Ecclesiastes 1:4-11 – What goes around comes around

The preacher started with the premise that life is a cycle of endless mundane and meaningless routines. We all have seen a carousel in an amusement park. They are decked with all kinds of images of animals - horses, elephants, giraffes and what have you. Kids just simply love to ride on them. And as they spin around, they make a lot of noises, send out glitters and shimmering lights but not actually making any real progress. This is how the preacher saw life. This of course, as we have established, is because God is not factored into it. Life to him is running in a circle. To prove his point that man has nothing to show for all his efforts, it can be attested to by four illustrations.

He first illustrates by showing how generations of people have come and gone. Every generation comes to the scene once and then goes off the scene after its time, only to have another come to replace it. Each appearing on the world’s stage, made its presence and then went off the scene, yet the earth remained the same old one. Mankind is assailed with the same old attitudes and habits. The rise a of a new generation gives the impression that something new has arrived but a close scrutiny will tell us that everything remains much the same. Think about it this way, to a new generation, anyone above thirty years old is old fashion. The generation gap always exists, the old sees the young as lacking manners, the young sees the old as people who are stuck in the mud and conservative.

Secondly, he illustrates with the movement of the sun. This is the routine of the sun, early at dawn it rises and evening at dusk it goes down. The sunrise and sunset are by way of saying the sun has a daily routine that seems mindless and boring. There’s nothing new to its movement. Thirdly, he illustrates with the circuit of the wind. It flows ceaselessly round and round its predictable route yet accomplishing nothing. Then the flow of streams is used for the final illustration. Every stream continuously empties her water into the sea, yet the sea is never filled with its water. The level of water always seems to be somewhat the same. All the ceaseless and purposeless motion in the world is tedious to witness. The preacher here couldn’t find adequate words to express how wearisome it is. As far as he is concerned, there is no way anyone can explain earth’s fruitless and frantic activities.

Besides all these, human sensory experiences also tell him how truly meaningless life can be. This is a life outside of God of course. One just cannot seem to make sense of what his eyes see and his ears hear. Everything seems to be moving in a monotonous rut. There is nothing new under the sun – the same old, same old thing. Whether nature or human experience, life seems to be in a rut. So, what’s new? If the sun, wind and river have nothing to show for in their accomplishment, what hope is there for us man? Life is indeed wearisome and difficult to explain. We may see but can’t explain the intricate mechanism that got things working. Then there will be memory loss when old age hits and our mind become incapable of processing new facts. How quickly we forget the past. It seems like we will all succumb to some form of amnesia.

All these of course are under the sun’s perspective. For us who trust and believe in the Lord we are placed on a higher plane, to see from above the sun’s perspective. We have been bought with an awesome price. Jesus paid for it by His own blood. For us who trust Him, there is a promise of a new heaven and new earth where the sun will never set. This promise gives us a renewed hope. So, we set our eyes on things above where Christ is seated. We must seek to get ‘above the sun perspective’. And then we shall not be disappointed by the uncertainties of life, no matter how mundane.