O Captain! My Captain!

At first glance the book of Ecclesiastes is very negative. It seems that with every turn of the page the preacher is telling us that there is no point to life. With the opening of the book he says that all is vanity, the sun comes up and goes down, each generation works under the sun then dies and the next comes, the rivers run into the sea but the sea is not filled. We read in verse 18 of chapter 1, “for in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” The preacher went so fare as to say in chapter 4 verses 2-3 that it is better to have never lived than to see the evil under the sun. Is this really true what the preacher is telling us, to learn is vanity and even life itself is waste, and to not have been born would be better?

So what is all of this negative talk about? What is the message the preacher is trying to convey to his readers? We learn from the latter part of the book that the whole duty of man is to “fear God and keep his commandments, for this is man’s all” (12:13). When we look at our lives and look at the things we do on a daily basis, how much of our day is spent toiling over things that do not matter rather than spiritual things that do?

The preacher gives a very grave comparison to the man who has everything desirable but does not do good. He says a stillborn child is better than a man that has not been filled with goodness (6:3)! I ask, are we filling our lives and the lives of our fellow man with goodness or are we squandering all with which God has blessed us on ourselves?

Walt Whitman wrote the poem “O Captain! My Captain!” telling of a sailors devotion to his captain. Christ must be our captain, not our co-captain, or just along for the ride in the back seat, but the captain of our soul. We must not just simply do the acts of worship and live a decent life but be so moved by His Word that we, like Jeremiah, could not keep His goodness to ourselves because of it being like a fire in our bones (Jer. 20:9). We must have complete devotion to our Captain, Friend, Brother, Savior, and Lord.

Let not our lives be in vain. Life is only vanity if we fail to fear God and keep His commandments. Let the Captain pilot you!