05/23/2025 – Day 327 – Ecclesiastes – Chapters 9 – 10 / “This is not only Solomon’s view of our lives; it is also the modern world’s” – from “Three Philosophies of Life: Ecclesiastes – Life as Vanity / Job – Life as Suffering / Song of Songs – Life as Love” by Peter Kreeft (pg #33 – pg #35)
“This is an evil in all that is done under the sun; there is one fate for everyone.” Ecclesiastes 9:12
Whoa, whatever happened to the young wise king Solomon? We can’t fault him too much on this verse, in that the Jewish people did not have much conception of an afterlife at all, excepting a hazy undefined “Sheol” that indeed was a destination for everyone after death.
Peter Kreeft wrote a great book on philosophy which happen to the be three books from the Bible: “Ecclesiastes; Job and Song of Songs.” He presents them in that order, with the premise that they are a stepwise progression through the faith. I would like to share with you a short excerpt from pages 31 to 32:
“Ecclesiastes is the first and necessary step toward salvation for the modern world. The world will not go to the Great Physician (except on its own, patronizing terms) until it admits that it is desperately sick. ‘They that are sick need a physician, not those that are well. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.’
Ecclesiastes is the book we moderns fear more than any other. For it is a mirror that shows us a great hole, a black spot, where our heart ought to be. The microcosm of the self has a Black hole just like the macrocosm of the universe. What could be more terrifying than this? – to find there at our heart, where the source of lie ought to be, instead the source of death?
For meaninglessness (‘vanity’) is the source of death. There is a death worse than death: the death of the soul; and ‘dead souls’ (Gogol’s terrifying title) can be seen on any city street. ‘Vanity’ is death indeed; eternalized, it is Hell. Mystics and resuscitated patients who claim to catch a glimpse of Hell do not say they saw physical fire or demons with pitchfork but rather lost souls wandering nowhere in the darkness, with no direction, hope, or purpose. It is a far more terrifying picture of Hell than fire and brimstone. And most horrible of all, it is true. It is here. We can smell those fires even now and gag on their ashes that drift in our lives.”
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Picking another excerpt up, pages 33 through 35:
Five Ways to Hide an Elephant
“This is not only Solomon’s view of our lives; it also the modern world’s. For the modern world has no answer to the biggest and most obvious question of all: What is it all there for? What are we here for?
The question is as big as an elephant. How can you hide an elephant? The modern world has invented five ways.
- Diversion is the first and most effective way to to hide an elephant. An elephant can be hidden by mice, if there are enough of them….
- Propaganda is the next. Since the modern world has no answer to the greatest of all questions, it calls it nasty names, like ‘abstract’ and ‘metaphysical’ and even ‘religious’, and above all ‘a matter of private opinion (and do not impose yours on me, please. That would be propaganda! No. That is propaganda.) – as if the nature of the real world and of our efforts to find the truth about the life we all share in this world were only a dream or a private fantasy in our own minds.
- Indifference is a third way to hide an elephant. Someone says, ‘There’s an elephant!’ and we simply yawn. There is God, or there is Nothingness; in either case, there is Death. There are three elephants, and we care more about mice…
- The pursuit of happiness, which our American Declaration of Independence calls one of our great, inalienable rights and which Malcolm Muggeridge calls one of the silliest ideas ever propagated, hides the elephant because the elephant does not seem to make us happy…
- Finally the reigning philosophical orthodoxy of subjectivism blunts the pin that could prick the balloon of happiness, namely, the pin of truth, by turning its point back on itself; truth is what you believe, “true for you” but not for me. The best way of all to hide an elephant is to hide your eyes instead, to play peek-a-boo and not to peek, to grown ingrown eyeballs. Thus we turn the question ‘What is the real summer bonus; what is the truth about the good?’ into the question ‘What is my set of values, my order of priorities for my life?’ We reduced ‘the Good’ to ‘value’, ‘value’ to ‘values’, and ‘values’ to ‘my values’. And ethics is then reduced to ‘values clarification’. Then we dare to say to an honest scientist of lie like Solomon (or Moses or Saint Paul) ‘What right do you have to impose your values on me?’
Soli Deo Gloria!
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Thoughts? Reflections? Questions? Prayer.
Questions for fellowship generation, the lifelong sanctification process:
- What does the text reveal about God’s character?
- How has this reading generated prayer for you and/or us?
- What themes stand out to you in this bible study?
- How does our reading fit into the bigger picture (creation, the fall, restoration, etc.)?
- What verse(s) jumped out at you like never before? Is it explainable at this point?
- Do you have any questions you would like to put before the group as to how to interpret any particular verse(s) in our reading. Let scripture testify to scripture: Share with us where you sense contradiction between passages elsewhere.
- What did you find convicting and inspiring at the same time? Share with us how the Spirit of God is working within you as a messenger, both within and outside of our fellowship group.
- Share with the group how our study is calling or confirming to you a new mission to glorify God in our times.
Always connected through prayer and by His grace!
Jimmy
Comments: Peter Kreeft is one of my all time favorite Christian authors. Another book of his: “How to Be Holy – First Steps in Becoming a Saint.” (ISBN 978-62164-102-5