Episode Details

Pray

Read: Ecc 4:4-8.

Meditation

There is a prevailing sickness in our culture today. You will find this sickness quarantined behind closed suburban doors and high fences. You will see its symptoms in next door neighbours avoiding eye contact and a friendly wave. There are train carriages full of this disease all across our major cities each day. You notice it when you look up from your phone and realise that almost everyone on board is glued to their screen. This disease leaves people bedridden night after night as they sit alone, watching an endless stream of episodes on flickering screens. And worse still, we might even find symptoms of this disease in our own hearts if we look closely, in our tendencies to avoid other people and to close ourselves off.

You see it sometimes in churches as well. People standing after church by themselves for awkward minutes on end. Closed circles of people who know each other well and talk to no one else. People not knowing each other’s names. The sickness I am talking about is the disease of individualism, the compulsive tendency that we each have to be self-oriented and self-contained. This disease has always existed among sinful people, and it is something we will all need to fight against, even as Christians.

And even if you are “a social person”, you will probably still find that you are not immune to this sickness. As we will see in our passage, it is possible to be surrounded by people and yet still live in a radically individualistic way. It is possible to interact with others and yet still be almost entirely self-absorbed, self-focused and self-contained, with other people becoming a means to an end for our own goals.

As Solomon continues to lead us through the vast labyrinth of life, in our passage he notices something else in this broken world and brings it to our attention: the plague of individualism. And without question, what he will show us is that individualism is a dead end. It is a sin that we must resist, and an influenza for which we must find a cure. Individualism is a sure way to avoid growing in the fear of the Lord.

There is, however, a positive side to Solomon’s message here. As we have seen before, Solomon does not want to lead us down dead-end paths. He is not a despairing old skeptic. He is a man of wisdom, and he wants to show us the pathway to life. He wants to teach us how to live life in a fallen world in the fear of God. And again, as we will see here, what he shows us is that we are not designed to love and fear God alone. We are designed to live together. To fear God is to live together.

You find this right there at the creation in Genesis 2:18: “The LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone.’” Walking through the labyrinth of life is best done in the company of others. In our next meditation we will look at the cure for individualism, but first we must understand the problem. So let’s consider the disease of individualism. I want us to be better able to spot this tendency in our own hearts, and I want to show you, as Solomon does, just how much of a dead end isolation really is.

Generally speaking, individualism, thinking, and behaviour that is self-absorbed and self-contained, rears its head in all sorts of ways. In broad terms, it really is just a basic aspect of sin. While we were created to put God first, others second and self last, sin gives us a new equation: self first, others second, God last. In that sense, sin is individualistic by definition. So we are not going to see everything there is to see about individualism. There is too much to cover. But in our particular passage, we are given some unique insights as we listen to the voice of Christ speaking through Solomon. As we know, all wisdom ultimately comes to us from God in Christ, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:30. Never forget that Ecclesiastes is a book of