Ecclesiastes is one of those books in the Bible that everyone should read and be careful how they interpret it. If you take every world literally, you might come up with a pretty good excuse for avoiding wisdom, getting drunk and thinking of yourself as no better than a mere animal. But the truth lies in the context.
Ecclesiastes is the candid chronicles of a king looking for the meaning to life. Very honest and transparent, the king waffles from one thought to another. You must keep this in mind as he struggles to find the truth in world rampant with paradox. He sees the same fate coming on both the foul and the wise man. He sees pleasure, wisdom, wealth, and hard work as mere vanity. Men work hard to build up a nest egg that eventually gets spent by the next generation. Rain falls on the just and the wicked. Sometimes there just seems to be no real rhyme or reason to life.
This king, who many belive was Solomon, was considered a very wise and wealthy man. He had anything a person could ever want. But he never found any lasting happiness or fulfillment in posessions, wisdom, work or even pleasure. The king starts out by trying to find meaning apart from God. In his mind, he takes life just as it comes and attempts to remove God from it. Thus, he wants to know if anything really satisfies apart from God. Of course, his experiment is a failure because he could no more separate the Creator from creation as he could make the sun stand still.
Eventually, the king comes to the end of the journey. He discovers that God gives everything meaning, purpose and value. God breathes life into the world. There are seasons for everything. And God makes all things beautiful in His time. We are to enjoy the good things of life as a gift from God. We are to find fulfillment in our everyday lives. We are to live in the present via the light of eternity.
The Word says that God has set eternity in the hearts of men (Ecclesiastes 3:11). This means that we know there is something bigger than we can fathom going on in the world. But we just aren't really sure what the entire pictures looks like. We know that we are but a speck on the masterpiece of world history. We long to know what is too big for us to grasp. While this may be disturbing at first, this thought brings peace to the man who has put his trust in God. The man who waits under the shadow of God's protection does not fret because he knows that God transcends eternity and knows the masterpiece of time from beginning to the end.
As the king bounces from one extreme to another in his mind, he finds freedom in trusting God with every step. The king proclaimed, "The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: (A)fear God and (B)keep His commandments, because this applies to (C)every person. For (D)God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil" (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 - New American Standard Bible.)
The fear described here comes out of a love relationship. This is not the kind of fear that most rulers have used to rule. This is a fear based on the might and holiness of God. It is a fear that comes from someone realizing that they have no other recourse but to give up and yield to The King.It is a fear born out of the reality that even though the King is larger than life itself, He loves us and has good plans for His people. Those who rightly fear God understand that the meaning to life is found in following God's path and freedom comes by obeying His commands.
You could search all over the world for the meaning to life and miss it if you try to look to something other than God and His Word.
