Ecclesiastes 8:9 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Ecclesiastes 8:9

Comments

Next he asks, ‘Will we be free if we run away from God? Will we be able to turn life to profit, by taking charge of it ourselves? If we refuse God’s rule over us, and organise what seems like an advantageous position for ourselves, we may find that life takes an unexpected turn, and in fact we have acted to our own disadvantage. If I will not be ruled by God’s word, then I am ruled by this world, by my appetites and desires. Look at human power structures; what are they all about? One person being under another – that is life. So it is with rebellion. If you leave your place, you will only be under the service of another. You are on the run from God; you think it is an imposition to have to live by his commandments. But we turn our back on God, and find we only enter some worst servitude.The Preacher had seen all that precedes and considered it very carefully. He had arranged his words in order and expressed them skilfully, aiming always to bring men to repentance and to the knowledge of God. He had given attention particularly to how men go astray and what obstacles lie in the way of them finding the Lord: to the great bitterness and sorrow that comes to the womaniser, to the scarcity of true wisdom, to the perversity of human nature, to the great advantage of wisdom, to the danger and foolishness of taking offence before God, to the importance of understanding right protocol before our heavenly King, to our ignorance of the future without God and to the inevitability of death and our powerlessness in that day if we don’t know the Lord. Solomon wishes to show us how little we really understand the realm of sin which we have chosen to make our home.

Application

Sin has a way of hurting us just when we are convinced that it must bring us some advantage. He illustrates this with a particular example in which, the ruler may find that he has become the target of the jealousy and plots of others, or that his power has exposed him to temptations that he would have been shielded from, or that the business of ruling is an unbearable burden to him This is just an example of how sin hurts us in unexpected ways. We are so naïve about sin that we imagine we can take control of it without incurring any disadvantage, but God ensures that what a man sows, he will also reap. This reaping certainly comes in the next world, but it comes to some extent even in this world. How many unexpected surprises sin has for us! Therefore it is foolish for anyone to think they can make sin their servant.

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Ecclesiastes 8:9 Commentary and Bible Study