Living With Fulfillment

Ecclesiastes 2:25

     Here in chapter two of Ecclesiastes, the author writes in verse 25, "For apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?"

The Breakdown

     This is such a great verse that I read over in chapter 2 today. I love it, so let's begin! "For apart from him..." The "him" in this verse refers to God, just to clear things up. So right here the author is just stating that whoever is apart from God, whoever is not saved, whoever is living their life absent of God. That is what the author is saying. "...who can eat or who can have enjoyment?" When he says, who can eat? That is the key phrase here. When you eat, you obviously eat to satisfy your hunger. If humans never ate, then we would all starve to death. Eating is something that allows us to live. So when the verse says, "who can eat?", he is really saying who can live? "...who can have enjoyment?" is the next phrase. Here that's just saying how it's practically impossible to have any type of true joy in your life if you are separated from God. If you don't have the Father, then you will never experience true happiness.

The Application

     So here, I feel like this verse is telling me that until i acknowledge God in my life on a daily basis and know that I am only here because of Him, my life will utterly be meaningless. God is the key to meaning in our lives. We are powered off of Him alone! If we ignore Him daily, never talk to Him and never acknowledge His presence in our lives, then we will not have happiness! No joy, no meaning. We will be lost that day and days to come if we don't recognize Him in our lives. The challenge I feel like this verse in Ecclesiastes is giving us is that in order to fully and successfully live life, we need to live life with God, then we will have that sense of fulfillment. We need to feed our spiritual stomachs. That is a perfect metaphor for this. We can't live without eating food. We can't live spiritually without digesting the Word. We need to feed our spirituality by investing in the Word and truly examining it. The Word of God is the only thing that can fill that craving, it is the only Divine Word that can give us insight to God and see what He wants for us. Living according to the Bible is what will allow us to fully live our lives for God, and keep us safe in Him. The Bible will keep us from sin, and sin will keep us from the Bible. We have to be careful with where we spend our time.