Ecclesiastes 12:1-8

Ecclesiastes 12:1-8
Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say,
“I find no pleasure in them” –
before sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark,
and the clouds return after the rain;
when the keepers of the house tremble,
and the strong men stoop,
when the grinders cease because they are few,
and those looking through the windows grow dim;
when the doors to the street are closed
and the sound of grinding fades;
when men rise up at the sound of birds,
but all their songs grow faint;
when men are afraid of heights
and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms
and the grasshopper drags himself along
and desire no longer is stirred.
Then man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets
remember him – before the silver cord is severed,
or the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
or the wheel broken at the well,
and the dust returns to the ground it came from.,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
“Meaningless!! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher.
“Everything is meaningless.”


What is the meaning of Life? Meaningless! Life without God is MEANINGLESS!

I just love this passage. I think it is one of the most artistic passages in the Bible. God was so good to the people that wrote the Bible – what talent He gave them. So that millions of years later, the Word will still be THE WORD. We have very artistic writers today, but none can compare with the ones that wrote according to what God placed on their hearts during that era. I could go off on a tangent now about “for such a time is this…Esther”, but I will refrain (for now). Isn’t it amazing that God interwove all of the writings of the Old Testament characters together to form what we call our Bible today….

Anyway, I’ll get on with it…

Verse 2 talks about a man’s mind – “before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark, and the clouds return after the rain;” What a beautiful word picture! What did the author think when this came from his brain to his pen? He obviously spent much time in prayer with God to have that simile. The SUN and the LIGHT and the MOON and the STARS grow dark and the COULDS return after the rain. HOW AWESOME IS THAT??? (I just get so excited about stuff like this…) Right here, we have a passage about Alzheimers! Can you believe it? The sun, light, moon and stars make up the universe – our lives are controlled by these (I’m talking about scientifically…) The moon controls the ocean and the sun give us light and temperature and …do you get what I mean? Can you grasp what I am so poorly trying to say? Parallel that with the mind. The mind controls our whole body. Without the mind, our nervous system would be haywire and nothing would be possible. God controls all of that. The rain is a parallel to the same rain that we talk about frequently - the storms of life, trials, tribulation, problems, - and when we have been through RAIN storms, clouds come…over time, we lose our minds because of all of the stress or because of disease, or whatever….but usually it is later in life….which is what this passage is all about…the process of growing old. What an amazing word picture….

Let’s go on….

Verse 3 talks about hands, legs, teeth and eyes – “when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men stoop, when the grinders cease because they are few, and those looking through the windows grow dim;”. Hands trembling, legs holding up a stooping body, with very few teeth, looking through the eyes that are becoming blind……a beautiful picture of a person growing old – in poetry…

Verse 4 talks about hearing – “when the doors to the street are closed and the sound of grinding fades; when men rise up at the sound of birds, but all their songs grow faint;
Hearing – everything is cut off from the sound by a door closed. Man often rose to the sound of the birds, but as we grow older, the hearing goes and they can’t hear the bird alarm chirps any more….

Verse 5 is about our ability to move about freely – “when men are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets; when the almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags himself along and desire no longer is stirred. Then man goes to his eternal home and mourners go about the streets. This is such a beautiful statement! When men are afraid of heights and of dangers in the streets – as we get older, we are less able to protect ourselves as we have in the past….but we often fight that every step of the way down the old age path. Nobody wants to give up their independence, and most fight it.

When my grandmother was starting to decline (in Itta Bena), I wondered WHEN was going to be the moment that I had to take her independent living arrangements away. Just taking the keys away was hard, but after the third time that she hit a car and almost ran over her friend in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, it no longer became her choice. BUT, she didn’t want it to happen and fought it every step of the way. It was hard for her to give up that – the keys and the freedom that went with it, but it was also freeing of her (although she would never have admitted it.)

“The almond tree blossoms and the grasshopper drags himself along” is so POETIC! I get chills just thinking about it! Did you know that the almond tree blossoms in the winter? Did you know that the blossoms are WHITE!??? Isn’t that a beautiful statement in poetry? Winter is usually, in the literary sense, the “season of old age. I believe that this passage is directly speaking to the winter season of life, the old age, and the WHITE hair….and the grasshopper dragging himself along is speaking directly to the gait of an older person.

And leave it to God to not leave any thing out….”when desire is no longer stirred” is speaking to the sexuality of people as they age. I may be wrong, as we know in the nursing home, that desire is often there to close to the very end of life, but when it really is the end, I don’t think anyone on their death bed is actually thinking about sex. That is a gift that God gave us for pleasure, but when I think of someone actively dying, I believe that spiritually, a person is preparing their hearts and souls for the awesome experience that they are called for – seeing Jesus face to face.

Somehow, I think seeing Jesus face to face completely erases the desire for sex.

Anyway, I won’t go further on that subject…
But then we face death…

People mourn for us, some more than others, but then they move on with their own lives…and their own challenges…
There are certain people that have died in our own lives and we mourn for them, but the world just continues on…people pick up the pieces and keep on going….and it really doesn’t matter about the person who died. That person might have made huge influences on our lives, but not so much that we can’t function without that particular person. We take the memory of that person and get on with it…occasionally attributing a lesson learned from that person to the task at hand. Those are never forgotten, but life goes on and everyone adjusts.

Well, I didn’t mean for this to get morbid or anything. I am most inspired by the genius that wrote it! What a beautiful word picture about getting old and losing your mind….