Chapter 25
Good Monday Morning to this week 25 of 2022
I have discovered only this: God made human beings for righteousness, but they seek many have sought inuention or alternatives.” Ecclesiastes 7.29
The Hebrew word implies an ingenuity exercised mainly for evil but takes within its range, the varied acts of life which are in themselves neither good nor evil.
This inventive faculty, non-moral at the best, was what struck the thinker as characterising mankind at large.
In this thought again we have an unmistakable echo of the language of Greek thinkers. Of this, the most memorable example is, perhaps, the well-known chorus in the Antigone. In this play, a central theme is the tension between individual action and fate.
“Many the things that strange and wondrous are,
None stranger and more wonderful than man.
And lo, with all this skill,
Wise and inventive still
Beyond hope’s dream,
He now to good inclines
And now to ill.”
Solomon, in his search into the nature and reason of things, had been miserably deluded.
Vain man would be wise, wiser than his Maker; he is giddy and unsettled in his pursuits, and therefore has many inventions. Those that forsake God wander endlessly. But he here speaks with godly sorrow. He alone who constantly aims to please God, can expect to escape.
We can’t really know for certain what Ecclesiastes thinks about God—but that’s part of his point, in a way. God is a mystery, and he’s forced the rest of us to work inside that mystery, never knowing exactly where we are or what it’s all about. That seems to be Ecclesiastes’s real position on the God question. Although his God may not care about humans, he does require one thing that might seem pretty familiar: humility. “
Wishing you a good week as you seek the God of mystery in humility!
Philemon