Ecclesiastes 12
New International Version (NIV)
Remember your Creator
in the days of your youth,
before the days of trouble come
and the years approach when you will say,
“I find no pleasure in them”—
2 before the sun and the light
and the moon and the stars grow dark,
and the clouds return after the rain;
3 when the keepers of the house tremble,
and the strong men stoop,
when the grinders cease because they are few,
and those looking through the windows grow dim;
4 when the doors to the street are closed
and the sound of grinding fades;
when people rise up at the sound of birds,
but all their songs grow faint;
5 when people are afraid of heights
and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms
and the grasshopper drags itself along
and desire no longer is stirred.
Then people go to their eternal home
and mourners go about the streets.
6 Remember him—before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
7 and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
8 “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.
“Everything is meaningless!”
The Conclusion of the Matter
9 Not only was the Teacher wise, but he also imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. 10 The Teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true.11 The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one shepherd.
12 Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them.Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.13 Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the duty of all mankind.
14 For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.
Footnotes:
- Ecclesiastes 12:8 Or the leader of the assembly; also in verses 9 and 10
- Ecclesiastes 12:11 Or Shepherd
THEOLOGY is the old bugaboo that leads an aged person to falsely assume that his youth in the world and at church, however blessed, was misspent on such vagaries as becoming rich, finding a spouse, settling into a life of comfortable domesticity, and overall, feeling a sense of contentment or pride at his or her accomplishments.
Under inner pressures to remember the saints one has known during the course of one’s lifetime who have had a direct impact on one’s own spiritual developments, it is difficult, because most of these lights have long since burned out in the gray mists of the past. To overcome such difficulties, one must make the attempt to get back to a former lifestyle, which is best organized in the Old Testament of the Bible, and its 66 books, one of which is Ecclesiastes, highlighting the melancholic preacher who deems that all is vain and meaningless. The concluding chapter to this book gives the response to this viewpoint, for all those who pursue the challenge of the bone weariness of studying and writing books to resolve problems of theology, rather than to simply enjoy the virtue and strength of youth that is the chief end of man. Stated in this way, life takes on the cast of a burden rather than a celebratory victory stance for those who ignore wise counsels.
In undertaking this essay, I too must admit the difficulty of it all and expect the weariness that is promised to all who pursue this wisdom, but do so gladly, in the foreknowledge that it is well worth the cost of admission, from my joy in sharing fellowship with the saints in the assembly of God’s kingdom upon earth, who encouraged me when I had such little faith of my own to stand on.
I recall the saints because they taught me to “Fear God and to keep his commandments.”
The Biblical character of Solomon was my early teacher in the church. I especially fell in love with the wisdom writings in the Bible as a child, represented by the collection of proverbial saying, not all written by, but collected by Solomon from the tower of wisdom in the ancient world. Through these writings I developed a kingly sense for judging good from evil. At times, this judgmental spirit has caused me grave problems in equating other denominations of Christians with cults, and members of these organizations to be persons to steer clear of. This is where your theology can lead you to place the cart in front of the donkey, so to speak. One’s progress in spiritual matters is therefore stymied, and never given the proper expression of one’s inner intentions.
A Christian should be a person of faith. He or she should give expression to this faith in love, which the apostle Paul in the New Testament admits is “the most important thing in life.’’
Being a person of faith involves the resolve to follow Christ in loving reverence to God, obeying his commandments in regards to water baptism and in regularly observing the Lord’s supper, the sacraments of the church.
If one’s life on earth is to be spent on more profitable ends than to merely follow the epicurean urge to “eat, drink and be merry”, then joining with some kind of fellowship of believers in the Way, is an absolute necessity. How else could one experience and practice the teachings and commandments one finds recorded within the holy scriptures?
I know I am now sounding more like an old-time prophet rather than a wise old serpent of expedience who has stumbled upon the secret to the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of God, who would like to share this knowledge with others. Although reading the Bible narratives of faith, attending church get-togethers, and performing charitable works towards one’s fellows are all good callings, and signs of the spirit at work, there has to be something more to it, that makes it all fit together and make sense to even the dullest mind, in order to keep us from spinning our wheels and remaining in one spot for too long.
As time went by, I began the study of one theological perspective after another, from Augustine to Luther, the so-called church fathers, and even further into the philosophical creations of man, but everything kind of left me with a hollow feeling, that these efforts rarely satisfied my spiritual longing and hunger for meaning.
I do not consider myself any kind of a slouch in understanding complex trains of thought in history. As I said previously, I considered myself as one of the elect, an expert on both worldly knowledge and Christian ethics. As such, I fully endorsed Augustine’s credo of the Evangel, which is to “Believe, in order that you may understand.” I consider this to be the first rule of action for any serious undertaking of the spirit. In Augustine, we find the expression of simple faith that can confidently make the statement that, “I am, therefore God is.”
Thus preceded in time by Augustine, Descarte’s own version of the truth should have been suspect, but few have noticed that his dictum, “I think, therefore I am”, places a heavy burden on the intellect, and removes the solid basis for faith-building uneasiness, or existential dread, fear and loathing, that Augustine would have found invigorating in his search for communion with more divine shafts of light.
What happened in modern philosophy is that God became an object of, rather than a subject of, faith. The “I” of Cartesian logic put an emphasis on the intuitive nature of knowledge, and thus reduced the reliance on more objective forms of testing the spirits to see if they are true or not. If I can think it myself, then it must be so, is perhaps Descarte’s transcendental meaning of consciousness rather than as a means of discovering outer resources to locate God’s whereabouts. Left to himself, the subject may fail in his object to know God more intimately.
By opening the door to subjective reason, the secular philosophies were given wider expression of freedom within my own lifetime. Do not misunderstood what my intentions are here, in bringing this fact up. I am not endeavoring to endorse conservative views on religion, typically referred to as a fundamentalist stance, but rather following Christ’s command to “Judge not, unless you be judged.”
Worldly entertainments, chemical and substance abuse, pollutions of the environment, mass productions of sinful activities such as the killings and maimings committed in wars, and the general injustices of prison and fines that governments extol out on their citizens to insure conformity, are symptoms of and not the cause of the world’s evils. If there is a devil, he is very much in control of person’s minds, causing them to fall into bad behaviors and distresses that lead to destruction and hell. I would be a canting hypocrite, if I claimed special righteousness from the rest of humanity that excludes me from the consequences of a normal human life in the modern world.
And, yet, I strongly believe, through my studies of God’s Word, that there is an author of the secular, who spoke the commandment through Moses, “Thou shalt have no other gods beside me.” I frankly do not understand other Christians who do not have this understanding of the righteousness of God above the righteousness of man. Over and over again, in the scriptures, I find constant reminders that God is not interested in my own hypocritical, holier than thou attitudes, but prefers a secular outlook that reaches out to others, who may benefit from my caring offer of a cool drink of water in a thirsty world, drunk already on the lies bandied about on the spiritual life.
One of these lies is the philosophical variant of The Middle Way, or Existentialism. For the Christian, there is no middle way. Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man comes to the Father but by me.”
Philosophers, like Augustine, and reformers of the church, like Luther, were followers of the one Way. They put Christ above their own self-deceptions.
Taking up the cross of Christ is quite different from taking up the banner of self. Learning the history of philosophy can free us from false ideas about who we are, and where we come from. A liberal education is not a luxury, but a necessity to cure most individuals of their conservative tendencies towards wars of conviction between sects of Christians, and with unbelievers.
Let me now take a short stroll through time and the history of ideas to enlighten those who have not been so educated as I have been in regards to these matters. Philosophy begins in ancient Greece, not in Rome, and not with the Pope.
The ancient world of the Near East, including the Greeks, and the Egyptians (and other semitic peoples) in that region of the globe that we find in the Biblical literature, had developed a mythical outlook that populated their ideas of earth with gods and heroes. The contemporary mindset may find this earlier existence, where everything was reversed, hard to comprehend. In this outlook, nature was not considered the real reality, but the forces behind the scenes, of the gods and mythical legends, were.
This mental stream of consciousness was interrupted by the philosophical concept that ‘all is one’.
When philosophy in ancient Greece freed the human mind from age-old misperceptions about the natural processes and day-to-day phenomenom that constitute real life, science was then made possible and allowed to take free flight from the provinces of the gods on Mount Olympus, the state religion of the time, as well as from the more personal gods of private initiation into, the so-called Orphic ones. The tolerance for other gods was astounding in these earlier times, where many gods existed side by side, with no apparent repercussions for the followers of not finding the one, true god who is supreme among the gods. It was more of a personal choice, or permission, to invite one god to take possession of your destiny on earth.
The cost of maintaining beliefs in supernatural myths was not cheap. Temples and shrines had to be constructed and kept up to date in order to attract adherents. Priests and soothsayers of the gods had to be supported also, in order to utter the words of edicts and justice served out by the gods to humans, from up above or down below the surface of life.
It has been theorized that the epic poets were actually the original creators of the concept of the gods. The poet and theologian Homer of the Greeks became a spokesperson for these stories about how the gods came to be, and the adventures that happened to the heroes. This aristocratic claim to a heroic age is probably Homer’s own contribution to the myths that pre-existed before his time.
By Plato’s time, the gods were already in decline, and he rightly accuses Homer of being false to the true history of the human race, which, more likely than not, involved the acts of barbarism, like the Cyclops, and human sacrifices, rather than the heroic deeds of a bygone age meant to spur future generations to aspire to realms of greatness and glory.
It is hard to say if Alexander would have conquered much of anything without the heroic inspiration of Homer, but one cannot say the same thing about Alexander himself, who was all-too-human, and wasted away while still young from dissipation. The philosopher who had tutored the young general, found himself an exile of Greece. Aristotle’s philosophy can be summed up as, “To admire or marvel at nothing.”
While in this sad state of affairs, that the world was suddenly placed, philosophy passed from the ancient to the Christian era, with stoicism and cynicism becoming the new and deflated currency of intellectual barter. It required Francis Bacon’s role as a reconstructor, during the Renaissance period of history, to restore the philosophical integrity that had been lost, while constructing a new atmosphere for the advancement of learning. This resulted in a freedom from the superstitious beliefs that had been gathering during the intervening age of faith. Augustine’s conversion to the Christian faith and search for inner light had ended in Constantine’s bloodshed in the name of Christ that centered faith in political might and power rather than in its rightful place within the human heart.
To fully appreciate the change that occurred in the modern world, one must see that Bacon’s idea for the advancement of learning, also complemented the Protestant desire for the eventual conversion of the world to Protestantism. The existing Pope was decried by the new religion, in hopes of a better thing to replace him, and that thing ultimately became the science which promised to bring about the eventual perfection of mankind through natural procurement, if one follows the logic here.
Both John Milton and Erasmus, representatives of the Christian humanists, contested these notions, with a focus upon the sovereignty and dignity of the human under God, and only under God.
The American Revolution then came upon the scene, with a new slant on the old debate between human rights and godly submission. It stated the cause in this way, “Man is endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights, and these include the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Oddly these rights are never mentioned outright in the Bible, but are the products of human invention, the same humans who ate of the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, offered to them by a creature of guile.
God the Father had proclaimed, “Thou shalt not eat.” Mankind responded by announcing, “I shall eat and know of myself whether the fruit is good or evil.” For this sin against the Creator, came freedom and human will. All Americans, like Adam and Eve, succumbed to the propaganda of an elite citizenship, such as Homer’s myth, and ascribed it to originating from God himself, but it was actually only the same old argument that has been told in different guises throughout history.
One CANNOT serve God and Mammon, but, as Kenneth Clarke diagnosed in the final episode of his series of programs broadcast on public television titled “Civilization”, representing a survey of culture and art through the ages, it is apparent that the current generation is caught in the struggle of heroic materialism, returning the chicken back to the egg from which it broke.
I have attempted to describe this breaking of the egg that split into two distinct camps of opposing metaphysics, the idealists and the materialists of classical philosophy.
The idealists, I imagine, sought for the ideal in the real, whereas the materialists were far more interested in pursuing a romantic vision of the real in the ideal. In doing so, the Idealist brings heaven down to earth, to indwell idealized forms. Likewise, the Materialist lifts earthly realities heavenward, favoring the mundane even above things considered precious such as pearls or gold. The human mind can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven, Milton had poeticized within his Paradise Lost, and this brilliantly sums up the classical world of ideas.
In between these views, the Existentialist looks foremost for the birthrights of freedom, so as not to be controlled or influenced by conformity to principles or entities outside oneself, but to be self-ruled and self-governed.
The road to spiritual ruin is built upon such freedoms as deny the reality of God’s rights to subordinate the human will to greater ends, namely the adoption of Christ as Lordship, to give us an example of the truly human, self-abregating and God-revering, to reveal the truly divine.
I do not expect to convince anyone to be convinced by the recitation of the lessons of philosophical study, which is a man-made discipline, but advocate the scriptures themselves as the divine means of Providence to restore humans from their fall from grace into the full dignity and sovereignty of sonship, and peace with God.
I agree with Robert Webber, who felt that the ancient future faith of the narrative stories of the Bible, involving creation, incarnation and recreation, can give meaning to the human story. It is your story as well as my story. It allows us to become children of God.
This admission brings me full circle, from the student going out from the leader of the assembly, the Teacher, to the one practicing the way of the cross, the Christ disciple or Christian. In Genesis through Revelation, I find elements of wisdom to complete my journeys of faith that started out by reverencing the One who has given eternal life to those who fear and love Him.
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