Vanity

All is vanity. So begins one of my favorite books of the Old Testament. The reason I love this book, Ecclesiastes, is the it gets to the heart of existence. Everything is useless, it is all mere vanity, a chasing after the wind.
What does man get for all his toil? Nothing. In the end we will all die and all the work we have done will have been for nothing.
The sun rises and goes down and rises, the winds blow on and on. It is endless, but my days are numbered, they will end.
All streams run into the sea, but the sea is never full.
All things are full of weariness.
The eye is never satisfied with seeing, the ear never fulfilled in its hearing. We will never find anything here to satisfy us. There is always this hunger for more and more in the world.
There is nothing new under the sun. Everything has been done before and will be done again.
Everything will be forgotten. Things in the past already have been, and the future will look on these days now and remember nothing of them, they will have been as nothing, but it will not be new.
Wisdom and knowledge, they are mere vanity, they increase sorrows.
This book starts off outlining these things. This seems depressing. Perhaps it truly is, and now you know why I love it. But the thing is, this whole book outlines a life full of everything men seek after. Solomon, who is attributed the authorship of the book, lived a life most would envy. He had great wisdom, answers to all that people would ask. He did great wonders. He had power, wealth, women, and whatever else he desired. But in the end he looked back and saw the truth, that all he had done, all he had sought, it was all worthless, it was all vanity, a chasing after the wind.
Think of the wind, it would be foolish to chase it. Yet this is what we do every day. We chase after the wind. What would be gained even if we could follow the wind to where it ends? Nothing. It would be useless. The wind is useless to us and the chasing of said uselessness if more foolish. This is to say that we waste our days endeavoring for something we never needed in the first place. All we are is foolish people chasing vanity.
Now, Solomon spends a good portion of the book dealing with all of this. And I will admit it gets confusing at times, but I enjoy this book and so I am letting it direct my reading and writing for the next little while. I am not sure if anything remotely of value will come of it. But of course it ends with the command to fear God and keep His commands, this is the whole duty of man. And that is the only thing that has any meaning. That is why I like the book so much.

But in this first bit I se the futility of a life lived apart from Christ. And while I try to center my life on Christ in all that I do, I find too often the wind distracts me and I chase after it. In my mind I somehow imagine that I have found some magic secret, something new under the sun, if you will, and in the end it is meaningless vanity. The other verse that is dominating my life lately is Matthew 6:33: "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness." That verse and this book go together perfect in my mind. Because whatever else we seek is meaningless. God is the whole meaning of my being here. And that comforts me so much.