A Series on Ecclesiastes - #2
Speaker Notes
Ecclesiastes 2
Pleasures Are Meaningless
2.1 I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless. 2 “Laughter,” I said, “is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?” 3 I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly—my mind still guiding me with wisdom. I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives.
4 I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. 5 I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. 6 I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees. 7 I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. 8 I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem[a] as well—the delights of a man’s heart. 9 I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me.
10 I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my labor,
and this was the reward for all my toil.
11 Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.
Wisdom and Folly Are Meaningless
12 Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,
and also madness and folly.
What more can the king’s successor do
than what has already been done?
13 I saw that wisdom is better than folly,
just as light is better than darkness.
14 The wise have eyes in their heads,
while the fool walks in the darkness;
but I came to realize
that the same fate overtakes them both.
15 Then I said to myself,
“The fate of the fool will overtake me also.
What then do I gain by being wise?”
I said to myself,
“This too is meaningless.”
16 For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered;
the days have already come when both have been forgotten.
Like the fool, the wise too must die!
”The City of God against the Pagans” by Augustine, pages 528-529:
What godly ears could bear to hear the following argument? After a life passed in the midst of so many and such great calamities (if, indeed, it can be called a life at all, which is so much more like death: a death so grievous that the very love of it makes us dread the death which will release us from it), and after many great and frightful evils have at last been expiated and ended by means of true religion and wisdom, we achieve the vision of God. We are made blessed by the contemplation of incorporeal light and by participation in His changeless immortality, which we burn with love to attain. But then, our adversaries say, we must of necessity lose all this in due time, and those who lose it are cast down again from that eternity, truth and felicity to hellish mortality and wicked folly! They are caught in the toils of horrible miseries, in a state where God is lost, truth held in odium, and blessedness sought in filthy iniquities.
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And this eternal revolution of fixed cycles, which remove and restore true misery and false blessedness in turn, occurs so that God may be able to know His own works. For, on the one hand, He cannot rest from creating, but, on the other, if He were always engaged in creating, He could not then know the infinite number of His creatures.
”Life Out Of Death” by Hans Urs Von Balthasar, page 35:
But what is the [Christ’s] mission? It is that by his loving obedience to the very end, he should reconcile to God the world estranged from God, which is possible only by his taking all this estrangement upon himself and bearing it - as an eclipse of God - through to the end, and even beyond its end, since his loving obedience to the Father is deeper and more final than any rebellion of sin can ever be. One may call the sin of the world its lie and illusion, but the world itself, the people to whom Jesus’ mission is addressed, are anything but maya and illusion. And his mission runs counter to the philosophical teaching on dying: it is not about detaching oneself from the transitory things in order to flee into some real or supposed eternity, but, conversely, about sowing the seed of eternity into the field of the world and letting the Kingdom of God spring up in this field.
David is a Theologian and Ethicist.