No Guarantee

Passage: Ecclesiastes 3:9-22

The Old Testament has some pretty depressing books. Judges, for instance, chronicles the steady decline that occurs in the religious and moral life of the Israelites almost immediately following their settlement of the Promised Land. 2 Chronicles details the deterioration of the Kingdom of Israel and the eventual exile of its people to Babylon – all forewarned by God’s prophets. Hosea presents a prophet commanded by God to marry a prostitute in order to serve as a metaphor for God’s relationship with his unfaithful people.

Then there’s Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is depressing not because it tells a sad story, but because it paints a sweepingly pessimistic picture of all human experience. The author of Ecclesiastes, named simply “Qoheleth”, or, “The Teacher,” mentions on all the normal things in which people invest themselves: education; work; marriage; family; pleasure. He proceeds to talk about the futility of each of these pursuits. Educated people suffer as much as uneducated ones; the fruits of one’s life’s work eventually go to someone else; spouses die; kids grow up; the aging body loses its capacity for pleasure. And, of course, everybody eventually dies. Verse after verse the author peels back layer after bitter layer to reveal the truth we’re all scrambling to avoid: everything you cherish in life will one day be taken away.

Wait a minute, say the religious among us. There’s always the afterlife, isn’t there? The author fixes us with a steely gaze. How can you be so sure?

In his third chapter the Teacher turns his cynical eye even on this – the last hope for those disenchanted with the promises of this life. He says,
I also said to myself, "As for human beings, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?"
How has such an expression of doubt made its way into our Bible? And how do we make sense of it?

The author of Ecclesiastes is presenting, for polemical purposes, the perspective of someone without faith. Looking simply at the physical evidence, you can’t help drawing the same conclusions as the Teacher. Life is short; everybody dies; in the process everybody loses everything. And there is no empirical evidence that life goes on after death. There’s no guarantee that death isn’t the end. All we have to go on is someone else’s word.

The key to the life of faith is trusting that there’s something more. Trusting God’s word, and those who bear witness to it. Trusting that God not only preserves our life and identity for eternity but also guides and watches over our lives here and now. God’s word promises us that our lives aren’t buried in the earth with our deceased bodies; we are distinguished from other creatures in that we are created in God’s image. We hold out hope that life has meaning and that death isn’t the end of the line based not on any physical guarantee but on the promise of a good God.