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 God’s wisdom, not merely Solomon’s.

We see Solomon’s first observation in verse 4: “Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbour.” This may have been written thousands of years ago, but it is a cutting-edge commentary on modern Australia. We see this, do we not? A busy economy, people industriously toiling away in life. But Solomon looks below the surface and says that this toil, generally speaking, is driven by envy.

We live in an economy of envy. You see this in workplaces. Our vocations were designed to be a means of glorifying God and serving others, yet in verses 7 and 8 we see a worker who lives alone and works for no one but himself. Instead of serving one another, what we so often find today is that work revolves around climbing the ladder. What people call career progression is often nothing more than corporatised envy. Pursuing excellence is one thing, and it is to be encouraged. But pursuing excellence does not necessarily mean being better than everyone else or being in charge of everyone else. God did not design work to be driven by envy, but by love service.

You might ask at this point, what does envy have to do with individualism? But that is exactly the point. We may not realise it at first, but envy is actually a characteristic of individualism. If you are absorbed by getting what others have, who is your attention focused on? You see it there in verse four: the man does not love his neighbour, he objectifies him. He does not rejoice in his neighbour’s prosperity. His neighbour becomes nothing more than a benchmark for his own goals and desires. Envy, by definition, is individualistic. It does not treat other people as people. It separates people and poisons relationships.

We can see many examples of how envy poisons communities around us. People toil in their careers, treading on others to get higher, sacrificing their families in the process. We see it on social media, where people are absorbed by impressing others and envying what others have. There is a lifestyle many Australians pursue: holidays, a beautiful partner, lots of money, not having kids so that those things are easier to obtain. These pursuits often feed on envy. And envy is a dead end. It will not lead you to the fear of God. It will lead you down a winding labyrinth path until you find yourself sitting alone in a dark corner.

Solomon opens up the individualism of envy further in verses seven and eight: “Again, I saw vanity under the sun: one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, ‘For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?’ This also is vanity and an unhappy business.” You see it clearly. This man works and works and works. His eyes are never satisfied with riches. He never stops to ask himself, ‘Who am I doing this for?’ He has no one in his life. No son. No brother. He is alone, consumed by individualism, and yet he is still not satisfied.

What Solomon is saying is that this too is a dead end. It is hevel. This man will work and work and work, and in the end he will have no one. He will die. His riches will disappear. His life will be over, and he will have nothing. This is what envy does. It isolates its victims and destroys them.

So we must examine our own hearts. Do we see envy at work within us? Are we workaholics, so focused on toiling and earning that we push all other people out? Is your life a lonely life? It may be that the reason for that loneliness is an all-consuming devotion to work. Our work can become a means of filling our own cravings rather than a means of serving God and serving others. Work can take up all our time and leave us with no time to serve anyone else. Consider this, pray, and tune in to the next meditation to look at the cure! SDG.

Prayer of Confession & Consecration

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Ep 135: The Sin of Individualism (Ecc 4:4-8).