July 19, 2026 | The Empty Promise of Overthinking
The Empty Promise of Overthinking | Ecclesiastes 7:13–29
Ecclesiastes 7:13–29
Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked?
In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.
In my vain life I have seen everything. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing. Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them.
Wisdom gives strength to the wise man more than ten rulers who are in a city.
Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.
Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. Your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others.
All this I have tested by wisdom. I said, “I will be wise,” but it was far from me. That which has been is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?
I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things—which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. (ESV)
In Ecclesiastes 7:13–29, Solomon confronts the empty promise that enough thought, wisdom, or careful planning can make life predictable. God gives both prosperity and adversity, and no human scheme can remove life’s uncertainty. Overthinking may disguise itself as wisdom, but it often feeds pride or fear by tempting us to believe we can control every outcome.
Jed Gillis explains that uncertainty should lead neither to passivity nor foolish risk. Instead, believers are called to fear God, pursue wisdom and righteousness, and trust Him with the results. God did not create us to understand every detail of His plan. He created us to depend on Him and faithfully pursue the good He has placed before us.
Transcript of The Empty Promise of Overthinking | Ecclesiastes 7:13–29
Marketing: Your Life is Unpredictable, and Our Product Can Solve That
Jed Gillis: You know how when you see certain things, you just can't unsee it? And then not only you can't unsee it, but then sometimes you start to see it everywhere else that you look.
As I was thinking about this message for today and this section of Ecclesiastes, I started seeing in advertisements, which we all see all the time. If you've been watching World Cup games, you see all the advertisements that go on there. If you watch TV at all, if you go on the internet, you see all these pop-up ads, all these targeted ads. And it struck me how many ads, here's essentially the marketing pitch: Your life is unpredictable, and our product can solve that. That's it.
Your financial world is unpredictable, but if you just, seven payments of $300, we can solve that for you. If you just invest according to these exact principles, here's how you'll be a millionaire. You can't lose. We even have literally a whole segment of our economy built on insurance, which says your life actually is unpredictable, but when it's unpredictable, your outcome will be predictable.
I mean, essentially, so many things, whether they do it overtly, sometimes they do that. Allstate, be better prepared for mayhem, like me. They do that. Sometimes it's overt like that. Sometimes it's just there's the really fit, handsome, or beautiful spokesperson, and you think, "I'd like to be like them." Yeah, if you just use this shampoo, you're set.
Our lives are unpredictable. They're uncertain, and our economy, I don't even know, probably billions, definitely millions of dollars move because life is unpredictable, and we desperately want it not to be. Life is uncertain, and we want it to be certain.
So how do you handle uncertainty in your life when life has its ups and downs? How do you handle when you're not sure how it's going to turn out? When you feel like some days are really great and some days are really bad. When your business plan works for a little while, and everything's headed up, looks really good, and then, oh man, this is hard. What's gonna happen? When you feel like January 1st rolls around and you get your life all figured out for the whole year, and you wake up on March 3rd like, "Wait, what were those goals again?" How could I ever do that?
We have this up and down every area of your life, relationally with your friends, with your coworkers, with your spouse, with your children, with your job, with your career With your spiritual life goes up and down. Sometimes it feels like everything you can't miss. Sometimes it feels like it's never getting any better So how do you handle it?
Reading Ecclesiastes 7
Jed Gillis: In Ecclesiastes chapter 7, starting in verse 13, here's what Solomon says: "Consider the work of God. Who can make straight what He has made crooked? In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.
In my vain life I have seen everything. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing. Be not overly righteous. Don't make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? And be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. I mean, why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them.
Wisdom gives strength to the wise man, more than ten rulers who are in a city. Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins. Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. Your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others.
All this I have tested by wisdom. I said, 'I will be wise,' but it was far from me. That which has been is far off and deep, very deep. Who can find it out?"
Consider the Work of God
Jed Gillis: We'll stop reading right there. We'll finish that text up at the end of our time. First thing I want you to do is really just obey a clear command in God's Word here that you can do right now today.
He says in verse 13, "Consider the work of God." Think about it. many times we have things in scripture, we go, "Oh, I need to apply this and obey later." You can do that one right now. Consider. Think about the work of God, about God's purpose in the unpredictability of life. how does He do that? Solomon calls you and God calls you here to think about something.
Now, He's not calling you to know something. I think a lotta times we talk about God's purpose in difficulties, and what we're really saying is, "I want to know how it all works out." I want to know all the details of God's purpose in uncertainty.
That's not what he's calling you to do. He's not calling you to be God by knowing all of these purposes and how everything connects. He's calling you to think about it, to consider.
Who Can Make Straight What He Has Made Crooked?
Jed Gillis: And he starts with this question, "Who can make straight what he has made crooked?" Now, don't hear... This would be the wrong way to paraphrase this text. Don't hear, who can make good what God made bad, or who can make righteous what God made evil. God doesn't make evil So that's the wrong way for us to paraphrase this text.
Instead, think about this. Crooked doesn't have to be evil, and straight doesn't have to be good.
For example, if you really love to drive, some of you probably really do, some of you hate it. If you really love to drive, if you've ever been out west, you know there are some roads that are as straight as you can possibly imagine them for as long as you can possibly imagine. I doubt any of you go, "I love driving those roads." Why? 'Cause straight can be boring.
But you might have heard of a road around here called The Dragon It's very much not straight, in case you were wondering But I know some of you love to go drive the Dragon. See, crooked's not always bad. Straight's not always good. Straight can be boring.
But this question, who can straighten out what is crooked? All right, so if we just don't assume that crooked has to be evil, then we go, Solomon, what are you talking about exactly?" it can mean evil. We do talk about somebody being crooked and they're evil. So if it doesn't have to mean that, how do you take scripture when you have a question like this and say, "What does Solomon mean?"
What we do always, we pray. We ask God for His help, and you keep reading. You look in the context. You say, "What came right before? What comes right after?" And not only read the context, but ask questions of the context. How is this related to this statement?
So he asks at the end of verse 13, "Who can make straight what He has made crooked?" Now notice right where he goes in verse 14, "In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider."
So in other words, when things look like they're up here, and when things look like they're down here. When life seems really good, and when it seems really hard. This is crooked. It's not a straight line.
So he's asking you the question if God in His wise authority on Earth, in the way that He has created this world, He has brought about by His sovereignty all these things. I appreciate past Wednesday, Ben Lunsford shared with a group of men, he talked about Daniel and talked about God's sovereignty in putting Daniel in captivity, in putting Daniel, giving him favor, in putting Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in a fiery furnace.
You say, "There were some days of pretty bad adversity." But don't you think Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were pretty joyful when they came out of that fiery furnace? They go, "We trusted God and he did deliver."
See, that's crooked. It's like this. It's not what they expected. It's up and down. There's prosperity, there's joy, there's adversity.
So what do we do? And his solution is in days of prosperity, be joyful. He's not stoic. That's one answer. You could say, in days of prosperity, remember that the bad times are always coming. The other shoe's gonna fall, so don't be excited." We do that. We do it to protect ourselves 'cause we don't like this, and we would much rather have even this. Don't be joyful. No, something bad's coming. Because we think, then maybe when something bad happens, we won't at least go through the floor.
In days of prosperity, be joyful. In days of adversity... Now, what he doesn't say is, "In days of adversity, despair." He doesn't do that. He's also not naive. he's not stoic. He doesn't say, "Do this with your emotions." He also is not naive. He doesn't say, "In days of adversity, plaster this Pollyanna grin on your face and be like, 'Oh, it's all good.'"
That's not what he says to do. He says, "Consider." Think. Think about what God is in fact doing. Why did God do this? God made the one as well as the other so that man may not find out anything that will be after him. We'll come right back to that in just a second.
But if you think about this crookedness of life, that's what all those marketing pitches are trying to do. They're trying to get you to say, "Life really is like this, and you know it. Pay us enough money, we'll solve your problem."
But life doesn't progress in a straight line If we graphed the health of your spiritual life, does it look like this? Probably not. Probably looks a whole lot more like this, and a little of that, and a little of that, and it goes all over.
If we graph the health of your marriage, looks like this? I doubt it. Actually, I'm gonna say you're probably lying if you say it does If we graphed your finances like this? No. It looks like this.
That's what life is like. Things don't continually progress in a straight line, but consider God made both. wait a minute, God, why? Why did you do that? Now he gives this phrase...
This text has some really, hard Hebrew throughout chapter seven, so when you look at different translations, you'll see some things that are worded a little bit differently. They're trying to wrestle with some really hard Hebrew, and some of them we come and we go, "I... This is my best understanding. I might find out I'm wrong."
This is one of those phrases. "So that man may not find out anything that will be after him." All right, here's what I think He's saying. I think He's saying God gives prosperity and adversity so that life is not perfectly predictable. You can't find out what comes afterwards. That's what predicting would be. Life is not predictable for a reason. So why?
Now, I wanna illustrate this. If you're a parent, this probably re- resonates with you a little bit. If you're a child, your parents have probably done this with you. A few weeks, maybe a month ago, something like that, I was gonna go on an errand. I had just completed a car repair, was gonna drive, and wanted to get my car out on the interstate for a little while, and wanted to make sure that it was, not gonna break down in the first few miles. And I asked one of my children, "Do you wanna go with me?"
Now, what I knew, it... That wasn't, by the way, that wasn't a reward. I wasn't finding, the best child and going, "Oh, please come with me." That wasn't the point. I just asked one, "Do you wanna go with me?" Now, I knew I was planning to go down to Buc-ee's and go get an ICEE or something like that. I didn't tell my child that ahead of time. For lots of reasons. Sometimes I do. "Let's go get a treat." Sometimes I'm like, "Hey, do you wanna come with me?" Why? Because I want the relationship with them. I don't want it to be a calculated bribe.
As parents, we do that. We do that all the time, but we like to think of ourselves as parents. We don't usually like to think of ourselves as children.
But our heavenly Father is a better parent than we are. He knows the same things we do. If you have a child who behaves wrongly but always gets what they want. We know how that child turns out. We have a word for it called spoiled. Or entitled.
On the other hand, if they behave well and always get what they want, they're still spoiled.
Right? They're still spoiled 'cause they get what they want every time. If right behavior always produces predictable good results, so you go, "Yep, that's the ones I want. I always get what I want." I'm entitled and spoiled and probably proud.
Our Heavenly Father is not interested in training entitled, spoiled children who manipulate everything around them to get what they want. That's not what God's doing. Instead, He wants to train children who trust Him and who do good, who love justice and love mercy and walk, what's that next word? Humbly.
If life is always predictable, I put in this good work, I always get what I want. I don't know about you, I'm not humble enough to handle that.
So consider the work of God. He gives days like this so that we can't predict. In other words, uncertainty or unpredictability of life is not part of, it's not a bug in the system, it is the system.
Sometimes Righteous People Perish and Evil People Flourish
Jed Gillis: So Solomon gets to verse 15, and I wanna ask you, and I can see from your faces I know this is true, have you seen life be unpredictable? Have you seen days of prosperity and days of adversity sometimes come one after the other like this? Of course you have.
And Solomon says, "I've seen it all," verse 15, "in my vain life." Now we've talked about this word vain repeatedly. It doesn't mean proud in this context. "In my fleeting," this is our word hevel, which is the breath. It's the fleeting frustratingness of life. I can't wrap my hand around it. "In my quick, fleeting, passing life, seen it all. There's a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness."
Have you known people who seem so good and godly, and they just seem to die too early? Yeah. And there's a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing. Have you known people who seemed evil who didn't seem to die early enough? Yeah. That's what Solomon's saying. He's like, "I've seen this. I've seen this up and down."
Now, Solomon here is about to give you some really bad advice, and you're supposed to know it when you get to this section. He says, "Be not overly righteous, and don't make yourself too wise. Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool."
Now, what he's doing here is he's saying, "If you're going to control your life, if you're gonna straighten out all the ups and downs, if you're going to do that, then here's the logical conclusion." That's what he's doing. He's giving you a, a bad logical conclusion, not telling you, "This is my instruction for you." He's giving you a bad conclusion. The conclusion is, "If I'm gonna straighten it all out and make it predictable," he says, do righteous people always benefit the way they want to? No. Do wicked people always get punished?" Here. If you're gonna make it predictable, here's the only thing we do know. Working really hard to be more and more righteous doesn't guarantee this direct straight line. We do know if you're bad enough, it tends to end badly.
So he says, "If you think you're gonna make it predictable, don't be too righteous or too wise because even righteous people die early." Don't be too wicked or too foolish because we know there are some things that are so bad you end up regretting it quickly.
He gives you this really ridiculous advice. And we're supposed to know it's ridiculous. And here's what happens when you say, "Assume this principle, here's the ridiculous conclusion," the whole point is for us to go back and say, "Wait, maybe this principle's wrong." That's why he's doing it. If you assume I'm gonna make life predictable, he says, it hasn't worked for any righteous person I've ever known. So he gives you bad advice so you'll go back and say, "Wait, life isn't predictable. Life is uncertain." This kind of mentality that he's giving you, this bad example, "Don't be too righteous. Don't be too wicked." He's like, "Don't be too committed to anything. Just kind of hold back and be passive, since life's uncertain after all." But that's not what he calls you to do.
Instead, he wants you to pursue what is good, to really pursue it. When we get down to the end of verse 18, another hard translation point, "For the one who fears God shall come out from both of them." He's-- You could translate it, I think it'd be a better translation, "The one who fears God shall come out with both of them," which would be probably a better translation.
So the idea is instead of being passive, "Hey, how do I pursue wisdom? But I don't count on wisdom to solve everything. I pursue righteousness and wisdom and trust and mercy and love, and I pursue it as hard as I can, and I pursue those things." And he says, "The one who fears God, at the end of the day, comes out with all of it."
By the way, that sounds a lot like what Jesus said when he says, "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you."
Pursue what's really good. Don't let the uncertainty of life make you passive.
Because what is wisdom? See, w- we all have this tendency, because life's uncertainty, we can make wisdom out to be caution. wisdom is not always caution? Sometimes it is. Wisdom does not always mean you don't take the risk. It means you take wise risks.
We can act like to be wise, since life is uncertain and unpredictable, to be wise is to be passive. And Solomon says, "No, it's good to grab this, to pursue what's good, to chase wisdom. It's good to pursue all of these things." But wisdom is also not controlling. It won't make your life not include prosperity and adversity.
Examples of Good You Can Pursue
Jed Gillis: So he gives you three things in verse 19 and following, which I wrestled with this week because it seems like they're just proverbs thrown out in the middle of him saying some other stuff. You go, "What does this have to do with anything?" I think just what he's doing, he's telling you, "Here's some good that you can pursue. It does not change your life from this to this, but here's good you can pursue."
First, verse 19, "Wisdom gives strength to the wise man more than ten rulers who are in a city." You pursue wisdom, not because it controls your outcomes, but because it really does give strength.
You say investment is unpredictable, so therefore I just won't do any of it. It's probably not gonna end well. When you say, "No, I have opportunity to invest. I, who, since it's unpredictable, I'll just invest in the first thing that comes along." Also doesn't end well.
Pursue wisdom, not because it flattens life out, not because it takes away adversity, but because it does give strength.
The second one stated a little bit different way of saying it in verse 20, "Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins." Consider that with the end of verse 18, the one who fears God comes out with both of these things. So pursue righteousness, but not because it's gonna guarantee earthly inc- earthly outcomes, because you're not gonna be perfect in it. Don't pursue it for that reason. But we are to pursue righteousness because God does promise it brings reward. Jesus says, "A cup of cold water given in my name will be remembered, be rewarded." He says, "Seek first the kingdom of God, and you'll receive all of these things."
Pursue righteousness because it brings reward, not because it takes out this in your life. There are good things for you to pursue. Solomon is saying we all want to deal with that and say life can be certain. It can't. It's uncertain. It's unpredictable. But pursue wisdom and pursue righteousness because these things do bring about good results.
And the third one he gives you this little story "Don't take to heart all the things people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you." He, says pursue what's good, don't pursue the approval of others. Don't try to please everybody.
You guys know in your life, especially if you're in any kind of leadership context, you can please some people or nobody, but you can't please everybody. If you pursue approval, if I, if everybody just likes me, then my life will look like this, it won't go up and down. Solomon says, "No, that doesn't work either." Because approval is, fickle. It comes and goes.
Notice his motivation. He says, "'Cause you've done the same thing to others. You have looked at decisions others have made, and you've complained about it." That's happened in your life. I have, too. You have thought a decision was really obvious because you didn't have all the information. And you've complained about it.
Solomon says, "When you look at," he's talking to the king primarily, right? He's saying as a king or as a leader, as a parent, as a manager, as any role of leadership It's easy to say, "People might not like what I do, so I'll just be passive." It's easy to say, "I have all the answers and I'm gonna get life all figured out so that my leadership just goes straight up, no ups and downs."
Solomon says that's not gonna happen. Pursue what's good. Pursue wisdom. Pursue righteousness. Don't pursue this approval because you know the servant in this context might be right in criticizing the leadership's decision or might be wrong. And he says you know that 'cause you've done the same thing when you've been under someone else's leadership.
By the way, this book has said it-- I haven't brought it out as much as we've gone through, but this book has also said repeatedly that it's better to be a wise servant or a wise poor person than to be a rich king who doesn't take advice. But this book has repeatedly said that.
So don't hear this to say whoever happens to be in leadership, they're perfect. The rest of you just keep your mouth shut and don't do anything. That's not what he's doing. He said repeatedly the king should listen even to the poor wise person.
So in this picture, when the servant doesn't approve of the leader, in this context the king, maybe the servant's right, maybe they're not. Maybe the servant is just complaining. Maybe the servant's just petty. Maybe the servant's trying to manipulate the people around him. He's like, there's all kinds of reasons.
So what does he say? "Don't take it to heart. Don't run your life based off of the approval of others." And all this in this context of life is uncertain. If you try to please everybody, you're not gonna find that the uncertainty goes away you'll find it's worse.
And this helps us in, our context, by the way, as we work both as leaders and as followers and everything in between. These are good principles for us. Solomon is telling us if someone in a leadership role, if there's something that a leader around you, you have an issue with, then it's wisdom not to just complain and grumble and create division.
Go talk to them respectfully and humbly. Be willing to share your wisdom because the poor wise person sometimes saves the city. That's a picture Solomon uses. But also be willing to listen because you might not know all that you think you know.
This is part of how these kinds of interactions are supposed to happen. They're not gonna make life predictable. They're not gonna make life certain. But Solomon tells us, don't think that you're going to even out all the ups and downs. Instead, pursue righteousness, pursue wisdom, and don't pursue approval to govern your life.
The Impossible Task of Seeking Out the Scheme of Things
Jed Gillis: Then we get to verse 25, which we didn't read earlier. 25 down through 29, Solomon gives this kind of a summary of what he's been saying for several chapters now. "I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom in the scheme of things and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. And I find something more bitter than death, the woman whose heart is snare-- is snares and nets and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her.
'Behold, this is what I found,' says the Preacher, 'while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things, which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.'"
All right, if that makes you a little uncomfortable, especially if you're a woman hearing me read that, hold on just a second. Not as bad as it could sound.
Here's the big picture. Do you notice he uses the word scheme three times? It's not used anywhere else in the book. It's really not used anywhere else in the Old Testament, not the Hebrew word behind it. So here's his one-point takeaway, really from seven chapters. Don't think you will find the scheme to understand life to make it predictable.
Again, that's the whole marketing pitch, right? We'll give you the scheme to make life predictable. Just pay us enough. Solomon says, "No, you will never find it. It doesn't exist where you can get it." If you decide, "I'm not gonna be passive because life's uncertain," the other side is we get this empty promise of overthinking. "If I just think through everything and figure it all out-" Then I'll control the ups and downs of life.
And Solomon says, "No You won't. He says, "I tried." He had a lot of resources, and he had a lot of time. He says, "I tried to add one thing to the next to find the scheme, to figure it all out." It's the way he describes it in verse 27, "While adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things."
Isn't that how we think? We're going through life and things get difficult, and we're like, "Oh, no, I got it figured out this time. I'm gonna add that to my scheme. Now I've got it. Now it's just gonna keep... Oh, Got bad again. I'm gonna add another thing to it. Now it's gonna just keep going. Oh, no." Isn't that how it works?
Solomon says, "That's what I found. I keep adding to this, trying to understand it. And I didn't." Because no amount of human understanding and scheme understanding, trying to find the blueprint for it all, nothing will make the uncertain, unpredictable life here on this earth, in this fallen world, nothing will make it certain and predictable.
So when Solomon makes these comments, which sound a little strange to us for sure, about women here, first off, do remember it is Solomon. We know actually that he was drawn away by women, by foreign wives. So even if he were saying, "Yeah, women have really just pulled me all these different directions," we'd be like, "That kinda makes sense from Solomon's perspective."
I don't think that's even what he's doing, though. Remember in Proverbs, we just went through Proverbs several months ago. You remember there was the picture of the woman Folly and the woman Wisdom? And Solomon paints it that way because, he's a man, and he's talking to young boys in Proverbs, and he's saying, "Hey, folly can look very tempting, and wisdom can be wonderful." Both sides.
Now, when he describes the woman whose heart is snares and nets and whose hands are fetters, if you go back and read the woman Folly descriptions, they sound a lot like that. I think he's doing the same kind of wisdom thing. He's saying-- He's personifying foolishness as a seductive temptress. He's saying, in this trying to wrestle with the scheme of things and organize it in my head, in all of that and trying to figure it all out, he finds his old nemesis, the woman Folly, and it's so tempting if I could just understand a little more. It's so tempting.
But just like in Proverbs, the end is death. You find that it doesn't make your life certain and predictable. Even when he gets down to verse 28 and he says, "One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found." Some of the hardest Hebrew in the whole book. There's a whole lot of different guesses. I think this one makes the most sense.
When he says man, it could be the way we use the word male. When he says, woman, could be the way we use the word female. I think what he's doing is recognizing difference in perspectives from male and female. Trying to figure out how the whole world works, he says, "Look, I can't tell you how every man thinks about it, but I got one man's perspective. One man among a thousand I found. One male perspective." Solomon says. "I know my perspective. That's all. And I don't understand how the female perspectives around me work at all. I don't even have one of those."
He says, "As I try to get this scheme of how all life works, I come alongside other men and find he doesn't put together life quite the same way I do. Maybe I'm not so accurate on my scheme." And he comes alongside women and goes, "They don't think the same way I do either about life and how all this works together, and sometimes it seems to work for them." He's telling you in searching this scheme to control life, he's "All I find is one perspective, and it's not enough to make life not uncertain but predictable." Trying to find one comprehensive scheme for life is hopeless. That's his point.
And he gets to verse 29 and draws you back to the creation, to the Garden of Eden. "See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes." This is why I keep using the word control as we go through Ecclesiastes. If you think back to Eden, God made Adam and Eve upright.
He made them to do good. He made them in a garden with all kinds of good things. Now think back to His command. He said, "Don't eat of this tree, 'cause if you eat of it, you'll die." Now, if I'm Adam, I want to know, "God, how does that work? Can you give me the scheme of things? Like, how does that work exactly? If I eat it, is it, poison? Will I die, right then? Why that tree and not this tree, God? What's so special about it? I wanna know how all of it works together." But that's not what we're told Adam and Eve get. What we're told they get is, "Here's what good is, and you need to trust god. Good is don't eat this tree." He made man upright. He made Adam and Eve to pursue what's good, not to understand every piece of why it works.
And what did they do? They start going, "Wait." Satan comes along and tempts, "How does it work? Oh, that's how it works? We'll be like God, knowing good and evil?" Adam and Eve start chasing, "I can understand how all this works. Now I get to decide my own way instead of just following what God said was good."
Back from the garden, and now God has given you tons of information about what is good and what is upright. But our tendency, our temptation is to seek out the scheme so we can manipulate it, so we can control it. We all overthink, if you will. I'm using that phrase. We overthink to understand and control our outcomes to try to be favorable. Overthinking like this, searching for this scheme, it disguises itself as wisdom, but it feeds either pride or fear.
We go, "I can just figure it all out." But Solomon tells us God didn't make you to figure out everything to remove the unpredictability of life. He made you to pursue good, upright."
Where Are You Tempted?
Jed Gillis: So where are you tempted? To be passive? Where are you tempted to not take wise risks because life is uncertain?
That might be in your job, that might be in your finances, that might be in your personal spiritual life, that might be in your relationships with your spouse, with your kids, with your friends A lot of places.
Where are you tempted to say, "Life's uncertain. I'm not going to take a risk to pursue something good here. I don't know how it'll turn out?"
Remember, God didn't make you to passively just ride along with whatever happens. He made humans to reflect him as sub-rulers in the garden, to reflect him as humans who have dominion over the earth, to reflect him as people who can influence the world around us and who can bear fruit, who can do good works he's prepared for you beforehand. God made you to do that. Where are you tempted to be passive or to not take risks because life's uncertain?
Or where are you tempted to look for the overarching scheme that removes uncertainty? That removes the down days or months or years. Where are you tempted to trust yourself to say, "I'm going to figure that all out?"
Remember, God not only made you in His image to have dominion, but stop with the first part of that sentence. God made you. He created you. You will always be dependent on Him. You won't figure out the scheme that lets you play God in your life. It doesn't exist. Consider the work of God.
And this isn't just an individual message. Sure, we do all this in our individual lives, but in groups, in your family. As a family, you might be tempted to be passive and not take risks because life's uncertain. You might be tempted as a family to say, "How can I figure it all out?"
But as a church body, we do the same thing. We often face questions that we wrestle with in wisdom and we say, "How does that turn out?" One of those questions, which is a wonderful thing, is that there are many of you here, and sometimes this room is pretty full. And we say, "Praise God, that's wonderful." I don't know how that will all turn out. How should we handle growth? How should we try to include new people and connect new people? How do we do all of those things?
And our prayer needs to be, God help us not be passive and avoid taking risks just because there's uncertainty, and help us not be foolish and take foolish risks. But we should recognize we're not ever going to figure out this scheme that says, "I know how the next 10 years works." Straight uphill progress. Solomon says that's never going to happen.
So don't be passive. Don't overthink to try and get control by this understanding. Instead, God made man upright. Pursue good. things that are good. Wisdom, righteousness. If you say, "I don't know what that means," spend more time in God's word, 'cause He does and He tells you. Pursue loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself.
"I don't know how that'll all work out. Life's uncertain. It goes up and down." Yeah. But God didn't make you to find that scheme. He made you to pursue good. So what's good in front of you even if it's scary because life's uncertain?
I wanna invite you to take a moment I think it's important at the end of our services to take what we have in God's word and to not just be hearers of the word, but take the opportunity to pray, to ask God to help. If He has brought to your mind something specific, talk to Him about it. I wanna encourage you, we'll have a few minutes.
That doesn't mean you'll have enough time to do all the business you need to do with God. So one of the things I do often is write down. He brought this to mind, I write it down and go, "I need to think about that later." Maybe that's all you do during this time. Write down something that says, "I need to pray more about that. God, show me how to live this out." I want you to take a few minutes to pray and respond to God. And then we'll sing together.