Does Ecclesiastes Contradict Christianity?
Does Ecclesiastes contradict Christianity? When we’re reading Ecclesiastes, it has a lot of phrases that the teacher or the preacher — that’s the person who wrote Ecclesiastes, what he calls himself. He says, life is meaningless, life is vanity. And we could start to think, well, I thought Christianity, God and the Bible were all about meaning in life, finding purpose in life abundantly.
How are we supposed to take the words of Ecclesiastes and read it? Should we just throw it out? And in church history, and especially Jewish history, some people have said just that. But Ecclesiastes is in the canon, in the Scriptures, and it is for our profit. So what are we supposed to do with this?
Well, the first thing that we need to do is zoom in before we zoom out. And what I mean by that is we need to take Ecclesiastes on its own terms. Ecclesiastes is written by a guy in the spirit of Solomon, where he’s at the end of his life and he’s reflecting on everything that he’s done.
And he’s going through, is life meaningful under the sun? And that’s going to be important for us. And it’s so encouraging to me that he’s so honest. The Bible is not an artificial book that only gives this kind of shallow optimism, but it deals with real life and real people. And here in the book of Ecclesiastes, we have a real question. Does life make sense if we don’t think that God has any part of it?
And I appreciate that. And there’s a ring of trueness to it. But when we start to look at, okay, so if it is real, if it’s a real reflection by a real guy with a real question, still, what are we supposed to do with it? And here is, when we’re zooming out, a helpful biblical principle of how we’re supposed to read the Bible.
Not everything in the Bible is for us to follow. Everything is true, but not everything is there for us to emulate. A catchy way to remember this is, everything is at least descriptive, but only some things are prescriptive. In Psalm 14:1, it says, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. Does that mean the Bible teaches atheism?
No, this is what the fool is saying. Cain kills Abel. Does that mean we need to go and emulate Cain and go and murder? No. These are real descriptions, and in that sense, true. But what the Bible is telling us is something that is getting in the mind and the heart — in this case, of a guy who is at the end of his rope and doing this thought experiment: can we find meaning without God?
The Scriptures also say that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for us. So the question for us is, how is this reflection of the futility of life without God, how is that profitable for us as Christians? And there are many ways, and we’d have to go through all of the book of Ecclesiastes to see what, but here is a helpful question to ask of any Old Testament text. How does this biblical text in the Old Testament anticipate, create a longing for, or point to the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus?
And a really good frame for when we’re reading the deep, dark despair that the preacher tells us about in Ecclesiastes is, how is Jesus a truer and better preacher than Ecclesiastes? And I think the hermeneutical key is this. Jesus experiences a deeper and darker despair than even the preacher does when he finds meaninglessness under the sun.
How? Because Jesus experiences the complete wrath of God on all of the world’s sin, and God turns his back. Why does he do that? Jesus is the wisdom of God. Jesus is God incarnate. He does it for you and for me. So that by trusting in Jesus, we might experience the abundant life that the preacher is looking for in Ecclesiastes and that we long for.
So I think it’s eminently compatible with Christianity and so helpful, especially for our day and age, in which people can really relate to the meaninglessness that they feel, and Ecclesiastes has something to tell us about that.
We’re so happy for your questions in response to the sermons. Please send any more in. We’d be happy to answer here at Bridges Community Church.
