For many people life is meaningless, empty, boring drudgery. Read the book of Ecclesiastes to discover the futility of life. It is especially empty without God. Can you imagine what it must be like for those who don’t know God? In his thought-provoking book on Ecclesiastes, Living on the Ragged Edge, Chuck Swindoll describes the problem:

To put it bluntly, life on planet Earth without God is the pits. And if I may repeat my point (Solomon does numerous times), that’s the way God designed it. He made it like that. He placed within us that God-shaped vacuum that only He can fill. Until He is there, nothing satisfies. There is no hell on earth like horizontal living without God.

Can you imagine being raised in a country that teaches everyone that “there is no God”? Perhaps you remember the Soviet athlete who in following his coach’s instruction to do a three and a half somersault, tucked position, cracked his head on the ten-meter platform. Today he’s dead.

That tragedy made me stop and think how I’d feel if I were a parent in the Soviet Union, sitting in a hospital room with my boy dying on the bed in front of me. Think about it. There I sit, helpless to do one thing to revive him. I have no God to talk to. I find no comfort coming from the Supreme Being, because I do not think He exists. And there is no one to put his arm around me and tell me there’s an eternal purpose in it all.

But the writer of this Old Testament book also states that God has made everything appropriate in its time. He makes everything work together for good (Romans 8:28). What difference will God make in your life today? in your partner’s life?

  1. Norman Wright, Quiet Times for Couples (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2011).

We have just released a new Bible Study based on the book of Ecclesiastes.

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