My question—that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide—was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man … a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was: ‘What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?
—Leo Tolstoy (A Confession), channeling his inner Qohelet, Ecclesiastes.
The answer: no, nothing, futility, or, as the book of Ecclesiastes itself puts it, a mere “striving after wind.”
Death is the ultimate “vanitizer.” Nothing escapes its finalizing, universal stamp of “pointless.”
That is apart from resurrection.
Enter Jesus. Welcome, Easter.
Kirk E. Miller 