Starting at the Ending     
   Part 1 of 2

Warning: This is not Sunday School

   Utterly meaningless. Everything is meaningless. 

   So said the author of Ecclesiastes (teachings to an assembly), believed to be King Solomon in 935 B.C. He asked God for wisdom, and God obliged.

   The king himself spent his royal life in search of meaning, and denied himself no pleasure in the pursuit of happiness. His conclusion: nothing gained absent a personal relationship with God is truly satisfying. Even man's wisdom and wealth can bring sorrow.

   We are as animals, he noted. All come from dust and to dust all return (v. 3:20). 

The same fate overtakes the wise man and the fool (v. 2:14). 

   There is a time to be born and a time to die; a time to weep and a time to laugh 

(vs. 3:2,4). 

   The world would scoff: Sorrow is better than laughter (v. 7:3). There are good times and bad times. God has made the one as well as the other (v. 7:14). 

   If our worldly days are meaningless, short, not remembered, uncertain, a chasing after the wind... how should we live? 

   Solomon wanted the assembly to know that life eludes our control. The reality of human death is before us. 

   God has set eternity in the hearts of men, and everything God does will endure forever (vs. 3:11,14).  

Tomorrow: The day of death - better than the day of birth???