Please read “E1. Meaning to the Meaningless” before reading any of my other articles on Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes 12:1-8 1 Corinthians 15:35-58
Ecclesiastes chapter 12 verses 1-8 is a poem about growing old. Poems do not translate easily because literal translations often lose the figurative meanings found in poems. This Poem speaks of aging as a process of decline. In our youth, the future was sunny and bright, but now the future is dark and cloudy. Once we hiked to the mountain peaks, now it is difficult to make it from the bedroom to the bathroom. Once the songs of birds could wake us in the morning, now we cannot hear the TV on full volume. When we were young, we were fearless, now we are afraid to walk without a walker. We used to work from sunup to sundown, now it is work just to get up or sit down. New things once were exciting, now we just wish the world would stop changing. It seems the end is near and family and friends begin to plan for our going away.

The writer of Ecclesiastes understood what it means to grow old. He did not understand what it meant to die. He believed that God, who breathed into us the breath of life, takes that breath back and we cease to exist. Our body turns to dust, and returns to the ground it came from. He believed that at death people go to their eternal home, and that home is a hole in the ground. His final words in vs. 8 are, “Meaningless! Meaningless! … Everything is meaningless!”

Our lives are not meaningless! We find meaning in our relationship with God. That relationship culminates in the resurrection of the dead. We place a perishable body in the ground; God resurrects an imperishable body. Death is swallowed up in victory. God gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, we stand firm. We know that to our labor in the Lord is not in vain. Each day of aging is one day closer to being with Jesus.