Control, leverage, insight into acts of Providence...none of these are gained by the acquisition of wisdom.
As Pastor Meyers lays out early in his commentary on Ecclesiastes, "The godly wise man will humbly concede that God has hidden from us almost everything we should like to know about his providential purposes...The wise man learns to walk by faith and not by sight. Ecclesiastes is the book about faith in the Old Testament. It tells us how a man of faith looks at the world."
Pastor Meyers demonstrates the significance of these opening words; "The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem." Hereby the words of Ecclesiastes are commended to us as pastoral words from Solomon in fulfillment of his office as shepherd king of Israel. Solomon lays out for us the Christian's proper perspective on life: "Enjoy God's gifts of life while fearing him and keeping his commandments. God is in control. He will bring everything to a fitting and just conclusion. Faith will be satisfied with that."
"A wise man will resonate to Solomon's frustration with the ephemeral character of life under the sun. The superficially pious man calls for positive attitudes and cheery one-dimensional slogans about life and the world, but the wise man knows better. He has experienced Solomon's theme: 'Everything is vapor.' And armed with this, therefore, the wise man is ready by faith to rule the world."
3 comments:
"A Table in the Mist" is a very helpful book for understanding Ecclesiastes. Here is my brief Amazon customer review of it. There's also a link in the comment section to a video podcast interview with Jeff about his book.
I gave your review a "Yes"! Very well done. I wasn't able to pull up the podcast...I'll try again tomorrow.
I hate it when other people know more about what my pastor is doing than I do!
Wait...here it comes...it was just slow! LOL! They put up the title as "A Table in the MIDST"! Ha!
>>They put up the title as "A Table in the MIDST"<<
I didn't even notice that! An easy mistake to make...I almost made that typo when I was leaving my comment.
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