W8D2: Life Is Hevel

“'Everything is meaningless,' says the Teacher, 'completely meaningless!'” Ecclesiastes 1:2 NLT

We all struggle when we encounter the adversities of life. We don't understand how a loving and good God can allow evil to touch us. As children we grow up in the church believing if we are “good” everything will turn out the way we want it to. We believe the wisdom book of Proverbs when it says if we follow and obey God, we will have a life of honor, wealth and happiness.  But when we find that it's not always true of life, we begin to distrust God and turn away from Him. We try to live a life of “Proverbs”, but we end up in the reality of “Ecclesiastes.”

When we read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, we think there is a conflict between the two books. But they are not in conflict, they really complement each other. They both point to the lives we should lead, giving us guidance and direction on how we do that. Proverbs gives us steps for living a Godly life, and seems to say if we follow those steps, we will have success. But that is not exactly what it is saying. It says the best chance we have to live a full and abundant life is to be wise and follow God. It doesn’t give any guarantees.

Ecclesiastes says that life is more complicated than that, it says that life is ‘hevel’. Different translations of the Bible interpret that Hebrew word as “meaningless”, “vanity”, or even “pointless”. That’s a far cry from Proverbs “do this and you will get that” kind of wisdom. But a better translation for the word hevel may be “smoke” or “vapor” because there are things in life that appear to be real and true, but when we reach out to grasp them, they disappear. Like a child that HAS to have the latest toy but 5 minutes after they get it the toy doesn’t mean as much to them as it did when they wanted it. It didn’t live up to all they thought it would. Getting it was pointless.

We live with this tension between wanting to know the exact steps we need to take in order to get what we want out of life; and realizing that the world is a beautiful, yet wild and unpredictable place. We may think a lion is a beautiful animal, but we don’t enter its presence without considering its nature or it will kill us. We may think we understand the nature of a lion, and follow all the “rules” to be in its presence, but one wrong move and we could be its dinner. That doesn’t make the lion evil, God created it and said it was good, it is just wild.

Ecclesiastes is not saying that we should live our lives any way we want because it’s all meaningless. It’s simply trying to help us to adjust our expectations. If we expect only good to happen in this natural and wild world we live in, we will be shattered when tragic things happen to us. The balance between Proverbs and Ecclesiastes is that our BEST chance of having a full and meaningful life is to love God and obey what His Word and Spirit guide us to do.

Do you believe that life will be perfect if you perfectly follow Jesus? Can you name some times you (or someone in the Scriptures) did all the right things, but somehow it went bad?

Meditate on Ecclesiastes 1:2