Ecclesiastes 5:3 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Ecclesiastes 5:3

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This Solomon’s gentle way of getting across his point. The meaning is not that a dream comes from being worried about your business concerns, but that it comes with a multitude of ideas, a profusion of images presented to the mind. Where do dreams come from? Usually from what has preoccupied our minds during the waking day and which, in sleep, we continue to think about. Most people have experienced what it is to perform some new repetitive task and to find that even when their day’s work has is done, they continue to perform the same task in their dreams. It is as if, during sleep, the mind is attempting to perfect what it did imperfectly during the day, so that the day’s activity overflows into our night-time dreams and the mind tries to catch up with life. The dream careers from one place to another; fantastic things collide together so that the scene changes but somehow the same people persist. A dream does not last long; you wake up and find it was only a dream: it doesn’t matter. All the rapidly changing ideas amount to nothing. So the fool’s words and approach to God may all amount to nothing because he doesn’t come on God’s terms. In other words, the person who comes to God with their mind already full of ideas about what he is like, about what he wants from us, about the sacrifices we ought to offer; that person is like someone with a fevered brain which overflows into a dream. His cluttered mind will not listen to God and expresses all sort of crazy ideas about religion, about how to go to God. Those many words are bottled up inside him and they must come out. To tackle his foolishness, he would have to deal with that overconfidence within which makes him think that he has anything worth saying in the presence of God.

Application

Universalism is one such foolish opinion – the idea that everybody goes to heaven, or perhaps, everybody except Hitler and other monsters of history. Of course, it fails to take account of God’s holiness and his hatred of sin. He cannot allow anyone into heaven without providing an atonement for sin, without that person coming to him for pardon, and receiving a new nature that loves righteousness. Or the idea that all religions are the same. How can they be when they teach opposite things: one says we earn a place in heaven by our good works, while another says we are saved entirely by the grace of Jesus Christ. One worships idols, while the other worships the God who made heaven and earth. The fool is a fool in matters of faith. He may be shrewd in business, successful, highly educated, but in religion he is a fool. None of these ideas will get you to God. It is not surprising, that some make their own religion. They want God on their own terms, so there is a temptation for people invent their own beliefs. Of course – that is perfectly predictable. This is the fool’s voice, known by a multitude of words. Paul explains that the law was given, ‘that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God’ (Romans 3:19). ‘Be silent in the presence of the Lord GOD’ says Zephaniah (Zephaniah 1:7; 2:13).

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Ecclesiastes 5:3 Commentary and Bible Study