Tag: God’s gifts

How to Enjoy Your (Vain) Life

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

When Christians think of Ecclesiastes, they probably think of vanity. If it’s been a while since they read or studied the book, they might only remember that famous line: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

And yet, even though “all is vanity,” not all of Ecclesiastes is about vanity!

A surprising thread runs through this gem of ancient wisdom literature. The Preacher wants his hearers to sober-mindedly face life and to enjoy themselves in the process.

There are a small number of passages in Ecclesiastes in which the Preacher explicitly discusses joy or enjoyment. I’ll be drawing from those passages for this post and connecting them to some of the larger themes of the book.

Our Days Are Few

Death is coming, and it may come much quicker than we’d like. This is one of the drums Ecclesiastes bangs repeatedly; it is also a key to enjoying life.

Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. (Ecclesiastes 5:18)

In the context of another passage about enjoying life, the Preacher also says, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going” (Eccl 9:10).

Ecclesiastes puts our life in context, and one foundational context is that life is finite. We may act as though life will extend forever—that’s often easier than confronting our mortality, after all—but pretending does not conjure reality. This life ends, no exceptions.

It may seem counterintuitive, but accepting this truth makes life easier to enjoy. We cannot enjoy this life after we die; therefore, we should enjoy life now. Let’s push it a bit further: if, drawing on a monastic impulse, we refuse to enjoy what God gives us in this life, we do not honor our God who loves to give.

Receive God’s Gifts

In his book Living Life Backward, David Gibson presents one of the early contrasts in Ecclesiastes as gain versus gift. Will we take good parts of our human lives (work, wisdom, pleasure) and use them for our gain, or will we receive and enjoy them as gifts?

Recognizing the good things in our lives as gifts, the Preacher would contend, is crucial to our joy.

There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? (Ecclesiastes 2:24-25)
I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. (Ecclesiastes 3:12-13)
Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God. (Ecclesiastes 5:18-19)

We honor God most when we enjoy his gifts as gifts—when we don’t try to make them into anything more. They are not meant to increase our status, they do not determine our identity, they are not a way for us to earn favor with God or others.

We are on the path to enjoying life when we recognize God as the good giver he is, developing the habit of receiving what God places in our empty, outstretched hands. The Preacher mentions food, drink, work, wisdom, knowledge, wealth, possessions, and marriage in the context of gifts of God we should enjoy. God does not give all of these gifts at all times to all people; yet when he gives, we can rejoice.

God Must Give the Joy

One of the most sobering passages in Ecclesiastes comes at the beginning of chapter 6.

There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous evil. (Ecclesiastes 6:1-2)

The Preacher writes this directly after noting how good it is when God gives power to enjoy his gifts (Eccl 5:19). So, let’s make this crystal clear: not all who have God’s gifts will enjoy them!

Common sense may dictate that joy rises and falls in proportion to our possessions, health, or other tangible markers of vitality. But that’s not the way God’s world actually works. God gives some great wealth and no joy while he gives others meager belongings and exceeding happiness. This is part of the upside down nature of the kingdom of God.

God Approves

The Preacher pulls few punches in Ecclesiastes. He writes about oppression, futility, and death. A lot.

Yet this honest assessment of the fallen creation, far from being a barrier to joy, is a prerequisite for joy. There is no hero’s journey we must undertake. Rather, we only need to see ourselves as finite and created, receive good gifts from our creator, and use those gifts in the way they are intended.

God gives to those who please him (Eccl 2:26); for those whose work he has approved, he tells them to eat with joy and drink with a merry heart (Eccl 9:7). The honest reader of Ecclesiastes must ask: How can I please God?

The looking-ahead answer that Ecclesiastes gives is to “fear God and keep his commandments” (Eccl 12:13). In its massive scope, and in the face of human sin, this points ahead to Jesus, the one who perfectly feared God and kept all of his commandments.

We may not think of Jesus as the most joyful human ever, but he was—and is. Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, so those who walk by the Spirit will grow in joy. And instruction for growth in this joy is found in part, of all places, in Ecclesiastes.

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God’s Fleeting Gifts

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

The signs of her are everywhere. From inspirational sayings on the fridge to masking-tape labels on spice jar lids, we see her handwriting all over the kitchen. No matter how much sorting and donating we’ve done, she’s still a huge part of that house.

Rightly so. My parents were married for almost 50 years, spending close to 45 years in that house. Mom has been gone since the fall of 2023, but I can still smell her distinctive scent when I walk in the front door.

I spent some time with my dad this past February, and I felt those now-familiar feelings that I know accompany loss and grief: sadness at my mom’s absence and gratitude for the time I had with her. That time was not short—I am not young!—but good relationships rarely last as long as we’d like. We’re finite, but we crave the infinite.

We don’t raise the topic much in conversations at work or at the coffee shop, but our death is inevitable. Famously, this is the great equalizer, the one experience (aside from birth) all humans will share. Here’s one among many obvious implications: all of God’s gifts are temporary.

It’s easy to acknowledge the temporary nature of some gifts—an ice cream cone, a garden bloom in the spring, a favorite band’s concert. We know we can’t hold onto these for long.

But we treat some other gifts differently. A best friend or spouse, an energizing career, a well-loved home—if we tilt our heads at the right angle, we might convince ourselves these will last forever. Whether our ignorance is willful or naive, we’re still ignoring the obvious. We’re going away, and so is everything we ever lay eyes on.

God’s gifts aren’t the problem, of course. He gives good gifts to his children (Ps 84:11, 34:10, 103:5). Our problem is the weight we misattribute to these gifts. We want them to be and to bear too much. When we hoist a crane on the back of a horse, we shouldn’t expect any galloping around the pasture.

One correction we can offer each other is to receive these given things in the way they are intended: as good but temporary gifts. We might think this will lead us to devalue or ignore the people and things in our lives. That’s possible, but this perspective should actually help us love them better. No spouse was made to be the object of worship; no friends were intended to be eternal sources of encouragement. We love these people and things best when we agree with what God says about them: they are good, and they (like us) are dust.

Some of my mother’s labels and notecards have been in my childhood home for decades. Her memory still lives on in that house and with her loved ones. But from the perspective of centuries, it won’t be long before those index cards, that house, and everyone who ever knew my mother’s name is gone. This may sound like a downer, but it’s actually a necessary perspective if we want to relate well to God’s gifts.

There is one of God’s gifts that will last, only one that can bear the weight of our desire, our hope, and our worship. Only one gift that will actually satisfy the desire for permanence that stands like a pillar at our core. That gift is God himself. The incarnation of Jesus was a preview of what is to come (Rev 21:3). God gives himself to his children freely and gladly—without hesitation. And we will enjoy him forever.

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