February 15 - Ecclesiastes 9:1

February 15 - Ecclesiastes 9:1

“So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no man knows whether love or hate awaits him.”

Sometimes the author of Ecclesiastes gets a little morose and that really isn’t what you expect when you read the Bible … someone who doesn’t offer the best hope and the best ideas.  He just says what all of us feel.  It makes me think of the transition from the Brady Bunch to Roseanne.  All of a sudden we’re confronted with the gritty reality of life and we aren’t sure that we really want to have that in our Bible. 

It’s one thing to read about wars and battles and worshiping idols, a Savior who loves us enough to die for us.  We know those stories really well and have they have become part of our nature.  But, we aren’t so sure that those feelings we have when nothing makes sense and it seems as if the world really isn’t on our side are what we want the Bible to emphasize. 

Yup, the righteous and the wise are in God’s hands, but who knows what tomorrow will bring.  The world presents both bad and good to us all the time.  We want it all to be good, but that just isn’t reality.  There are some who seem to have only good things that come to them and we envy those people.  Then there are those whose lives have fallen into complete disrepair.  We are thankful to not be them.  And then there we are.  Right there in the middle.  We don’t know what is coming next.  It could be bad, it could be good.  We pray for the good and fight through the bad.

Now, while Ecclesiastes doesn’t tell us that everything is going to be good if we believe in God, it does tell us that everything is in God’s hands.  These words remind me more and more that the place we want to be is not here on earth where we don’t know what is coming next, but to be in eternity with God.  These are the things that make us yearn for home, that remind us we really are aliens in this land as much as we try to adapt it to fit our lives.  We will never be content here.

We don’t know what awaits us tomorrow – it could be love or hate.  But, the first part of that sentence is as important as the second.  God has it all in His hands and there is no safer place to be.