ESOCS Devotional 25 October 2024: God Made It Crooked

ESOCS Devotional 25 October 2024 – God Made it Crooked

MEMORY VERSE: “Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked?” Ecclesiastes 7:13

TEXT: ECCLESIASTES 7:1-14

A good name is better than precious ointment,
And the day of death than the day of one’s birth;
² Better to go to the house of mourning
Than to go to the house of feasting,
For that is the end of all men;
And the living will take it to heart.
³ Sorrow is better than laughter,
For by a sad countenance the heart is made better.
⁴ The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
But the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

⁵ It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise
Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
⁶ For like the crackling of thorns under a pot,
So is the laughter of the fool.
This also is vanity.
⁷ Surely oppression destroys a wise man’s reason,
And a bribe debases the heart.

⁸ The end of a thing is better than its beginning;
The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.
⁹ Do not hasten in your spirit to be angry,
For anger rests in the bosom of fools.
¹⁰ Do not say,
“Why were the former days better than these?”
For you do not inquire wisely concerning this.

¹¹ Wisdom is good with an inheritance,
And profitable to those who see the sun.
¹² For wisdom is a defense as money is a defense,
But the excellence of knowledge is that wisdom gives life to those who have it.

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.

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Solomon sounded irreverent to our ears, accusing God of having made things crooked! Doesn’t that fly in the face of Scripture’s insistence that God is good? Is it fitting for any creature to say of the Creator that His work is “pervert­ed,” as the word is translated elsewhere? God didn’t create this world as a broken place. The Holy Spirit tells us God’s own evaluation of everything He made: “It was very good.” But God built into the world the possibility of death. I say that because of God’s instruction to Adam; he could help himself to every tree except that one; and God said, “When you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen 2:17). The result? Adam and Eve knew the grief of burying a son. Lamech’s wives cringed under the arrogance of the brute that was their husband. The many on earth in Noah’s days perished in the flood. Abram was childless till old age. Isaac saw his son swindle him. Joseph was hauled across the desert with a noose around his neck. Even when God delivered His people from bondage and came to dwell among them, grumbling and bitterness con­tinued.

In the Promised Land surely, that was Paradise restored! God’s hand of judgment pressed upon the people because of their idolatry. In Solomon’s own day, when the people ate and drank and were happy, “each man under his own vine and fig tree” (1 Kings 4:25), there were still the tears of funerals, the pains of marriage ten­sions, the anguish of wayward children, even the selfishness of two women fighting over a living child. Life was so crooked, so broken, as God had or­dained it to be in response to the fall! Who can fix it?

The people of Is­rael had the wisest king who ever lived. Surely, Solomon could fix it! He couldn’t. Despite all his wisdom, his own heart turned from the Lord. Could the code of Hammurabi set straight what was crooked? Or the wisdom of Aristotle? Or the power of Alexander the Great? Or the peace of the Rom­ans? Could science or philosophy or edu­cation? The list of human initiatives is endless, and all have been tried.

But none of it ultimately helped to straight­en what’s crooked in this broken life ­because God has made it crooked; and who can withstand His work? Day by day, it’s his heavy hand that presses upon human life in righteous response to our rebellion in the beginning and who can squeeze out from under that divine hand, so we no longer feel its crushing weight? Fighting God is such a senseless waste of effort. We share the hopelessness Solomon’s audience felt at his words: if even Solomon couldn’t make straight what God had made crooked. We are forever doomed to this life of in­justice, crookedness and tears.

• Can a man fight against God?
• Lord, teach me to submit myself under your will for me all through my life.

Further Reading: Proverbs 30:1-9; Luke 22:35-46; 2 Corinthians 8:16-end

ESOCS Devotional 25 October 2024