Page 129 - The Poetic Books - Student Text

of all kinds. Yet a human is a human. They find life empty, meaningless. “Many people today see reality
as wholly confined to the here and now, and they live accordingly. There is no fear of God before their
eyes, nor is there any hope in God within their hearts. And that’s why our world is in such a mess.
Without hope lifting the human heart to higher expectations and loftier aspirations, people inevitably
fall back into the lifestyle that Malcolm Muggeridge called ‘licking the earth’ – ego, carnality,
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materialism.”

This is the topic of Ecclesiastes. The Teacher speaks to people of all ages and cultures. He challenges us
to examine the work of our lives. What is it for? The Motilone peoples in Columbia, South America,
might be a primitive tribe, but their anguished search for meaning speaks for all peoples everywhere.

The shouting men were closer than I had thought. And there were only two of them.
One of them I knew well. He was a leader in his communal home, and a fierce warrior.
He had killed oil company employees just to get their safety helmets to use in cooking.
He wore a necklace of buttons from his victims’ clothes, and another necklace of jaguar
teeth from a jaguar he had killed with his bow and arrow. Noe, standing in front of a
hole that he had dug –a hole that was a good six feet deep – he was shouting in a
desperate, searching voice, God, God, come out of the hole.”
The other man was in the top of a high tree. He was stuffing leaves into his mouth and
trying to chew them, while shouting, “God, God, come from the horizon!”
It was the strangest sight I had ever seen. It could have been laughable, but something
kept me from seeing any humor in it.
My three companions came up alongside me, looking sad and embarrassed. [One]
explained that the brother of the man shouting into the hole had died in a region that
was not his home. He had been bitten by a poisonous snake and had died before there
was time to get him back. That meant, according to their traditions, that his language,
his spirit, his life, could never go to God beyond the horizon. Now the man was trying to
look for God, to get him to bring his brother’s language back to life, to live in his body.
“And what makes him think he can find God by calling into a hole?”
[He] shrugged. “It’s as good a place as any to look.” The hopelessness of his expression
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was transmitted to his words.

212 Raymond c. Ortlund Jr., When God Comes to Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001), 124.
213 Bruce E. Olson, Bruchko (Lake Mary: Charisma House, 1973), 139.
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