‘Life without God is a Vapour’ (Eccles. 1:1-11)

One of the saddest things in the life of a church is to watch young people walk away from the faith and seek their meaning and pleasure elsewhere.  Why do they do it?  Often, they do it because they somehow believe that Christianity sucks the joy out of living.  Of course, the opposite is true.  

Ecclesiastes tells us that their search for a fulfilled life apart from God will end up in disaster.  They might experience some immediate thrills, but they will not experience what their soul was designed to savour.  

In the fourth century a woman called Monica prayed for her son, Augustine.  Augustine sought his pleasure in sex and sensuality.  He is reported to have prayed, ‘Lord, make me sexually pure, but not yet.’  Then God answered Monica’s prayers and stepped into Augustine’s life.  He later opened his spiritual autobiography saying, ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.’  Augustine became a Christian leader who knew the goodness of a life of intimacy with God.  He once preached: ‘Love God and do as you please,’ for he knew that when we love and enjoy God, we will find our greatest joy is doing what God commands.

Life without God is a vapour (1:1-2)

These are the words of ‘the teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem’ (1).  I don’t see any reason not to see them as the words of King Solomon.  

The word translated ‘teacher’ refers to one who gathers or assembles, in particular gathering people together for the worship of God.  So, Solomon is gathering the people of God together to teach them what he has learned from his vain attempt to live without God.

‘Meaningless, meaningless!” says the teacher, “Utterly meaningless!  Everything is meaningless!” (2).  The word translated ‘meaningless’ refers to a breath or vapour.  Life is like a puff of smoke coming off a fire, the vapour of breath that can be seen for an instant on a cold day or the vanishing steam rising from a boiling kettle.  Part of the meaningless of life is that it is so brief.  James asks, ‘what is your life?  You are a mist that appears for a while and then vanishes’ (James 4:14).

However, Solomon is here describing the meaninglessness of life ‘under the sun’.  This phrase ‘under the sun’ is repeated twenty-nine times in this book.  ‘Under the sun’ refers to human life lived apart from God.  This is what life is like when we view things from a merely human perspective (from under the sun), without ever lifting our eyes to see the beauty of life lived with the God of the heavens.  Ecclesiastes is not so much about the meaningless of life, but the meaningless of life without God.  The great evangelist, John Wesley, wrote about this book saying that it proved, ‘the grand truth that there is no happiness out of God.’ 

There is nothing to be gained from life without God (3-11)

‘What do people gain from all their labours at which they toil under the sun?’ (3).  This question will come up a couple more times in this book.  What will we have to show at the end of our life?  We end up with precious little for all the effort we put into life.  We leave everything we own behind when we pass from this life and we will soon be forgotten.

Life is fleeting.  ‘Generations come, and generations go, but the earth remains for ever’ (4).  Life is wearisome.  Like the sun rising and setting, only to rise and set again the next day.  Like the wind blowing round and round.  Like the steams flowing into the never filling sea.  ‘All things are wearisome; more than one can say’ (8a).  Life leaves us restless.  Even in our information age ‘the eye never gets enough of seeing, nor the ear of hearing’ (8b).  After all our entertainment, we still end up empty.

Despite all our advances in technology, there is a sense in which things never change.  ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’  ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’ (9).  New forms of entertainment but the same boredom.  New inventions that are just variations of the old inventions.  

Worst of all, it will not be long until no one remembers us.  ‘No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them’ (11).  Our vapour will vanish, and there will be nothing left to even remind people who we were.  Even if you get your name on a plague or a mention in a book, that plaque won’t be able to describe the real you and the book will soon be out of print.

Conclusion: ‘Live life to the full’

Finally, before you start to get too depressed, remember that Solomon has been describing life ‘under the sun’.  He is taking about life lived without God.  But there is a God above the sun.  There is a God of the heavens and knowing him changes everything.  Jesus lived, died and rose again so that we could live our life in relationship with a heavenly Father.  Jesus said that he came that we could experience life in all its fullness (John 10:10).  Your life does not have to be meaningless!  You can have a meaning that will last for all eternity!

See how God changes the picture.  

Life is a vapour without God.  It’s short and meaningless, without God.  Yet Jesus offers us life that is eternal in both joy and duration.  God gives us meaning.  Our identity is now as his sons and daughters, his ambassadors and heirs, and he has prepared works in advance for us to do.  When our vapour is extinguished, we shall pass on to something more substantial and real.  The Christian knows that ‘the best is yet to be.’

What is to be gained in life?  Without God nature testifies to meaningless repetition and cycles of sameness.  With God, nature speaks of glory.  ‘The heavens declare the glory of the Lord, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork’ (Psalm 19:1).  ‘From the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, the Lord’s name is to be praised’ (113:3).  We will be forgotten when we are gone, but God will never forget us.  He says, ‘Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child that she has borne?  Though she may forget, I will not forget you’ (Isaiah 49:15),

When I speak to young people who have walked away from the faith, I ask them when they were happiest.  They generally tell me it was when they were walking close to God.  Sometimes they are aware of their own foolishness!  Leave Christ out of the picture, and the picture has no colour. 

So, let’s show those who are wondering away from God their foolishness by ‘enjoying all things in Christ and enjoying Christ in all things’ (Charles Simeon).  Let’s speak of the peace of sins forgiven.  Let’s enjoy lives with purpose.  Let’s be content to trust the God who knows what is best for his children.  Let’s rest secure in his love.  Let’s focus on a future that ‘no eye has seen, no ear has heard, or no mind has conceived’, that awaits all those who love him (1 Corinthians 2:9).