Ecclesiastes 7:23-29--What the Teacher Found

Ecclesiastes 7:23-29Christian Standard Bible
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What the Teacher Found
23 I have tested all this by wisdom. I resolved, “I will be wise,” but it was beyond me. 24 What exists is beyond reach and very deep. Who can discover it? 25 I turned my thoughts to know, explore, and examine wisdom and an explanation for things, and to know that wickedness is stupidity and folly is madness. 26 And I find more bitter than death the woman who is a trap: her heart a net and her hands chains. The one who pleases God will escape her, but the sinner will be captured by her. 27 “Look,” says the Teacher, “I have discovered this by adding one thing to another to find out the explanation, 28 which my soul continually searches for but does not find: I found one person in a thousand, but none of those was a woman. 29 Only see this: I have discovered that God made people upright, but they pursued many schemes.”

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Solomon is now going to interject and speak in first person.  These are all things that he tested and thought he could figure out because the LORD had given him great wisdom, but it was beyond him to reason through the questions without considering God.  You could lose yourself in the questions of philosophy and never fully answer life's biggest questions if you were seeking answers from a purely Naturalistic and Humanistic perspective.  Even if you were the wisest person (by human standards) it would not be enough to get meaningful answers on the questions of Origins, Meaning, Morality, Destiny, and Identity that can only be found in the revelation of God's Word.  Solomon is baffled particularly by the problem of wickedness, stupidity and folly that lead to madness.

All the answers he found were bitter...nothing actually eased his soul.  He also had no good answer for the type of woman he warns about in the book of Proverbs (the adulterous woman and the harlot) that are worse than death.  Men are caught in her traps, snares, and nets that she lays to catch them.  The only answer Solomon can come up with is to fear the LORD and obey Him.  Do what pleases Him, and you will escape these traps and snares that laid for you by all kinds of tempters.  However, the sinner who rebels against the LORD will be caught by sexual temptation and all other kinds of temptation.

Solomon tried to find meaning and answers to these questions by adding all kinds of things to his life--money, possessions, land, and LOTS of women--300 wives and 700 concubines as I recall.  He says here that he found no answers or true pleasure by adding more women into his life, and he seems to be saying that he needed to find friends that were closer than a brother and they were rare (1 in 1,000), but he could not have that kind of relationship with any woman because he needed another man to disciple him and sharpen him.  "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another."  Paul tells us in his pastoral epistles that the older men should disciple the younger men and the older women should disciple the younger women.

Solomon thinks that God made people good (and He did) and we are pursued and hunted by many evil schemes.  That's only partially true though if we know the whole story of the nature of evil and the nature of man.  Adam and Eve were made perfect, but when sin entered the world, they and all of Creation fell and there is now something called a sin nature that we are born with that bends our hearts towards evil.  We are born wanting to be the one who choses good and evil for ourselves and in rebellion against the LORD and His commands.  That is why the conclusion that Solomon comes to doesn't fit with the Naturalistic or Humanistic worldviews that are Atheistic at their core.  He knows the right answer is to fear God and obey Him, but the heart of man wants to listen to the words of Satan in Genesis 3 telling us that we can't take God at His word, that He won't punish us for sin, and that somehow we can ascend to the throne and be like God--we can choose right and wrong for ourselves and maybe even make people worship us.  We want to steal glory from God that only He deserves.  Solomon is starting to realize that this is at the heart of all the world's problems, and anyone staring off with the viewpoint that there is no God is a fool, no matter how "wise" or "knowledgeable" he is by worldly standards, and he can never hope for satisfying answers to these worldview questions if he rejects out of hand the source for all these answers.