Ecclesiastes and the New Testament

But what about the point that we mentioned, and said nothing about, the charge that this part of the Old Testament has no discernible influence on writers who appear in the New Testament?  Actually this may not be the strict truth: Paul’s statement that we brought nothing into this world and it is certain we’ll take nothing out (I Tim.6.7) could be an echo or an explicit use of a verse such as 'All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return'. (3.20) But Job 1.21 is another possibility, 'Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return'. Maybe you can find others.

However, this question raises a  prior question, which is, How are we to decide on the presence of absence of the influence of one book upon another? How do we detect such influence if it’s there? One line is to look for literary correspondence, in words and phrases, and in idiom. It is in this sense that Bible-students tell us that Eccelesiastes has no influence.  

But there is another way in which influence shows itself besides the verbatim quote, which I commend in this case. The ideas in one writing may be found in another, later writing even without direct quotations. They may be expressed in different words. And the idiom in which these ideas may be expressed may be different.

So consider these parts of the New Testament.

‘And if Christ has not been raised, you faith is futile and you are still in your sins…If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied’. (I Cor. 15.16)

‘What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’.  Do not be deceived ‘Bad company ruins good manners’. (34)

What is Paul teaching us here? He is reminding us that there is another horizon, not the horizon merely of today, or of my life, or of your life, but the horizon of the day of resurrection. Without such a horizon professing the faith is a vanity. For if there is no resurrection, we are still in our sins, and this life with its limited horizons, is all that there is.  If the dead are not raised then the Epicurean attitude of sensuality and other forms of selfish pleasure is the correct one. Let us live for today because today, or more todays until the last one, is all that there is. Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. (Paul was quoting from the pagan writer Menander, the Greek dramatist.) What Paul is teaching is that if we have no hope of endurance after death, then as professing Christians, we are wasting our time. His preaching was vain, and the faith of Christians is vain. ‘Vain’ is certainly a precise point of contact with the Preacher. We might as well live in a way that the Preacher condemns as a vanity.

Eternity

It’s often said that the Old Testament does not teach that a human being will outlast the death of his body.  Apparently, it doesn’t even hint at it.  But this is to neglect the book of Ecclesiastes, among other parts of the Old Testament. What does the Preacher tell us?

Amongst the many passages that set put the vanity of all things when looked at from the vantage point of this earthly exists, ‘under the Sun’ as the writer puts it, are these:

‘He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has set eternity into man’s heart….’ (3.11)

‘Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upwards and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?’ (3.21)

These are suggestive passages, at the best, I grant. 

But what they suggest is in the same direction. Man’s heart is not like that of the beast. The Lord has set eternity in the human heart, whatever precisely that means. And his spirit which outlasts his body goes upward,  returning to his Maker, unlike the spirits of the beast which dissolve in the earth.

And then there is a series of verses having to do with the fear of God

‘Yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they fear before him’ (8.12)

‘Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days if your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment'. (12.7)

  

‘Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.’ (12.13-4)

We are enjoined to fear God as the chief thing, to watch our words and actions because God will bring them into judgment. But why does all this matter, if we perish like the beasts? We are to fear God because we have another horizon than the end of our lives here on earth. Because there is a judgment to come.  No conception of an afterlife?

Jesus

Or consider these teachings of Jesus; the first from the Sermon on the Mount -

Therefore do not anxious be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

The second, even more better known, but not perhaps properly understood for all its familiarity. In the Lord’s Prayer we have these words -

Give us day by day our daily bread

Jesus is teaching that we necessarily live one day at a time. We cannot now live tomorrow much less can we now live in next year. He grants us lives that are not like a lease on a house or apartment, for so many months or years. We are given one day, and then the next, and then the next, and so on. And so Jesus teaches his disciples  that they should ask for food sufficient for a day at a time.

Paul

I have learned in whatsoever state I am therewith to be content, I know how to be abased and how to abound…..

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment…

James

But maybe it is the book of James, the half-brother of our Lord, that comes nearest to Ecclesiastes in its tone and teaching -

Come now, you who say ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit – yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, If the Lord wills, we will live and do this and that’.  As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.’ (4. 13-16)

James is not condemning travel, or enterprise, or the making of money. Obviously not. All are legitimate. But what he is saying is that today does not guarantee tomorrow. The same teaching as in Jesus's teaching of the man who planned to build better and greater barns to store food in order to fund his retirement. The same theme as we find in extenso in Ecclesiastes.

What are all these passages teaching us? What is their connecting theme? We are to live one day at a time, present-ly. Besides this, we must

Leave God to order all thy ways,
And hope in Him whate'er betide,
Thou'lt find Him in the evil days
Thy all-sufficient strength and guide;
Who trusts in God's unchanging love,
Builds on the rock that nought can move.

So as a part of living our lives as Christians, Scripture in both the  Old and New Testaments bids us develop the discipline of oscillation, of not focusing on today at the expense of eternity, and in particular of not focusing on a future which we ourselves project, when we shall settle and relax in this ‘present evil  world’. Instead, in our thinking we should learn – as Paul had to learn it, he tells us - to oscillate between the present (which may be a present of being abased, or it may be one of abounding), and the eternal future to which in Christ we are destined. Of course we must plan for the future here, as far as we are able, but such planning is always conditional on what the Lord has in mind for us. But we should focus on what is guaranteed, first, the immediate present, and then  eternity to come. Other than having these two certainties, we do not know what tomorrow – any tomorrow - will bring.

So how do we define success in life?

Guidance

Finally, in all this, the matter of various horizons, the uncertainty of the future, the view of the life of the godly as beset with uncertainty and how we are to regard it and handle it, has importance for the topic of guidance. How does the Lord guide his people? Assuring us a Christian life with a beginning, a middle and an end,  with the end being the tying up of all loose ends? It is an interesting fact that the apostles, in giving much doctrinal and practical guidance, never once  (as far as I can see) gave guidance with respect to Christians’ futures. They are never asked, and never offer such guidance, as to what the will of God is for their lives and how they are to discern this.  This is disappointing for any one hoping, through prayer or Bible study or some other discipline,  to be handed a torch which has the magical power of shining a golden light illuminating the path leading from the present to an assured tomorrow, or to the next year, or the next decade of our lives.

We are to live in the present, but not for the present. This is earth is not our home, and we must never present the Gospel as if it is the key to earthly success, or the icing upon a consumer life-style. We look for a city which has foundations, whose maker and builder is God.

Jonathan, Bill and Melvin

Jonathan Chaplin

William Lane Craig

Melvin Tinker

It is a pity that Jonathan Chaplin,  the Director of KLICE, affiliated to the Tyndale Fellowship, a Christian evangelical research fellowship, should write a ‘Comment’ for KLICE which promotes his own view of Christians and ‘social action,’ as if this transformationalist and generally neo-Calvinist position (an ‘authentically biblical “social gospel"’) are self-evident truths, allowing him to dismiss alternative views. The link is -

http://tyndalehouse.createsend1.com/t/ViewEmail/r/F53D9A610819FF822540EF23F30FEDED/64B1BB004CEBE525C9C291422E3DE149

He says

I won’t attempt to restate the case that has been compellingly made over many decades by a succession of distinguished evangelical theologians, that a truly biblical faith calls the church to be fully engaged in all aspects of cultural, social and political life – that the ‘Gospel’ actually found on Jesus’ lips (see Luke 4: 18-19), unlike the one still too often found on ours, thrusts us out into the world to be servants of healing, justice and peace. Nor am I going to rehearse the tired old debate over the relative priorities of ‘evangelism’ and ‘social action’, the very framing of which obscures the fundamental point that ‘proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom’ – the only kind of evangelism Jesus engaged in – inescapably includes what we today call ‘social action’ as a constitutive element and not just a ‘consequence’ (still less an optional extra).

This looks remarkably like a call for the church unitedly to participate, as a fundamental matter of the gospel of Christ, in agreed programmes of social action. Its reference to the 'compelling' work by ‘distinguished evangelical theologians’ could be understood as an attempt to pre-empt debate. How crass to go against such a powerful trend! How could this trend possibly be gainsaid? He claims that there is no alternative, and that any discussion is nothing but words.  But of course there is plenty to be discussed, and it should be Jonathan's and KLICE's  task to foster research and scholarly discussion, and not to use the platform of the Fellowship to act as a ginger group for one particular view. 

Even if the case for such 'social action' has been  compellingly made over several decades may it not be the place of KLICE to promote the examination of other views, views that been held by some for centuries. Isn't that part of the role of research as distinct from that of a pressure group?Jonathan's statement entirely avoids mention, for example,  of the tradition of Augustine’s ‘two cities', or of the Reformers’ view of two kingdoms, or of later Dissent, who all stress Christ’s teaching that his kingdom, and gospel of the kingdom which he preached, is not of this world, and that Christians are pilgrims and strangers here.  The Two Kingdom's view draws a principled line between the gospel of saving grace, and the Christian as a citizen of this world. (For the Two Kingdom’s view see David VanDrunen’s Living in God’s Two Kingdoms. (Crossway, 2010)) Christians should in any case strive to be upright members of society. And Christians may, as a matter of Christian liberty,  be socially and politically active, or not, in ways that they see fit. But how they do this is their affair, and not part of the good news of the gospel. Alongside this activity is the truly diaconal service to the people of God  

The Tyndale Fellowship should through its affiliate KLICE and its various study groups, exist in order only to foster research into the biblical and theological roots of various historically-important views of the relation between the Christian, the church, and ‘social action’ and should not allow itself to be held captive to some particular political platform. The inevitable alternative is that the Fellowship or its affiliate would become ‘the SDP at prayer.’

Melvyn Tinker’s new book on Ecclesiastes will be out in March, published by the Evangelical Press. 

William Lane Craig and the blogger at Helm’s Deep had a short exchange of views on Calvinism and Molinism on Premier Radio’s ‘Unbelievable?' slot on 4 January, hosted by Justin Brierley. We did not get very far but you may be interested. Here are some links –

http://www.premier.org.uk/unbelievable

http://bit.ly/1cTg6T6

http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/molinism%20full%20show-1.mp3

The Message of Ecclesiastes - Living Presently

The book of Ecclesiastes, which hardly anyone reads nowadays, if they ever did, is part of the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, along with Psalms, Proverbs and the Song of Solomon. There are two main reasons why no-one or hardly anyone reads it, I think. One is that despite its inclusion in the body of wisdom literature the general tone of the book has appeared to many to be sceptical and cynical, despite its reputed author being Solomon. People remember the phrase ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’, the pessimism of the Preacher, and nothing much else. The second reason is that the book appears to have been ignored in the New Testament, for it seems that there is not a single quotation from Ecclesiastes to be found in it. So there seems to be no warrant for us as Christians to read and learn from it.

I don’t take this view. Being part of wisdom literature, which has the function of applying the Old Testament torah to every day, we should open the book expecting to gain an insight into the sort of wisdom that ought to be practiced by the people of God. The second reason is more personal. It has been said that of all the books of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes comes the nearest of all to providing a ‘philosophy’, not in the sense that it offers purely rational arguments for its conclusions, but because it offers general conclusions about what is and is not worthwhile in life, a ‘philosophy of life’. It draws these general conclusions about life from what the author has observed gong on around him. Insofar as this is true Ecclesiastes has for me, a philosopher, an added interest.

The outlook

The argument of Ecclesiastes is first to show, as a result of what the writer has observed, that various well-known and obvious ways of living lead only to what the writer calls ‘vanity’. What does the writer mean? A vanity in this sense is something that does not last, but is insubstantial or fleeting or disappointing or unfulfilling as the key to how we should live. Whatever it might at first promise, it turns out never to fulfil it. A vanity is a goal, but not an abiding goal. We might think of what the writer calls ‘vanities’ as the outcome of our planning and searching; if we place our hopes upon them they will invariably disappoint. However, this fact does not prevent fallen human beings from hankering after and seeking fulfilment in such ends – which are abundantly available in the Vanity Fair of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, another book not much read these days.

The writer considers several of these vanities, pleasure in eating and sex, the search for wisdom, planning, success of various kinds.  Each he closely (and in some cases repeatedly) inspects, and comes to the conclusion that they cannot sustain our lives from beginning to end. For none of them provides us with a big idea that invests a life with a satisfying goal. So the writer pronounces ‘they are vanities!’. For they do not deliver what they promise, and this for a variety of reasons: because of the nature of human life, that whatever our plans and ambitions we grow old and die. Nothing lasts. This leads the writer to describe and discuss a cyclical way of understanding life. We don’t appear to be going any where. One generation succeeds another without the first getting anywhere. Because of the behaviour of others who come after us, and we are forgotten. And because of those who presently get in the way of us realising our dreams. Wisdom and righteousness are not appropriately rewarded

The writer at work

Let us briefly see the writer work at these themes

Ch. 1. Circularity, no end of all that happens is apparent ‘under the sun’ life, and lives go round. There is change but not progress. As the sun rises and sets, so a generation of human settle succeed an earlier, leaving it behind, and forgotten. And human satisfaction is short-lived. 

Self-indulgence is not the answer, for the author has been in the position of denying himself nothing – Ch.2. And even his technological success (v.4) gives no lasting pleasure.

Further the pursuit of wisdom, the fear of God do not ‘pay’ – all things happen alike to all and to successive generations, so that there is no ‘progress’ nor degeneration. 2.12. All life is ‘a striving after the wind’. (2.17)

What about a life in pursuit of justice? Justice is mingled with unrightousness. And all (the just as well as the unjust) ‘go to one place’. We are from the dust and we shall return to it, just and unjust alike. People work motivated by envy and not because they gain satisfaction through the worthwhileness of what they are doing. (To ch.3 end))

See also

No permanence 2.18, ch.6

Injustice 3.16

Oppression ch.4

Disproportion ch. 9

So what should we do?

No big, satisfying projects ‘under the sun’. So - we should seek fulfilment in the here and now, in a certain kind of small ends that are provided for us and which we overlook or undervalue. ‘Gifts of God’ as the writer describes them. Here is what he says -

2.24 'There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. His also I saw is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment. For the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom and knowledge….'

3.22 

'So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what can be after him?'

5.18f 

'Behold what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot.  Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to rejoice in his lot and rejoice in his toil – this is the gift of God'.

8. 15 And I commend joy, for man has no good thing under the sun but to eat and drink and to be joyful , for this will go with him through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun.

9.7 'Go, eat your bread in joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved of what you do. Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on you head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you live all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because this is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you going'.

11. 6-8 'In the morning sow your seed, and at the evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good…..So if a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all, but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity'.

12.13 'The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgement, with every secret thing, whether good or evil'.

Present-ly

Are these simply further expressions of  secular cynicism? Not at all.  The writer draws word pictures of a life of present enjoyment of work and of everyday circumstances. Note the emphasis on joy, merriness, toil. But we don’t know what we do will prosper, or not. Such times are our ‘lot’, our ‘portion’. They are not permanent, but they are real. Framing such a life is the knowledge that we have a Creator, and that there is a judgment to come, and God is to be feared. So whatever the ‘message’ of the book,  it does not celebrate a secular outlook; the themes of Creation, eternity, judgement and the fear of God recur. As in this -

5. 1f. Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Be not rash with your mouth, or let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few.

While we are to live in the present, we are not to live for the present. We are to do our best at work, and enjoy the company of those we love. These are God’s gifts to us now. As young people our tendency is to live in the future, investing all our hopes and energies in it; as older people, we tend to live more and more in the past. But both these attitudes should be corrected, by the recognition that God has given us the present. We don’t know what’s around the corner.  In a way we should ‘live each day as if thy last’, and ‘for the great day thyself prepare’ as the old hymns put it.