By its very nature, life confronts us with the question of our meaning. We ask ourselves, as the famous piece by Gauguin puts it, “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” We urgently need to know the answers to these questions.
In the Old Testament, “the Teacher,” who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, addresses them. The Teacher (traditionally understood to have been Solomon) was a sort of ancient existentialist, clawing for the meaning of life as he tested every potential source of fulfillment. And as he draws his book to a close in chapter 12, he answers each of these questions in turn, inviting us to see what wisdom would have us do.
Where Do We Come From?
Albert Einstein once acknowledged, “Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore.”1 We’re all here, he says, unasked for, involuntarily, and cluelessly.
The Teacher offers a contrasting perspective. According to him, we’re not the product of some kind of chance evolutionary process. We’re not a collection of molecules held in suspension. We have actually been created in God’s image and with an innate understanding of eternity (Eccl. 3:11). Thus he urges us, “Remember … your Creator” (12:1).
The reason so many in our world look and act as lost as they do is because in a spiritual sense, they really are lost. They have no notion of the creative handiwork of God. They do not know where they come from. They have lost the picture on the front of the jigsaw box, and they can’t begin to put the puzzle of their lives together.
When the apostle Paul preached in Athens to the great thinkers of the day, he addressed people in a similar situation. The solution he offered was a knowledge of God: “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man” (Acts 17:24). As he explained the truth about the creating and sovereign God who is a Father to all mankind, he set forward an understanding of the world that explains the whys and the wherefores to those who, for all their worldly wisdom, could not provide satisfying answers to the ultimate questions.
Where, then, do we come from? The Bible’s answer is as clear as it is comforting: We have our origin in a Creator who made us with a purpose.
Who Are We?
Knowing where we come from will help us to understand who we are.
Throughout Ecclesiastes, the Teacher takes his time contemplating the ephemeral nature of life. Our time on this earth is brief and frail, he reminds us. The opportunity to know where we come from and so live both wisely and vigorously soon passes, and we are weighed down with the burdens of old age. Ecclesiastes 12:2–7 in particular presents a montage of ailments, humorously described in metaphors, from the dimming of vision in verse 1 to the disintegration of the whole body in verse 7.
The reason so many in our world look and act as lost as they do is because in a spiritual sense, they really are lost.
Einstein was right about one thing at least: Our stay is short. We are mortal, impermanent, and the day will come when we will “face the final curtain.”2 To the youth, the aisles of the drugstore are a mystery. As he takes his soft drink from the edge of the store, he wonders what goes on deep in the pharmaceutical section. He doesn’t suspect how quickly the day will dawn when he needs many of the anodynes and antidotes on those shelves just to get through the day. He thinks himself permanent. Perhaps he doesn’t know the truth about his Creator—or the truth about himself.
And so the Teacher urges us, “Remember … your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’” (v. 1). We ought not to delay seeking this wisdom, because the day will come when it can no longer do us any good.
Where Are We Going?
Finally, knowing where we come from and who we are will help us understand where we are going—namely, toward eternity.
The Teacher doesn’t shy away from acknowledging the reality of death. There will be a day, he warns, when you reverse your car out of your garage, and you will never drive it back in again. There will be a day when you put your key in the lock for the last time. There will be a time when you kiss your loved ones goodbye, and you will never kiss them again.
The Teacher had said in 7:2,
It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.
The worldly-wise may acknowledge death and conclude, “Life is short, so live it up!” Such a perspective forgets where we come from and doesn’t understand where we’re going. Death is not the end, for “God will bring every deed into judgment” (v. 14). God will look on our lives, and if He sees that we have spurned the purpose for which He made us, He will hold us accountable. Jesus Himself warned, “Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell” (Luke 12:4–5).
Made for Another World
The story of Ecclesiastes is the story of a man who tested every desire and found that life came up short. So it concludes with the admonition to remember where we came from, understand who we are, and anticipate where we’re going. It concurs with the observation by C. S. Lewis: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world”3—that is, made first of all not for the pleasures and experiences of this life but for God.
In Christ, God has provided a way to restore us to His purpose again.
As we come to understand where we come from, who we are, and where we are going, it is natural for fears to rise in our hearts. Yet there is an answer to these fears, because the God who made us so desires us to live according to His purpose that He sent His Son to die for us and restore us to that purpose. To be human is to know sin and death—to be under God’s judgment for rejecting His purpose and to anticipate a final judgment when the opportunity for repentance will have passed us by. But in Christ, God has provided a way to restore us to His purpose again : “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).
Because of God’s grace, we may turn to Christ in faith, entrusting ourselves to Him as the one who can forgive us and help us. Jesus Christ is the very image of the Creator, revealing to us where we have come from. He is the template of human purpose, showing us what we are meant to be. And in His death and resurrection, He offers us the gift of eternal life, giving us confidence about where we are going when this mortal life ends. As we set our hope in Him, we find the answers to life’s big questions.
This article was adapted from the sermon “Preaching the Gospel from Ecclesiastes” by Alistair Begg.
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Albert Einstein, “Mein Glaubensbekenntnis” [My Credo] (speech, German League of Human Rights, Berlin, 1932), quoted in Michael White and John Gribbin, Einstein: A Life in Science (New York: Dutton, 1994), 262. ↩︎
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Paul Anka, “My Way” (1969). ↩︎
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C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), bk. 3, chap. 10. ↩︎