The Grand Irony: Wrestling with Ecclesiastes 7
Part of our series through Ecclesiastes, "The Key"
Irony is when something intended to produce one result ends up producing the opposite. A puppy shredding its own certificate of dog obedience training. A pickup truck, loaded down with tires, riding on a flat. A fire extinguisher catching fire. We recognize irony when we see it, even if we can't always define it. And contrary to what a certain 90s pop song taught us, rain on your wedding day isn't irony. It's just bad luck.
Ecclesiastes 7 is full of the real thing, ironic observations about how life is supposed to work and how it actually works. The Teacher has just asked, at the end of chapter 6, "Who knows what is good for anyone in life?" Chapter 7 is his attempt at an answer, built from a lifetime of watching the wisdom he inherited from his elders collide with reality.
Better Than What?
The chapter opens with a string of "better than" statements, and it starts reasonably enough: "A good name is better than fine perfume." Fine. But then, "the day of one's death is better than the day of one's birth." It only gets darker from there. Mourning is better than feasting. Grief is better than laughter. The wise spend their time at funerals, not parties.
There's something to that, honestly. A funeral confronts you with your own mortality in a way a birthday party never will. You leave a funeral thinking about the kind of legacy you want to leave, or the kind you're afraid you're leaving. A wedding rarely does that work in us. The Teacher isn't telling us to stop celebrating. He tells us elsewhere there's nothing better than eating, drinking, and enjoying what God has given us. But he wants us to notice that sorrow teaches us things joy can't.
He keeps going: the rebuke of a wise person is better than the empty laughter of fools. A patient spirit is better than a proud one. And then, pointedly, "Don't say, why were the former days better than these, since it is not wise for you to ask this." Nostalgia is a trap. The past wasn't actually better. We were just less aware of what was wrong with it.
Blaming God
Then the Teacher's frustration boils over. "Consider the work of God. For who can straighten out what he has made crooked? In the day of prosperity, be joyful, but in the day of adversity, consider this: God has made the one as well as the other." Praise God for the good days. Blame God for the bad ones, because he sent both.
This is dark territory, close to what Job's wife says in her own despair: curse God and be done with it. And it's an honest expression of something many of us have felt. If God is sovereign over the good, isn't he sovereign over the bad too? What do we do with that?
The Teacher pushes further into what scholars call theodicy, the question of why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad ones. "Someone righteous perishes in spite of his righteousness, and someone wicked lives long in spite of his evil." This isn't a new problem. It's one of the oldest questions in the Bible, and it's still with us.
His conclusion, if you can call it that, is a kind of exhausted moderation: don't be excessively righteous, don't be excessively wicked. Don't try to out-Christian Christ. Don't try to earn God's favor through your own self-made holiness, but don't give up on righteousness altogether either. It sounds less like sound advice and more like a man who has run out of answers and is simply describing what he sees.
No One Righteous
Verse 20 is the only line from Ecclesiastes quoted directly in the New Testament. Paul cites it in Romans 3 while making the case that no one is righteous, not one, Jew or Gentile. Both the Teacher and Paul arrive at the same wall: no matter how hard you try, you will never be good enough, wise enough, or righteous enough on your own.
The Teacher goes searching for wisdom and can't find her. In verse 26 he describes a woman "more bitter than death," a trap, a net, chains. Read on its own, it sounds harsh toward women. But it's almost certainly a callback to Proverbs, where wisdom and folly are both personified as women, Lady Wisdom and Dame Folly. The Teacher goes looking for Lady Wisdom and keeps running into Folly instead. He searches for one person in a thousand who lives up to the standard, righteous, wise, and comes up empty, even when he looks in the mirror.
That's the deepest irony of the chapter. In pursuing wisdom entirely on his own terms, by his own strength, the Teacher discovers just how limited his own terms really are.
It's Our Fault, Not Our Fate
But he doesn't stay there. Verse 29: "I have discovered that God made people upright, but they have pursued many schemes." He turns the blame back where it belongs. God didn't make the mess. We did, going all the way back to that first bite of forbidden fruit.
It might be our fault, but it doesn't have to be our fate.
Reading through this chapter, it's hard not to see it as the Teacher's dark night of the soul, that place of silence and despair that, in every story we love, seems to arrive right before everything turns. It's Rocky down for the count. It's Frodo wrapped in the spider's web. As Joseph Campbell put it, the dark night of the soul comes just before the revelation. When everything seems lost, that's when new life is closest.
Jesus himself walked through this. In the garden of Gethsemane, deeply grieved, troubled to the point of death, he prayed, "Take this cup from me." From the cross, he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And in the middle of that darkness, abandoned by his friends, he still prayed, "Not my will, but yours be done."
If you're in a dark night right now, keep going. The only way out is through.
Foolishness That Saves
Paul picks up this same tension in 1 Corinthians 1, but from the other side of the resurrection. Where the Teacher found only the limits of human wisdom, Paul found that God chose what the world calls foolish to shame the wise, and what the world calls weak to shame the strong. "Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles," and yet, to those who are called, "the power of God and the wisdom of God."
The Teacher pursued wisdom on his own strength and came up empty every time. Through Christ, who became wisdom for us, righteousness and redemption are possible no matter where we started or how far short we've fallen.
Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 4 make a fitting close: "We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed. We are perplexed, but not in despair. We are persecuted, but not abandoned. We are struck down, but not destroyed." The God who turns graves into gardens and bones into armies is the same God who takes every irony of this life and, in the end, sets it right.
Think About It
The Teacher says the "day of death is better than the day of birth" and that mourning teaches us more than celebrating. Do you agree? What has a funeral taught you that a celebration couldn't?
Ecclesiastes 7 says God sends both prosperity and adversity. How do you personally wrestle with praising God on good days but trusting him on the hard ones, without assuming every hardship is punishment?
The Teacher warns against "why were the former days better than these" nostalgia. Where in your own life or in the church are you tempted to romanticize the past? What might that nostalgia be blinding you to right now?
He searches for one righteous person and can't find one, not even himself. Where do you see yourself trying to earn God's favor through your own effort, and what would it look like to let that go?
The sermon frames this chapter as the Teacher's "dark night of the soul," a low point that comes right before a turning point. Have you been through a season like that? Looking back, what helped you keep going, or what do you wish had?
WATCH or LISTEN TO the full sermon, plus more, at tulipstreet.com/sermons
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