ABSTRACT: The apparent bleakness and pessimism in Ecclesiastes has long baffled interpreters of Scripture. Some even argue that book’s epilogue corrects the “unorthodox” theology in the middle. But Christians need not discard the body of Ecclesiastes as the musings of a cynic. The book’s shocking and intentionally provocative realism reframes our perspective on this world in the light of eternity, and invites us to prepare now for the surprising hope of judgment.

For our ongoing series of feature articles by scholars for pastors, leaders, and teachers, we asked David Gibson, minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen, Scotland, to explain the message of Ecclesiastes. You can also download and print a PDF of the article.

In his famous sermon “Learning in War-Time,” C.S. Lewis wrestled profoundly with the relationship between things temporal and things eternal. The particular pressure point in his context was the advent of the Second World War. How should his students make sense of the pursuit of academic pleasures — what Lewis called “placid occupations” — while Europe was poised on the precipice of so great a conflict? Lewis engaged the question by widening its lens, dramatically broadening the scope from the immediate danger to the more remote but greatest reality of all: judgment by the living God. If learning in wartime may be compared to Nero fiddling while Rome burned, then “to a Christian the true tragedy of Nero must be not that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell.”1 In other words, Lewis suggested, the real question is this: How should we make sense of anything at all in our present, bodily, earthly lives while the yawning chasm of eternity waits for us beyond the grave?

Widening the lens often changes everything. It’s not that our questions and challenges disappear; rather, they come into sharper focus. When we’re asking about the meaning of life, about whether anything matters, about why we should love and be loved if one day we will die, and about how we can continue to put one step in front of another when grief and pain threaten to suffocate our very lives, then the need for a big picture that is both true and beautiful is very urgent indeed.

I want to suggest that Lewis’s technique follows the skillful Teacher in Ecclesiastes, who helps us pass through things temporal with wisdom and wit, precisely because he has seen the weight of things eternal. Ecclesiastes is the book in the Bible that asks some of the biggest questions in life but perplexes us with its seemingly unorthodox and impenetrable answers. “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:2–3). The key to answering this question is seeing how the Teacher helps us to pass through things temporal (“under the sun”) that we finally lose not things eternal (“[God] has put eternity into man’s heart,” Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Following the Teacher’s message is not an easy task in a book as foreign to us as Ecclesiastes. Many Christian interpreters go astray in coming to terms with the unusual voice with which this devout Teacher of wisdom speaks. Let me suggest three common mistakes that deafen us to the sermon about reality that Ecclesiastes is preaching. I then will outline four key emphases from the book’s big picture that both widen the lens and sharpen the focus of the book’s message.

The first misstep has to do with the shape of the whole book. Tremper Longman III, for instance, observes that the prologue (Ecclesiastes 1:1–11) and the epilogue (Ecclesiastes 12:8–14) are both written in the third person, marking a clear stylistic difference from the main body of the book made up of autobiographical reflections (1:12–12:7). For Longman, this main section contains stark observations about God, life, and death that are in explicit conflict with the wisdom traditions of Israel, so much so that the Teacher’s God “is distant, occasionally indifferent, and sometimes cruel.”2 This unorthodox perspective is countered and corrected by the epilogue, which, together with the prologue, provides a frame around the book that shapes how we should read the whole. The normative teaching of the book isEcclesiastes 12:9–14, and this frame narration is there to correct and redeem the autobiographical narration.

Longman’s view should not be quickly dismissed. For one thing, there is precedent for the presence of unorthodox views within individual books of the Bible, such as Job’s comforters (an example Longman himself uses in support of his position). Longman’s viewpoint arises from trying to take very seriously indeed the bleakness of several parts of Ecclesiastes.

There are serious problems, however, with his overall reading of the book. We should note that the prologue (Ecclesiastes 1:1–11) is only awkwardly subsumed within a schema which sets the main body in contrast to the frame narrator sections; although the opening verses may be poetically beautiful, taken on their own they are as bleak and negative as much else in the book and hardly “correct” the autobiographical section. Furthermore, as Longman himself accepts, his view requires a strong reinterpretation of the epilogue as damning the Teacher with only faint praise and strong criticism, a view which is rather hard to sustain on a straightforward reading of the epilogue, where the Teacher’s words are described as delightful and embodying the wisdom of a shepherd (Ecclesiastes 12:10–11).

The main flaw in Longman’s proposal, however, is his own admission that many positive passages in the main body appear right alongside the most negative passages (Ecclesiastes 2:24–26; 3:12–14, 22; 5:18–20; 8:15; 9:7–10). For Longman, these offer only “a limited type of joy,” connected as they are to eating, drinking, and work3 — and it is precisely this evaluation of joy that, I suggest, says more about our modern location than the biblical worldview of the wisdom literature. For Longman’s Teacher, temporal pleasures only lighten the burden of a meaningless existence. But might the Teacher have some kind of wide-angle lens that allows him to hold together the kind of things we think are irreconcilable? I think he does.

A second wrong turn with Ecclesiastes is to misunderstand one of its key phrases: “under the sun.” We read the words “under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:3, 14) and we think spatially: we split the world into below and above. We take the meaning to be that under the sun everything is a certain way, but above the sun it’s different; below is the world lived without God and without the Lord Jesus, above the sun is life lived with him. This way of reading Ecclesiastes can be linked to a very wooden Christology, the kind of worldview that says life without Jesus is awful (under the sun) but life with Jesus is wonderful (above the sun). If we live the way God intends, and if we see the world from his vantage point, then we can be spared the nihilism of the under-the-sun perspective.

I think this is to misread this key phrase. Rather than thinking spatially, we should think chronologically. In the ancient world, and in Scripture, the sun marked time more than space. “The phrase ‘under the sun’ . . . refers to a nowrather than a there.”4 “Under the sun” points to these days, now — as long as the earth lasts, in this period of time, this is just how things are. One day the sun will be no more; we will live in a new creation, a new world order. But for now, the Teacher is simply commenting on what this temporal life is like. Pastorally, it’s so important to realize this is true. Coming to Christ as Savior and Lord doesn’t change the under-the-sun existence. Many embrace Christ in difficulty and walk the way of the cross to increased suffering and heartache this side of eternity. We live under the sun today, but we will live in glory tomorrow.

The third misstep happens when we move from the big picture and crucial phrases to key words, and none is more open to misunderstanding in Ecclesiastes than the word “vanity,” or “meaningless.” This word recurs throughout and is the main cry of the Teacher as he looks at life: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” In my own reading, I have followed interpreters such as Iain D. Provan, who challenges the idea that the Hebrew word hebel carries the main meaning in Ecclesiastes of existential meaninglessness. With that connotation, the book becomes a bleak discourse on the emptiness of life.

In contrast to this, however, Provan (and others) point out that elsewhere in the Old Testament, hebel means “breath,” “breeze,” “mist,” or “vapour,” and thus the metaphorical application is to things that are insubstantial and fleeting rather than to actions that are in vain or have no purpose.5 “O Lord, what is man that you regard him, or the son of man that you think of him? Man is like a breath [hebel]; his days are like a passing shadow” (Psalm 144:3–4). This means that in using this word, nearly always, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes is pointing to how life comes and goes in the blink of an eye, and he is exploring what that feels like when one considers both all the beauty and all the brokenness of the world. He is musing, deeply and disturbingly, on life’s repetitiveness, life’s brevity, life’s elusiveness, the quickness of things to slip through our fingers, and all in the light of an eternity belonging to a God who will judge the living and the dead. “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.”6

If this perspective is right, then Ecclesiastes becomes a jolt to our spiritual systems, a cleaning of our damaged spectacles for looking at the world. We get a new and maybe entirely unexpected perspective on ourselves, our joys, and our sorrows, and the way God has made the world to work. In Anthony Thiselton’s lovely phrase, God gave us the wisdom literature to “wound from behind.”7 We are left blinking in surprise, and, as we get our bearings, the world looks different. On the other hand, if the missteps outlined above are pursued with vigor — as they often are, in the pulpit or the classroom — the result is a view of the created order that sees it all as vanity, temporal things as mere weightless distractions from the truly spiritual reality of life in Christ.

So what might it look like to read Ecclesiastes differently? In a similar way to Longman, I believe the epilogue does indeed function as a hermeneutical key to the book because of the way the closing verses explicitly comment on what has gone before. In contrast to Longman, however, I suggest that these verses do not correct the autobiography so much as give us a theological framework through which to hold together things temporal and things eternal. There is a way of looking at what joy is and of looking at what God does in pain, and a way of looking at today in the light of tomorrow, that helps us to see that the wisdom of the wise is found in the most unexpected of places. Note how Ecclesiastes is able to say that the Teacher’s words are both delightful (Ecclesiastes 12:10) and painful (Ecclesiastes 12:11) — our task is to inhabit the world in such a way that we can comprehend how one book is both these things.

Here are four emphases in the epilogue that give us this big picture.