Page 122 - The Poetic Books - Student Text

panicky government officials… arranged for large numbers of foreign cats to be
201
parachuted into the area in order to mend the break in the food chain!

The Teacher invites his readers to inhabit the pagan world for a time. His readers may be pagan
themselves. To them he would demonstrate the logical conclusions of their pagan mindset. His readers
may be believers in Yahweh. He would remind them of the anguish many of their neighbors live in.
Believers (especially NT believers) have an immediate and powerful sense of purpose and direction in
life. Believers experience God’s presence now and anticipate eternity in heaven after death. Before very
long a believer forgets what it is like to live a pagan life with pagan thoughts and choices and feelings.
Expressing hope in eternity, a believer may often experience scorn from one who has no hope. The scorn
is reasonable for one who simply observes life now. “Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on
as it has since the beginning of creation (2 Pet. 3:4).” This is the lesson of Ecclesiastes. We might call it a
book of apologetics both in the sense of reasons for faith but also in the sense of reasons for evangelism
and missions. Our neighbors, many of them, are living in frustration every day desperately in need of
hope.

As the Teacher moves beyond his introduction, he explains his method. He decides to use his wisdom to
explore life in a variety of ways (1:13). He tells us clearly in advance what he had discovered by his
exercise of heart. “What is crooked cannot be straightened (1:15).” Life does not work. Even using all his
wisdom, he only discovered sorrow and grief (1:18)

The first area he tried was pleasure. He pursued laughter and wine. He built houses and vineyards and
parks and groves of fruit trees. He became rich and acquired a harem. While pursuing all these
pleasures, he continued to observe
his actions from a position of
wisdom. He did not refuse any
pleasure exploring each delight for a
length of time. At the end of his
experiment, he found it all
meaningless, “a chasing after the
wind” (2:11).

The Teacher gives us a valuable
lesson. If life is broken, pursuing
pleasure only masks the
brokenness. With all the
entertainment options in the Figure 59: Nagaland India feasting
modern world, we can easily see the
value of pleasure in helping us forget our frustrations. “Diversion consoles us in the face of our miseries.
Yet, paradoxically, it becomes the worst of our miseries because it hinders us from thinking about our
true condition and deceives us into believing that we are in no danger of being destroyed.” 202

201 Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, 118-119.
202 Doug Groothuis, Truth Decay (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000), 173.
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