What is your favorite book of the Bible? Have you thought about it? Have you read enough of the Bible to have a favorite? If not, why not? What are you waiting for? It only takes a few minutes a day.
The first time I read Ecclesiastes, I had just spent the hardest year of my life trying to transform myself from a D-student to an A-student. I had never bothered to study before, never made any organized attempt at anything. My goal had been to simply get by while doing as little as possible. When I realized God was calling me to address my academics—a serious and sober calling that I knew came from Him—I worked crazy hours, enduring a level of boredom so painful I could hardly believe it. I got through it, and grew from it, I brought my grades way up, and one day that summer I sat down to read Ecclesiastes….
A second part of the story was that I had spent so much of childhood discouraged and depressed, partly because of my bad grades and a resulting sense of hopelessness about the future, and partly because of things I saw every day at the “Criminal Minds” high school I was attending. Having improved my grades and grown in Christ, I was hopeful for the first time. But despair and even depression were things I could easily remember.
Then I read Solomon’s words about the endlessness of books and the meaninglessness of too much studying and the benefits of being able to have fun once in a while and to lighten up, and the value of “eating and drinking and enjoying life and telling oneself that one’s labor is good,” and I found a message of grace and hope that was exactly what I needed.
I love the Bible. I try to read through it every year. But after all these years, Ecclesiastes remains my favorite book. And this after even my own favorite preacher nearly dismissed the book each time he mentioned it. To an eternal optimist like him, the book was filled with negative messages based only on Solomon’s mistakes. But if you have faced hard realities, if depression or even suicide seems rational, few books in the Bible can speak to your hurt more perfectly than Ecclesiastes. And if you have worked your fingers to the bone in an effort to achieve anything—particularly if that thing is academic or bookish—only Ecclesiastes seems to understand that pain and to put it into perspective.
(Everyone says “readers are leaders,” and on that subject, good students are not allowed to entertain doubts. Only the writer of Ecclesiastes will admit that a lifetime of studying and books can be painful and boring and sometimes pointless, that researchers and professors sometimes spend years hunting for needles in haystacks and go to their graves disappointed.)
I LOVE Ecclesiastes. It has changed my life and given me hope and realism and grace in the face of some of the hardest truths of life.
And they are truths. The words of the Teacher—that life is futile and repetitive, that nothing is new, that study can feel or be fruitless, that grief can seem endless, and that riches and success do not satisfy—those are TRUTHS that depressed “losers” understand intuitively and unsatisfied “winners” understand from experience. They are TRUE.
Everything else in the Bible is also true of course, the hope and the light and the glory and the grace. But for hurting and lost people, sometimes nothing speaks more deeply or personally than the words of the Teacher. And I find the words of the two characters in Ecclesiastes, the Teacher and the Narrator, to be entirely consistent. Both are true, and both point the reader to the grace found only in a God who makes a way where there seems to be no way, who sends His Son for us, and who gives us hope with each new sunrise and a good meal and a hard day’s work.
I love Ecclesiastes.
—Ask God to increase your love for His Word, to make you interested, to make you passionate about it, to give you the self-discipline to read it every day, and the humility to submit your heart and life and beliefs to His Word.
ΑΩ
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