What do we do when life just doesn’t make sense? Illness strikes. A job is lost. Friendships fade. Uncertainty looms. Whether the gray-haired saint facing cancer or the college student burdened by the pressures of the future, crisis and suffering have a way of shaking even the most confident Christian.

We may know that God is in control of all things at all times in all places, yet we often feel frustrated because we don’t understand what he is up to. So what do we do when life doesn’t make sense?

The Preacher in Ecclesiastes asked a similar question. Often, when someone mentions Ecclesiastes, we can think, “Whoa — he was a downer.” In reality, though, Ecclesiastes does not push the depressed over the edge, but rather gives the frustrated a foothold of joy in our puzzling world. The Preacher declares a simple message of hope for the struggling: enjoy life by fearing God even when you cannot understand his works and ways.

God Weaves All Things Together

When we do not understand why life is the way it is, the Preacher would have us be certain that God orchestrates all its changing seasons.

Everything has its time: “A time to be born, and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:2). The Preacher poetically introduces his subject by using birth and death to encapsulate all things in life. All things — the good, the bad, and the somewhere in between — occur according to an appointed time. In his words, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Who appoints this timing? The Preacher does not leave us wondering for long: “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Just as beauty befits a lover (Song of Solomon 1:8, 15; 2:10), so God works all things together in a fitting, beautiful way according to his will. He is the artist; all of life is his mosaic. He is the great weaver who threads all things together to form an exquisite tapestry. Perhaps we know what passage Paul meditated on as he wrote, “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28).

Mystery from Beginning to End

Yet even with confidence in the sovereign rule of God over all things at all times in all places, the Preacher recognizes his own inability to understand. He writes, “Also, [God] has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

In context, “eternity” parallels “what God has done from the beginning to the end.” Humanity has a God-given desire to comprehend “what God has done from the beginning to the end,” but God placed this desire in our hearts in such a way that we “cannot find out” what he has done. As Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) writes, “For all eternity he put in men’s hearts the fact that they might never discover what God has done from the beginning right to the end” (Homilies on Ecclesiastes, 79).

Naturally, as we arrive at the intersection of our finiteness and God’s infinity, we leave frustrated. The Preacher writes, “What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with” (Ecclesiastes 3:9–10). His question implies a negative answer: none. The worker has no gain from his toil.

What toil? In general, the activities noted in Ecclesiastes 3:2–8 constitute our toil through life, but Ecclesiastes 8:17 also reveals a specific piece of our struggle: “Then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out.” No matter how hard we try, we cannot make sense of God’s works and ways.

“God’s works and ways make sense — beautiful, wise, and fitting sense — just not always to us.”

At the very least, we should consider reframing the original question. Instead of asking, “What do we do when life doesn’t make sense?” we might ask, “What do we do when life doesn’t make sense to us?” God works all things together according to his wisdom, but we do not have the capacity to understand all he does. God’s works and ways make sense — beautiful, wise, and fitting sense — just not always to us. Isaiah would not be surprised by this conclusion: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8).

Fear Before Him

So what do we do when life doesn’t make sense to us?

The Preacher does not leave us alone to suffer in nihilistic resignation: “I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him” (Ecclesiastes 3:14).

God is not merely playing with his creation because he wants to have some fun at our expense. He has not created a world with no meaning, leaving humans to wander through life without hope of understanding. Instead, God designed us to desire infinite knowledge so that we would fear him.

To fear God means to remember who God is and to remember who we are in relationship (and outside of relationship) with him. We remind ourselves of God’s sovereign control of all things in life, humbly accepting our own inability to always understand his ways. At the same time, we can do so with joy because we know that God works all things together beautifully for our good.

Like Job in the face of great calamity, we ask, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10). We look uncertainty and tragedy in the eye, as painful as it may be, and by his grace declare, “Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

Embrace the Life You Can See

We do not stop at fear, though. Rightly fearing God starts the process, but God wants more. The Preacher writes, “I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil — this is God’s gift to man” (Ecclesiastes 3:12–13). Don’t read the Preacher’s words as some sort of carpe diem motto that urges us to make the most of life while we can. Even when we cannot understand God’s work or ways, he wants us to enjoy life — every season of it — within the context of a holy fear.

In his book Things of Earth, Joe Rigney urges Christians to “embrace your creatureliness. Don’t seek to be God. Instead, embrace the glorious limitations and boundaries that God has placed on you as a character in his story” (234). Rigney’s exhortation hits at the core of Ecclesiastes 3: rightly fearing God and enjoying his world. To fear God rightly is to remember our humanity. When we can’t see around the dark corner of life yet to come, no matter how much we want to, we remember our humanity. We remember that God is God, and we are not. He controls all things at all times at all places, and he is good.

“God is God, and we are not. He controls all things at all times at all places, and he is good.”

So, we ask God for the grace to embrace the life we can see — the life he has given to us — and to enjoy it fully. Breathe deeply the cool air of a fall morning as you walk the dog. Slowly sip hot chocolate with your children. Work hard at the temp job as you await a permanent position. Let your hand linger with your ailing loved one. Even when we do not understand God’s works and ways, we can delight in his good gifts to us. We can find a unique pleasure in our toil as we throw ourselves upon our rock, Jesus Christ, through the storms of life.

Jason DeRouchie ably summarizes the tension between finitude, infinity, frustration, and joy: “This is the goal of Ecclesiastes: that believers feeling the weight of the curse and the burden of life’s enigmas would turn their eyes toward God, resting in his purposes and delighting whenever possible in his beautiful, disfigured world” (“Shepherding Wind and One Wise Shepherd,” 15).

Do Good Like God

After inviting us to enjoy the life God has given, the Preacher adds one more dimension to our well-being: “There is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live” (Ecclesiastes 3:12). When we embrace our finiteness and enjoy God and his gifts to us, we ultimately live like God by doing good to others. We soak up the joy of the life he has given to us, and then we channel that joy to others.

So, what do we do when life doesn’t make sense to us? We face all things — the good, the bad, and the somewhere in between — with confidence because we know our God is weaving all things together for good, even when we cannot see past our current circumstances. We walk hand in hand with our Savior on the path of life, enjoying all his gifts, big and small. And then we do good to others by inviting them to do the same.

Joan of Arc (1412–1431) was a Catholic mystic and military prodigy. At age seventeen, she was appointed commander in chief of the French army and led her forces to decisive victories over the English. Mark Twain — the pen name for Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) — was a world-famous writer who was also famous for being a grizzled skeptic, a religious agnostic, and an outspoken, scathing critic of the Christian faith.

So, who do you suppose was Twain’s historical hero? Yep, Joan of Arc. He even wrote a biographical novel about her astounding life, which I read with astonishment 25 years ago. Twain said the Maid of Orleans was “by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced” (452). To call this ironic is an understatement. What in the world did Twain see in Joan that inspired his supreme admiration?

Well, if you trust the historical records — and Twain did — there’s a lot to admire. Over a number of years, this anti-religious curmudgeon took his fine-toothed comb to the original court documents and the many firsthand witness statements that still exist in various European archives. And at the end of his research, he found it impossible to deny a few astounding claims:

This kind, humble, illiterate, teenage, peasant girl, with zero prior exposure to or training in the art of war, inexplicably possessed military genius.
With no prior leadership experience, she quickly became the most effective, courageous leader in the French military, and in a career that lasted barely a year, she achieved a series of unparalleled victories.
As someone given to frequent ecstatic spiritual experiences, she somehow exercised more levelheaded wisdom in decision-making than her sovereign or the high-ranking officials around her.

By all historically credible accounts, Joan was a phenom.

Sacrificial Love Conquers a Skeptic

But the Maid’s astonishing skill in warfare isn’t what most captured Twain’s heart. What captured his heart was Joan’s heart. In the “Translator’s Preface” at the beginning of his book, he wrote,

[Joan] was perhaps the only entirely unselfish person whose name has a place in profane history. No vestige or suggestion of self-seeking can be found in any word or deed of hers. (20)

What Twain calls unselfishness the Bible more accurately calls love. We can see this more clearly in a description of Joan that Twain later wrote in an essay (included as an appendix in my edition of the book):

She was full of compassion: on the field of her most splendid victory she forgot her triumphs to hold in her lap the head of a dying enemy and comfort his passing spirit with pitying words; in an age when it was common to slaughter prisoners she stood dauntless between hers and harm, and saved them alive; she was forgiving, generous, unselfish, magnanimous; she was pure from all spot or stain of baseness. (451)

Four centuries after her death, it seems Joan of Arc achieved another victory: she conquered a jaded skeptic. She made Mark Twain a believer, not in the existence of the true God, but in the existence of Christlike, sacrificial love. He saw in Joan a person who actually loved God supremely and followed what she believed was his will with pure, childlike faith, all while seeking to love her neighbor as herself — even when her neighbor was her enemy.

The Heart Has Its Reasons

Whether or not Joan of Arc was, in reality, as selfless and loving as Twain believed her to be is beside my point here. What’s remarkable is his admiration of the self-sacrificing love he saw in her. Why did it move him so deeply?

We can ask this another way. If Christianity isn’t real, and the world is governed merely by pitiless naturalistic forces, then it strikes me that Joan of Arc ought not to be glorified as a historical hero, but pitied as an example of what the real world does to those whose love ethic is informed by a delusion. Twain would have known this, but it appears he couldn’t help himself. Why?

I believe it’s because, as Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” (Pensées, thought 423). Let’s let Pascal expound a little more on what he meant:

We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. (thought 282)

As Twain applied his reason to the claims of Christianity, he found numerous reasons to be skeptical. Having been raised in the Christian tradition, he knew the Bible well. He knew Jesus’s commandment that Christians were to sacrificially love one another as Christ had sacrificially loved them (John 13:34), and he took cynical delight in pointing out ways professing Christians had failed miserably to keep that commandment. For he knew that “anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8).

But in Joan, it seems to me, Twain’s heart discerned a truth, a first principle, his reason could not refute: “Love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7). In this case, Twain’s heart was better than his head. Being an image-bearer of God, unbeliever though he was, he recognized the real thing when he saw it. Something deep inside, the part of him designed to admire and be drawn to sacrificial love, couldn’t help but find such love in a real person captivating.

By This All People Will Know

Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Why? Because deep down, their hearts acknowledge a truth their reason may deny: God is love. And so, while “no one has ever seen God,” people intuitively recognize that, “if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). This is why years ago I wrote,

Christlike, sacrificial, forbearing, hopeful, enduring love is the greatest apologetic to the existence and nature of God. It is more compelling than brilliant, well-reasoned arguments (which can be brilliantly countered) and more powerful than signs and wonders (which can be counterfeited, Matthew 24:24). And any Spirit-filled Christian, man or woman, of any ethnicity, social class, age demographic, intellectual capacity, or spiritual gifting, can demonstrate love.

They will know we are Christians by our love. This is why Jesus made love his last and greatest commandment for Christians. And it’s why, when all is said and done, Paul tells us that “the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Because God is love.

‘Best of All My Books’

Near the end of his life, Twain said, “I like Joan of Arc best of all my books, and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.” The irony of this has not been lost on many of his ardent fans. As one expert on Twain has observed,

By the time he’s writing [Joan of Arc] he’s not a believer. He is anti-Catholic, and he doesn’t like the French. So he writes a book about a French-Catholic martyr? Ostensibly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

No, but the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. In spite of Twain’s anti-Christian bias, in spite of his anti-French bias, in spite of his anti-mystical bias, who became his historical hero? The French mystic warrior, who was, in his view, “the most noble life that was ever born into this world save only One.”

Save only One. That’s a notable qualification, given this grizzled skeptic’s religious views. I think it’s a haunting indicator that Twain perceived in Joan of Arc’s sacrificial love a type and shadow of the One who, like no other, laid his life down for his friends and enemies. And Twain couldn’t help but admire it. Because in his heart he knew there is no greater love than this (John 15:13).

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