All Is Vanity (Meditations in Ecclesiastes, Part I)
Text: Ecclesiastes 1:1-11
“Vanity of vanities,” writes Solomon. “All is vanity.”
Inconsequential might be the word we contemporary people would use.
The nature of life as we know it is fleeting, transitory, temporary, futile, and incomprehensible.
Humanity is constrained by death (1:4), endless repetition (1:5-10), and the forgetfulness of future generations (1:11). Human existence is played out in a world broken beyond repair, where men and women are born, live, and pass away while the ongoing cycles of nature continue as if the people had never existed in the first place.
Solomon’s opening salvo declares that life in strictly human terms is not much more than an unfunny joke. Even the best of us, our highest achievers, our great kings and heroes and champions and celebrities, die and fade away, lost both to physical existence and human memory. (The king in Jerusalem was articulating existentialism 2,500 years or so before the existentialists even showed up.)
This world encourages you to live your life with the prospect of legacy firmly enshrined before you at all times: we erect statues of supposedly important and influential people, make movies and write books about them, put their names on buildings, streets, states, cities, warships, businesses and anything else we can imagine. Still, they stay dead. And nevertheless, with time they are forgotten.
Think of it: how many people know anything about the person for whom their high school is named? How many of us would encounter a statue of Charlemagne, a bust of Cyrus the Great, or a self-portrait from Rembrandt and even know who we were looking at? How many of us could identify the most famous musicians or actors in our country one-hundred years past? How many of us even know the names of our own great-great grandparents?
The simple truth of the matter is that while some of the past achievements of human individuals may affect the way we live our day-to-day lives, the memory of the people themselves barely impacts us at all. The things that our culture and the world around us prioritize, value and celebrate can do nothing at all to keep us alive and barely more than that to ensure we are remembered in the years after we’re gone.
If life is meant to consist of nothing more than what the world considers important, we are doomed to a fate of meaningless futility no matter what we manage to accomplish. The world carries on without us, regardless of how important we are perceived to be. We die, never to return, despite whatever magnitude of an impact we believe we have made.
The soul desperately hopes for something more. Solomon dedicated himself to discovering what it was. And if anyone in all of history was up to the task, it was he. Ecclesiastes is the account of that quest. I hope you continue to join me as I reflect on it.
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O Lord, make me know my end
and what is the measure of my days;
let me know how fleeting I am!
Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths,
and my lifetime is as nothing before you.
Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! Selah
Surely a man goes about as a shadow!
Surely for nothing they are in turmoil;
man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather!
- Psalm 39:4-6
…even the wise die;
the fool and the stupid alike must perish
and leave their wealth to others.
Their graves are their homes forever,
their dwelling places to all generations,
though they called lands by their own names.
Man in his pomp will not remain;
he is like the beasts that perish.
Be not afraid when a man becomes rich,
when the glory of his house increases.
For when he dies he will carry nothing away;
his glory will not go down after him.
For though, while he lives, he counts himself blessed
—and though you get praise when you do well for yourself—
his soul will go to the generation of his fathers,
who will never again see light.
Man in his pomp yet without understanding is like the beasts that perish.
- Psalm 49:10-12, 16-20
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
- I John 2:15-17