Are you an optimist? A pessimist?
As Christians, we often feel pressured into being optimists. After all, the gospel is good news. This story has a happy ending, and therefore, we have every reason to call this a good life. But sometimes, this well-intended optimism can unfortunately come off as disconnected naivety.
Because another person can look at the exact same life, know there is good news, know there is a happy ending, but get hung up on the hurt, the injustice, the reality of loss that is in this world. And sometimes, this clear-eyed pessimism can unfortunately come off as jaded cynicism.
From time to time, both our pessimism and our optimism need to go to the chiropractor. There is a glib, superficial Christianity that sounds strange and out of joint among the watching world, and there is a pessimistic, jaded Christianity that is out of place amongst the good news of the gospel.
Ecclesiastes gives us a dose of reality, but be warned: its medicine doesn’t go down as easily as the other familiar books of the Bible. Many people who love their Bibles and bookmark passages in Romans, Ephesians, and Psalms aren’t sure what to do with Ecclesiastes.
The author and pastor Zack Eswine compares books of the Bible to visiting towns and neighborhoods.
Many Christians have grown up traveling the prophetic roads of the Old Testament and the Pauline highways of the New Testament. Wisdom highways are less traveled. The Song of Solomon is like a back-road brothel to us. (As a young man, I was told by a pastor not to read this book until after I was married!) Job is like a long stretch of desert road with no night light and no gas stations or rest stops for miles. People can get stuck out there with no help, so we rarely travel there without a great deal of preparation. James is like an old law building that doesn’t seem to fit the gospel landscape. We drive around it and wonder if we should bulldoze it. Ecclesiastes sounds like a crazed man downtown. He smells like he hasn’t bathed—looks like it too—and as we pass by he won’t stop glaring at us and beckoning to us that our lives are built on illusions, and that we are all going to die. So, most of us choose to get our lunch at a different shop on a less dreary corner of town. – Zack Eswine, Recovering Eden, 5.
For some of us, spending time in a book of wisdom like Ecclesiastes will be new or even strange territory. But let me remind us of another well-worn and well-loved passage:
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” (2 Timothy 3:16, ESV)
Ecclesiastes is a necessary book for well-read, Bible-saturated, theologically robust Christians.
Take a moment to quiz yourself:
- Can you still have a meaningful and human conversation with an unbeliever?
- Can you offer the skeptic more than a chapter and verse?
- Do you know what it means to be human? To wrestle through the uncertainties, mysteries, and frustrations of this life?
- Do you even know the questions your neighbors are asking?
Likewise, there are some questions many of us would like to keep tucked away in a drawer, out of sight and out of mind. The sort of experiences, questions, or uncertainties that don’t tie up nicely with a symmetrical bow. It is helpful, from time to time, to open that drawer of misfit toys and take an honest look. We need not fear that there is no answer, but we may want to be slower in providing the trite and didactic answer.
In the end, God will put everything right, and we should prepare ourselves now to meet him, so that we can receive this fleeting life as the gift it is. Because life is short, like a mist, a vapor, a wisp of smoke. That can either be the greatest frustration or bring great freedom. It all depends on what you expect from this world and what this world is for.
It’s time to listen to the Preacher, the son of David, the king of 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?