May 1 Daily Devotional

Scripture for Day 1—Ecclesiastes 1:1-2

¹The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

² Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
     vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

Devotional:

"A bit of healthy disbelief is sometimes as needful as faith to the welfare of our souls"—words from A. W. Tozer. Would you agree? Of course, before you put your signature under the statement, you would want to ask some questions of your own. For example, "Disbelief in regards of what?" Disbelief in the basic goodness of God could hardly be a healthy thing. Likewise, if disbelief meant the rejection of—say—the doctrine of Christ's atonement, we would consider this to be a turn for the worse. But what if Tozer's dose of "healthy disbelief" takes aim at received tradition, conventional or even popular ways of conceiving life, theology, and God. What if it simply means that you cannot be too careful to remain critical of the stream of tradition in which you have come to stand? Ecclesiastes is such a reminder, and as such, makes an important contribution to the Bible. This is a voice that needs to be heard—as a text on its own merits, and yet in the larger context of the whole counsel of God.

Every now and then you meet people that are hard to classify, people less predictable than the rest of us. We all know that such people are usually considered a little suspect. They don't fit in. Ecclesiastes is a book, not a person. But as a book, it has sometimes been treated in similar ways. From the beginning, sporadic efforts were made to exclude it from the list of inspired (OT) books. The Mishnah (the oldest written document of rabbinic Judaism) reports challenges to the sacredness of the book down to the time of Rabbi Akiba († ca. 135 AD). Of course, Ecclesiastes survived the challenges and maintained its position in the canon because God wanted the book to be there. Based on this conviction, we do well to hear the author of the book out, an author who seems rather willing to put to the test unexamined assumptions about our faith. His gift for asking hard questions will not permit us to take anything for granted, and in this sense, will prove to be a tonic for our biblical faith. Ecclesiastes is certainly not "too unorthodox" for God who gave us this book. In any case, the community of believers transformed by Christ's grace should exemplify the kind of openness that will allow thoughtful opinion to be voiced, if only to be challenged in light of the whole counsel of God. We have nothing to fear of the truth. God gave it for our salvation from sin and the things that enslave us.

The author of these devotionals, the Rev. Martin Emmrich, is an ordained OPC minister (Westminster OPC, Corvallis, Oregon) as well as the author of Pneumatological Concepts in the Epistle to the Hebrews, a book on the teaching of Hebrews on the Holy Spirit. We are happy to make these devotionals on Ecclesiastes and other passages of Scripture available to you.