Conclusions

            What are we to make of this mix of good and ill, meaning and vanity, action and ignorance, which the Teacher finds in life and work? Work is a “chasing after wind,” as the Teacher continually reminds us.  Like the wind, work is real and it has an impact while it lasts. It keeps us alive, and it offers opportunities for joy. Yet it is difficult to assess the full effect of our work, to foresee the unintended consequences for good and ill. And it is impossible to know what our work may lead to beyond the present moment. Does work amount to anything lasting, anything eternal, anything ultimately good? The Teacher says it is really not possible to know anything for certain under the sun.

            But we may have a different perspective. Unlike the Teacher, followers of Christ today see a concrete hope beyond the fallen world. For we are witnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of a new Teacher, Jesus, whose power did not die with the end of his days under the sun (Luke 23:44). He announces that “the kingdom of God has come to you” (Matthew 12:28). The world we live in now is in the process of being brought under Christ’s rule and redeemed by God. What the writer of Ecclesiastes did not know — could not know, as he was so keenly aware — is that God would send his Son not to condemn the world, but to restore the world to the way God intended it to be (John 3:17). The days of the fallen world under the sun are passing in favor of the kingdom of God on earth, where God’s people “need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light” (Revelation 22:5). Because of this, the world in which we live is not only the remnant of the fallen world, but also the vanguard of the kingdom of Christ, “coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:2).

            The work we do as followers of Christ therefore does — or at least could — have eternal value that could not have been visible to the Teacher. We work not only in the world under the sun, but also in the kingdom of God. This is not to engage in a misguided attempt to correct Ecclesiastes with a dose of the New Testament. Rather, it is to appreciate Ecclesiastes as God’s gift to us as it stands. For we, too, live daily life under much the same conditions the Teacher did. As Paul reminds us, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22–23). We groan under the same weight the Teacher did because we are still waiting for the fulfillment of God’s kingdom on earth.

            Ecclesiastes, then, offers two insights unmatched elsewhere in scripture: 1) an unvarnished account of work under the conditions of the Fall; and 2) a witness of hope in the darkest circumstances of work.