E
very now and then within the church, the cry goes up, ‘We need to make the Bible more relevant!’ But such a cry is only an indication of misunderstanding the Bible. We don’t need to make it relevant – it already is! Indeed, whenever the Church seeks to make the Bible relevant it always ends up playing catch-up with the culture, following it rather than challenging and changing it. This month’s Ecclesiastes passage (2:1-11) looks, for example, at laughter, pleasure, architecture, gardening, money, rest, stress, wine, women and song. In other words, sex, drugs and rock & roll.
Solomon built cities, great buildings and storehouses. This included luxurious gardens typical of royalty and nobility in the ancient near east at that time. Solomon saw what he had made, and despite its grandeur and beauty, it still didn’t satisfy. Wealth: Verses 7-8 tells us Solomon was at Bill Gates’ level of wealth. ‘All King Solomon’s goblets were gold, and all the household articles in the Palace of the Forest of Lebanon were pure gold. Nothing was made of silver, because silver was considered of little value in Solomon’s days’ (1 Kings 10:21). He found that the Swedish philosophers Bjorn and Benny were wrong in declaring that ‘money, money, money...it’s a rich man’s world’. The writer Doug Coupland reflects the angst of many when he observed: ‘All you are doing with your life is collecting objects and nothing else.’ Women: Verse 8 says he acquired a harem. This is a disputed term. It could mean cupbearer but is more likely to mean mistress, lover or concubine. It could also be quite a crude term which refers to women solely as sexual objects. How very 21st-century! There is, after all, ‘nothing new under the sun.’ With hundreds of wives and concubines, if sex could satisfy then you would expect that Solomon would have been very satisfied! Song: Also in verse 8, it says he had a mixed choir. It was pretty good and it was very entertaining. Music is such a vital part of human culture. Laughter, drugs, wealth, work, sex and entertainment. Solomon tried them all. And the conclusion is...he remained objective. He was like the German poet Goethe who ‘analysed
WHY DOESN’T PLEASURE SATISFY? Solomon is trying to work out what is the point of life. Millennia before Freud he tries a bit of Freudian psychoanalysis, working on the assumption that man is just a pleasure-seeking animal. So he conducts an experiment. He has the money, the power and the ability to enter the pleasure dome and to see if any of it satisfies him. And in so doing he provides us with a list of what we in the 21st century also seek to satisfy our thirst. Laughter: Here it means superficial fun. ‘He’s a good laugh.’ We all love someone with a good sense of humour and we all love a good laugh. But ‘even in laughter the heart may ache, and joy may end in grief’ (Proverbs 14:13). Laughter will often hide sorrow, pain and grief. Just look at the lives of some of the most famous comedians. Wine: There are artificial stimulants that we can use to drown our sorrows or give us pleasure. The simple answer as to why someone takes drugs is because it ‘feels good’. Great projects: Verse 4 of 2 Chronicles 8 tells us that
THE
GOSPEL FOR TODAY’S SOCIETY
ECCLESIASTES: THE RECORD
18
FEBRUARY
