The one book of the Bible written specifically to unbelievers

In one way, since we all start out life separated from God, every book in the Bible is written to unbelievers because that’s what we are.

Scripture says our original state is far from good. David wrote, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5); Job says: “What is man, that he should be pure, or he who is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?” (Job 15:14). and Jeremiah states: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). Addressing Christians, Paul says of our previous state: “You were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds” (Col. 1:21).

Since we all start that way, we need revelation from God to tell us that we’re more than just another animal, which is how the Bible begins and ends. So, the entirety of Scripture, in that respect, is written to everyone who is “estranged from the womb” (Ps. 58:3).

And because we’re in that condition, we naturally try to live life without God. But at some point, we start having flashes of realization that tell us life ultimately has no innate reward in itself. Instead, the material world and nature seem to constantly bring on the heartache, no matter what we do, smashing us into the ground until we’re gone.

This hasn’t been lost on philosophers, especially the existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, who describes, in his work Nausea, life as an empty bubble floating on a sea of nothingness. When a person courageously accepts this, Sartre says it makes them sick, hence the title of his book.

Then there’s Martin Heidegger, who said human beings are characterized by something he called Unheimlichkeit in German, which means a weirdness felt by all; a sensation of being homeless, alienated, and profoundly lonely.

Albert Camus agreed and in his novel The Fall said: “Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time … For anyone who is alone without God, without a master, the weight of days is dreadful … For the person who likes to dig into these ideas, they find life is impossible.” Bertrand Russel put it this way: “Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

How cheery.  

There’s one particular book in the Bible that was ahead of those guys by thousands of years, which says the same thing. When we wake up to the fact that, as Mark Twain put it, “the world will lament you for an hour and forget you forever” when we die, this part of Scripture can provide a remedy for Sartre’s nausea.

It’s the book of Ecclesiastes.

This often misunderstood part of Scripture, which many bible scholars say was written specifically to atheists and agnostics, devotes two full chapters to atheism and the remaining ten to navigating our sometimes confusing lives with a sovereign God. Reading the author’s words will have you nodding in agreement, uncomfortably squirming, and scratching your head all at the same time.

Class is in session  

Ecclesiastes starts by saying it’s the words of the Qohelet, which some versions translate “preacher”, but others say “teacher” or “professor,” with the latter being more appropriate. The professor is holding a class about life without God (which he constantly refers to as “life under the sun”) and tells us we’d better pay attention.

In his book on Ecclesiastes entitled The Problem of Life with God, Tommy Nelson sums up what the professor says this way: “Life bankrupts those who invest in it; entropy is sovereign.”

How cheery.  

When God is stiff-armed out of a person’s life, the Qohelet tells us we follow the same progression of intellectualism, hedonism, and materialism, all of which ultimately fail to satisfy. He uses the perfect way of describing our life’s pursuits without God: “Striving after wind” (1:14). No matter how hard you try, you’ll never catch it. It’s like Bob Dylan sang: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”

This naturally leads to frustration, emptiness, and lots of hurt. We ask like Jeremiah, “Why has my pain been perpetual and my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?” (Jer. 15:18).

I’ve had a decades-long front row seat to watching that kind of perpetual pain. My career led me from one as a database engineer to being chief product officer of several database software companies, most of which were in Silicon Valley, the pinnacle of status and wealth. It’s also home to some of the unhappiest people you’ll ever meet.

I remember one guy who was the CEO of an up-and-coming software company who had it all, including a tattoo on his arm that read “I am awesome.” Six months after he was on a panel with my CEO at a conference, he killed himself in a Bay Area hotel room.

He had all the world could offer but still ran headfirst into “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” (Ecc. 1:2).

The Qohelet tells us that such can be life under the sun — one that shuts Heaven out. He goes to great lengths to paint an ugly picture and an ending that is anything but uplifting, which causes many people to misunderstand this part of Scripture.    

Here’s the thing: you are meant to be depressed when you read the professor’s book. You’re supposed to walk away with an understanding that an intellectualism-hedonism-materialism path ends in despair. That’s his goal.

He’s waving with both arms and saying you can’t live life believing that an impersonal, amoral, meaningless, and purposeless universe accidentally created you — a personal, moral someone who is obsessed with meaning and purpose. That dog simply won’t hunt.

The Qohelet sums that up by simply saying: “For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him?” (Ecc. 2:25). In the end, no one.  

Make learning your god and you find “the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body” (Ecc. 12:12). Go with pure pleasure and “it too is futility” (Ecc. 2:1). Pursue material things and you’ll end up at some point admitting “all my activities which my hands had done and the labor which I had exerted … behold all was vanity and striving after wind and there was no profit under the sun” (Ecc. 2:11).

Cyril Joad, an English philosopher, author, teacher, and broadcasting personality, discovered this after trying to embrace the idea that humankind would evolve ever higher and have no need of God. After witnessing WWII and society’s increasing downward trajectory, he broke from his atheism and ended up writing The Recovery of Belief, where he argued a life without God isn’t worth living.

He’s right.

That being the case, we need to listen to what the Qohelet says: Rejoice in your days, honor your Creator, love well, work with joy — this is the whole of everyone. In the end, a simple poem by someone I can’t name sums up Ecclesiastes pretty well and gives us the best life path to pursue:

Eat with joy, drink with gladness,
Walk in love, work with cheer,
Fear God — this is all.