Somewhat of a confusing passage for me today. Ecclesiastes 2:12-14 says, “Then I turned myself to consider wisdom and madness and folly…Then I saw that wisdom excels folly…The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness.”
That all sounds good and normal (biblically-speaking), but the end of verse fourteen ushers in a change of thought: “Yet I myself perceived that the same event happens to them all.”
Wow…I can really identify with a couple things in today’s passage. Verses 1-2 say, “I said in my heart, ‘Come now, I will test you with mirth; therefore enjoy pleasure’; but surely, this also was vanity. I said of laughter
So Solomon “set [his] heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven” (1:13). Remember that Solomon was the wisest mortal to walk the earth.
II Chronicles 1 tells the story of how God gave Solomon all his wisdom: “And Solomon went up there to the bronze altar before the LORD, which was at the tabernacle of meeting, and offered a thousand burnt offerings on it. On that night God appeared to Solomon, and said to him, ‘Ask! What shall I give you?'”
As I read through this passage, a few things stuck out to me:
v.5- “The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose.” It’s so true that the sun almost seems to move from one side of the sky as quickly as it possibly can. We wake up and not much longer, we’re back in bed. We wake up again, and not long after we find ourselves asleep again. The days go by so fast that we don’t have time to stop and watch them pass. We must actively make the most we can of the little time we have for God’s glory.
Wisdom for life is best given at the end of one’s life. With age comes experience and with experience comes wisdom. Hence the value of the book of Ecclesiastes. Writing about life as his own came to a close, Solomon expresses the virtues of a life well-spent and the vanity of a life wasted.
Last week I was given the opportunity to give a devotional to the lower level of my dorm here at Faith Baptist Bible College. During my time here at school, I have really been challenged with the importance of using time wisely and redeeming it as Paul exhorted Christians to do in Ephesians 5:15-16. So the topic of my devo last week was using time wisely, and my text was Ecclesiastes 12:9-14. After studying the passage and talking about it to the guys here, I was challenged to read through the book of Ecclesiastes for my daily devotions.
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