Ecclesiastes 12 - Make the most of life

12:1-7

This chapter begins by urging us to “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth”. A theme of Ecclesiastes is that we should make the most of the time we are in, for we do not know when it will come to end, but we do know that it will indeed come to an end. Of course each of us will one day come to an end. We might think that the writer of Ecclesiastes  is a bit of a misery guts, with his dwelling on death, but I think he actually wants us to live life to the full, and appreciating our finitude is a key to this. In the last year some of us will have lost people, in the coming some of us will lose people. When that happens we cannot actively love them anymore. Of course, we can still remember them fondly and be thankful for them, but we can no longer do anything for them. We must love people while we can, we must make the most of the times we are in.

But why does the writer begin this section by urging us to remember our creator? If we are to make the best of now, then we need to act in obedience to the Lord.

12:8

“Meaningless, meaningless!” says the teacher. Here is a place where Ortlund’s view that the NIV translation is wrong comes to the fore. The writer is not saying lif is meaningless, but life and the seasons of life are fleeting, here for a time, then they are gone. So we should make the most of them.

12:9-14

Here we have a statement of the Teacher’s purpose. The Teacher was wise, he was prepared to consider the harsh realities of life and death, to face up to them, so that he could “impart knowledge to the people. He wrote what was “upright and true”. “Fear God and keep His commandments”, is his key teaching,