I guess all Reality TV has one thing in common: everybody’s working. Whether people are racing, surviving, building stuff, designing rooms, cutting business deals, singing, flirting, losing weight, parenting, or whatever…they’re working. It’s been said that people love to watch Reality TV so much because people love to watch other people work. There must be something relaxing to watching people do what they themselves have been doing all day. I have to admit that it is.Recently I surveyed the phrase “under the sun” from Ecclesiastes and found that it’s repeated 27 times in the 12 chapters. Solomon’s phrase (though scribed several millennia ago) describes all dimensions of today’s hurried, fast paced, active, Starbucks -drinking, cyclical rat race that we call life.
4 times Solomon plays the pessimist about life “under the sun.” 2 times life is an injustice, 6 times its evil, 5 times its either bad, good, or blasé and 3 times he says you should suck all the joy out of life you can. Translation: get Starbucks with friends when possible because there are no guarantees.
What was curious is that 7 times (the most of any category) it refers to working (“toil” in ESV). For Solomon the monotony of work can be a big bummer unless you get outside yourself or can look above the sun. I can’t argue that watching people work isn’t fascinating. But I’d guess Solomon - even watching work all dressed up on TV - would say its pretty empty (Ecclesiastes 2).
Hope to see you this Lord's day at 9am as we continue our study in Ecclesiastes, From Vanity to Sanity: Fear, Judgment, Obedience.
1 comment:
Thanks for the posts Jeff both on Ecclesiastes and on the Acts sermon from last week. They have been helpful to read and think through the issues.
Thinking about living life "above the sun" has been good this week and encouraging.
Michael H
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