In a written interview for Biola Magazine for her recent book Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters, Carmen Imes shares insights on the book of Ecclesiastes that are relevant for today – it is really good!
You’ve got a section in the middle of the book on what we can learn from the Bible’s wisdom literature about what it means to be human. Ecclesiastes is one of those books that can be a puzzle for folks, because it just feels bleak or meaningless. But you have an interesting take on it that diverges from a lot of people’s popular conceptions. Can you sum up what we can learn from Ecclesiastes?
Yes, so I am a fan of the NIV, but this is one place where I think the NIV has not done us a favor by the way they’ve translated one Hebrew word that occurs dozens of times in the book of Ecclesiastes. The word is hevel, which they’ve translated as “meaningless.” The book opens with “Meaningless, meaningless. Everything is utterly meaningless.” And then it’s natural to ask, what is this doing in the Bible, because it doesn’t seem like that is consistent with the rest of the teaching of Scripture. But the Hebrew word is actually a metaphor. It means vapor or smoke. It’s something intangible and transient. The point is lost when we try to get around the metaphor. The voice in Ecclesiastes is trying to say “Vapor, vapor. Everything is utterly vaporous.” That is, it’s transient; we can’t fully grasp it or keep it or hold onto it. The message of the book is not that life has no meaning, but rather that the meaning of life is difficult to grasp. And the key to a happy life is to enjoy the journey — and not always keep reaching out, trying to grasp for what we don’t have yet. And so I find the book a really powerful antidote to our production-driven, climbing-the-corporate-ladder kind of world, where it seems like even my students are on a journey of always reaching out for something they don’t have yet.
I used this in class this semester. I said to them: Some of you did not enjoy high school because you were so stressed trying to get a high enough GPA to end up at Biola, and you thought this was going be the thing. But as soon as you got here, you realized that you had to put everything into success here, so that you could land the right internships, so that you could land the right career. And so you’re not enjoying Biola because you’re too busy worrying about what career you’re going get on the other side. You’re going to get to that career and you’re not going to enjoy that either, because you’re going to always be worried about the next promotion that’s just out of reach, or finding that special someone to spend your life with, or having a child, or buying that house, or getting that dream vacation. There’s always going to be something that’s out of reach. And Ecclesiastes is an amazing antidote to that hopeless way of living because he says, I’ve tried it all. None of it ultimately satisfies. The key is just to enjoy the gifts that God has given you today and to relish those. And that’s where the phrase “eat, drink and be merry” comes from — the recognition that we don’t have tomorrow. All we have is today. And so we need to learn to enjoy today.
συνεσταύρωμαι: living the crucified life 