Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

Look (says the preacher) at the sort of world we live in. Take off your rose-colored glasses, rub your eyes and look at it long and hard. What do you see? You see life’s background set by aimlessly recurring cycles in nature (1:4-7). You see its shape fixed by times and circumstances over which we have no control (3:1-8; 9:11-12). You see death coming to everyone sooner or later, but coming haphazard; its coming bears no relation to whether it is deserved (7:15; 8:8). Humans die like beasts (3:19-20), good ones like bad, wise ones like fools (2:14, 16; 9:2-3). You see evil running rampant (3:16; 4:1; 5:8; 8:11; 9:3); the wicked prosper, the good don’t (8:14). Seeing all this, you realize that God’s ordering of events is inscrutable; much as you want to make it out, you cannot do so (3:11; 7:13-14; 8:17 RV; 11:5). The harder you try to understand the divine purpose in the ordinary providential course of events, the more obsessed and oppressed you grow with the apparent aimlessness of everything, and the more you are tempted to conclude that life really is as pointless as it looks. But once you conclude that there really is no rhyme or reason in things, what “profit”—value, gain, point, purpose—can you find in any sort of constructive endeavor? (1:3; 2:11, 22; 3:9; 5:16). If life is senseless, then it is valueless; and in that case, what use is it working to create things, to build a business, to make money, even to seek wisdom—for none of this can do you any obvious good (2...