The other day I was reading the book, Christianity: The True Humanism, by J.I. Packer and Thomas Howard, and found comments on Ecclesiastes worth jotting down. I am assuming they are Packer's, since Howard's style usually gives itself away with its florid prose. The writer of Ecclesiastes, Packer says,
piles on the agony of hope frustrated and builds up his picture of life's letdowns with a somber artistry, that makes that heart ache. Do not kid yourself, he says, that life is a bed of roses for anyone; it is more like a bed of nails. Yet he is not a cynic; on the contrary, his whole aim is to make clear three things which, when grasped and understood, become a permanent bulwark against cynicism in the human heart. Here they are.
First, we must get clear about our lot in this world.
The human condition, as the writer of Ecclesiastes, theist and realist, views it, is one of not being able to see moral rhyme or reason in most of the things that happen. We would like to watch virtue being rewarded, crime not paying, and wisdom bringing happiness, but that is not what we observe. "Under the sun" in God's World -- that is, from our present, this-worldly point of view--the whole range of human life and action appears as "vanity"--that is, a fruitless, unfulfilling, unsatisfying, frustrating outlay of energy. No one can plan or work for happiness with any assurance of success; the law of divine providence is, in effect, Murphy's law, that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the most awkward time too. God the invisible king is inscrutable. The only thing clear about his present providential government is that he will not as yet establish the correspondences between aim and achievement, or expectation and event, or merit and outcome that we with our innate sense of fitness want to see.
Why does God act thus? "So men will revere him" (Ecclesiastes 3:14), and acknowledging that all actual good comes from him as his own free gift and not falling into the folly of trying to be the source of their own joy. We were made, not for self-sufficiency, but for a life of worship and dependence; and the discipline of providence is meant to drill us and keep us in such a life. The Book of Job shows us that unexplained pain and grief may come to anyone, even the best of men, for special reasons. Ecclesiastes, picking up where Job stops, assures us that unexplained pain and grief will come to everyone, as part of God's ordinary dealing with a race that has to be weaned from the sin of self-reliance. This, then, under God, is how things are, and they will not change. So one of our first steps in wisdom is realistically to face this reality and to crucify all our self-sufficient, self-indulgent, self-deifying hopes accordingly. Did we think we could build heaven on earth, for ourselves or for others? We were wrong. Frustration, injustice, and random troubles, rather than any form of self-made contentment, are the appointed lot of all human beings. But if we are prepared in advance to find this true, we shall not be emotionally shattered nor pitchforked into cynicism by the impact of the blows when they come.
Second, we must get clear about our joy in this world.
Life is tragic, says our author. Tragedy is in essence the frustration of nobility and the waste of good, and much of everyone's life is tragedy in relation to their hopes, plans, powers, and deserts. "The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them" (Ecclesiastes 9:11-12).
But tragedy is not the whole story. God gives joy too. Joy, which is deeper than pleasure just as grief is deeper than pain, is a sense of well-being and contentment, plus (more or less, according to its intensity) a sense of significance in what one is doing and of insight into some aspect of life's real meaning. Those whose arrogance makes them spend their time resenting the way things are and planning egoistically for their own pleasure miss these joys entirely; humble folk, however, who live in the present moment and allow things around them to make their proper impression on them, find sweetness in life's simplicities, however much sourness may flow to them fro more ambitious schemes. Central to the message of Ecclesiastes is the writer's insistence that this is so, and that these joys should be acknowledged as God's gift. Inscrutable providence, as he describes it, has its generous side.
I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work. . . (8:15)
A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? (2:24-25; see also 3:12-13; 5:19).
Light is sweet, and it pleases the eyes to see the sun. However many years a man may live, let him enjoy them all (11:7-8).
Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun (9:9).
Ecclesiastes here directs us not to a calculating hedonism, as has sometimes been thought, but to a humble openness to the many simple joys with which our path is strewn, and which genuine cynics are, alas, too proud, too hurt, or simply too complicated to notice and accept.
So life under the sun is not universal tragedy, which excludes joy, but rather tragicomedy, in which, through divine action, joy and happiness are constantly winning out in the heart over tragic external circumstances. And no one who is alive in this world will miss God's gifts of joy at this level save those who shut their hearts against them. Joy will keep breaking in; God will see to that.
Third, we must get clear about our hope in this world.
Ecclesiastes is an Old Testament writer. He does not know much about the hope beyond this world that was brought to light by the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. But he knows that because God is just, somehow, somewhere, at some point in the future, there will be a judgment--that is, a final transmuting of our desert and direction in this life into our destiny forever. On this note he ends. "Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil" (12:13-14; see also 3:17, 11:9). Which is as much as to say: Man's hope in this world is precisely his hope of divine judgment.
What's that? you say. Hope of divine judgment? Yes. The word judgment may suggest to us condemnation only, but in the Old Testament it regularly points to God's vindication too. The Book of Ecclesiastes is so somber and low-key that it would be easy to hear its last words only as a grim warning, which indeed from our standpoint they are. But they are more than that. They are words of encouragement to the harassed, bewildered, and frustrated victims of the "vanity" that we experience when we invest ourselves in trying to shape things to our own will. They are a plea to us to give up trying to play God to ourselves and to concentrate on worshiping and working for the real God instead. They are a reminder that God knows and notes all honest attempts to do this, and that he will not forget any genuine effort after reverence and righteousness, however little appreciation it may win from our fellow-humans and however pathetic the circumstantial background out of which it comes.
The pre-Christian sage is here like a solo bassoon hinting sotto voce at the truth that blazes so triumphantly (full orchestra!) in the words of the apostle Paul: 'Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:58). In the knowledge that God through Christ will one day reward, beyond this world, every "good deed" -- that is, every bit of service truly rendered to him and to others for his sake -- lies the hope by which today's cynical mood, brought on as it is by disappointment and disillusionment, may be finally vanquished.
"Anyone who come to [God] must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him," we are told (Hebrews 11:6). Cynicism takes over through disbelief of this. Clearly, from the thoughts that filled his mind, the man we know as Ecclesiastes lived on the very edge of the abyss of sceptical cynicism -- but his knowledge of joy and his hope of judgment, in the sense explained, acted as guardrails which kept him from falling, however dizzy his head might grow as he looked down. And his hope remains the answer -- the only answer -- to the more secular and nihilistic cynicism that is flooding the West today. [pp. 90-94]