The Daily Devo with Steve

This chapter today has two clear ideas to me, and they are somewhat complementary yet distinct.  The first comes in the more poem-like text my ESV, the first 13 verses; it is basically telling us to be open to, and even looking for, growth and being challenged in this life.  In other words, don’t seek an ‘easy’ life’’...seeking easy means looking for confirmation and reassurance rather than truth.  The teacher is suggesting that this is what fools do; instead of wanting to know what reality is, they are only looking for evidence that what they think is reality.  In psychological lingo, this is called confirmation bias...and we all do it to some extent, because it is comfortable.  It is a lot easier to look for opinions that agree with ours rather than to critically assess and think about differing opinions that challenge our own.  Perhaps it is just true that, at some extent, we are all just a little lazy.  Either way, wisdom is living life in search of truth over comfort.  That is a subtle but profound idea for sure.

And the second idea that I noticed this morning is this idea that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to see God through your circumstances; meaning, we should give thanks where thanks is due, and we should seek His hand in troubling times, but should understand that good and bad circumstances are not reflections on God’s love for us.  I think (and this is just me) that it is silly to think that God is up there looking down on us and flipping the switch, good or bad, at every little circumstance in our lives...like every time something could happen one way or another He is sitting there making an active determination about whether to let it be good or bad.  I mean, I suppose that could be true, but that just seems silly.  God set up cause and effect in this world for a reason...so He wouldn’t have to micro-manage every little thing.  He can swoop in and do something miraculous in an instance, and He does and has, but more times than not, the world just goes according the way is it generally designed.  That’s why Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are so powerful...God has given them to us so we can understand the general way the world works.  I will say though, going back to my first point today, I don’t KNOW that my point of view on that is correct, but since writing is a one-way form or communication, I am just offering the conclusion I’ve come to in my mind.

At any rate, great reminders and great stuff today!

In this shorter chapter this morning, we get a reminder that we should enjoy life, and that we would be best to soak it up because life is short.  That was the more positive reminder.  Then we are reminded that we all come and we all go, and that none of us live forever, and that teacher is really pushing this idea that we don’t really make a difference on this earth; that we’ll long be forgotten and that God’s already written this story.

I need that occasional reminder to enjoy life, to live in the moment, and the be content with where I am....that is definitely an area where I struggle to find success historically.  So I appreciate that.

The second reminder brings me back to something we’ve said in our reading these first 6 chapters already several times, that I am so glad, blessed really, to be living on THIS side of the resurrection, where our lives are not truly ended at our death, that Jesus gives us a way to simply move on to the next phase of living.  Prior to Jesus, it was a much more grim picture...I am thankful it is different than that now.

For today, I am going to cut this a little short, and I am going to spend a few minutes journaling about things for which I am grateful and thankful, as a way to really cement the first message from the teacher in today’s writing.  Off to do that now.

These are some very Proverb-sounding verses today, speaking about wealth and about the vanity of just pursuing wealth for wealth’s sake.  Some great thoughts here.  I particularly love how the teacher finishes up the chapter, with some less cynical and more positive and constructive thoughts - verses 18-20 read:

18 Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. 19 Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God. 20 For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.

In reading this, we see that this is really a recap of a lot the chapter, and it sounds like a few things are being said.  First, life should be partly about seeking joy, finding enjoyment...it isn’t about just working or just following orders and marching through life on mission and looking to the future for any kind of enjoyment...no, God wants us to enjoy the world He’s given us.  Frankly, that is refreshing, because one question I rarely ask myself that is SO important is this, “Am I happy?”.  Think on that for a minute… “Am I happy?”.  If the answer isn’t ‘yes’, then I need to get busy working on that.  The second thing I get from these 3 verses is that we need to work, we need to toil; our life doesn’t need to be committed to that as a primary mission, because life isn’t just about working, but we are made for work, thus we should work.  And no, I don’t think work means career, or job, or any of that...we should use our time, skills, and energy to do something meaningful in this world.  Meaningful doesn’t mean everyone needs to be a preacher or teacher or politician either.  2 months ago the trash men in Starkville, MS, whom my 3-year-old son waives at every time he sees, were doing their jobs with smilies on their faces and they stopped their truck and gave my son a little trash truck...he was so excited.  They were excited.  They were doing meaningful work before they did that, and they stepped it up with that gesture.  We just need to make a difference in some way.  And lastly, that last verse is great...when we get happy and we get busy living life and working in some way, our hearts are occupied.  You know what I would say to that?  The most miserable people I know, the most cynical, they are often the most bored, or they’ve spent a long part of life being bored and they became jaded and cynical, and maybe now they are just busy and cynical.  The point it, when we are busy living life, there are so many trivial things that just seem not to matter.  That’s a blessing that God gives us, I am convinced of that.  Let’s just get busy living and enjoying life.

Before diving into chapter 5, let’s pause for a moment and think about where we’ve been here in Ecclesiastes.  We started with this idea that there is an author or writer of this work, and then there is the main character, the teacher, who is the one narrating things, speaking to us and giving us his insights about the life he’s lived.  We’ve seen several themes all centering on the vanity of setting up the meaning of life as being related to our work, to our enjoyment of life itself, our wisdom, or our attainment of ‘stuff’...meaning, the teacher is telling us that we can’t find satisfaction if that’s what our life is all about.  All of the while, we have this innate desire, this quest, to find meaning, so we are longing to find meaning and desire...it’s just that time will help us to realize that those things aren’t THE things on which to be focused.  That’s essentially what we’ve done to this point.

For today, I am just going to focus on verses 1-7 of chapter 5, as I feel like there is a great message buried in these verses that the teacher is giving us and that we can blow past if we aren’t careful.

Listen - I think it is pretty simple, listen...that’s the message of this section.  Fools speak too much.  Fools let everything fall out of their mouth without care for the effect their words have on the world around them.  Fools carry that into their prayer life as well, spitting off requests and orders to God.  Listen...speak less, listen more, ask questions instead of giving advise, seek to be interested instead of being interesting.  Seek to understand rather than to convince.

What would it look like if that was really our mantra?  What if I did really carried that mantra into my daily life?  What if I did it for a month?  Or even for a day?  What if my goal for the day was to try to extract as much information as possible by asking questions and leaning into what others are saying and I only offered opinions and advise when I was basically forced to do so.  What would happen to the level of understanding I would bring to the conversation?

So that’s my challenge today...to be a big time question-asker.  To see if what I can do in terms of information gathering.  And that’s how my prayer time will go this morning too...on my knees, in silence, waiting and listening.  It may be strange, and it may be silent, but I feel compelled in that way this morning.

So now we can see that what was a clear and concise set of writings grouped by topical argument is more of a grouping of ideas that have a more random feel, similar to Proverbs.  Actually, it is kind of like reading a cynical version of Proverbs in a way.  What I’ll do is pull out things that really jump out at me while reading, like we’ve done with Proverbs, rather than focus on each topical idea, which would keep us in this text for months.

Here are two little sections that caught my eye:

4 Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind. 5 The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh. 6 Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.

In this first one, we see a clear aim at the topic of envy, that it is a worthless pursuit to strive in envy, to chase others’ status or place in life, and it is foolish to do nothing as well; he says it is ultimately better to be quiet than envious though.  In reading this, I definitely would agree...when we are motivated by envy we are wrongly motivated.  It is okay to emulate someone, it is okay to have goals, but we have to live our lives as a whole with a more positive motivation.  Think about professional athletes, you see these stories of them slaving away in their careers, working and practicing 24/7 for 10-15 years from college through their career and then we hear stories about falling into depression, losing their way...it is sad.  They have thrown their whole life into the pursuit of this goal of being the best they can be and what happens is that they let that become their identity.  Envy is like that if we aren’t careful too, because if we envy someone and we push to get what they have and then we get there, we move the goal posts and we move on to the next person and the cycle begins again...it is a dangerous cycle.  And again, it isn’t bad to pursue goals and emulate...the problem it, we have to maintain balance in that pursuit, we have to maintain a focus on the one REAL goal, which is becoming the person God created us to be.  If we get off of THAT track, then our pursuit becomes a problem because it pulls us from our purpose and that will ultimately lead to empty envy, envy of the wrong things, and a pursuit of the wrong things, and potential disaster.

13 Better was a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice. 14 For he went from prison to the throne, though in his own kingdom he had been born poor. 15 I saw all the living who move about under the sun, along with that youth who was to stand in the king’s place. 16 There was no end of all the people, all of whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a striving after wind.

And this is a great message as well, that we can’t stop growing, we can’t stop learning, we can’t become anything less than curious about life.  We have to remain young at heart as it relates to wisdom, ready to receive it, ready to be challenged and to accept responsibility for our decisions and outcomes.  It is vanity to assume we can ever know it all...when we stop being open to wisdom, whatever wisdom we have will start to wither, it loses its power.  What a powerful idea.  Wisdom is like a muscle, it needs use and it needs more wisdom stacked on top of it, repeatedly over time.  That’s how it is exercised.

Great stuff today.

Switching back over to Proverbs, to get back into a more positive state of mind (haha), we again see a chapter littered with ideas, one-liners, advise...we could go verse by verse for days.  But, in light of the reading we are doing in Ecclesiastes, I want to focus on 2 verses that really jumped out at me.

Verse 21:

Many are the plans in the mind of a man,

but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.

and Verse 23:

The fear of the Lord leads to life,

and whoever has it rests satisfied;

he will not be visited by harm.

In thinking about these 2 verses, starting in  21, and in combination with our reading of Ecclesiastes, something really seems to be clear between the two texts - we are burdened with the desire to create progress and to understand our purpose in life, and we’ll construct ways to get at that - career paths, ideal family structures that fit to our own image of what we would deem ‘successful’, friendships and associations, etc...we can go about building our lives in a manner that we see fit, or we can lean into the plan that God has for us.  When we go our own way, we feel in control, we feel powerful, we feel secure at times, but then we face shocks in life where we are reminded that we aren’t and never were in control; we realize that it is God’s plan that ultimately is coming to fruition.  If we are wise, we come to understand that our best best is to lean into that plan, not our own; to find ourselves in His plan.  And that’s why verse 23 promises hope...that fear of the Lord, a deep respect for the fact that God IS in control, that God IS working His own plan in our lives and others, leads to a satisfying life...because that is the truth.  Fear of the Lord is life lived in reality.  And, I don’t know that the author really means that we’ll never suffer any harm if we living according to God’s plan, I like to think He is saying that the hard times in life are felt and experienced with a purpose in mind, and that it is that understanding of purpose for which we all are desirous that really fuels us to get through what would otherwise be really hard times.  When there is purpose in pain, the pain is usually far less about the pain and far more about the growth and the progress.

It is great to see how Ecclesiastes and Proverbs read back-to-back like this can get at opposite sides of some of the same ideas.

Another heavy reading today...and there some clear themes in mind - the idea that time is essentially written already, by God, that our work is futile because God already has in mind what is coming and what will be, and that we are like the beasts or animals in that ultimately return to dust as do they.  It is a grim reading almost.

I particularly noticed this verse: “...Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end”, which from verse 11.

The teacher touched on this idea before, that God has given us an internal sense for eternity, that we desire purpose and meaning and to make a long-term impact in and on this world, and that we generally desire significance.  I think that is MORE true of some people than others, but generally applies to everyone.  This desire is challenged by our realization that we are finite and by the reality of life, that we all live and die.  This creates a tension, this eternal desire and the understanding that life is finite.  It is a great insight.

That said, there is a hopeful thought that I had as I was reading this, and I recognize again that I living on this side of being saved by Jesus, on this side of the resurrection, and I live with that hindsight that I can’t undo...and frankly, I am grateful for that fact; but the pushback I would offer on this notion that life is written and that we can’t really control anything is this - we can control right now.  I can choose to write this journal entry, or I can choose to not.  I can choose to do a lot of things in any particular moment, and that can’t be taken from me.  I can’t ultimately choose the outcomes, granted, but I think that is where faith and life come together.  I also think that is why we can’t attach meaning to outcomes.  Meaning is in the doing, purpose is realized and joy is experienced in process.  There is an element to faith that pushes us to learn to enjoy the process more than the product, which is hard for me admittedly.  We must live in each moment, and we must enjoy each moment to the fullest, and we must be present there.  We must learn to both seek and find God in each moment.

Heavy stuff today!

No amount of wisdom can put us into a situation where we don’t die. The clock is always taking, for the wise in for the unwise.  The same could be said of hard work; we can’t work our way into eternity, and we certainly can’t save our own life.

The author makes is abundantly clear that living life for the simple sake of enjoyed it, living for the sake of being wise and being known as such, and living life with the purpose of working hard; all of this is “vanity”, or “chasing after the wind”.

In my world, my professional work, people come in all the time and it seems like there are two really common themes in the world of financial planning: reduce fees and taxes and avoid insurance.  In reality, what people want is to be able to live the life I wanna live, to enjoy it, and to know that if something happened to them the people they love will be taken care of. But those are hard things to define.  Most people spend more time brushing their teeth or picking out their clothes than they do sitting and thinking, and therefore, it’s not that they are stupid, they just have spent very little time considering how to get from point A to point B.  And when I asked about it, all I can come up with is avoiding fees and taxes and insurance, as if avoiding those things are the difference between success and failure. In 15 years I have never seen a story of someone being successful financially because they avoided fees and taxes and insurance; they are successful because they save more and spend less.  And because they don’t think about it, they spend all their time trying to avoid fees and taxes and insurance, and they miss the point.

This reminds me, what the author here in Ecclesiastes is writing, of this phenomenon in my professional life. Wisdom is good, hardwork is good, I hope the level of self indulgence is good… But those should be viewed as tools leveraged in having a great life, not a goal.  These tools can’t be seen as being “the point” of life - THAT is the point I believe the author is making.

This next chapter explores the ‘vanity’, to use the teacher’s word, of living a life of self-indulgence, of living a life with wisdom, and living a life of toil (hard work).

We’ll just bite them off one at a time in our reading.

In these first 11 verses, we hear that this guy has lived a life where he had everything...alcohol, property, servants, women, riches, and everything else he could possibly have wanted or had...he literally had it all.  And it wasn’t enough to satisfy that striving that was in him.

For me, that raises questions for me...like, am I content?  Is this desire to have more something that lives in me?  I don’t think everyone struggles with this, but do I?  What do I really think it will take to make me content?  How do I really push back against this particular issue, this insatiable desire to acquire?

One thing that is really easy to skip past or to discount in reading scripture like this, when we don’t know the writers personally, when we can’t really completely appreciate them fully because the divide between their life and ours is just so big, is that we miss that they really are far more like us than they are different.  In other words, it is far more reasonable for me to assume that if I were writing these words, and if I had everything just like this author, that I would feel the same way - it is more reasonable to assume that to be true than to assume that I would be different.  Which means, if I had everything, it wouldn’t be ‘enough’ to satisfy the quest for more.

The only thing I have been able to come up with that helps me when I spot this desire to acquire running rampant in me is the practice of gratitude, of pausing and just reflecting on how blessed I am, on how much I have, on the people in my life.  In reflecting like this, it shifts me from a mode of “I want” and into a mode of gratitude.  It isn’t permanent, so it is a practice that must be upheld, a habit to be built.  I am never going to be in the position this teacher was in, with literally everything, so the only way I can truly embrace this reality is through trusting that he got it right...but I can definitely say that they acquisition of more ‘stuff’ in my life really hasn’t produced more happiness.  Once you have enough so you don’t feel threatened financially, we have to begin to embrace a life of gratitude.  Great reminder this morning!

In this short section, the teacher illuminates 3 conclusions.

#1:  God has appointed man with the unhappy ‘business’ (or burden) with a quest for meaning.  I find this fascinating.  The restlessness that we feel when we are challenged with the notion that life is meaningless, that derives from this need to engage in something, to be active in doing something.  We are compelled in that way, and we think and plan.  We wants to understand where his life is going and we can’t help ourselves in this. This is the burden which, by God’s decree, every man bears.  You know, I have definitely felt that.  I DO feel that.  That’s God in me.

#2:  The second conclusion is that we are frustrated - ...by #1.  He desires a sense of gain in life, of satisfaction, or progress...but we struggle to get that need filled.  We are faced with problems which we finds insoluble, with history which is repetitive and without hope - like we can’t help ourselves.  We see this ‘striving after the wind’ phrase, and my study Bible sites that the context equally suits two ways to view this: frustration by the insoluble, or ambition for the unattainable. The latter is almost certainly the meaning here...either way though, the result is this frustration.

So, we are appointed with an ‘unhappy’ quest for meaning, we are frustrated because we feel like we are chasing after something that we can’t truly find, and then #3: we can only come to the conclusion that we aren’t equipped to know everything we need to know to resolve #1 and #2...there are twists and turns, there are gaps in life, and we can’t straighten out certain anomalies and condense things down into a perfect system.  In a sense, the more we understand, the more we know, the more we know that we don’t know...wisdom is an abyss.

Now, again, that sounds very dark, and almost hopeless.  But we can take something from this...think about it, if we can’t find the answers to this life in this life and we’ve been given the quest to find that meaning, then it is there, we just have to discover it.  You can’t find the painter in the painting...but you can learn a lot about Him, and you can understand and know that He is out there.  Similarly, if we want to find meaning, as the teacher will eventually lead us to conclude, we have to look to the Creator.  The conclusion is an argument for God - if life has meaning, it can only be because there is a God that gave it meaning.  By extension, if we are to experience satisfaction in life, true meaning in life, God has to be a part of our story.

Deep stuff today...wow!