Is Everything Meaningless? John's Response to Ecclesiastes (Part 1)

I hope you won't mind if I move on from specific examples of John's deeper meaning. I could go on and on about the subject. I haven't even touched on John’s use of chiasms or the importance of this gospel’s wedding theme. But in this post, I want to begin to address how and why John's deeper meaning is important for the world today.

Almost a year ago I had one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. Surprisingly it came not through an enlightening revelation but through a gradual loss of spiritual sight. Over a period of months the depths of my worldview receded in doubt from the boundless vistas of God’s higher world to the natural world immediately in front of my face. I was blinded to spiritual realities. I regarded the intangible world as the product of my imagination. All reality is physical, I thought. For the first time I began to believe there is no God.

At first I thought this understanding might bring a sense of release. If God does not exist then there is no morality or sin; no Cosmic Kill-Joy riding my back. I’m free to do as I please. But instead there came a sudden sucking nihilism (nothingness). "What purpose is there if there is no God?" What meaning is there if reality is only what I can see? If right and wrong do not exist, what significance is there in living? I’m a man adrift on an endless uncaring ocean with neither motor nor land in sight. Without a Creator/Judge there is no destination, no means of travel, no delight in arriving; all directions are equally void of meaning.

The experience opened my eyes to the present bleakness engulfing the modern world. Like me, mankind no longer sees the horizon for the trees. Everything is defined by the material world. Science has gone beyond the empirical data to argue that all truth is material. They say we owe our existence to evolution (i.e. blind purposeless chance). In Art, where some higher meaning should still prevail, we have blank canvases, spattered paint, and toilet seats hung upon walls. If an artist is questioned as too his art's meaning, he remarks, "That is for individuals to decide.”

Ask the common man on the street if he suffers from a lack of meaning and the answer will probably be no. But it’s not because he’s not aware of the pain. We numb ourselves from the emptiness of living. We gratify the impulsive desires of our flesh. We fill ourselves with drugs, alcohol, sex, television, video games, movies, music; all the temporal entertainment we can find. But still we cannot satisfy our insatiable hunger for meaning.

It’s nothing new. The emptiness related with this naturalistic perspective has continued on down through the ages. “Meaningless, Meaningless all is Meaningless,” the writer of Ecclesiates proclaims.