Ecclesiastes week 8: The Way of Righteousness

Ecclesiastes 7:15-8:8

In our journey through the book of Ecclesiastes, the author, QOHELETH, offering wisdom for living. What is wisdom? A definition I saw is that wisdom is “seeing life from God’s perspective so we can choose the best paths in it.”

QOHELETH continues, “In my life I have seen both a righteous man destroyed and a wicked man living long.” Sometimes the most righteous of people suffer. And sometimes the worst of people prosper. This is one of the classic questions of a branch of theology called theodicy, dealing with the justice of God. Why do bad things happen to seemingly good people and sometimes the worst of people enjoy long life and prosperity? It’s a question people have pondered for a long time, at least as far back as the book of Job, which may actually be one of the oldest books of the Bible, more than 3500 years old.

But QOHELETH does not take a deep dive into the subject. Instead, he just sees it as a fact of life. “This is how it is.” And he’s not wrong. We can’t count on being a “good person” as a path to ease, comfort, or prosperity.

Instead of trying to delve into this mystery, QOHELETH warns us readers about the danger of perfectionism. Trying to be perfect can be just as much of a trap as giving oneself over to wicked living. Perfectionism and legalism, the idea that only those who are meticulous about always doing the right things are acceptable to God, after all, were the sins of the Pharisees. And they led the Pharisees to great pride.

In the Gospels, we see Jesus calling the wicked to repentance. But he seemed to spend as much time calling the self-righteous Pharisees to turn away from their pride. Jesus implies several times in the Gospels that the Pharisees were motivated to seek after a perfect keeping of God’s Law not for the glory of God, but for the glory of self. They wanted to be seen as the perfect people. Always doing what God required. Never falling short. But the end result was a religious elitism, a way of thinking that they were the only ones God valued.

Instead, we should choose the middle way, between wickedness and perfectionism, the way of righteousness. QOHELETH says, “The one who respects and obeys God will find the pathway between these two evils.” After all, “remember there is no on earth who is perfectly righteous.” Well, except for this one guy, of course. But we’ll have to excuse QOHELETH for not knowing about Jesus, since he came about a thousand years later, right?

A corollary of this is that we should not be too hard on others for their faults. This was, after all the fault of the Pharisees, the fault of religious perfectionism: You look down on everyone else as less than yourself. “If you hear someone bad mouthing you, don’t be too hard on them. You have bad mouthed others, too.” And he’s right. About all of us.

In the New Testament, we are told to “make allowances for each other’s faults and forgive others. Remember, the Lord forgave you.” (Colossians 3:13). None of us is altogether righteous, so none of us has the right to be unforgiving toward others. Only Jesus has the right to be unforgiving, since he is without sin, and he did not exercise that right. When he faced the woman caught in adultery, he said to her, “I do not condemn you either.” And then he died on the cross for lost sinners.

Just as perfect righteousness is beyond us, so is perfect wisdom. All along, QOHELETH is extolling the virtues of having wisdom and living wisely, but even he has to admit, perfect wisdom is only God’s territory, not ours. He started out this book in chapter one by saying that he set out to find all wisdom and knowledge, and his conclusion was that it was impossible.

We are all prone to beating ourselves up when we make mistakes. But mistakes are a fact of life. And perfectionism, the inability to tolerate mistakes in ourselves, or others, is harmful. I’d say it’s a form of idolatry. It is worshipping a false perception of ourselves. It’s trying to take the place of God, who is the only one without faults. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try our best, that we shouldn’t seek after the truth, that we shouldn’t do what is right. But we absolutely should not live with an unrealistic idea of ourselves.

Perfect wisdom is impossible. The same sentiment is echoed elsewhere in Scripture, maybe most clearly in Job. Job says in chapter 28 of his book, “Do people know where to find wisdom and understanding? No, it is not found among the living.” The mysteries of life are beyond our comprehension. In Isaiah, God declares, “as high as the heavens are above the sea, so my thoughts are higher than yours and my ways higher than yours.” Job went on to say in chapter 28, “The fear of the Lord is true wisdom.” QOHELETH says something very similar in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes: “Obey God and do his will.” That is true wisdom. But just as no one can be perfectly righteous, so no one can be perfectly wise.

Moving along, verses 26-29 are seen in a rather negative light by many commentators. Many see them echoing the patriarchal attitudes towards women that were common in the ancient Near East world, that women were inherently less able to

do what is right than men. But that’s not the only way to interpret them. Dr. Dorsey, who did this translation, sees them more in line with Proverbs, where wisdom and folly are both personified as women. There is a seductive nature to folly. It seems good in so many ways, especially when many in the world follow in her ways. But she is a snare, a trap. Only those who seek God will escape her.

QOHELETH returns here at the end of chapter 7 to the idea that perfect righteousness is not to be found among people. But he doesn’t blame God for this. God made humankind righteous and upright, but we have “complicated” the world, as some translate this verse. This is a way of explaining the fall from grace that happens in Genesis chapter 3. The world is complicated. Right and wrong are seldom as obvious of choices as we would want them to be. God’s good design is perverted.

QOHELETH moves on in chapter 8 to say, “Obey the king.” Assuming that QOHELETH is King Solomon, it seems a rather self-serving piece of advice, right? Well, yes, but the general principle is still true: Life goes easier when we obey the law of the land. And assuming that those laws don’t defy God, then we should. Any loyalty to people must be limited by loyalty to God. “We must obey God rather than human beings,” Peter and John said to the Sanhedrin in the book of Acts.

“The wise person knows how and when to do things.” And yet, the future remains uncertain. The only real certainty is death.

This goes back to the subject at the start of the chapter: Death is the great inevitability. The height of wisdom is to fear God and to live life in preparation for death.