___________________________
___________________________
Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad was born on August 12, 1891, in Durham, England. As a student at Oxford, Joad formed a worldview based on atheism and socialist and pacifist views. Engaged in government service for sixteen years, he retired in 1930 to teach in the departments of psychology and philosophy at the University of London.
As a philosopher, author, teacher, and radio personality, he was one of Britain's most controversial intellectuals of the 1940s. He became famous in Britain as an agile participant in the BBC “Brains Trust” radio program from 1941 to 1947.
An Outline of Ecclesiastes
Following the Logic of Solomon
I. A Critique of Life: Chapters 1-2
Life grinds to nothingness, but man keeps searching (1:1-11).
Intellectualism, hedonism, materialism (1:12-2:11)
Although wisdom is better, all still die (2:12-16).
Thus he despaired (2:17-23).
Late in his life, Cyril Joad reversed his course and came to a much different conclusion about reality. To paraphrase him, he said, “I have previously held in my optimism that man would find ultimate good, meaning, peace, and harmony on this earth.” He watched with interest the quest of politicians to find peace. He saw the formation of Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations and then the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But after all was said and done, he also watched men enter into two world wars and kill each other in horrifying ways. In the end he realized that the fundamental problem of man is man.
Cyril Joad repented and accepted the worldview he had formerly rejected. In 1952, he published his final volume, The Recovery of Belief.
Cyril Joad's search is a summary of the plight of modern man. People are seeking to understand the world in a way that can give them meaning and wholeness. Sometimes this search is conscious; at other times, it is subtler. But if you look around you today, you will see men and women who, at the core of their beings, are desperate for hope. In our world, hope is the square peg we fumble to fit in the round hole.
Solomon went through this same quest for meaning in 1000 B.C. The Book of Ecclesiastes is as close as the Bible gets to pure philosophy. But it's different from most philosophy in that it is not so much an inquiry of one man's mind as it is God's declaration of the meaning of life.
Solomon begins his book by making an observation about life and history.
The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher,
“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” (vv. 1-2)
In Hebrew, a word is used twice to make it a superlative. For example, the “holy of holies” means the most holy place. So when Solomon uses the phrase “vanity of vanities,” he means that life is the ultimate vanity.
When Solomon uses the word “vanity” he doesn't mean that life is ultimately meaningless. Nor is he saying that life is chaotic or disordered.
What Solomon means by vanity is echoed in other Scriptures. As James says, “You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (James 4:14). And God tells Adam in the Book of Genesis,
“From [the ground] you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.” (3:19)
And as Job says,
“Naked I came from my mother's womb,
And naked I shall return there.” (1:21)
Materially speaking, life is short and then you die. You will lose everything you own to the next generation. Your children will rent out your house, purge your possessions, and spend your inheritance. Ultimately, you will be a distant memory at a Thanksgiving meal.
Solomon makes what can be a very harsh observation about life: You may want to be immortal but tough luck. You may want to be like King Tut and build a massive pyramid where you can cram all of your precious possessions in the hope that you'll take them with you, but you will go and they will stay. Your best-case scenario is that one day some archaeologist will discover you and your goods, put them in a traveling exhibit, and bring it to Cleveland so children can sneak up and spook each other around your dead body.
You may be a wealthy Indian prince with a devoted wife who throws her body on your flaming funeral bier, but neither your riches nor her spirit will accompany you.
When you die, there will be a funeral. You may have twenty-five or two thousand people attend. But do you know what they'll do after the funeral? They will catch lunch and have a great old time together. Then they will hurry back to work because somebody was covering for them while they took the morning off. That night they'll go home to their families, watch a sitcom rerun, and forget all about your memorial by morning. Are you ready for that?
In the end, you will lose everything. All is vanity. Vanity of vanities—that's life. It goes quickly, you die, and pretty soon nobody knows who you were.
At this point you may be thinking, Boy, am I glad I bought this book! Sometimes facing reality is difficult and even discouraging, but that's one great thing about the Book of Ecclesiastes—Solomon tells it like it really is.
In verse 3 Solomon asks a question that begins his explanation of what he means by vanity.
What advantage does man have in all his work
Which he does under the sun?
The word “advantage” literally means “profit.” What is a profit? It's what you have left over at the end of the week. It's what you net. When your life is over and you die, what is your profit? You may have enjoyed life and blessed people, but what do you net “under the sun” ?
The phrase “under the sun” will be used over and over in this book. It refers to our life here on earth. So when Solomon asks about profit, he is not talking about riches in glory, heaven, or the kingdom of Messiah. Those are truths covered in other biblical books. Solomon is talking about life in this world.
So what profit is there under the sun? In verse 4 he answers that question.
A generation goes and a generation comes,
But the earth remains forever.
You are born into the world, you live your life, and then you die, but the earth keeps right on going. It's like you are walking across a desert, leaving footprints in the sand that the wind erases as though you were never there. Life bankrupts those who invest in it. It mocks those who seek its meaning.
Even the most significant and extreme events are forgotten. Carl Sandburg illustrates this in his poem “Grass.”
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.2
Also, the sun rises and the sun sets;
And hastening to its place it rises there again.
Blowing toward the south,
Then turning toward the north,
The wind continues swirling along;
And on its circular courses the wind returns.
All the rivers flow into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full.
To the place where the rivers flow,
There they flow again. (vv. 5-7)
In these verses, Solomon describes the natural world as a machine that keeps going perpetually. The sun rises, the winds blow, the rivers flow, and the water evaporates from the sea and rains down from the sky to fill the rivers. Nature is not heading toward a climactic point but is performing an endless cycle of the same thing every day. You can almost hear the “pocketa pocketa” of the cosmic machine's gears and pistons in motion.
As one author said, creation does not leave a residual. It gives no advantage. The earth does not reward you. Entropy is sovereign.
You come, you live, you die, and you go into the earth. The earth does not applaud you—it just keeps going. Man has always wondered what his purpose is in nature's machine. What meaning can be found in the face of the impersonal cosmos?
Evolution has such a powerful pull on the secular mind because it provides some (albeit unflattering) answers. Evolution answers these philosophical questions by dehumanizing man, proposing that man is nothing but a cosmic accident— a random by-product of the workings of the universe. Hence, man's struggles are caused by his mistaken assumption that there is such a thing as personhood. If man wonders, Who am I? evolution answers by eliminating the question altogether: You are nothing.
Solomon doesn't try to solve this dilemma of man's ultimate purpose by denying the problem. It's true that in this world, life is nothing but vanity. It doesn't matter who we are because we lose it all. Nobody remembers us. Nobody cares.
Nature is not benevolent. It has no sense of righteousness. If you're good, nature doesn't reward you. You don't start to grow hair in your bald spots when you repent. Nice things don't always happen to you if you are nice to people. Nature is an impersonal machine that consumes you.
Solomon summarized the plight of man in relation to this inhuman, impersonal, destructive, entropy-filled cosmos.
All things are wearisome;
Man is not able to tell it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor is the ear filled with hearing. (v. 8)
Life is tough. Everything is wearisome. Life never resolves into peace and contentment. A man can never stop in his quest for happiness because he will never find it. Our culture is filled with men and women who are destroying themselves to fight a losing battle. They are trying to find happiness in places where it will never be found.
When Solomon says, “Man is not able to tell it,” he means that—by himself—man can't figure out life. Man doesn't naturally step back and realize that it's impossible for a finite man in a finite world to have infinite meaning. Man will not say the sum cannot be greater than the parts.
But if the parts are finite and perishable, it should be obvious that life cannot give ultimate meaning in and of itself. If there is any meaning to life, there must be someone outside the system who is infinite and eternal, providing that meaning.
But man is “not able to tell.” Man will not stop and declare with resignation, “I can't do it.” Rather, our eyes are not satisfied with seeing, nor are our ears filled with hearing. Man in his ignorance will always be looking and listening for a new thing. He's like a little gerbil trapped on an exercise wheel, wanting to go faster and faster and faster.
It's been said that man is the only animal that will accelerate when lost. When a person realizes that he can't understand life, instead of saying, “Life is wearisome; I cannot find meaning in this life in and of myself,” he just speeds up. He is not satisfied, so he just keeps looking.
Man will always grope for an answer, but look at Solomon's conclusion in verse 9.
That which has been is that which will be,
And that which has been done is that which will be done.
So, there is nothing new under the sun.
Even though man is always looking for something new (i.e., novel, satisfying, and hitherto undiscovered), Solomon says man will never be successful. Anything he tries in the future has already been tried in the past. That which will be done has already been done. Man in and of himself will find no meaning. But he'll always keep scrambling like that gerbil on its wheel— just like the men of Athens who spent “their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21).
Let me give you the Tommy Nelson compendium of world history in two pages.3 In his earliest days, man tried to deify nature. Ancient Canaanite religions personalized the sun and the elements by giving them names. Hinduism called everything god.
Notice that the creation didn't reveal itself. The sun didn't say to ancient man, “Call me Leonard.” But man knew that there must be something outside himself that was bigger than he was and could give his life meaning. So by personifying the forces of nature, man gave himself the illusion of being a person—of having morals, intellect, and uniqueness, and dignity.
As nature came more and more under man's control, man slowly but surely began worshiping gods who were like amplified people. Man didn't worship the sea itself anymore; instead he worshiped Neptune or Poseidon. But these gods weren't big enough to last. Man knew that he had to go outside the system and that these gods didn't go far enough.
In about the fifth century B.C., the first philosophers, the Ionians, tried to find something within nature that could give unity and meaning to life. One early philosopher said the unifying force was fire; another said water.
Out of this tradition came Socrates, the first great rationalistic philosopher. He said he didn't know what the answer was, but that it had to be based on reason. His pupil Plato and Plato's pupil Aristotle birthed modern philosophy and the quest to build meaning with reason. They refused to look to the gods and, instead, investigated the fields of knowledge for something to give meaning to everything. This search continued through the Greek- and Roman-ruled periods.
Then Christ came. Now the infinite, personal God became a man who redeemed evil and offered restoration to a fallen world. This was the God who is outside the system; the One who created and sustains the world; the One who made man in His image. The infinite stepped into finitude, eternity stepped into time, and finally everything fit. A fountain of living water was poured into the world.
Then came the fall of Rome, the Byzantine period, and the Middle Ages. The liberating truths of Christ were tainted by legalism and superstition. So men started going on adventures and quests to find hope. They traveled across the oceans to find the city of gold and the fountain of youth. All they found was sin and death.
Then in the Renaissance, men turned back to the Roman and Greek classics and their emphasis on reason. That study didn't bring meaning, but the continuing quest eventually led to the Reformation and the rediscovery of the Bible as the sufficient illustration of faith and practice.
Many great spiritual truths were recovered, but with the rise of the nation-state, rulers became corrupt and oppressed people with their power. So some Christians thought that if they went across the ocean to the New World, they could set up a perfect society. But their utopia didn't work.
With the Industrial Revolution we saw the birth of the modern age and, soon after, the theory of evolution. The generations that followed brought forth philosophic atheism, which proposed that each man was a god. But if we were little gods, you'd think we could do better than to kill each other in two world wars.
In our generation, science has become our god. The pervasive belief is that if we keep discovering new ideas, ultimately we'll find meaning from the universe. But this hasn't worked either.
As nature has failed us once again, we've had a renewed interest in mysticism and irrationality, embracing New Age spirituality and postmodern worldviews. People have even adopted a fascination with extraterrestrials, projecting them as magical beings who have everything under control and can come and fix the mess we've made. People are captivated by extraterrestrials usually because of what amounts to a religious hope, not a scientific inquiry.
Oddly enough, when faced with the coldness of the cosmos, man is not about to turn to God the Father Almighty and His Son, Jesus Christ. If we did that, we would have to acknowledge our need and our sinfulness, so we continue to try other ways to find meaning. In fact, I firmly believe that man's last “hope” will be anti-Christ, who will finally cause man to face his need for repentance in Jesus. And now, back to Solomon and his emphasis: Everything you try to find meaning has already been done.
Is there anything of which one might say,
“See this, it is new”?
Already it has existed for ages
Which were before us. (v. 10)
The drug culture of the 1960s was not started for the purpose of pleasure or even for getting high. The drug culture started as a response to Eastern philosophy, which promoted a search for meaning deep within ourselves. The opportunity to “drop this and expand your mind” proposed to be something “new.”
Remember Timothy Leary, the professor who first advocated drugs to expand consciousness? Interestingly, the whole purpose of the drug culture was to take a trip. But you didn't go to the seven cities of gold, the fountain of youth, or the New World. You expanded your mind to be enlightened. But in the end, drug experimenters found that there was nothing new— nothing to satisfy their search for meaning—in the pills and powders.
Solomon had the answer for them three thousand years ago. You want to be a pantheist? Welcome to India. They were doing it in 2000 B.C. Or is astral projection more your speed? Again, the Indians have been experts in that for centuries. How about Wiccan practices like the worship of mother earth? The Celts were doing it in A.D. 1400. There is nothing new that hasn't been tried before.
Solomon's next verse prophesies man's continual unsuccessful quest for meaning. Man will never learn. He will always repeat his humanistic folly.
There is no remembrance of earlier things;
And also of later things which will occur,
There will be for them no remembrance
Among those who will come later still. (v. 11)
Solomon offers himself as a living example of this quest for meaning. He goes through three stages—intellectualism, hedonism, and materialism—of pursuing meaning in life and shares his results. His first stop? Intellectualism: the idea that by learning we will ultimately find the answers to give us meaning and peace.
I, the Preacher, have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I set my mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven. It is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with. (vv. 12-13)
Solomon says he worked hard to understand life. He says, “I have gone north and south and I have gone east and west. I have gone deep and I have gone broad. I have looked at what the Queen of Sheba has done. I have looked at what the people in India have done. I have looked at what the rich have done. I have looked at every nation we have traded with. I have talked to our sailors and examined every field of wisdom to see if you can find meaning in this dying world.”
Solomon says it is a grievous and vain life that we, “the sons of men,” have been given. The term “sons of men” literally means the “sons of Adam”—men who have been cursed and are fallen. It is tough to be born a fallen human.
Adam had no philosophic problems in the garden. He walked with God in the cool of the day. He was in touch with infinite reality; he had an absolute answer for creation, for the dignity of man, and for the distinctiveness of his wife. He understood himself in relation to the animals and to the cosmos. He knew why he was here. He knew where he was going. He knew what he was to do, but he sinned.
When Adam sinned, the lights went out. His awareness of his place and purpose vanished. His eyes darkened, and his offspring have continued in that state. His children cannot look up and know what is up above the sun. We're just down here in this machine, trying to find some scrap of meaning. Life is a grief and affliction.
I have seen all the works that have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after wind. (v. 14)
Man in himself—in his finiteness, intellect, pleasure, human religion, and inventions—is grabbing at something that is beyond his reach. The songwriters of my generation contemplated these very thoughts. Consider this verse from Peter, Paul, and Mary's “philosophical” song: “How many roads must a man walk down before he knows he's a man? / How many times do the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned?”
When I listen to Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary and a lot of those folks, I realize they weren't singing to make good music because it wasn't that good. They were singing philosophical songs. They were trying to say something. It was the last vestige of hope for my generation. Now nobody cares anymore. Hope has been exhausted. When was the last time you heard about a really good protest? They just don't happen. Those songs of the 1960s were about how men could learn to live with dignity. But, ultimately, their conclusion is the same as Solomon's: “The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.”
The answer is blowing in the wind; it remains mysterious and undiscovered. There is nothing new under the sun. All of life is vanity.
The problem is that humans are not capable of altering what's wrong in life. As Solomon points out:
What is crooked cannot be straightened, and what is lacking cannot be counted. (v. 15)
This world is fundamentally flawed and you can't fix it. There must be something outside the system that can give purpose to life. Nothing within this universe, you, your abilities, experiences, or mind will give any meaning to life.
It's been said that a good preacher makes points that are bluntly stated, clearly explained, and endlessly repeated. That's what Solomon is doing here.
Mrs. Snodgrass, my English teacher at Waco Richfield High School, would have written “redundant” all over Ecclesiastes with a big red pen. But Solomon knows it will be hard to convince us that knowledge can't bring meaning. He states it again because he really wants us to believe it.
“Behold, I have magnified and increased wisdom more than all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has observed a wealth of wisdom and knowledge. “ And I set my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly; I realized that this also is striving after wind. Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain. (vv. 16-18)
Solomon searched out all of history, sorting through the foolish ideas, good ideas, maxims, and proverbs. He examined the rise and fall of empires. He looked at all the gods and all the religions. He read the important thinkers and had his advisors accumulate as much information as they could. And yet, after all this effort, his conclusion is that it is a striving after the wind. He recognized that he was chasing something he could never grasp. The universe in itself does not contain anything to give meaning, purpose, happiness, joy, and fulfillment in life.
Now the wisdom Solomon is talking about in context is not the wisdom of God and His word; it is wisdom derived from exploring human knowledge—philosophy, religion, psychology, sociology, history, logic, and rhetoric—the best ideas that man has invented or discovered. But in the end, all an educated man can do is die an educated failure. All the learning in the world won't help you change the human heart.
In the movie Mosquito Coast, Harrison Ford plays an atheist who flees America to set up a perfect community in a remote jungle. Early in the movie, he meets a missionary (portrayed in the worst light possible) bound for the same area.
When he arrives, the atheist sees immediate success in establishing a thriving village. But by the end of the movie, the atheist totally destroys his village because he finds out that even though he can help people scientifically, he cannot deal with their sinful hearts. And he also finds that he can't deal with his own sin.
Meanwhile the unflatteringly portrayed missionary has a loyal, loving following of people at the end of the movie. Those people are joyful, hopeful, changed, and peaceful—a fact that irritates the atheist. He finally gets so enraged that he destroys everything around him and himself.
When I saw that movie, I said to my wife, “That is Ecclesiastes chapter 1.” The atheist increased in wisdom more than all the people around him. He was brilliant. He could change everything about society … except the hearts of sinners, so he ended up destroying himself. That is the summary of chapter 1 of Ecclesiastes: You're never going to ultimately change man through human wisdom. Meaning for life must come from something outside of ourselves.
Where have you looked for meaning and purpose? In knowledge? Or success? Or finding the right spouse or having the perfect family? Have you been looking to your career or to money and material things? You are following the “broad path” to destruction that many have trod.
Whatever it is, Solomon has already been there. And his conclusion still stands: Life “under the sun” is emptiness and vanity. There must be something more—a thought that leads us to chapter 2.
1. What does Solomon mean when he compares nature to a machine? What impact does this have on man and our relationship to the world?
2. Has there been a time when you have sped up when you were lost either literally or figuratively? What was that like?
3. Do you think that we have seen a societal shift away from trying to answer deep questions and a move toward just making money and having fun? How has this affected you and those around you?
4. What impact does it have on us when we realize that all meaning must come from outside of ourselves? How does it change our view of ourselves, and how do we deal with this change?
2. Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1919).
3. For a wonderful overview of the history of thought, see How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1976).