Life's Tragedy: Old Too Soon, Wise Too Late
Ecclesiastes 1:1–3
“The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” -Ecclesiastes 1:1–3
Many years ago when my youngest daughter was in elementary school, she asked a profound question that caught me off guard! It was striking to me that an eight-year-old was wrangling with a perennial question philosophers and theologians have wrangled with for a millennia.
“Dad, is life just days and days and days until we die?” She asked.
In her childlike rationale, she was trying to figure out what life was all about. While she couldn’t articulate it so precisely at the time, she wanted to know what the end game was to this repetitious rising and setting of the sun we call today, tomorrow, and yesterday? She was wondering, how long is this repetitious process going to last? And, how do I know if I’m missing something?
The question rightly demanded an answer, but the truth is, I couldn’t think of one that addressed the complexity of the question in terms she could comprehend. So, I basically ducked the question and just answered, “Pretty much, I guess.”
The significance of this anecdote is reflected in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.
Qoheleth is asking the question,
“What do I get for all the work that I work at on this earth?
What’s the purpose of my life and labor?
What use is everything I’ve accomplished if, in the end, I die anyway? What’s the use?”
The despair is that much more compelling when we understand the author’s back story.
This is a man who has tried everything, done everything, and lived life to its absolute fullest. He is a man who never denied his appetites a single pleasure. By all practical purposes, he should have been the happiest man alive; yet when he approaches his end, he can only confess that he hated life.
We’ll explore all the reasons in coming Crumbs, but he summarizes them in Ecclesiastes 2:17 when he says,
“So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind.”
The Author
As was previously mentioned, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes is Solomon, the son of the famed king, David (1:1), the king over Israel in Jerusalem (1:12). While the text never names Solomon as the author, all proverbial fingers point to him. He was the son of David. And besides David, only Solomon ruled Israel from Jerusalem. After Solomon died, his son, Rehoboam caused a civil war that divided the kingdom, so Israel and Judah each had their own king. Further, many of the pursuits and achievements of the author of Ecclesiastes corresponds specifically with the accounts of Solomon given in 1 Kings.
The Book
The book of Ecclesiastes is a 12-chapter sermon written in the 10th century BC (about 3,000 years ago) that explores every facet of “life under the sun.”
This expression “under the sun” is used 29 times—if we include the three times he uses the synonymous expression, “under heaven.” The meaning of this expression was an idea that was key to understanding the meaning of life in the ancient world.
In some ways, it’s similar to Plato’s realm of the forms—the idea that there is a life below the line (things we can see and interact with), and above the line (the realm of the Forms: the reality of truth, goodness, and beauty itself).
The expression, as used by Solomon, speaks of life on earth without God, and with death being our final end. His sermon looks at life through the worldview of a materialist. It’s not that Solomon was an atheist; he just lived like one, practically, and realized too late the true meaning of life.
Like Benjamin Franklin aptly noted, Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.
Solomon’s conclusion was: it’s all vanity. It’s all worthless and empty. The expression Vanity, or vanity of vanities is used 34 times, and is translated from the Hebrew word, hevel, meaning emptiness, futility, breath, or vapor. It’s the same concept James uses when he says in James 4:14 …What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
The expression “vanity of vanities” is a superlative. It means the most worthlessness of worthlessnesses.
It compares with what the Jewish writer Sholom Aleichem once described life as “a blister on top of a tumor, and a boil on top of that.” You can almost feel that definition!
If we have any inclination toward wisdom, then we cannot afford not to pay close attention to this sermon. It’s a sermon that Jesus sums up with one statement:
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36, ESV)