Life can be like trying to grab hold of vapour

Do you sometimes feel that finding meaning or purpose or happiness or change in your life is elusive? Is it like trying to grasp vapour or smoke?

Do you sometimes feel your efforts for a better life are futile?

You invest time, energy, and money in something such as a hobby, a job, a relationship, a church, an education, a political campaign, or a new place to live.  Sometimes it goes up in smoke. Even if it goes well, it doesn’t deliver what you hoped. This can lead to despair, depression, or cynicism.

Well, it is okay to feel this because there is a book in the Bible that addresses such experiences and feelings. 

It is the book of Ecclesiastes and for the next few months we will be looking at the book in detail, both in the sermons at church and in our community groups.

An old post discusses how Ecclesiastes resonates with how the distinguished theoretical physicist, Steven Weinberg, felt about science, in spite of its grand achievements.

Here is Eugene Peterson's helpful introduction to Ecclesiastes found in The Message.

"Unlike the animals, who seem quite content to simply be themselves, we humans are always looking for ways to be more than or other than what we find ourselves to be. We explore the countryside for excitement, search our souls for meaning, shop the world for pleasure. We try this. Then we try that. The usual fields of endeavor are money, sex, power, adventure, and knowledge.

Everything we try is so promising at first! But nothing ever seems to amount to very much. We intensify our efforts—but the harder we work at it, the less we get out of it. Some people give up early and settle for a humdrum life. Others never seem to learn, and so they flail away through a lifetime, becoming less and less human by the year, until by the time they die there is hardly enough humanity left to compose a corpse.

Ecclesiastes is a famous—maybe the world’s most famous—witness to this experience of futility. The acerbic wit catches our attention. The stark honesty compels notice. And people do notice—oh, how they notice! Nonreligious and religious alike notice. Unbelievers and believers notice. More than a few of them are surprised to find this kind of thing in the Bible.

But it is most emphatically and necessarily in the Bible in order to call a halt to our various and futile attempts to make something of our lives, so that we can give our full attention to God—who God is and what he does to make something of us. Ecclesiastes actually doesn’t say that much about God; the author leaves that to the other sixty-five books of the Bible. His task is to expose our total incapacity to find the meaning and completion of our lives on our own.

It is our propensity to go off on our own, trying to be human by our own devices and desires, that makes Ecclesiastes necessary reading. Ecclesiastes sweeps our souls clean of all “lifestyle” spiritualities so that we can be ready for God’s visitation revealed in Jesus Christ. Ecclesiastes is a John-the-Baptist kind of book. It functions not as a meal but as a bath. It is not nourishment; it is cleansing. It is repentance. It is purging. We read Ecclesiastes to get scrubbed clean from illusion and sentiment, from ideas that are idolatrous and feelings that cloy. It is an exposé and rejection of every arrogant and ignorant expectation that we can live our lives by ourselves on our own terms.

Ecclesiastes challenges the naive optimism that sets a goal that appeals to us and then goes after it with gusto, expecting the result to be a good life. The author’s cool skepticism, a refreshing negation to the lush and seductive suggestions swirling around us, promising everything but delivering nothing, clears the air. And once the air is cleared, we are ready for reality—for God."

As always, The Bible Project video is a short and helpful overview.