Anyone who is among the living has hope — even a live dog is better off than a dead lion! – Ecclesiastes 9:4.

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 4, 2016): Ecclesiastes 9

This past summer my family said goodbye to two friends. Both were young adults with much still ahead of them to look forward to, and both had taken their own lives because they no longer could make sense out of their present or see what good the future might have to offer. Sometimes I find it hard to understand that level of pain. It is like selling your stock when the market has bottomed out. My financial adviser reminds me repeatedly that losses in the stock market are only theoretical until you make the decision to sell. Only then do they become real. The same principle would seem to apply to the taking of your own life. It is taking the worst that this life has thrown at you and deciding that this is the summation of everything that could be. I can’t imagine the pain that both must have been going through that essentially blacked out any vision of a positive future. Even though they were living, they both decided that there was no hope.

So I get what Solomon is trying to say here. As long as you are alive, then there is hope. The dead have sold their stock, and there will be no more profits or loss. As long as I am breathing, then there is hope for something good to happen tomorrow. But this is also just wisdom that is “under the sun.”

With God, there is hope even beyond the grave. No matter what your theology is, none of us know exactly what happens in those final moments of life. And we serve a God who can do the impossible, and who specializes in giving hope to the hopeless. A few years ago Rob Bell released his much-maligned book “Love Wins.” The premise of the theology in the book is both simple and ancient. According to Bell, if God is all-powerful and able to do anything, and God wants all to be saved, both of which are explicitly stated in the Bible, then it follows that, at some point in time, Hell will be empty.  I think what disturbed me the most was that Christians who responded negatively to Bell’s theology seemed to be in the unenviable position of cheering on people going to hell. There was a definite lack of love and grace in their responses. Is Bell right? I don’t know. I have said in the past that I am not sure he is correct, but I wish that he was. But this much I do know. Bell depends on a God who does not follow Solomon’s “under the sun” wisdom. His critics, on the other hand, seemed to be stuck “under the sun.” The God of the Bible is a God of love and is bigger than my doubts and beliefs. And right now that is the God that we need. Because, to be honest, the wisdom “under the sun” hasn’t taken us where we need to be. We need a God who is more. 

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Ecclesiastes 10