Why bother?

Sometimes I wonder why I bother writing these articles.  Most of these newsletters get tossed out along with the credit card offers and the cable TV promotions.  So, it seems like my efforts in writing or saying something that will actually make a difference in someone’s life is pretty much a waste of time.

This is basically what The Preacher, whom we believe to be Solomon, is saying from the first verse of the first chapter all the way through the twelfth verse of the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes.  Everything  is meaningless.  It’s all pointless.  There is no real satisfaction in life.  As The Preacher puts it so often throughout his treatise, everything under the sun is meaningless.  All is vanity.

For this reason, a lot of people never make it to the end of the book. Somewhere around chapter five they start to think, “I don’t need depression from the Bible; my life is depressing enough already. I need uplifting and hopeful stuff.”  And so they quit Ecclesiastes and flip over to read Philippians.  No question about it; Ecclesiastes is definitely hard to get through.  The familiar refrain plays over and over again—life is meaningless.  But then you come to the final two verses where you are told that everything’s meaningful.   And why.

The Preacher saves the best for last,  and in two verses pulls all the strings of apparent human absurdity into a bundle of hope and purpose for living.   Life is meaningful after all.  And how do we know that life is meaningful?  Because of one little word in the last verse of this book—judgment.

You know what God’s judgment means? It means your life matters to Him. God wouldn’t bother to judge people or things that don’t matter. We judge things that do matter. Our lives matter to God.

Take an Olympic event like gymnastics, for instance.  The vault lasts maybe five seconds. The floor exercise is like a minute or so. But then you have opinions…lots of them. The people in the stands have opinions. Parents, cheering wildly, definitely have opinions.  The TV commentators have opinions.  The people watching at home have opinions.  Even the gymnast has an opinion. But there’s only one opinion that really matters—the judges’ opinion.  The decision of the judges is final.  It’s the one that matters.

Do you know what they call a gymnastics meet with no judges and no medals? An exhibition.  An exhibition doesn’t really matter because it’s not important enough to bring in the judges and the medals. It’s like the preseason NFL games; nobody really cares because the scores don’t count.

This gives us a picture of what Solomon is urging upon us. For nearly twelve chapters, he explains how human life is like gymnastics with no judges and no medals. What is human life like if there is no God and there are no scores? Despair. Absurdity. A waste of time. Meaningless.

But wait! Look at verse 13 and you’ll see something that makes all the difference. There is a God and there is a judgment. This means that your life isn’t meaningless. It means your life really does matter; so much so that God will judge even the details of your life. Every aspect of our lives.   Even the little or obscure things are important enough to God to evaluate.  His judgment means something—your life matters.