What's Ecclesiastes about?

Ecclesiastes takes an ancient question: Why do bad things happen to good people? and suggests a surprising answer:

For no reason.

The poet is criticizing the common belief that God makes sure good people get rewarded and bad people get punished. While that’s a nice belief, we all know that’s not what happens in real life. The poet is saying that if our faith is based on an illusion, that all goes well for good people and badly for evil people, then our faith is an illusion. The poet challenges us to develop a faith that is deep enough that when things go wrong and God does nothing about it, we still trust in God.

The book is set out like a play. It starts in heaven where the Accuser (often translated as “Satan”) tells God that the only reason a very good and successful man called Job (rhymes with “robe”) remains faithful to God is because God has made him so successful. The Accuser believes that Job isn’t good at all, but as a religiously faithful person he is really getting something in return for his belief, and so is basically selfish. The Accuser challenges God to remove Job’s success to see if he remains faithful.

The second part of the play moves to earth and presents Job’s experience. Job loses his enormous fortune and herds, and his entire family are slaughtered and he contracts an incurable disease. He ends up homeless living in a garbage dump. Yet he does not abandon his faith in God. Three friends come to support him, and explain to him that he must have done something terrible to deserve this disaster. But Job insists to his friends that he has done nothing wrong. This sets up the question that the whole book is about. Why?

Finally Job accuses God of abandoning him and demands an answer from God as if he was a lawyer bringing God to court to explain. God’s famous response is to ask Job if he was present when God made the universe. God speaks for two entire chapters about the wonders of the universe that Job knows nothing about. Job acknowledges that he is a mere speck in the universe. But God never provides an answer.

The genius of the book is to face the fact that there is no answer about why things go so wrong for people who don’t deserve it. By facing that uncomfortable fact, and refusing to accept easy religious explanations, the poet is challenging us to a deeper trust in God that may have no benefit for us. That would be true faith, just as true love is love that we give without doing it for any kind of payoff.

The book was written about 300 years before Jesus, in a time when the Jews had been conquered by the Greek empire. No doubt, exposure to Greek culture and knowledge lies behind the detailed description of the natural world that God presents to Job. And no doubt sophisticated Greek philosophy encouraged the author to challenge the naïve overly simple beliefs held by many of his fellow Jews.

[At the end of the book a short section describes how Job regained his family and was even more wealthy than before, but it’s usually understood that an ancient reader was so offended by the main theme, that there is no answer to evil, that he added this last happy section to prove that God does indeed reward good people. The very opposite of what the author was trying to say! But that short section was added much later and the author didn’t get to remove it.]

How is Ecclesiastes important for us?

Ecclesiastes deals with an issue that is very important in our time. For many centuries we could explain that God would put everything right when disasters happened to individuals or nations. But in recent times people are skeptical about such a simple explanation. Rather than finding some clever way of getting around the problem, the author tells us to face the hard facts and to be open to a deeper experience of God. Science in our day has opened up wonders that were never dreamt of in the past, and just as happens in the book of Job, the response that God gives is to show us wonders we cannot understand, and to leave it at that. That’s a form of deep trust—what the author was hoping the reader would experience.