What is the meaning of life?

What a big question! This is something that people have wondered about for many centuries, along with other questions like:

What is the point of human existence?

Why are we on earth?

What happens after we die?

What is my purpose in life?

Why was I created?

Why do good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people?

These are questions that I have thought about too, but they can be rather uncomfortable to sit with and dwell over, so I used to just push these questions out of my head after a while and pretend I didn’t think about it.

Throughout high school, I never really knew what I wanted to do with my life, or why I was here on earth, and that really bugged me! Why was I working so hard? What was the point of getting good grades if I didn’t know what I was going to do after school? Then the same thing happened during university. Why am I doing this degree? What am I going to do with it after I have finished studying? What was the point of all of this?

And now, here I am in Taiwan, nearly 2 years after finishing my BSc, doing an inductive study of the bible for 9 months.

This week we studied the book of Ecclesiastes, and it was amazing to go through a book that was written either by King Solomon, or an anonymous writer that documented the thoughts of King Solomon, that he spoke to the people of Israel.

King Solomon was the richest man in the bible, and even to this day, he is in the top five richest people in history with a crazy net worth of $2.2 trillion! Which is equivalent to around R37 trillion! Currently, the richest person on earth is Jeff Bezos, who is the founder of Amazon, and he has a net worth of $116,9 billion. This means that King Solomon’s net worth was nearly 19 times greater than Jeff’s.

King Solomon was an interesting man, God blessed him with wisdom and he became the wisest person, and people from all over the world came to hear him speak. He also had 700 wives and 300 concubines. He possessed much gold and treasures, to an extent that silver had no worth. During his reign, he built many buildings, including the temple of the LORD in Jerusalem, and the palace. This man seemed to have everything that could possibly give fulfillment and from the outside, it seemed as if he had an extremely successful life!

However, when reading Ecclesiastes, we get to see some of the things that he was wrestling with, what was really going on in his life, and how he felt about all his achievements.

In this book, Solomon expresses how he had discovered that all the things he had were vanity! This word vanity, in Hebrew is hebel (H1892) which means vapour or smoke, and King Solomon used this word in order to show that life is futile, vanishes quickly, and that it is paradoxical, and hard to understand. This word is used to describe life thirty eight times in this short book. And somehow I think that we haven’t really managed to find a better way to explain what life is like when we look at it without taking God into consideration.

The book documents how Solomon looked at all of the ways that people try to find meaning and purpose in their lives, and then he explains how none of these truly bring satisfaction, and that even when these things are possessed, it does not give life purpose. It shows how Solomon searched for answers to these questions and he discovered that you can spend your whole life working hard and trying to achieve things, but all of this comes to a point where you die, and someone else will take all the things that you have been working so hard for. Showing that time just erases all people, because death is inevitable, and nobody will be remembered. Solomon worked hard to achieve great wealth, pleasure, work, and status. This obviously was the result of hard work, and he writes about how all this work causes stress and sleeplessness, and eventually, when you have this wealth, you are too old to enjoy it anyway. Super cheery right? This is what life is like when you look at the world without acknowledging God, as he is the giver of hope and purpose.

Throughout the book Solomon mentioned how one should just enjoy the food, drink, and be merry, encouraging the readers to enjoy the time that they have been given on earth, instead of waiting for life to become what they hoped a successful life would look like. He wanted them to enjoy the simple things in life, like relationships with others and having their basic needs met. He wanted the people to see that they should be appreciating the time that they have now, before it all goes, in the blink of an eye.

Overall he wants to show that time and death make life completely out of human control, as all people are affected by it, as it is inescapable. The author of this book then comes to a conclusion and wraps up all the things that Solomon says and he shows how God is the only one who has a complete understanding of Creation and life. He shows that it all comes down to trusting God, as it allows you to experience life without the expectations that the world has put in place, showing what we are expected to have in order to consider ourselves successful and happy with life.

This has challenged my thinking about how I view life, and what is my definition of a successful life is. Am I taking time to enjoy the moments that I have now, or am I letting them happen, allowing life to be hebel?

I have seen that material gain is never going to make me feel completely satisfied, because if I rely on material gain to define whether I am satisfied or not, there will always be something that I don’t have, and it just becomes a comparison of what I have a comparison to the people around me. I think that if anyone was going to have wise things to say about whether wealth brought satisfaction, Solomon is a good person to take advice from. So I have now been challenged to treasure something that cannot be taken away from me, and I will always have the LORD.

This has shown me that instead of looking for material things that I can gain in life, I can trust God and grow in relationship with Him, because that is something that cannot be taken away from me. I have also seen how I should see life as a gift, and I should be intentional about taking time to enjoy all the small moments I have with the people around me while I am still here on earth.

So with all that to say, what really is the purpose of life?

I think that the end of Ecclesiastes sums it up really well:

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. Ecclesiastes 12:13

This shows that the point of creation and life is for man to worship and be in reverence of who God is. This results in obedience to Him, as following in the LORD's ways was what God intended us to do, thus being the point of life.