observations, and Conclusions. This is the scientific method of trial and error.
In the scientific method, finding out that something doesn’t work is actually a success. We don’t have to waste time investigating that one again. The scientist who works out that something doesn’t work won’t get a Noble Prize, but they may have helped someone who will.
A friend of mine topped our selective high school in the HSC. He is very smart. He ended up doing a PhD in one of the hard sciences. He told me that his research for his PhD thesis was unsuccessful. The thing he was trying didn’t work. He wrote up his thesis and was awarded his doctorate. He is a double Doctor. But his research showed that the thing that he wanted to work didn’t in fact work. But that’s good science. And he still earned his doctorate.
So it is with the book of the Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is the report of a scientific experiment. It is an experiment conducted by an expert in the field over the course of a lifetime. The investigator, Qohelet, often translated as ‘The Preacher’ or ‘The Teacher’, had all the resources and wisdom to conduct a definitive investigation into what gives meaning to life. His laboratory is the world “under the sun”. This environment provides the controlled conditions for his experiments. His aim was to determine what is worth living for, what is worth pursuing, what is worth enduring pain for. His method is to give himself try everything and anything to see if it gives meaning and purpose to him. The observations constitute the book of Ecclesiastes. And the conclusion is a summation of his answer to the initial question.
The Preacher has given us a report of his detailed and in depth experiments. And the experiments conducted under the sun led all led to the same conclusion—they didn’t work. His work and efforts didn’t achieve what he had hoped it would.
Let’s look at Ecclesiastes chapter 1 verse 1, where we are introduced to the one who conducted the investigation and is now reporting on his findings:
1:1The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
This book consists of what is probably the essence of a written address by someone nicknamed as ‘the Preacher’. Our English translations render the Hebrew word ‘Qohelet’ or the Greek word ‘Ecclesiastes’ as ‘Preacher’ or ‘Teacher’. Both the Greek and Hebrew words in fact mean ‘one who gathers a congregation or assembly.’ And that is exactly what preachers or teachers do—they gather an assembly or congregation or class so that they can preach to them and teach them what they have learned.
The Preacher further is identified as the son of king David, and king in Jerusalem (v. 1, cf. v. 12). David was the king to whom God promised an eternal dynasty, and a successor who would not just be David’s son, but indeed the Son of God (2 Samuel 7; Psalms 2, 110). David retook the city of Jerusalem from the Jebusites and made it the capital of his united kingdom. And there were kings of Jerusalem long before David and Solomon—Melchizedek, for example.
In verse 16 of chapter 1, the Preacher says of himself, “I have gained for myself great wisdom, more than all who were before me in Jerusalem, and my heart has had great experience with wisdom and knowledge.” And in chapter 2 verse 9, he says, “So I was great, and increased more than all who were before me in Jerusalem, and also my wisdom remained with me.”
So this Preacher is wiser than all who ruled over Jerusalem before him. He was wealthier than every king of Jerusalem before him. And he was also wealthier and wiser than all of his contemporaries.
All of this strongly suggests that we are looking at the findings and work of Solomon. While Solomon is never mentioned by name, and the book of Ecclesiastes is strictly anonymous, the Preacher looks for all the world like Solomon. Qohelet intentionally applies to himself and appropriates to himself the unique description of Solomon that the Scripture provides. Are we going to accuse the author of fraudulently passing himself off as Solomon, or engage in a pious but in the end deceptive fiction? I think not.
Moreover, our commitment to reading Scripture with Scripture and the complete trustworthiness and inerrancy of the Bible, requires that we identify Qohelet or Ecclesiastes—the Preacher of Ecclesiastes—as Solomon. This is because the Preacher claims to be wiser than anyone in Jerusalem before him. But if that is so, he must be Solomon, because God made the following promise to Solomon:
3:12 […] Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind, so that none like you has been before you and none like you shall arise after you. 3:13I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor, so that no other king shall compare with you, all your days. (1 Kgs 3:12-13 ESV, cf. 3:28)
If God promised that none would be as wise before or after Solomon, and Qohelet was wiser than everyone in Jerusalem before him, and both Qohelet and 1 Kings is trustworthy, then Solomon was Qohelet. In fact, Solomon is said to have gathered the elders of Israel together and addresses the assembly (1 Kgs 8:1, 22).
Solomon had great wisdom—greater than any other mortal human (1 Kgs 4:29-34)—but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t also a fallible sinner. While he started as a promising successor to David through whom God fulfilled many of his promises, the seeds of his downfall were sown early with his accumulation of gold, silver, horses, and chariots, and most disasterously, his many marriages to pagans. Eventually in his old age, Solomon went astray after their gods. So 1 Kings 11:4 tells us:
As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God. (NIV)
The book of Ecclesiastes is a reflection on Solomon’s investigations over the course of his life. The essential elements of Solomon’s findings were probably compiled toward the end of his life, and possibly delivered in sermonic or lecture form at that time. Solomon in his old age probably gathered together people to listen to his findings about life. As such, the existence of the book of Qohelet itself is an indication of Solomon’s repentance, of his return to the Yahweh after his apostasy and his various sinful dalliances with false gods. His positive theological statements in the book of Ecclesiastes testify to his faith in God after his apostasy and toward the very end of his life.
Solomon conducted his experiment throughout his life. He had every resource to experiment with everything that this life has to offer, and everything under the sun that he desired was his. Anything that he wanted, he had access to.
And so Solomon set out on his quest for meaning in every conceivable place and experience to a man with limitless resources and unconstrained power. Solomon had an extraordinary capacity to make this investigation. He had unparalleled resources to perform this experiment, in terms of wealth, power, opportunity, and most importantly, wisdom.
We are not just talking about a tenured university lecturer, a Hollywood star, or a blogger on the internet. We are talking about the richest man of his generation, of his time, and the wisest person under the sun before or after him. It is Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump and Sultan of Brunei meets Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking and the 6 greatest philosophers you can think of, all rolled up into one person, multiplied by a factor of 10. That carries a lot of weight.
Solomon goes from one potential source of meaning and fulfillment to another—knowledge, wealth, pleasure, worth, building projects—on a full tilt search for the meaning. And yet each one of these possibilities, which started off so promising, proves to be a dead end. After Solomon can say of every human experience, “I’ve been there and done that”, what is his conclusion?
Thankfully, Solomon gives his conclusion at the beginning. We would call it an ‘executive summary’ to his report, that if we don’t want to read the whole report, we can get the gist of it in a few sentences. Ecclesiastes 1:2:
1:2Vapour of vapours (Heb. הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים), says the Preacher. Vapour of vapours, all is vapour!
All the effort and pain, the money, power, sex, influence, property, wisdom, everything that I have achieved is ‘vapour’, and indeed the most superlative vapour that could be called vapour, vapour of vapours (Hebrews, הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים).
The Hebrew word for ‘vapour’ is ‘hebel’. It connotes ‘vapour’, ‘mist’, ‘breath’, ‘wind’, ‘a puff of smoke’. It is like seeing your breath on a cold day. It’s real, and it exists, but it cannot be grasped. It slips through your fingers. And it is for this reason that it is ‘meaningless’, ‘without meaning’. Everything is insubstantial, and cannot be grasped or held. Everything is ephemeral, transient, and of temporary value, and thus does not remain. And thus the pursuit of these things under the sun is futile, absurd, and meaningless, a pursuit for no benefit or advantage.
It doesn’t matter what you achieve, attain, or acquire “under the sun”. It is all futile and meaningless. You don’t gain anything from it for all your pains.
So after giving us his finding, Solomon asks the guiding question of his enquiry in verse 3. This question is the introductory question. It is a bit like the aim of a science experiment. This is his program, what he is trying to work out. Verse 3:
1:3What profit do people get for all their labour with which they labour under the sun?
What advantage, benefit, profit, or gain is there that lasts and can be clinged to from our labourious toil in this world?
Labour is not just what we consider as ‘paid work’. Consider a woman who goes into labour and has a baby. ‘Labour’ here refers to all human endeavours, our dreams, our desires, our modus operandi and our reason for living. These are all our human pursuits. They all in the end involve pain and suffering and toil and exertion for us to achieve them. Nothing comes easy to us under the sun. We give our blood, sweat, and tears to them. All of this difficulty and trouble is an outcome of the fall and the curse (Gen 3:16-19).
But while the Preacher acknowledges the ‘pains’ which any human endeavor or pursuit requires, his observation is that it all comes to nothing. It doesn’t last. The curse of living in a fallen world “under the sun” renders all of our achievements transitory and insubstantial. None of it lasts. Whatever profit, advantage, or benefit we receive from these painful strivings is ephemeral, transitory, and insubstantial.
Now, at one level, of course there is benefit from our work. If we do not work, neither shall we eat (2 Thess 3:6-15). But the Preacher is looking for a deeper, longer lasting advantage and benefit than simply food, drink, shelter and meeting these base physical necessities. Does the nature of life “under the sun” provide the resources to live a deeply satisfying and fulfilling human life in the light of these good and even necessary things? Do the pleasures and rewards that are available commonly to humans as they live under the sun provide that meaning, satisfaction, and ultimate contentment? And the answer is, ‘no’. The reasons for this are many, but the conclusion is clear. The best this life can provide humans is vapour, transitory, whatever we achieve or experience doesn’t stay or remain, but it slips through our fingers.
Solomon starts off by circling his topic of the vanity of human pursuits. His concern is for human meaningfulness. So he writes a poem that raises the basic problem with human existence under the sun, but places the human predicament in its wider context. The problem is, or at least, one of them is, that we inhabit a world given over to cyclical monotonous and boring repetition.[1] We start with Solomon’s observation of the generations of the human race. Look at verse 4:
1:4A generation goes, and a generation comes, and still the earth keeps going forever.
Humanity is caught in an endless loop—it is a broken record that goes over and over the same ground in a never ending circuit. Ultimately, it seems to be going nowhere. One generation of humans comes forth and they are brought to be, of course, only to die. They are followed by the next generation of humans, who likewise spring forth from that previous generation, but no less die. And so on and so forth. Each generation succeeds the other, replacing those that went before and have now returned to dust with constant and boringly monotonous repetition, on and on, ad nauseum.
And in fact, the generations of the human race are just like the sun, and the wind, and the oceans. Verses 5 to 7:
1:5And the sun rises, and the sun goes down, and it rushes off to the place from which it rises.
1:6It goes to the south, and then turns to the north—turning, turning—the wind goes and then the wind returns along its circular paths.
1:7All the rivers run into the sea, and yet the sea does not fill up. To the place from which the rivers run, there they go again.
The sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and keeps doing the same, day after day. The wind endlessly blows around, and around, and around. The water runs from the rivers into the ocean, and yet the oceans never fill up. All these things take energy and effort, they relentlessly go on and on in an endless cycle, and yet nothing changes and is new.
Despite our improvements and discoveries in technology and medicine and science, the point is that there is no real gain and no advance, only repetition.
We think our lives make a deep footprint on the earth before we shuffle off it, but it’s a footprint in the sand on the beach, and it won’t even last the night—it will have been washed away with the next slightly bigger shore break.
And that frustrating reality is burdensome, oppressive, and boring. Verse 8:
1:8Everything is wearisome, more than anyone can say! The eye does not have its fill of seeing, nor does the ear have its fill of hearing.
Our senses can be fed but never filled. Today we have an endless supply of sensory stimulation. We can watch and listen to AM, FM, Free TV, DVDs, Netflix, Stan, Foxtel, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, emails, snail mails, books, kindle, amazon, google, newspapers, magazines, texting, ipod, ipad, iphone, itunes, i-never-have-enough. Even vinyl records and tapes are coming back. We binge watch Netflix. We know what the radio, or TV, or facebook feed will say—just what it said yesterday. Yet our eyes never stop wanting to see more, and our ears are always wanting to hear more. Yet with all this noise, and stimulation, what have we gained? It’s all completely and utterly boring.
Take human history and human endeavour. Verses 9 and 10:
1:9Whatever is will be, and whatever has been done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun.
1:10Is there anything about which someone can say, “Look, this is new!” It already has existed for ages, it has been from long ago.
For all humanity’s efforts and advances, there has been nothing really new achieved! We still live in a broken, fallen world. Our basic predicament has not been solved.
Now of course, some one will point out the undeniable technological advances we’ve seen within our brief lifetimes. Humanity has been to the moon. We have amazing communications technology, and nuclear weapons that can destroy the world a number of times over. And all of this was foreshadowed long ago, when God said as he looked down at the tower of Babel, and humanity’s latent and God-given power to rule and subdue the earth:
Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them (Gen 11:6).
Yes, we really do properly rule and run the earth. It is our natural environment where we can do great things like these.
But have these advances made us essentially a better humanity? Have we been rescued from bitterness, or jealousy, or hatred, simply because we have smart phones and live streaming across the web? Or has it simply unleashed an army of internet trolls and online bullying. And of course, what makes us think that this has solved the problem of violence and war. It just reveals what will happen if we had opportunity and freedom from consequences.
It’s never been easier to contact a missionary, and it’s never been easier to view hard core pornography and view new and exquisite forms of sin and debauchery.
But not only is there nothing new, nothing at all lasts under the sun. You are sooner or later forgotten under the sun. Verse 11:
1:11There is no remembrance of the former times, and neither will there be any remembrance of the later generations that are to come among those that will come after them.
In all likelihood, no one will remember you or me. Our great grandchildren will not even know our names. Under the sun, it will be as if we’ve never existed. From dust we have come, and to dust we will go! That’s the way of life under the sun.
Solomon writes to prevent you and me from engaging in a fruitless pursuit. The science is in and settled. The answer for meaning and purpose does not lie under the sun. The answer lies above the sun, in heaven, with God. We can only find our ultimate satisfaction, purpose, and lasting joy in God in heaven.
C.S. Lewis says this: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” (Mere Christianity, Reprint New York: HarperColins, 2001, 136-7).
Solomon is saying, “This is what life is like taking God’s gifts but not focusing on God himself.” Augustine famously said: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” (Augustine, Confessions, 1.1) There is no ultimate gain in our pursuits and no lasting benefit to our expenditure of energy “under the sun”. Apart from God there is no enduring benefit to any human endeavor.
But there is a God who rules over the sun, and at one point in human history and the history of the planet, God did something new. God came from his place in heaven and descended to the world under the sun. He did so in the person of his only eternal Son to become incarnate under the sun and become truly human. That was new. God becoming human was new. He is the first to rise from the dead. That’s new, too, that a human might have risen from the dead, and take new life. And this first member of the new human race also gives new life from the empty tomb through his resurrection from the dead.
Is there nothing new? Well, there’s nothing new that comes by our hands and under the sun. But there is something new, 2 Corinthians 5:17:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (NIV)
We can be new. We can last forever because of the resurrection from the dead.
(2) English Translation
Ecclesiastes 1:1-11
1:1The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
1:2Vapour of vapours, says the Preacher. Vapour of vapours, all is vapour!
1:3What profit do people get for all their labour with which they labour under the sun?
1:4A generation goes, and a generation comes, and still the earth keeps going forever.
1:5And the sun rises, and the sun goes down, and it rushes off to the place from which it rises.
1:6It goes to the south, and then turns to the north—turning, turning—the wind goes and then the wind returns along its circular paths.
1:7All the rivers run into the sea, and yet the sea does not fill up. To the place from which the rivers run, there they go again.
1:8Everything is wearisome, more than anyone can say! The eye does not have its fill of seeing, nor does the ear have its fill of hearing.
1:9Whatever is will be, and whatever has been done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun.
1:10Is there anything about which someone can say, “Look, this is new!” It already has existed for ages, it has been from long ago.
1:11There is no remembrance of the former times, and neither will there be any remembrance of the later generations that are to come among those that will come after them.
[1] There are inadequate reasons offered for us to attribute the poem of vv. 4-11 to the frame narrator. These too are part of the ‘words of the teacher’.