Ecclesiastes 1:1-18
Everything is Meaningless
1 The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
3 What does man gain from all his labor
at which he toils under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
7 All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
11 There is no remembrance of men of old,
and even those who are yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow.
Wisdom Is Meaningless
12 I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men! 14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
15 What is twisted cannot be straightened;
what is lacking cannot be counted.
16 I thought to myself, “Look, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” 17 Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.
18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
When I first read Ecclesiastes, I thought what a depressing book in the Bible...Then as I read it again and then again and saw the thoughts and ideas of William Lane Craig, a Light went off...
Theologist and Professor William Lane Craig writes about if there is no God...“"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed...Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution...There is no God, and there is no immortality...And what is the consequence of this?...It means that life itself is absurd...It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.”...if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded...But who can live with such a view?...Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says, the cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil...There is no reason to be human...There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man...The communist torturers often said, 'There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil...We can do what we wish.'...I have heard one torturer even say, 'I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.'...He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.”...“In a world without God, who’s to say whose values are right and whose are wrong?...There can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments...Think of what that means!...It means it’s impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil...Nor can you praise generosity, self-sacrifice, and love as good...To kill someone or to love someone is morally equivalent...For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare, valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong.”...“If God is dead, then man is dead too.”...“But the problem becomes even worse...For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong...All we’re confronted with is, in Sartre’s words, “the bare, valueless fact of existence.”...Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning.”...“For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.”...“If God does not exist, our lives are ultimately meaningless, valueless, and purposeless despite how desperately we cling to the illusion to the contrary.”...“If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa...Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please...As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: “If there is no immortality...then all things are permitted.”...“The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist...As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.”...“The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends that life has meaning.”...“the universe without God remains objectively meaningless, no matter how we happen to regard it.”...
The vanities of life are there without God...People get nothing from their youth without God...People get nothing from their work without God...People get nothing from their inventions, thoughts, or new ideas without God...We are born, we grow up, we work, we retire, and we die...A cycle we see over and over...It is all around us...No matter what one has accomplished he is now dead, after all his years of life...Solomon saw this despair in life and wrote about life here...A world with only this type of cycle is a life of despair and a depression...Only God can get us out of this depressing cycle of meaningless...All that we experience is meaningless without God...And somehow with God in the middle of anything, He brings life and LOVE to the one with faith...A life with God is meaningful...A life with God is one that is reborn from these cycles...A life with God is Eternal Life...A life with God is a Miracle...