Passage: Ecclesiastes 1:1-2
The Big Idea
Ecclesiastes is designed to make you uncomfortable. It gives voice to the thirst every human feels and refuses to offer cheap answers. It shows us how grim life is without redemption, so that we will hunger for the One who is greater than Solomon.
A Book That Bothers Us
For a long time Ecclesiastes didn’t connect with me. A friend who loved this book kept challenging me to look deeper. So I did, and it changed me.
Here’s the thing: I wasn’t wrong about how it made me feel. It is supposed to unsettle us. It interrogates things in our lives we would rather not look at, just like Jesus does. If Solomon doesn’t make you uncomfortable, you’re not really listening.
A Greater Than Solomon
Jesus called Himself greater than Solomon (Matthew 12:42). Solomon was wise; Jesus is wiser. Solomon challenges the way we see life; Jesus does it perfectly. Solomon is one more shadow pointing to Christ, and Jesus is the solution to every problem Solomon names.
Salt That Makes You Thirsty
This book is like salt. It makes you thirsty. And everyone is already thirsty. That is the curse we live with on this planet: nothing truly satisfies.
Ecclesiastes gives voice to that thirst: the cry of a newborn who needs milk, the weeping of someone who feels used, the pain of loss and death, possessions that break, dreams that shatter, betrayal.
Why would God put a book like this in the Bible? Because He is willing to go there with you. Past the G rating. Past the PG-13. Into the hardest parts of your life where the curse has touched your heart. He’s not afraid, intimidated or embarrassed. He loves you there, and He has something that satisfies there.
It’s Jesus. He is the way, the truth and the life. He calls out our empty lives and fills them with His own, like turning water into wine.
Read: Ecclesiastes 1:1
The Preacher
The book is written by “the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.” This is clearly Solomon; everything lines up with his life.
The Hebrew word for “Preacher” means one who gathers people together. You could almost translate it “Regional Manager” calling everyone into the conference room. “Conference room, five minutes!” And like most famous regional managers, Solomon makes everyone uncomfortable and takes us down roads we would rather not travel.
The book may have been put together by one of his students (an “assistant to the regional manager”) who wrote the short introduction and the conclusion in chapter 12.
Why This Book?
- Something is broken. Actually, everything is.
- Solomon is brutally honest about it.
- We’re all dying, and nothing can stop it.
- Religion in name only doesn’t instantly fix what is broken here and now.
We have to see ourselves honestly as humans in a broken world, even if we know God. We can’t be fake, trite, shallow or sentimental, like Job’s friends. They believed good always happens to good people and bad happens to bad people. They were wrong, and it made them unwise and unkind.
This sad truth leads us to God. Not by showing us His redemption (that comes later in the Bible), but by showing us how grim life is without it.
A Place to Start a Conversation
Everyone in the world agrees with Ecclesiastes in their heart. That makes it a great starting place for sharing the gospel.
“Life is hard.” “Yeah, it sure is.”
“You know the worst part of life? Death.”
“You know Jesus went to that worst part too? God went there, tasted it, rose from the dead, and now offers us life.”
Through His death and resurrection, we can know life the way it was designed to be lived.
As Zack Eswine puts it in Recovering Eden, Ecclesiastes seems like one of God’s ways of telling us that this world and our lives are more broken than we realize, and what God created for us is more satisfying than we believe.
How Solomon Teaches
Imagine a tour bus through the broken parts of life. Solomon will:
- Observe. He uses poetry and honest observations to reshape how we see the world.
- Grieve. He mourns the loss of Eden.
- Interrogate. He questions everything, skeptical that anything under the sun can satisfy.
Life under the sun follows the law of diminishing returns. The gain goes down. The satisfaction goes down.
But with God at the center, we can actually enjoy the world the way He intended: beauty, food, nature, marriage. True joy can be recovered.
Read: Ecclesiastes 1:2
The meeting starts with a bang: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
Boring. Pointless. Empty. Unsatisfying. It stings. (It sounds like an emo band in black skinny jeans.)
Vanity means transient, absurd, meaningless, futile. Vapor. All of it will leave you empty.
Paul uses the same idea in Romans 8:20-21: creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but in hope, because creation itself will be set free into the glorious liberty of God’s children.
God subjected the world to this futility after the fall (Genesis 3:17-19). He wants us to feel how empty life is apart from Him, so we will cry out for new life.
God subjected the world to futility to wake us up. He gave Jesus to raise us up.
Grace Takeaway
The best hope rises out of the deepest hopelessness. If Ecclesiastes makes you thirsty, good. That thirst is meant to lead you to the only One who can satisfy it. Jesus said whoever drinks the water He gives will never thirst again (John 4:14).