WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? ECCLESIASTES

Description

MELVIN TINKER

Ecclesiastes both fascinates and captivates. Herman Melville in Moby Dick, described Ecclesiastes as ‘the truest of all books’, this ‘fine hammered steel of woe.’ George Bernard Shaw compared it to Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises uses as an epigraph the book’s opening poem. A character in John Updike’s Rabbit trilogy describes Ecclesiastes as ‘the Lord’s last word.’ Even U2 used it as an inspiration for its song The Wanderer. But that said, Ecclesiastes remains a controversial book as far as Christian interpretation is concerned. Some interpret it as a mainly pessimistic work, others see it as hedonistic. Tinker’s approach is quite different: Ecclesiastes is a book by a unique thinker whose non-linear approach to argument can confuse us, but properly understood can speak directly to us about the meaning of life. Perhaps even more importantly, the author shows how the great questions dealt with in Ecclesiastes find their real resolution in the Lord Jesus Christ. As the author says, “Whether a Christian believer or not, if you have a sneaking suspicion that life is meant to be more than what we wear, eat, drink, work and play, and yet no matter what you do you are still left with a sense of incompleteness, then read on, this is the book for you.”