Read
Nothing Makes Sense
1When the son of David was king in Jerusalem, he was known to be very wise, and he said:
2Nothing makes sense!
Everything is nonsense.
I have seen it all—
nothing makes sense!
3What is there to show
for all of our hard work
here on this earth?
4 People come, and people go,
but still the world
never changes.
5The sun comes up,
the sun goes down;
it hurries right back
to where it started from.
6The wind blows south,
the wind blows north;
round and round it blows
over and over again.
7All rivers empty into the sea,
but it never spills over;
one by one the rivers return
to their source.
8All of life is far more boring
than words could ever say.
Our eyes and our ears
are never satisfied
with what we see and hear.
9Everything that happens
has happened before;
nothing is new,
nothing under the sun.
10Someone might say,
“Here is something new!”
But it happened before,
long before we were born.
11No one who lived in the past
is remembered anymore,
and everyone yet to be born
will be forgotten too.
Reflect
Futility. It’s almost a law of human endeavor. The falling snow erases the shoveled path behind us. The miles erode away the car we’re still struggling to pay for. The bodies we sweat and bleed and weep to maintain grow old and fail nonetheless. No matter how well we did our job, no matter how much we had saved for retirement, in the end all our treasures are buried with the body they could not keep alive.
And so we are not surprised by the words that come ringing across the three thousand years between Solomon and ourselves. He hasn’t said anything here we didn’t already suspect in our secret hearts, in the middle of the night shift, exhausted and disappointed by adulthood. But we didn’t expect to find those hopeless words here.
Is this still the word of God? It is. But it is also the word of a regular person, worn thin and ragged by the old heartbreaking business of being human, as we all have been. So why is this in the Bible? It is here because it is a truth, and truth is what God loves. But it is not the whole truth.
The Bible is not a document drafted to convince us of its agenda, but the living, breathing Word of God, spoken to a handful of humans, who speak it in turn to us. So this Word comes to us as Christ came to us: God Himself but also human, glory wrapped in the scarred and dirty skin of the only life we know, that we might understand and be transformed, and not obliterated, by it. The Bible tells us the truth about ourselves, and then it tells us the truth about God: The worst news, and then the absolute best.
Respond
Lord, You are the author of the world and the stories that take place in it, and only in you do our lives have meaning. Be the author of this day, and lead me to the purpose you have promised those who follow you. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Mike Bonikowsky
Mike Bonikowsky began looking at books as soon as he could sit up. Eventually he learned to read them, and has not been able to stop. One day he realized that people wrote the words in the books, and he began to write his own. He has not been able to stop that either. He lives with his wife and child in Melancthon Township, Ontario, where he writes his words in the basement.