People who ought to know keep saying that this year we will finally put the pandemic behind us. I’ve given up predicting myself, but I hope they’re right. If they are, I wonder how we’ll remember these last couple years.

For those who suffered the death of someone close to them, the defining experience of the pandemic may be loss. For many of us, I imagine the primary experience will be disorientation. We saw our plans upended. We felt time suspended. We saw what had been pillars in life crumble one after another — from time with aging family, to the joy of in-person worship, to a simple smile on the unmasked face of a friend.

Far beyond the physical impacts of the disease itself, the pandemic experience has exposed the fragility of so much of what we take for granted in life. How will we cope with the disorientation of the last couple years? Where will we look for stability and renewal coming out of them?

Nothing New Under the Sun

The Bible’s wisdom literature is given to help us answer questions like these. Wisdom provides proper orientation to the world. It’s a learned instinct for living in the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. And of the Bible’s wisdom books, perhaps ironically, it is Ecclesiastes that offers the perspective we badly need in responding to what we’ve been through.

“Wisdom is an instinct for living in the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

I say ironically because Ecclesiastes itself can be a disorienting book. It offers the perspective of a man called “the Preacher,” who essentially had everything he wanted in life. No one told him no. But in the end, he found it all to be nothing but vanity. A mere vapor. Meaningless. Empty.

It is striking to me how closely the list of his pursuits in life resembles the main options we have for reorienting ourselves after a difficult couple of years. We’ll be tempted to look for stability or hope in the same vanities that collapsed under his weight long ago.

Take pleasure, for example. In the earliest days of the pandemic, traffic to major porn sites skyrocketed. So did Netflix subscriptions. And now, after two years in which so many plans were disrupted, pleasure-seekers are booking luxury vacations at record pace. As one Forbes writer put it, what we learned from the pandemic is that “the future is unpredictable,” that “life is short,” and that “dreams should not be put off.” “If all goes well,” he continues, “2022 is going to be a big year for dream trips.”

The Big Quit

Some have chased dreams; others are looking to work for a fresh start. In September of 2021 more than four million people voluntarily left their jobs for other opportunities. That number broke a record set the previous month, when millions more made the same choice. It’s a trend so significant that pundits are calling this “The Great Resignation” or “The Big Quit.” Given how much of the disruption of these past years directly affected our work, it shouldn’t surprise us that so many would look to move on with a change of scenery.

Then there’s money and what it can buy. Retail therapy was a go-to treatment for months before any vaccine hit the market. With stimulus money going around, people purchased new fire pits and television upgrades, and started home improvement projects to take the edge off what had gone wrong. So many months later, retail therapy still sells. As one recent AT&T commercial put it, “I think we can all agree that after the past year-ish, we all deserve something new.” Why not reward your survival with the latest iPhone?

Still others have looked to mastery of some new skill to redeem the strange time and restore a sense of control. In April of 2020, I heard one economist talk about the loss of control as the primary stressor he was feeling since his job is to predict what’s likely to happen. His advice to others feeling that pain was to find something you can control, however small and insignificant it might be. Some learned to bake bread. Others took up a foreign language. I smoked my first couple briskets. What did you do with your pandemic? We want growth opportunities, to move from victory unto victory. If COVID was a curveball, we want to hit it out of the park.

All Was Striving After Wind

The Preacher warns us, however, that life doesn’t work this way. Ecclesiastes opens with a poem on the relentless, repetitive weariness of life under the sun. “What does a man gain,” he asks, “by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:3).

We want gain. We’d like to see life as one long process of acquisition. Where we have setbacks, we want to bounce back better than ever. We want steady upward progress. But just as the sun rises and sets (Ecclesiastes 1:5), just as the wind blows round and round (verse 6), so it is with all of life: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (verse 9).

In chapter 2, the Preacher explains how he reached this conclusion, with a catalog of where he turned for some sort of gain in this life. It’s a list that sounds eerily familiar. He looked first to pleasure (Ecclesiastes 2:1). He tried comedy (verse 2), fine wine (verse 3), entertainment, and sex (verse 8). He looked to his work, and to mastery over his slice of the world: “I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees” (Ecclesiastes 2:4–5). He built up more money and more possessions than any before him in Jerusalem (Ecclesiastes 2:7–8).

Pleasure, work, wealth, control — everything we might look to under the sun — he’s already had in abundance. We need to hear the lesson he learned the hard way: “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:11).

What We Can See Now

If you’re feeling disoriented by a difficult two years, you won’t find your footing in the same old vanities that let the Preacher down so long ago. But we do have an opportunity now for a greater clarity about the world than perhaps we could have had back when things seemed normal.

“Nothing is certain about life under the sun except the death that comes at the end of it.”

Nothing is certain about life under the sun except the death that comes at the end of it. The things we take for granted have always been fragile. Our control over what matters to us has always been severely limited. And the grip of death on what we love has always been stronger than ours. COVID didn’t cause these problems. Whatever comes next won’t solve them. That’s the perspective Ecclesiastes offers to us.

When the Preacher writes of “life under the sun,” what he has in mind is life from a strictly human perspective. As if what we see is all there is. Death really is the end. There’s no satisfaction for our deepest hunger pains. In other words, “life under the sun” is life on your own, left to your own ideas for what’s best, your own resources for pulling off your vision, and your own handful of years to make the most of it.

Ecclesiastes is a devastating critique of human self-sufficiency. We won’t find a cure for what ails us under the sun. Our only hope rests on a radical intervention from beyond.

Light from Beyond the Sun

The message of Ecclesiastes is that if God is silent, the whole world is a vapor. The message of the rest of the Scriptures is that God has spoken to us. Even better than that: the Word has become flesh and lived among us (John 1:14).

Peter Kreeft has described Ecclesiastes as “a perfect silhouette of Jesus, the stark outline of the darkness that the face of Jesus fills” (Three Philosophies of Life, 51). Under the sun, on our own, all is vanity and death has the final word. Ecclesiastes exists to make “the darkness intolerable” (Derek Kidner, The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, 103). And to prepare us for the only certain hope: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4–5).

Whatever else we may take with us from a disorienting couple of years, into another year under the sun, let’s at least embrace the message of the Preacher. We won’t find the stability we crave short of the help and hope and satisfaction that only comes beyond the sun. If we haven’t learned that lesson, we’ll be just as unprepared for the next time the world turns upside down. And there will be a next time. “What has been is what will be. . . and there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

How can Scripture say that there was a time when Jesus wasn’t “perfect”? Twice we’re told that Jesus was made perfect (Hebrews 2:10; 5:9). Hebrews even goes on to connect perfection with cleansing from sin. Old Testament sacrifices couldn’t “make perfect,” cleanse, remove guilty feelings, or “take away sins” (Hebrews 10:1–4). Yikes! Did Jesus really start his life as an imperfect human needing to be cleansed from sin? That doesn’t fit with what the Bible says in other places, even in Hebrews, where we’re told that Jesus did not sin (4:15). How can Scripture say that Jesus had to be perfected, connect perfection with sin, and still affirm that Jesus was sinless?

The Bible answers these questions in a surprising way. The perfecting of Jesus isn’t some embarrassing reality to paper over. Instead, Hebrews insists that Jesus’s perfection was “fitting” — good, right, appropriate (2:10). We’re told, in fact, that had Jesus not been perfected, then God’s story wouldn’t be good news. To hear the Bible’s surprising answer to why the sinless Jesus had to be perfected, we have to start at the beginning of the Bible’s story — with Adam.

Adam’s Imperfection

We were created to live permanently in God’s presence. That is the goal of God’s story. It’s where God’s story will one day end and, therefore, where it’s been headed from the beginning (Revelation 21:3). God wants to be our God in the perfect and permanent place he’s prepared for us (Hebrews 8:10; 9:11; 11:16). To reach that end, to enter and remain in God’s presence, humans must be perfected. Humanity’s original glory and worldwide dominion had to become permanent glory and dominion. For that to happen, Adam, our representative, needed to trust and obey God.

He didn’t.

Instead, he disbelieved in God’s goodness and disobeyed God’s word. As a result, humanity lost its original splendor. We lost our original splendor, becoming diminished in glory and restricted in our dominion. Hebrews 2 tells this sad story. It’s why perfection in a post-Adam, post-fall-into-sin world now requires unwavering trust in God and forgiveness. Faith alone won’t perfect us any longer now that we have red on our ledgers. Something has to be done about our sin too.

Jesus’s Perfection

This is the world Jesus entered and the humanity Jesus assumed. Hebrews doesn’t tell us how Jesus was “made like [us] in every respect” (2:17) while still avoiding guilt by association with Adam. Other places in the Bible give us hints. (Compare Matthew 1:18–25 and Luke 1:26–38 with Romans 5:12–21.) Hebrews only tells us that Jesus was like us and that he lived his human life full of faith and free from sin, with the help of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 2:13; 4:15; 9:14).

“Jesus did what Adam did not. And because he did, he reached humanity’s goal.”

Jesus, in other words, did what Adam did not. And because he did, he reached humanity’s goal. He was made perfect (5:9). Humanity’s original destiny — superiority to angels, glory, and dominion — is now his permanently (1:5–13; 2:9). Even his body is now “indestructible” (7:16), since perfection takes away even the possibility of mortality. It’s this new status, therefore, that makes Jesus fit to live right where God intended humans to live — in his presence forever (1:3; 11:16; 12:28).

But that’s only part of the story. After all, the Bible doesn’t just say it was fitting for Jesus to be perfected, but perfected “through suffering” (2:10). It’s a two-word phrase we cannot live without!

Our Perfection

When Jesus entered God’s presence, he went there ahead of us, not instead of us. He’s like Daniel Boone, a pioneering trailblazer who paved the way for others to follow him. That’s exactly how Hebrews describes Jesus (2:10; 12:2). It’s also why Hebrews won’t let us forget that Jesus wasn’t simply perfected but was perfected through suffering.

He ran his race. He succeeded where Adam had failed. He trusted and obeyed all the way to the cross. And he did all this for us. His final act of faith gives us a way to wash our sins clean and join him in God’s presence.

Hebrews tells the story like this: During Jesus’s final days, he prayed and prayed that God would rescue him from death and reward his sinless life with perfection. God — we’re told — heard Jesus’s request precisely because of his “reverent submission” (5:7 NIV). God listened to Jesus because Jesus listened to God all his life. Jesus ran his difficult race and, along the way, learned what it meant to trust and obey God through thick and thin. As a result, Jesus crossed the finish line and was made perfect and, at the very same time, became the “source” of our perfection (5:9). Jesus perfectly passed his test of faith, and his passed test perfects us!

Precious Perfection

Had Jesus not been perfected, then we could not be perfected. There wasn’t any other way to reach the end of God’s story. Hebrews wants us to see this so clearly that it tells us four precious goods we would lose had Jesus not been perfected.

1. PERFECT EXAMPLE

First, we would lose our perfect example. Had Jesus come as an already-perfected human, then he couldn’t be our example. His human experience would have been too different from our own to be useful. That’s why Jesus came not only as one not yet perfected but also as one lowered, diminished, and restricted. He came as a post-Adam, post-fall-into-sin human like us.

Yes, he was sinless and blameless. Had he not been, then his final act of obedience would have lacked the potency our sins required (Hebrews 9:14). But he was, nevertheless, weak and susceptible to suffering in a way pre-fall Adam — God’s “very good” humanity (Genesis 1:31) — was not (Hebrews 2:15, 18; 4:15; 5:7). Friends, it’s Jesus’s example, his likeness to us, that inspires our race of faith. That’s what it’s meant to do. Jesus is like the amazing runners of old (11:1–40), only so much better (12:1–2).

2. PERFECT PRIEST

Second, we would lose our perfect priest. Had Jesus not been perfected, had he not experienced our human condition, he could not be our priest (2:17–18; 5:1–10). After all, priests are selected from “among” others just like them (5:1). How else could they hope to “sympathize with our weaknesses” (4:15)?

It’s also Jesus’s sinless experience of our human condition that qualifies him for a unique priesthood. Only a human with an indestructible life could be appointed to the ultimate priesthood and, therefore, provide his peers with the perfection other priests could not (7:11, 16–17; 9:1–10; 10:1–4, 11–14). Because Jesus sinlessly suffered, because he faithfully trusted and obeyed to the point of death, he reached humanity’s goal. And his body was made permanently immortal, qualifying him for an eternal priesthood. The suffering, the becoming perfect, however, was essential. Jesus could not be the priest we need without it.

3. PERFECT COVENANT MEDIATOR

Third, we would lose our perfect covenant mediator. Had Jesus not been perfected, then he could not give us access to God’s best and final promises. It’s Jesus’s final act of faithful obedience that unleashes the promises God made in his new and final covenant (8:6, 8). There God promised to make a way for humans to live with him forever, to do for them what Adam had not. He promised to stitch perfect faith and obedience into their minds and hearts (8:10). But he couldn’t do this without first taking away their sin. Perfection in a post-Adam world requires faith, but it also requires forgiveness. In the new covenant, God provides both through Jesus’s faith-filled death (9:15–28).

4. PERFECT KING

Finally, we would lose our perfect king. Had Jesus not been perfected, then Jesus couldn’t be our king. As Hebrews tells us, it was Jesus’s life of faithful obedience that caused his enthronement. “You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions” (1:9).

Later, Hebrews specifically draws attention to Jesus’s final act of faithful obedience. “We see . . . Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death” (2:9). It’s Jesus’s death — his final act of faithful trust in God — that led to his enthronement as our king. And it’s this king who triumphs over every one of our enemies (1:13; 10:13), including our ultimate enemy, the devil (2:14–15). Before Jesus was perfected, before Jesus died, we were slaves to the king of death. But now that Jesus has died, we serve a new and better Lord (13:20).

God’s Good Story

Far from being an embarrassing subplot in God’s grand story, Jesus’s perfection is the story’s fitting and surprising climax. It’s the reason we can call God’s story good. It’s the way — the only way — we can reach the story’s end. How precious indeed is Jesus’s perfection.

We wouldn’t want the story told any other way.

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