Ecclesiastes 1:15 Commentary and Bible Study

Solomon introduces us to human depravity. These words relate to the final thought of the previous verse, that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Why is it impossible to find anything other than vanity in this world, which has become isolated from God? Because it is part of the fabric of this world and all the experiences that it offers, that they are flawed and unable to be put right. No amount of human optimism or wishful thinking is able to turn this world into the paradise that man wants it to be, because God has cursed it and this curse extends to every experience that man can have in it. God has made sure it is so to subvert all human idolatry. ‘What is crooked cannot be made straight.’ These words and the following provide a metaphor for the limits that God has imposed on the world. The world has, as it were, become crooked and it is not within man’s power to make it straight again. It is like something that is incomplete, a cricket team with only nine players, a dog with only three legs: what is missing cannot be fully numbered. This illustrates the vanity of all things under the sun. There is something wrong with the world and all its experiences that means that it can never give us full satisfaction. God knows that in our state of rebellion against him, we will turn to created things for the fulfilment that we ought to seek only in him. He is not willing to let us to succeed, and therefore has altered the fabric and structure of the creation itself so that we become frustrated in our attempts to do so.This crookedness is seen first of all in the physical world itself. The second law of thermodynamics describes how all things tend to decay, to rust and to run down. Our bodies too are subject to these processes and eventually must wear out and die, going back to the dust that they were made from, and from which they escaped only for a brief time. In the mental sphere we see the curse operating in the darkening of our understanding as a result of the ignorance that is in us due to the blindness of our hearts. This ignorance makes us unable to evaluate correctly what has true value and it drives us relentlessly on a pursuit of happiness in things that are passing away, even though knowledge would prevent us from ever starting down that path in the first place. In our moral faculty, crookedness and perversity makes us the slaves of sin so that our wills are corrupt and we do the very things that God has commanded us not to do, sometimes even because God has commanded us not to do those things. The crookedness in the physical world can only be removed by God destroying this present order and creating a new heaven and earth. Within individual human beings the crookedness is removed only by the powerful work of the Spirit in regenerating our minds and renewing our wills via the new birth.