Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
“I happen to love Ecclesiastes, for of all the books, it seems to offer the most realistic and motivating look at life in this world.” - Challies
Sometimes when I am among fellow believers, I get the feeling that they were, as someone once said about Calvin Coolidge, "weaned on a pickle", having forgotten that we are to praise God in dance (Psalm 150), the traditions of Shavuot and Sukkot in Deuteronomy 16, at weddings (John 2), and the like. Many of us need to re-discover the joy of knowing the Lord, and how to express it to a world that needs to know.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I find Ecclesiastes to be "soul-centering". It allows us to balance out the pleasures of life as well as what takes place in life with what we know about God through His Scripture.
“Under the sun”… from that perspective, much of life looks puzzling and frustrating (‘vanity… chasing the wind’). But Ecclesiastes ultimately reminds us that we don’t have to look at it that way, or only that way. “Remember your creator in the days of your youth…”
About the book, I don’t know what quite what his take is on all the vanity and chasing of wind, and injustice, but it does sound like he isn’t going the “Ecc = musings of a godless man who was living wrong” route.
A note about the Audible version. Ray Ortlund reads it himself, and that’s a huge plus from my point of view. His Audible reading of the ESV is by far my favorite audio Bible. I literally never tire of hearing it the way he reads it. So many others are too affected or too flat or have distracting accents or whatever. The Ortlund radiates “just a guy who understands and loves the Bible he is reading.”
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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