Ecclesiastes feat. Trent Reznor

Trent Reznor would be seriously angry if he knew that someone was using his songs to talk about the Bible. Trent Reznor, of the band Nine Inch Nails, is sort of a nihilistic Industrial artist whose aggressive Atheism permeates every lyric. but his song, Hurt, strikes a chord that King Solomon once touched on in Ecclesiastes: on its surface life is meaningless and accomplishment has no purpose. Trent sings out of his nihilism about the numb futility of everything:

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of dung
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end

You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Solomon said "Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless! The more you know, the more you hurt; the more you understand, the more you suffer. I looked at all the works that my hands had wrought, and there was no profit under the sun. The wise and the fool have the same death - how the wise dies just like the fool!" So Trent Reznor is half right; nihilism is half right: there is no purpose to anything, at least on its own. Everything is a waste of time.

The difference between the two, is that King Solomon did not stop where Reznor stops. In the end he found one thing that isn't meaningless: the worship of God. "Remember your Maker, before the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it."

Amen.