Ecclesiastes Chapter Seven, Considering God's Work

Ecclesiastes 7:13 Consider the work of God; for who can make straight what He has made crooked? [14] In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider; surely God has appointed the one as well as the other, so that man can find out nothing that will come after him.

This passage addresses the Creator God as sovereign. All God does is beyond man’s comprehension. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor or your ways My ways,” says the Lord,” Isaiah 55:8. “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think,” Ephesians 3:20. What God has done, who can undo? God is, in a very real sense, an incomprehensible being.

He is close and intimate with believers, and wants all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, 1 Timothy 2:4. He is the Heavenly Father, and the God who is love. He incarnated as a Man to take our sin upon Himself and suffer in our stead to save us from the penalty sin demands. But God is not a man in how He thinks and acts, Numbers 23:19. His nature is contrary to sinful human nature, and His holiness is entirely alien to Adam’s race. We are not equal to God, and we stand as His creatures. Even His redeemed saints aren’t the peers of the Uncreated One. He does, and it is eternal. He determines, and it cannot be undone.

To the recipient of prosperous and adverse days, the preacher offers this cautionary note. God gives man joyful seasons, as we learned from Ecclesiastes 3:1. But that is the case and the truth; they are seasons, and adverse ones are interspersed with it. We may rejoice when prosperity rears its head and the sun is shining on us. But what do we do when adversity strikes and we find that things have become difficult? I say this with the utmost sobriety. My childhood was a rough one after my father left us. We lived out in the country with no vehicle. My mother was blind at the time from cataracts and couldn’t work. Our plumbing was faulty, prompting us to become creative with showers and using the toilet. We had very little money, and to say things were strained and hard was an understatement. By God’s grace my mother clove to the Lord like Job once did and chided anyone that dared to mock her faith. She accepted hardship as a matter of course, and since we left that house things have gotten better for her and myself respectively. But I daresay that she was chastened by the Lord, and learned some formidable lessons, Hebrews 12:11. Because of this, and through my mother’s quiet devotion, I learned much about faith in practice, and patience while waiting for God’s timing to change the season.

We are told that God appoints one and the other. Hardship isn’t necessarily meant to torment; it is meant to test in the way such testing functions. It is meant to assay, or bring out the quality of the material being put to the test. In my mother’s case, it revealed the inner heart of a woman committed to letting God reign, even (or especially) in the midst of hardship. Hardship, she would like to tell me, makes one better or bitter. A man’s life is in God’s hands. Now, I eschew the definition the Calvinist asserts when sovereignty is mentioned. This is not what I mean by God having a man’s life in His hands. Neither does the Bible mean this, in the sense that man is a willess puppet, controlled by on high, capable of doing only and always what God desires. Rather, the preacher asserts that God governs His universe, and can control events, as He did with Pharaoh of old, to bring about one circumstance or another for good or ill.

Fortune tellers, tarot cards, familiar spirits, et al., will not and cannot predict the future. Man has no legitimate means of finding out what comes after him under the sun, save for the prophetic portions of Scripture that relate important details regarding the Day of the Lord. These circumstances, like waves that buffet a boat adrift in the ocean, are meant to humble man. We are boats, adrift in the vast sea of history that God has poured out. He sends tempest and calm; but He also provides the means to either avoid or cope with the scenario; and for the believer that scenario, no matter how painful it seems to be in the moment, is only and ever for our good and our Lord’s glory. So that we, “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths,” Proverbs 3:5, 6. God would not that man obsess over what comes after him on this earth. Rather, He would that we consider what comes after death for us. So, in the day of prosperity rejoice in the Lord; in the day of adversity consider. To consider means to think carefully about something before reaching a conclusion or making a decision. Does hardship provoke us to trust? Or does it harden our hearts? It is a seemingly easy thing to trust when rejoicing. Perhaps that is one profound lesson hardship teaches. Does our faith’s roots go deep enough to draw strength from the Lord when the seas get rough and life is chaotic? I pray the Lord that we all may find grace to help in time of need when the day of adversity finds us.