Ecclesiastes For The Youth

“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,”

Ecclesiastes 12:1

By Isabella Heigley

Ecclesiastes truly is a difficult book to understand. Upon a shallow study of the book, it is easy to misunderstand what God is teaching through the Preacher.  Before this past year, I had never really studied the book of Ecclesiastes. I had read the book once and struggled to find any sort of hope or meaning behind the seemingly depressing words of Solomon. Until one fall I signed up for a discipleship group that was studying the book of Ecclesiastes. As I have worked my way through the book, as well as a book entitled, “Living Life Backward,”¹ I have truly grown in my knowledge of this beautiful piece of wisdom literature.

For the first few months of school, going to my discipleship group was slightly upsetting. I admire my discipleship leader for portraying the beginning of the book in the way that it is written. She never attempted to sugar coat the truth, and always worked to plant seeds of humility into the hearts of every girl in her group.

Tough Words

With that being said, the first portion of the book of Ecclesiastes is difficult to bear. So often today in Christianity, we fail to be humble. No one likes to talk about God’s righteous anger or wrath, and we avoid talking about the fear of the Lord. We view ourselves so highly that even our churches sometimes fail to call out sin in the ways that it should. Ecclesiastes is a book that would be a great help to believers if they would spend careful time studying it, and acknowledge that the Preacher is right, “all is vanity.”² To go to discipleship group every week and hear this phrase repeated was extremely humbling to me. So often I look at my own relationship with Christ and feel that I bring something to the table. That if I just work hard enough, or if I would simply know more, then I would be able to serve God in a way that he is deserving of. But Ecclesiastes truly put me in my place and helped me to realize that although my desire to bring something before God is not inherently wrong, it is foolish to think that the vanity in which I pursue is glorifying to God.

My favorite part of the book that we read in my discipleship group is the idea that in order to truly live life freely, we must learn to live backwards. Perhaps the only way to ever find any enjoyment in life is to first acknowledge that the work you do is temporary, and your life will ultimately come to an end. As we read what Solomon has written, we see that he attempted to avoid the pain of the curse. Because we live in a fallen world, we can never escape the curse. It will continue to touch our lives until Christ returns. As we view the course of Solomon’s life, we see that he attempted to avoid the effect of the curse in three major ways.

• First, he tried to feel away the curse by relying on his emotions.
• Then he attempted to think away the curse by gaining all the knowledge that he could acquire.
• And finally, he tried to work away the cause of the curse.

As I reflect on my own life, I can see times that I have relied on false cures to distract myself from the curse. Despite all the distractions that this world has to offer, none of them can fix what sin has broken. No amount of work we do can stop our bodies from growing old and weary. No amount of knowledge we acquire can ever stop death from knocking at our door. The only cure to the curse is Christ, and as born-again believers we know this to be true.

Thoughtful Take-away

But do we wrongly associate Christ as the cause of the curse because he is the cure? The curse was caused by man’s decision to fulfill his own desires through sin, rather than follow the guidelines in which God had given them. When things go wrong, our first instinct is to blame God for allowing the curse to touch us. The heartache and trouble that we seem to “unfairly” encounter in our lives is simply a result of living in a sin cursed world. So, if everything is vanity, what then do we have to live for? This is the purpose of Ecclesiastes, to make the reader question why life has meaning in a broken world. Vanity is the trouble which comes from the curse, not from God. When we understand that all is vanity because of sin, we are then capable of living a life for the Lord. When we recognize that death is completely unavoidable, we learn to love God’s instruction and hand of guidance upon our life.

What a great teacher the curse is to us.

With a grasp of the true meaning of Ecclesiastes, we realize that although this life is filled with vanity, we have a greater hope found in Jesus Christ. There will come a day when He returns and makes all things new, but until then we are limited to what we can do because of the curse. The curse will always touch our lives, and death will eventually take our life from us, but what a great teacher the curse is to us. When we look at everything “under the sun”³ and realize how futile it all is, it just makes Christ and His mercy shine so much brighter. Ecclesiastes has taught me that I am lacking in the fear of the Lord, and one of the best ways to grow in this is to recognize the brokenness of this sin-cursed life.

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1. “Living Life Backward” by David Gibson, 2017 ↩︎
2. Ecclesiastes 1:2 ↩︎
3. Ecclesiastes 1:3 ↩︎