Demotivational Scripture
August 25, 2015 — Ecclesiastes 1:1–4
The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
I have been accused of being too negative. As someone who tends to live in the world of thoughts and ideas, sometimes it can seem like I am too zoned out to enjoy the small moments of life and, consequently, to be living in the joy of the Lord.
Many of the events that come across my news feed tend to well up in me a level of frustration, sadness, and sometimes despair because things are not as they should be. Now, sometimes the motivations for these negative emotions are due to the fact that I have taken my eyes off of the Lord, and have set them on my own abilities, or on the abilities of my countrymen or the abilities of the church. But more often than not, I am cognitively aware of God’s faithfulness, and His future plan, and am yet led to what I like to call ecclesiastical angst.
There is a prevalent belief in Christianity that the victorious life is just another way of saying that if you are in Christ everything is going to be amazing. This belief will always lead to dissatisfaction and the desire to bounce around to the next spiritually energizing thing. It is true, that the life of the believer isn’t one of self flagellation, but we tend to overlook some very miserable lives when we speak of the victorious one.
Take Jesus, Paul, Peter, John, Daniel, David, ect. and you will see lives that are lived faithfully, and yet lived with brokenness at every step. While they were able to live a life in the victory of God, they still faced persecution, suffering, and pain. That is why we need books like Ecclesiastes. It helps us to balance our thought life.
Sometimes we need to be reminded that the logical ends of our thinking will often lead to the hollow realities around us. It is right and good that in our Scripture are verses that tell us that when you really think about it, everything that we do on earth is pretty much pointless. We are taught that nothing really matters, and that we aren’t special. The beautiful thing is that the meaninglessness of reality ought not to lead the Christian to the philosophical reasoning of nihilism, but rather the backwards thinking of the gospel.
When nothing matters — when everything is meaningless, we need not dwell on what our senses teach us, we are freed to live a life of faith rather than a life of sight.
Often what I see when people are telling me to be more joyful is that they are asking me to reject the news around me. “You should just pray more,” or “you just need to read your Bible and sing” are effective ways to ignore what is going around you and create a world that is a little less crappy. It is the same logic that tells us to not hang out with a bad crowd so that our morals won’t be corrupted. In the end trying to grow the false fruit of self joyfulness is just another form of asceticism.
Rather than covering our eyes and ears to the things of this world, we ought to call them what they really are: vain meaninglessness. In the end it will take us away from despairing negativity, and away from shallow happiness to a serious joy that allows for us to walk by faith.
