June 10 Daily Devotional

Scripture for Day 41—Ecclesiastes 12:9–14

⁹Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care. ¹⁰The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth.

¹³The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. ¹⁴For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

Devotional:

So we have come to the conclusion of the matter. Before we devote our attention to the present text, a brief retrospect is in order. Ecclesiastes is an unusual book. If you compare its teachings with the more traditional, main-stream Israelite wisdom as found in the popular Proverbs, its voice possesses a particularly hard edge. Proverbs promises rewards for hard work, righteousness, the pursuit of knowledge, and it warns against the short-lived pleasures of sin and folly. The author of Ecclesiastes engages this fair-and-square kind of world view in what Derek Kidner calls a "creative conflict." He does not dismiss conventional wisdom, but he certainly offers a hard-nosed critique, as if he was saying, "Yes, ordinarily there is benefit in pursuing wisdom, but don't count on it! There is also plenty of evidence to the contrary, and death is the great equalizer."

Qoheleth is quite stingy in offering theological advice. We find very few comments that would point us directly to the light. It is almost as though darkness is made so intolerable that the reader is forced to grasp for what lies beyond. That being said, the author never speculates about the afterlife, or even a heavenly reward (8:12 possibly being the exception), and the book has a decidedly secular flavor. This down-to-earth focus is dictated by the book's aim: The writer addresses the people of this world whose philosophical horizon is limited by the material world. By meeting people on their own ground, he demonstrates the futility of all human ambition. Hendry may be right when he claims the book is "in fact a critique of secularism and of secularized religion."

But now, in the conclusion of the work (12:9-14), we are taken one step further and are approaching the idea of divine retribution after death. 12:9-14 is a most worthy and much needed salvo to make explicit what has so far only been intimated in a few places. The fear of God emerges as more than just "man's duty" (12:13b). The Hebrew in 12:13 reads, "this is every man," or even, "this is the whole man." In other words, to fear God is our very raison d'être. This saying provides us with a hermeneutical grid for the book. It is to be read in light of its closing comments.

Life under the sun must be lived with a heavenward orientation. This implies the privilege and the challenge to rise above the crowd, to become more than we would be without God in the world. It is God's challenge and call for us to move toward wholeness, and be what we are in Christ, who has shown us the Father and supplies all we need for life. He it is who said, "If you love me, keep my commandments."

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.