If we won’t live forever, or even long enough to make a lasting difference to the world, how then should we live? -David Gibson

Ecclesiastes 1:1-11

Qohelet’s idea that everything is a “breath” , a mist, a puff of wind, a vapor is a common Biblical idea we find in passages such as Psalm 39:5-6, 11, Psalms 144:3-4. Qohel’s portrayal of life is this: Everything is a breath. He will take the rest of the book to unpack what he means. Here are some ways to think about it:

Life is Short – The book of Ecclesiastes is a meditation on what it means for our lives to be like a whisper spoken in the wind: here one minute and carried away forever the next.

Life Is Elusive – But the smoke in front of your eyes is not just transient; it is also elusive…… Ecclesiastes is a meditation on how life seems to elude our grasp in terms of lasting significance. If we try to gain control of the world and our lives by what we can understand and by what we can do, we find that the control we seek eludes us……How much control do you really have over whether your job is secure, or how healthy you will be, or what will happen to interest rates and house prices, over whom you will meet and what you will be doing in ten years’ time?……. When we consider the brevity of our lives set against the millennia of the earth, we know that what the Preacher says is true. Except, of course, in everyday life we pretend it isn’t. We imagine we will live forever, or at the very least that someone else will get cancer, not us. We think our lives are built with granite, not sand. We pretend we’re in control….And so Ecclesiastes sets out to demolish our pretense by confronting us with reality.

Qoheleth then asks the programmatic question of the book, “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (1:3).

This question in many ways shapes the book and is developed throughout. The question, “What does a man gain?” sets the agenda….

The question itself, “What advantage or benefit or profit does a man have in all his work?” is not a philosophical question, but rather it is a practical one. It is focused on the reality that in this vaporous life we labor and then ask, “will it last?”…….Why spend a life toiling away when it is so short and nothing we do appears to last?

Doesn’t the curse and the reality of hebel nullify any advantage in our labor? This life of labor under the sun seems like building sandcastles. We work, and work, and work. Then comes a wave! “How long do sandcastles last? And how much control do we have over the castle we have constructed?….While we are toiling, we feel like we are accomplishing something, that we are in control. But it is an illusion. The next wave proves it. Qoheleth wants that to lie heavy on us for a while. He won’t give an easy answer. He wants us to feel his pain. To twist the knife a little deeper, he gives us a poem about the cyclical nature of this world. Nature is teaching us something. – Brian Borman

“A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever” (Eccl. 1:4).

Life Is Repetitive – The Preacher pictures the momentary and elusive nature of human life with a beautiful rhythmic pattern to his poetry. Read Ecclesiastes 1:4–10 aloud and feel the lyrical tilt with its tidal ebb and flow. That’s the point. Everything either goes around and around, or comes and goes; it rises and sets; what has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; what is present will soon be past.

In verses 5–8 the Preacher focuses on a threefold pattern in the world that is matched by a threefold pattern in human experience. The activities of sun, wind, and water follow the same course as the activities of speaking, seeing, and hearing. The point is that the world itself doesn’t seem to go or get anywhere, for everything is cyclical rather than linear, so why should humans get anywhere?

The sun chases its tail. The wind goes to the south and comes back around again to the north. Streams flow into the sea, and the water evaporates, and then streams flow into the sea again and it is never full. So is the world, and so it will always be. So is humankind, and so we will always be……..

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. (1:9)

The Preacher’s perspective is this: humans long to come across something in their lives that will break the constant repetitive cycle, something to say or see or hear that will be truly new and therefore significant—​​​but there is nothing. No such thing exists……

A new government is still a government, and we’re all familiar with those…..A new baby is still a baby, and the world has always been full of them. Even landing on the moon is still a form of adventure and exploration that has been with us since humans have walked the earth… He doesn’t mean no “new” things are ever invented in the world, for clearly that is not true. He means there is nothing new we can ever discover to break the cycle and so satisfy us……

Prepare to Die – The Preacher has answered his own question by pointing to the cyclical comings and goings of the world. His answer is that people do not gain from their labor and toil because ultimately they are going to die and be forgotten. Life stretches ahead of the young employee with dreams of a fulfilling career and a happy family; but it will all come and go. She is going to die and will not be remembered….

In the book, the Preacher is not commenting on what life is like without Christ. He is not saying this repetitive roundabout is what life is like from a secularist perspective. This is not what the world feels like from the viewpoint of existential nihilism, or postmodern navel gazing. It’s just what the world is like. It’s reality. It’s the same for everyone, Christian or non-Christian, adherent or atheist: we each live under the sun…..

We do the same things over and over again in a world repeating itself over and over again, and then we die, only to be followed by our children who will do the same things in the same way and then meet the same end. Being a Christian doesn’t stop this being true. Rather, it should make us the first to stop pretending that it isn’t true. That is the Preacher’s aim……In these days, under the sun, it is unavoidably true that we live in a world where we will soon be dead.

Learn to Live -The Preacher wants us to let the reality of our death sink into our bones and lodge itself deep in our hearts. But that’s because he’s writing a book about what it means to live. He wants the consequences of our fast-approaching disappearance from the earth to work their way out into all the realities of the way we see the world and the way we view ourselves within that world.

The single question that animates him is this: If we won’t live forever, or even long enough to make a lasting difference to the world, how then should we live?

It takes the whole of Ecclesiastes to answer that question, and I want to unpack it in the successive chapters of this book…. the Preacher is going to show us what we should, and should not, expect out of life. He is not just saying there’s no gain after we’ve chased the wind; he will insist there’s no need for the chase in the first place. There is no gain to be had under the sun, and that’s precisely the point. None need be sought. -David Gibson

Recommended Resources: 

“Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches us to Live in Light of the End”

By David Gibson

“Don’t Waste Your Breath: Ecclesiastes and the Joy of a Fleeting Life”

By Brian Borgman

Soli Deo Gloria