Ecclesiastes 7:15-29 - No One Righteous
Welcome & Prayer
Housekeeping
- Who I am
- Where to find the manuscript
The Intro
Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived.
And he lived in a magical world. (This is fiction by the way). He had jet black hair and was always getting himself into trouble, and he was going to school and there was a contest at his school that he didn’t even sign up for, but somehow he got put in.
His favorite professor was kind of mad about it or maybe not. Honestly I’m not really sure, but this contest involved fighting dragons and rescuing people from the bottom of a really deep, creepy, monster-infested lake. But the hardest challenge of all with the last one: a giant maze.
Now, you might think that a maze isn’t all that scary. It’s just a bunch of walls, right? But the challenge is that a maze has wrong path after wrong path after wrong path, and only one right path.
You try one thing, that doesn’t work. Go another way, that doesn’t work. You start to get lost, to second-guess your choices, to forget where you’ve been, and after a while you start to wonder:
…is there actually a way out of this thing? Am I trapped?
The farther you go, the more this existential dread starts to creep in, to weigh down on you, to press in, to squish & squeeze you until you feel panicked and hopeless and breathless. Like a trash compactor closing in on you. No way to stop it. No way out.
“When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.”
That is the type of feeling that today’s passage confronts us with. In fact, that’s the reality that Solomon — who wrote Ecclesiastes — has been exploring this entire book: that he’s tried path after path, way after way, with no success, no way out, and is staring at the question: does anything really matter at all? And is there any real hope for me at the end of this journey?
If you’ve ever felt that way or known anyone who has felt that way, or if you’re sitting there thinking “I’ve got this maze of life thing figured out actually,” this passage today has some interesting things for you, so let’s dive in.
Intro/Setting
Open up your Bibles to Ecclesiastes 7:15-29. It’s towards the middle of your Bible. If you’re in Psalms, keep going to the right. If it’s starting to sound a little spicy, you’ve gone too far. That’s some of Solomon’s other writings. He was an interesting guy.
As we learned last week, the beginning of chapter 7 asks the question: what is the good life, how does one gain an advantage in it, and (just like Jon Forman asked) what happens next. And it shows that the answers are found at a funeral because funerals force us to remember that we will die, that tomorrow is not guaranteed, and that both prosperity and adversity in this life are just temporary and find their proper place in light of eternity.
That’s where we pick up in verse 15:
Ecclesiastes 7:15–29
15 In my futile life I have seen everything: someone righteous perishes in spite of his righteousness, and someone wicked lives long in spite of his evil. 16 Don’t be excessively righteous, and don’t be overly wise. Why should you destroy yourself? 17 Don’t be excessively wicked, and don’t be foolish. Why should you die before your time? 18 It is good that you grasp the one and do not let the other slip from your hand. For the one who fears God will end up with both of them.
19 Wisdom makes the wise person stronger
than ten rulers of a city.
20 There is certainly no one righteous on the earth
who does good and never sins.
21 Don’t pay attention to everything people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you, 22 for in your heart you know that many times you yourself have cursed others.
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.”
If that seemed at all confusing to you, don’t worry, you are not alone. Many believe this to be one of the hardest passages in Ecclesiastes to understand, which is in one of the hardest books to understand.
There is a lot of symmetrical riffing off of concepts, weaving back and forth with an emphasis on what not to do with expansions on the futility of taking those paths. And at first glance, it withholds an obvious answer, making the problem clearer, but the solution seemingly elusive.
However, there are a few phrases that point at “a way out of the maze,” and that’s what we’re going to find together. So think of me as your maze tour guide.
The Paradox (v15)
Let’s jump back to verse 15 and start breaking this thing down:
Solomon starts with a word that he keeps coming back to: futility. Life is futile, vain, fleeting, meaningless — it’s like a vapor in the air that you reach out to grab but can’t get your hands on. He says that in this futile life, he has seen it all, and then describes a paradox:
15someone righteous perishes in spite of his righteousness,
and someone wicked lives long in spite of his evil.
Sometimes the good die young, and sometimes the reckless live long.
Why is this a paradox? Well, because the original readers and hearers of Ecclesiastes would know God’s proclamation from the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:
12Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life.”
And in Deuteronomy 12:28:
28Be careful to obey all these things I command you, so that you and your children after you may prosper forever.
These verses seem to be saying: “here’s the deal — if you follow through on following God’s commands to you, He will bring you long life and prosperity.” It sounds like a simple equation: good in, good out, and conversely, garbage in, garbage out. What goes around comes around.
We know that the Jewish audience was thinking that. When Job experiences hardship and calamity, the first question his friends ask is: what did you do wrong? When Jesus passes a blind man in John 9, his disciples ask: who sinned and made him be born blind — him or his parents, because obviously sin was the reason he was born blind? That’s how they were thinking.
But in Ecclesiastes, Solomon raises this paradox that this isn’t always how it pans out.
The Extremes (v16-17)
Then, drawn out of that, he instructs in v16:
16Don’t be excessively righteous, and don’t be overly wise.
Why should you destroy yourself?
Usually in church we don’t have a problem with people being too good, so what gives? Sometimes the good die young, so you don’t wanna be too good? Is that what he’s saying? No, it’s really not.
Look closely: Don’t be excessively righteous and don’t be overly wise.
This is not an about of righteousness that is being warned against. This is an orientation towards righteousness, a way of thinking about it, a path to pursuing it, an expectation of what to receive from it.
This is a self-directed orientation towards righteousness — a self-righteousness. And that problematic self-righteousness can manifest in many different ways.
It could be thinking: all your problems are simply a result of your failures. If you would just do more right things, all your problems would be gone. It’s seeing you as the solution and perfection as attainable, failing to recognize human limitations and your need for God.
It could be creating a set of extra-biblical rules that you hold up as true righteousness, as "real Christianity.” That might sound like “good Christians always do ______ .” It could be about dating or small groups or mannerisms or politics or … whatever, you fill in the blank! The Pharisees were the primo example of this, creating artificial standards and in so doing, missed out on the main thing.
What about “don’t be overly wise?” It’s saying that there is a way you can pursue the accumulation of wisdom that will lead to self-destruction.
For some of us, this may look like making our faith merely an intellectual exercise. We approach Bible study as simply imaginative, with musings and mythologies:
hearing without doing,
wisdom without worship,
sight without surrender.
Others of us may conversely just be looking for a list of do’s and don’ts. (Just teach us, give us enough wisdom that we can set it and forget it.) But that’s not the narrow road that Jesus calls us to. God has specifically designed our needs and limitations — our lack of full, immediate wisdom — to keep us engaged. We need our daily bread, and we need to ask for it. We need to pursue it day by day, not to collect and show off, but to receive and use.
17Don’t be excessively wicked, and don’t be foolish.
Why should you die before your time?
So, is this saying that it’s okay to be a little wicked, but we don’t want to be too wicked (because no one mourns the wicked, right)? Clearly it does not mean that. Psalm 11:5 says
“The Lord examines the righteous, but he hates the wicked.”
God loves good and hates evil and all of the Scriptures together call us to stay away from sin. And while all of us will engage in wickedness to some degree in life, excessive wickedness paired with foolishness often leads to dying young for a stupid reason.
There is a way of living that some embrace in which evil is called good, and good is called evil. In this way of thinking,
I am at the center of everything.
My desires direct my actions.
My pleasure sets the agenda.
My happiness is the only thing that sets the boundaries for my behavior.
Others are only a means to an end — the end of my personal fulfillment.
Or, as Palpatine would say:
“I am the senate.”
This passage warns that death awaits that way of life.
Hold On (v18)
18It is good that you grasp the one and do not let the other slip from your hand. For the one who fears God will end up with both of them.
What is the one and the other?
Quiz time: what is the opposite of righteousness? It’s wickedness aka. anti-righteousness.
Now, what is the opposite of wisdom? It’s foolishness or anti-wisdom.
So, you have two warnings in a symmetrical structure:
1. Don’t be overly righteous or overly wise, which leads to self-destruction, &
2. Don’t be overly anti-righteous or anti-wise, which leads to death.
So we need to hold onto both of these warnings. Both lead to death and destruction. Both lead to a dead-end in the maze.
Okay, so we’re supposed to not do those things, but what are we supposed to do?
18… For the one who fears God will end up with both of them.
The one who does not fear God says
“I can do enough right things without God’s help,
I can accumulate enough wisdom on my own to find the right path,
I can make my own rules of right and wrong
I can decide for myself what works and doesn’t work.”
Wisdom & Righteousness (v19-20)
The one who does fear God has a different orientation to these things:
19Wisdom makes the wise person stronger
than ten rulers of a city.
The one who fears God knows that wisdom is not a bad thing; it is a powerful thing! It is to be sought after and held onto.
Think of all the power that a mayor or governor has to make your life better or worse. The power of taxation or social programs or policing or policies that allow a giant inflatable summoning witch to be pointed at your property.
Take that power and multiply it by 10! That’s the power of wisdom!
The one who fears God knows the power of wisdom, but also knows its limits. An orientation towards wisdom as the ultimate end only leads to self-destruction.
How about righteousness? What is the proper orientation towards that?
20There is certainly no one righteous on the earth
who does good and never sins.
We are being led to the solution by the setting up of the problem.
Look at the symmetry:
(v16) Don’t be overly wise, (v19) but do pursue wisdom.
(v16) Don’t be excessively righteous, (v20) because no one on earth is righteous.
Here’s the problem: none of us can pursue righteousness so carefully, so vigorously, so excessively that we can achieve it perfectly. Perfection is the standard set by God, and verse 20 defines perfect righteousness: someone who always does good and never does bad. It’s pretty clear.
And if you think that is you, that you are perfectly righteous, look at verse 21:
21Don’t pay attention to everything people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you, 22for in your heart you know that many times you yourself have cursed others.
Ecclesiastes takes you to the courtroom and makes the case for your unrighteousness, specifically. This is not just talking about everyone else, this is using the language of “you.”
All of you (and me!) have cursed others. Maybe in a small way, maybe in a big way, maybe just in your heart and mind, but you all have cursed others.
Here’s what Jesus said about that in Matthew 5:
21“You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. 22But I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Whoever insults his brother or sister, will be subject to the court. Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be subject to hellfire.”
We might think to ourselves: “anger in our hearts is no big deal; it’s not a problem. After all, I’m the one in the right! I’m the righteous one here. They are the wrong one.”
But Jesus says that is not how we should think of our brothers and sisters in Christ — the remarkable creations of our God, our fellow image-bearers and blood-bought souls, fellow heirs with Christ. Storing up that anger in our hearts, giving it room to run and oxygen to breathe, that does not have a place in the kingdom of God.
And we’ve all been there. Verse 22 cuts down any delusions we had that perfection was attainable, that complete righteousness was possible for any of us. There is no one righteous!
One piece of wisdom that is offered in v21 is that because we know others will curse us with their words, we should not pay too much attention to everything that everyone is saying about us.
This is not saying don’t listen to others. See Eccl 7:5 - “It is better to listen to rebuke from a wise person than to listen to the song of fools.” It is saying: don’t listen to every type of feedback from every person. Haters gonna hate.
There are entire industries built around critics: food critics, movie critics, sports critics, political critics, church critics. Humans have this weird fascination with hearing other people talk down about something or someone else.
And we fixate on it. We put it up on bulletin boards. We play it back in our heads laying in bed at night, stuck in an infinite loop.
Without recognizing it, we so often establish our validation from those around us, and often it’s people that hardly know us. For many of us in this room, that comes from social media.
Jonahan Haidt is a social psychologist who has an excellent book on this topic called “The Anxious Generation” in which he explores the impacts of what he calls “socially prescribed perfectionism,” which is the ecosystem of most social media. He talks about how “even when we’re not on our devices and appear to be doing something in the real world, a substantial portion of our attention is monitoring or worrying about events in the social metaverse.” When we get likes and views and comments from our carefully-curated collection of shared stuff, our brain gets happy.
External validation creates a positive feedback loop that incentivizes posting more stuff that gets more likes & views that leads to more happiness that leads to more posting and on and on it goes. It’s a big reason why we have the most anxious, depressed generation in history since we have been tracking these things, and it’s what this book written about 3,000 years ago warns against — giving too much attention to what others think and say about us.
We all know this, but few of us actually do anything about it.
So parents, you gotta be careful. Young adults, you’ve got to be wise. That’s gonna look different for each of us, but that’s probably gonna look like boundaries that seem crazy to the world.
It might look like setting app and screen time limits or protections, even for you adults. I will admit that I have to do that for me as a 38-year-old man. Maybe I am just bad at life, but I have app limits set up on my phone at certain times of the day that disables most of my apps.
I know someone who uses a device called “Brick” that literally turns off most apps on your phone, and you have to physically put your phone next to it to turn them back on.
A radical problem sometimes requires radical solutions. Parents if you have not made a plan in this area with your kids, when you get home you should sit down and make a plan, and kids, you should have that conversation with your parents.
And if you do this, people are gonna look at you sideways. People are gonna make fun of you. But they’re gonna do that anyways, verse 21 says. So you might as well have that happen for you doing the life-giving thing, right?
So if we shouldn’t listen to the noise and the crowd, who should we listen to then? I love what John Maxwell said: “Success is when those who know me the best respect and love me the most.”
Think about your close friends and your mentors. Think about household and your families (including your spiritual family).
Don’t be so concerned about criticism that comes from outside those walls. Do you value the input most of those who know you the best? Are they the ones you are listening to? Or are you obsessed with those outside?
Mark Batterson said “I want to be famous in my home.” Is that your mindset?
And most importantly: who is the one that knows us best and loves us most?
It is God who knows us fully (every hair on our head, every thought in our mind, every feeling in our heart, every action of our hands), and it is God who loves us the most — entirely and unconditionally. In spite of all our failures and doubting and rejection, if we have received salvation through Christ, we are loved by the unchanging, immovable love of a strong and tender Father!
So his voice is the one that should be the loudest in our ears.
His influence should be the greatest mover of our motivations.
His likes and looks should be what lifts up our hearts most.
His “well done, good and faithful servant” should be the compass that sets the trajectory for our days.
Is that how you are oriented?
On Wisdom
v23-25
In this next section, he shows us how wisdom alone just doesn’t work. It’s a dead-end in the maze.
And the pattern you’ll see is the word “I.”
23I have tested all this by wisdom. I resolved, “I will be wise,” but it was beyond me. 24What exists is beyond reach and very deep. Who can discover it? 25I 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.
He is saying: I’ve tried it all!
Every intellectual curiosity.
Every cognitive exploration.
Every life hack.
And apart from the fear of God, it leads nowhere. It is bankrupt.
God cannot be figured out, outmaneuvered, or solved.
He is the Author.
He is the Architect.
Jesus is the arrival.
And judgement is the arrangement for all who are not found in Him.
The irony is that the pursuit of wisdom on its own — without God in the picture — is actually folly. It is anti-wisdom, because it is ultimately no good.
Every success that can be achieved apart from God is merely provisional. Every fulfillment felt apart from God is fleeting.
Every validation received from a temporary source is merely a waypoint, not a destination.
It is futility. It is vapor in the wind — here one instant and gone the next.
The only true, lasting, eternal meaning to be found in this life is to be found in God. Apart from Him you can do nothing, at least nothing that really matters.
On Righteousness (v26-28)
In the final section, we see that righteousness cannot be achieved apart from God, and outlines a trap we face.
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.
Is Solomon saying that every woman is just to be seen as a trap, that women are just crazy? No, not at all. He says later in Ecclesiastes 9:9 “Enjoy life with the wife you love … for that is your portion in life.” And in his other writings in Proverbs 18:22 “He who finds a wife finds a good thing.” In fact, from the beginning of the creation of the world everything is called good, but what’s the first thing that is identified as not good? The absence of a woman.
So this passage isn’t calling all women a problem, but this is an allusion to “the woman” in Proverbs 5 & 7 who is a temptress, trying to draw in a man to get him to commit adultery with her, to give himself up to destruction. Sexual temptation is everywhere: relationships, pornography, entertainment, socials, daydreams, pretty much everywhere, so the warnings we find in the Bible is to be alert, to be on guard, to watch out, and to not test boundaries.
My daughter is 3 years old, and often times we’ll tell her not to put her foot somewhere, and she will suddenly become the most inquisitive human on the planet. “Is this okay?” *moves foot* “Is this okay…?” She wants to test that boundary, explore all the edges of it, come to a greater understanding of it, figure it all out. And she’s 3, so most of her life is learning about boundaries.
But this passage warns us that sexual temptation is not an area to test boundaries. I mean, consider this: James 4 says that you can stand up to even the devil himself, and he will turn tail and run from you. But about sexual immorality, 1 Corinthians 6 says “flee!!” “run away!!!” Don’t test it, don’t try it, don’t toy with it.
Brothers and sisters, understand the seriousness of this warning, and take evasive action in your lives to survive this fierce battle. I want you to take a minute right now, and think about what changes you need to make in your battle plan in this area, and write something, anything down that you plan to do, and men, we need to lead out here.
- Maybe it’s a place or situation that you need to avoid — maybe it’s not being alone late at night or a show you need to stop watching or a part of town you need to stop going to.
- Maybe it’s an app you need to delete or one you need to add.
- Maybe it’s some confession that needs to happen, and some new friendships you need to build. Battles aren’t usually won alone.
- Maybe it’s some shame that has been weighing you down that you need to cast off as you more fully experience forgiveness in Christ.
- Maybe it’s some new healthy habits you need to build to replace the bad ones as a part of rejecting evil and clinging to what is good.
- Maybe it’s something simple like running or cooking or learning guitar (would recommend)
- Maybe it’s that you need to be in more prayer (if you don’t know what to pray, come ask me — I’m kind of obsessed with collecting books with really old prayers to pray and a bunch of new ones, too)
- Maybe it’s some verses you need to memorize or put on your desk.
Whatever it is, it’s not going to be easy, but it will be worth it. I can promise you that.
Conclusion
Some of you are standing at the very beginning of this maze of life, and you’re excited to try every path see what works and what doesn’t. Maybe you think you’re gonna speed run this thing and you’re walking in confident and excited.
Some of you have been in this maze a long time you’ve tried path after path, you have engaged in thing after thing, you’re tired of it, and you’re ready to try something better.
Some of you have tried the path of righteousness. And it’s been good and you’re feeling proud about that. You’ve done things the right way and life is going the right way for you and that’s what you expect, and all is as it should be.
But our passage today warns that there is no one righteous — not even one. Well, there is One.
Life is a treacherous maze with only one solution because there was only one who never failed to live rightly,
who never despised wisdom,
who never walked the path of the wicked,
who never engaged in foolishness,
who always perfectly drew his wisdom from the Father,
who never gave into sexual temptation — not even for a second,
who gave of His whole self, even His life,
that we might find life in Him as we are credited with His perfect righteousness, and are able to claim it as our own.
Jesus Christ is the one source of righteousness, the one spring of wisdom, the one that we are to set our hope on and live our lives for.
Today, find your righteousness in Him.
Repent to Him.
Rely on Him.
Follow Him.
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