Solomon and Jesus in cahoots

Since I started teaching the youth Sunday school class at the beginning of this month, I've basically been conducting my own personal experiment (and God's more controlled "experiment") of talking to a few 14 to 17-year-olds about the meaning of life and purpose as exposed by Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes. I was going to go into this class with a more comfortable and common study, maybe looking more specifically at one of the gospels or Paul's letters or digging into some of Isaiah's prophesies. But then I know how heavily God has laid purpose and meaning on my heart and mind that I figured it was more than appropriate territory to explore with some teens who are in a phase I only so recently left behind.

I've discovered that the hardest part about tackling Ecclesiastes not only in personal study but especially in group study is understanding why Solomon speaks throughout most of the book from a secularist point-of-view. There is so much explicit doom and gloom, you almost miss those glimmers of "there is a time for everything," "eat, drink, and be merry," and "fear God and keep His commandments." So far we've looked at the first chapter as well as the last chapter partially because I only have a few weeks with them and also because I wanted to get straight to the hopeful conclusions of Solomon's wise discoveries. All of the "this is meaningless" and "that is vanity" business in the middle has been mentioned but for the most part left unexplored.

But this coming Sunday we're gonna get into it. At least, we're gonna get into chapter two and talk about the vanity of self-indulgence, which underlies most strictly secular pursuits.

The night of my 22nd birthday (July 18th), I started a house-sitting job. I arrived, dropped my stuff on the floor of the living room, pulled out my Bible, and read straight through Mark and about six chapters into Luke. And as God does, he showed me many sides of Himself that I truly have never even seen before. With the words of Ecclesiastes on my mind a lot lately, I started seeing how much more radical and uncomfortable Jesus' words are than anything Solomon ever said. I also saw how much Jesus basically reiterated the points Solomon had made two hundred years before.

The secularist POV is a straight-up-in-your-face illustration of exactly what Jesus later warns us against.

Just look at the parable Jesus told about "the rich fool":

Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me."
 ¹⁴Jesus replied, "Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?" ¹⁵Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."
 ¹⁶And he told them this parable: "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. ¹⁷He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.'
 ¹⁸"Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." '
 ²⁰"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'
 ²¹"This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."

The nice thing is that Jesus throws that verse 21 bit in there, whereas Solomon generally leaves that out until around the end of his entire book. But really, this one parable gives a great summary of most of the things Solomon gets into. You may also recall that story about the guy who says he's kept up with all of God's commands, but when Jesus says that's terrific but go on and sell everything you have, the guy is filled with sorrow.

Having stuff isn't the problem. It's "the love of [having stuff]" that brings problems. Mostly, it's loving having stuff more for ourselves rather than having stuff for God. And by stuff, I am referring to everything Solomon goes into, which is beyond just material. It's sensual, spiritual, and all dimensions of "-ual." I mean, Solomon took every path toward illusions of happiness that one could even imagine.

And so the having stuff and the doing stuff for God is such obscure territory itself that we really can't just get it right, and it's when we run into those walls that we lift up our hands and let God's sufficient grace overwhelm our helpless situation once again. God's love and mercy cleanses all dimensions of "-ual," and that's the hope that arises from this anomaly we call Ecclesiastes. There's more hope in this book than most people can see, but if you just go listen to Jesus for a bit, maybe He can convince you of this truth.