death

Why Ecclesiastes Needs Jesus: the Answer to Death’s “Vanity”

Kirk E. Miller

Ecclesiastes recounts things, not as they should be, but as they actually are (unfortunately so). In Genesis 1, God creates and repeatedly calls it “good” (Gen 1). In contrast, Ecclesiastes details instance after instances of conditions it declares “vanity.” What is the source of these conditions? The curse.

In Romans 8:20 Paul says God subjected this world to “futility” (or “vanity”). Here he uses the same word for “vanity” as does Ecclesiastes (LXX), and I tend to think he does this intentionally. As such, these conditions (e.g., evil, suffering, and the sorrow they bring) are not the way things are suppose to be. Though may be typical—and so they are, universally so! But they are not normal.

So too, death is a product of the curse (Gen 3). In fact, Ecclesiastes 9 describes death as “an evil.” Death serves as another instance of the “vanity” that has thus far characterizes Ecclesiastes’ account of life “under the sun.”

But death is more than just one “vanity” among the others though. Death functions like the “final boss” of these vanities. It’s the ultimate “vanitizer,” as I have said elsewhere. That is, even if the other vanities don’t get you, this one always does—without exception. According to Ecclesiastes, death casts a long shadow over all that proceeds it, rendering it all “futile.” No matter what you accomplish or experience in this life, what difference does it make when, at the end of the day, death brings it all to naught?

Leo Tolstoy (Christian) and Albert Camus (non-Christian absurdist philosopher) capture well this absurdity that death imposes on our lives:

“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?”

—Tolstoy, A Confession

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.”

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

In other words, Ecclesiastes needs Jesus.

That’s precisely why Paul’s discussion of Christ’s resurrection—the very thing that secures our own—mentions “vanity”/”futility” so frequently throughout 1 Corinthians 15 (four times: vv.2, 10, 14, and 58). It’s a controlling theme in his argument, the operating background to the importance of resurrection. “Futility” results if Christ is not raised. If Christ is not raised, we labor in “vain,” our faith is “vain,” our preaching is in “vain,” etc.

However, as Paul goes on to proclaim in 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection (our hope) is what undoes the vanity of death. Or in Romans 8, the “futility” (again, the same word as in Ecclesiastes) to which creation was subjected meets its match at Christ’s return when he resurrects his people and restores all things (Rom 8:20). Christ undoes the realities of Ecclesiastes.

Praise God, the wisdom Ecclesiastes provides is provisional. There will come a day when we no longer live “under [its] sun” by in the light provided by the Son (Rev 22:5).

Haunted by What Should Be: Christianity’s Resonance with Our Cursed World

Kirk E. Miller

I attended a “celebration of life” (read: post-funeral party) this afternoon with my wife. It was for my wife’s friend. She was only 36 and had a 3-year-old son. Absolutely tragic.

It was a bit of a weird scene. They had a DJ who was playing dance music and dancing in the corner. Lot’s of drinks, food, and chatter. They were going for good vibes as a way of honoring this woman who lived life full of energy. But it was a jarring juxtaposition given the reason that brought us together.

Have you ever noticed that some don’t call them funerals anymore, “but celebration of life” services? Our culture doesn’t like to deal with death. We like to keep it out of sight and out of mind. We find it unsettling. We probably don’t know what to do with it existentially. So even when we do have to deal with it, like at a funeral, we like to recast it as life, “a celebration of life.”

But the juxtaposition made me think: Gosh, this is all so tragic, this woman dying at the mere age of 36, leaving her son behind who will likely barely even remember her. It’s heart-breaking.

But the reason it’s so heart-breaking isn’t because we’re the natural result of some mere evolutionary process that causes us to develop attachments to others due to its evolutionary advantage, with the byproduct that we grieve their loss. No, the reason we experience such deep tragedy in this world is because it’s haunted by what it should be. And the more beautiful and good something is meant to be, the more tragic and distressing its loss and destruction is.

We don’t just live in a world where unfortunate things happen—and that’s just the way it is. No, I think we sense something more sinister at play. Thus, we’re instinctually unwilling to accept this world as is. We internally want to resist it. We internally protest. We feel it as evil. We deeply sense something has gone wrong, that things are not the way they are suppose to be. And not just that, but that something good and beautiful has been disrupted—making it all the severer.

Think about those movies where a curse is invoked. The curse becomes an active force wreaking havoc, ruining the good, a force of harm. Tragic events aren’t just happenstance, the way things are. They are the torturous workings of the curse. The characters are constantly haunted by its reality. It chases them down. It won’t leave them alone. They struggle to escape it’s presence.

C.S. Lewis speaks of Christianity as the “true myth.” By this, he wasn’t saying that Christianity is unhistorical or untrue. No, he was saying, Christianity makes sense of our myth making. Myths provide meaning. And Christianity is that meaning-making story that explains all of our other attempts to make meaning.

So too Lewis said he believes in Christianity like he believes in the sun, because it illuminates and makes sense of everything else. It resonates with reality, our existential longing, our deep desires and sense of this world. Christianity “resonates” with the way things actually are.

One of the ways I think Christianity resonates with reality is this idea of the curse. When Adam and Eve sin, creation came under God’s curse (Gen 3).

The older I get, the more and more messed up I feel this world and this life are. It’s not just happenstance unfortunate events. It’s like a curse from a movie, an active presence wreaking havoc. We feel the tragedy not merely of unfortunate things we wish weren’t the case but of things we know ought to be beautiful and good, like the life of a young 36-year-old woman and her three-year-old boy.

Death Swallowed Up! (Isaiah 25:1-12)

Kirk E. Miller

Death Swallowed Up! (Isaiah 25:1-12)
CrossWay Community Church
April 17th, 2022

Podcast link.

Bavinck’s Theological Description of Death

Kirk E. Miller

Death is not natural but arises from the violation of the divine commandment (Gen. 2:17); from the devil insofar as he by his seduction caused humanity to fall and die (John 8:44); from sin itself inasmuch as it has a disintegrating impact on the whole of human life and, as it were, produces death from within itself (James 1:15); and from the judgment of God since he pays the wages of sin in the currency of death (Rom. 6:23). And in Scripture this death is never identical with annihilation, with nonbeing, but always consists in the destruction of harmony, in being cut off from the various life settings in which a creature has been placed in keeping with one’s nature, in returning to the elementary chaotic existence…. 

Accordingly, in its essence and entire scope, death is disturbance, the breakup of all these relations in which humans stood originally and still ought to stand now. Death’s cause, therefore, is and can be none other than the sin that disturbs the right relation to God and breaks up life-embracing fellowship with God. In this sense sin not only results in death but also coincides with it; sin is death, death in a spiritual sense. Those who sin, by that token and at the same moment, put themselves in an adversarial relationship toward God, are dead to God and the things of God, have no pleasure in the knowledge of his ways, and in hostility and hatred turn away from him. And since this relation to God, this being created in his image and likeness, is not something extraneous and additional, a donum superadditum, but belongs to the essence of being human and bears a central character, the disturbance of this relationship will inevitably have a devastating impact on all the other relationships in which human beings stand—to themselves, to their fellow humans, to nature, to the angels, to the whole creation. Actually, in terms of its nature, at the very moment it was committed, sin should have resulted in a full, across-the-board death (Gen. 2:17), a return of the entire cosmos to its primeval chaotic condition.

But God intervened: he broke the power of sin and death. … He intervened first with his common grace to curb the power of sin and death, then with his special grace to break down and conquer that power. Not only is physical death postponed, and not only did God by various measures make human existence and development possible; but also Christ by his cross fundamentally achieved a victory over sin and death and brought life and immortality to light (Rom. 5:12ff.; 1 Cor. 15:45; 2 Tim. 1:10; Heb. 2:14; Rev. 1:18; 20:14), so that everyone who believes in him has eternal life and will never die (John 3:36; 5:24; 8:51–52; 11:25). Now it is this life and this immortality that in Holy Scripture stands in the foreground.

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, pp. 614-15.