Fear God and Obey

Ecclesiastes is one of the most difficult books in all the Bible. One key reason is that it is inverted. Much of it is an extended ad hominem argument. By ad hominem I don’t mean that Solomon is insulting his intellectual opponents. Rather he is embracing, hypothetically, an errant worldview, and then showing forth the necessary implications of that worldview. When Solomon says “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity” he is not saying that all is vanity. Rather he is saying that if there is nothing beyond the sun, if this world that we perceive with our senses is all that there is, then all would be vanity.

The bulk of the book is taken up with various explorations of attempts to find meaning under the sun. He looks at earthly wisdom, at pleasure, at work, at success. And each one dies a swift and brutal death when confronted with… death. If there is nothing beyond the here and now, there is no meaning in the here and now. Solomon looks unflinchingly into the empty chasm of meaninglessness and returns to tell us the horror of what he saw.

He does not, however, leave us there. Having left the world of matter and energy in a heap of dust he turns to remind his reader that there is meaning, and that there is direction. He finally tells us, truthfully, the sum of the matter- “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). After all the complications, after the hard work of tearing down our idols, Solomon brings us right back to the most simple of truths, to the direct, plain, eminently understandable calling of God on our lives- we are to fear Him and obey all that He commands.

It would be easy to find this conclusion anti-climactic. Of course we are to fear God and obey all that He commands. Every child knows that. There’s no disputing it. But what about… We may be willing to confess that this is our default position. The trouble is we think there’s a switch, and that sometimes circumstances cause us to flip it. Yes, fear God. Obey God. But if they threaten your livelihood, if they see you as a second-class citizen, if hardship comes, if this or if that, then it gets complicated. Then we have to figure out how to get what we want. God understands. He wouldn’t want us to be miserable and overrun.

Reformation happens not when we embrace a complicated, man-made strategy, but when we do the simple and obvious, when we fear God and obey Him. Consider the Great Reformer. When Martin Luther spent the night in his cell praying over his second appearance at the Diet of Worms his prayer was as simple as it was powerful. He did not ask for God to show him a way out. He asked God to recognize that the battle was His. Luther reminded himself that the end was in God’s hand, that all he had to do was fear God and obey. It is still true for all of us. It is the sum of the matter.