The Search for Significance

Introduction

We all want to matter. We want to think that our life matters. But how does it?

“What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?” sang Cilla Black. Many people who have no belief in God would say, “Of course not! Our life matters; it matters to us and to others.” But does it? That is the question which Qoheleth pursues now, as he looks for meaning in life under the sun, that is, life without God. So, now the focus sharpens. We turn from impressions to exploring whatever the world can offer to a man of unlimited genius and unlimited wealth.

And so Qoheleth leads us down the dark corridors of life’s dead ends. He faces us with the consequences of a life that has no time for God. He exposes the depressing realities of life under the sun to destroy our happiest illusions and so bring us, like the prodigal son in Jesus’ parable, to our senses - to turn us from a godless way of life, to a life of meaning in relationship with God.

With his usual devastating frankness Qoheleth is quick to tell us the worst. His search has come to nothing. To spare us any disappointment from building up our hopes, he warns us of the outcome before he takes us on his journey; finally he will share with us the conclusions he has reached. In looking for meaning in life under the sun, leaving God out of the frame, Qoheleth tested pleasure, personal achievement and wisdom and knowledge.

Pleasure and Achievements

First he plunges into pleasure - to see what it as a lifestyle implies, and what it does to a person. Here we are brought very near to our own times with the modern cult of the irrational in its various forms, from naturalism down to the drug addict’s craving for altered states of consciousness. It is a world where nothing is as it seems. Even the laughter that goes with this way of life must be cynical and destructive. And that is not far from our own black comedy and sick humour.

Qoheleth notes at once the paradox of pleasure, that the more you hunt for pleasure, the less of it you find. In any case, he is looking for something beyond pleasure and through it, for this is more than simple indulgence. It is a deliberate flight from reason, to try to get at some secret of life to which reason may be a block. But wine, women and song were, in the end, unable to give meaning to life.

As if he had overreacted in turning to life’s futile pleasures, Qoheleth now gives himself to the joys of creativity. He bends his energies to a project worthy of his great gifts, his grasp of skills and sciences, and his organisational ability. He creates a little world within a world: a secular Garden of Eden, full of delights, with no forbidden fruits.

Yet, in the end, what has it yielded? A less exacting mind than Qoheleth’s would have found a great deal to report with satisfaction. The achievements had been brilliant. On the material level, he had been successful. If ‘a thing of beauty is a joy for ever’, Qoheleth had not searched in vain for what was timeless and absolute. That is the way we tend to think. But Qoheleth will have none of it. To call such things eternal is no more than words, and nothing perishable will satisfy him. As he said, it was like trying to catch the wind: he realised that it didn’t mean a thing.

Not long ago a university professor made a similar discovery. He had experienced an occasional but profound sense of melancholy. He first thought it might have to do with having moved to a new job in a new town. But that was not it. The real problem was the dawning realisation that someday he would die. Or worse: within a few years after his death only a handful of people would know or care that he was ever here. And there was nothing he could do about it.

He began to realise that much of what had occupied him had been an attempt to defeat insignificance, anonymity, and death. But his efforts would not defeat death or oblivion.

He wrote, “I had worked hard. Like many others, I burned the candle at both ends to win that elusive prize. But now, with the hope of professional immortality faded, I see the futility of that quest and of the life that it produces. Nothing but frustration lies down that road. Nothing but profoundly distorted priorities. To continue along that path is to miss this life completely,” he concluded.

So, one day facing the inevitable, he gave up the hope of obtaining immortality through his achievements. He gave up the fight; he let it go. he said, “I acknowledge that I will die in a short number of years, and few will remember me. Congratulations, Death. You win.”

There was no future down that road. Unfortunately many people still look for meaning in their work. That is why unemployment is so traumatic for many people. Their personal worth and self-esteem is all tied up in their work. Take that away and they feel they have been robbed of their worth. That is not just sad; it is tragic. They have missed the meaning of life.

But, if pleasure and work were blind alleys in Qoheleth’s search for significance, then perhaps wisdom and knowledge might provide the answer.

The bare comparison of wisdom and folly is simple enough, but the final assessment is shattering. What is the ultimate worth of wisdom, if, in the end, none of us will be around to exercise it, let alone to value it?

The fact of death brings Qoheleth’s search to a sudden stop. This is why purely human achievements which we call lasting are nothing of the kind. If one fate comes to all, and that fate is extinction, it robs every person of his dignity and every project of its point.

And we can see the truth of that in the world about us. In global terms, the advance of human knowledge and technological achievement has not produced a new age of perfect sweetness and light. Technology has not delivered the goods it once promised. Knowledge in and of itself has not produced heaven on earth under the sun! And it never will! It’s a dead end!

God provides a point

And, if death is the end of the road, then the choices that we once thought were significant will be brushed aside as ultimately irrelevant.

If death is where it all ends, it makes nonsense of the journey. Life is little different from the pirate’s walk down the plank. You call that meaning? Death laughs at all the moments of our lives. It curses life and casts its shadow over all our work. We toil away in order to sustain our life just for its extinction! Where is the sense in that? And where is there any comfort, when I am annihilated into atomised oblivion, in the fruit of my labours going to another? There is no satisfaction for those who have ceased to exist. An aching emptiness claws at the heart. The last resting place of the godless mind is the aching anticlimax of absolute non-being.

Death is the wall that modern under-the-sun godless materialism cannot climb. Even the memory of those who have died perishes with the death of those who knew them personally. Beethoven may be said to live on in his music, but the truth is that we know the music, not the man. The names and deeds of the famous and notorious remain in the written records and the oral traditions of mankind. But outside these selective memorials, the good and the bad, the foolish and the wise, perish into anonymity. Dust they were and to dust they returned!

No wonder Qoheleth says, “So I hated life.” And many of modern youth, Generation X, would agree with him. If there is a lie at the centre of existence and nonsense at the end of it, who has the heart to make anything of it? If, as we might put it, every card in our hand will be trumped, does it matter how we play? Why treat a king with more respect than a knave?

But is life itself just a dead end? Are all our efforts along the way no more than polishing brass on a sinking ship? If, in the words of the rock group, The Grateful Dead, we are “going to hell in a bucket,” shouldn’t we be “enjoying the ride on the way”? Should we not just say in the words of 1st Corinthians 15:32, “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”?

Life under the sun is pointless. The point is that any search for meaning apart from God and His revealed will is bound to be frustrating - trying to catch the wind - simply because it has the wrong starting point.

In fact, the great emphasis today on self is a by-product of the loss of our self-identity as persons made in the image of God. At one level, selfishness has always been the core problem this side of the Fall. You could argue that war, hate, slavery, lust, covetousness, false religion and much more are inextricably entangled with a focus on self.

We tend to think of ourselves as being at the centre of the universe. That is nothing new, but it is only now, at the end of the twentieth century, that self-centredness has been turned into a virtue; we promote assertiveness training, we urge people to do it their way regardless of others. The older notions of self-denial and service to others have been drowned in a deluge of selfishness.

There is a biting irony here; it was made clear by Qoheleth over two thousand years ago. And his conclusion could be the epitaph of modern godless humanism: it is absolutely pointless! There is, finally, only one way out of mankind’s despair: a return to the God-centred universe in which he was reared.

So, why not receive life for what it is? Why not accept it as a blessing from God? After all, life itself is a marvellous thing. Does it not look to you as something designed to be good and do good? That’s how God made it, as Genesis 2:9 tells us. The fundamental fact is that we do respond to good things with enjoyment. The compulsive worker, overloading his days with toil and his nights with worry, has missed the simple joys that God is holding out to him. In themselves, and rightly used, the basic things of life are sweet and good. What spoils them is our selfish desire to get more out of them than they can give.

Life is meant to be satisfying! It is meant to be received with joy, but receiving life as a gift is impossible without receiving the Giver. This is the condition of true fulfilment, according to Qoheleth.

Conclusion

It is a matter of “no God, no point!” There is in this a very positive message for those can feel the icy hand of hopelessness closing in on their lives. Through a living faith in Jesus Christ, God’s Son, there can be joy in both the simplest and most complex of life’s experiences. But it can only be had in Jesus Christ, the only mediator between God and man, who paid for all the selfishness and sins of all His people, as their substitute. In His sufferings and death, He despised the shame and satisfied the perfect justice of God. God’s love secured the satisfaction of His own justice in sending His son to die for other people’s sins. So, the crucial point to life for men and women is how we respond to Jesus Christ. God calls us to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ that we might be saved - saved from the pointlessness of a godless life and a godless eternity.