Ecclesiastes 12:9-14

" Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care. The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth. The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil." (Ecclesiastes 12:9-14, ESV)

The conclusion of this book is not exactly what you would expect. You expect the Preacher to close with, “The end of the matter. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.” This conclusion is absolutely essential to understanding the whole of the book. If it ended as expected, the message of the book would be hopelessness and meaninglessness. But the conclusion “fear God and keep his commandments” does not leave us without meaning. It leaves us with a God.

God obliterates despair. He is the enemy of meaninglessness. The universe, life, you are merely the product of time and chance without God. Many contemporary individuals will see this logic as a sign of personal weakness. Religion is for the weak, they will argue. “You cling to some irrational hope in a God because you are too weak to deal with the realities of death, despair, and pain without him. This is no argument for the existence of God. It is merely a naive hope.” This line of thinking, though, misses the point of this book. The argument is not, “Life really stinks without God, huh? So you better believe in Him.” Rather, the argument is, “Life makes no sense without God.” It is not merely an existential argument (“life feels really lousy”) as much as it is a metaphysical argument (“reality has no explanation, thus no purpose, thus no meaning, thus regardless of how you feel about it, it is inexplicable hopelessness”). It matters very little whether you are strong or weak. The argument is not about whether you can cope with death, despair, and pain. Deal with it or no, the reality is that it is meaningless without God. All the intellectual reasoning, philosophical inquiry, and scientific exploration you can muster cannot make sense of senseless world. You are simply left to pretend that you believe in a purpose that you know doesn't exist. You may say religion requires weakness, but a godless world requires daily self-deception.