Inscrutable

Sharing with you today a brief portion from my devotional reading in Knowing God Through the Year with J.I. Packer.

Ecclesiastes is intended as a warning against a misconceived quest for understanding.

Look (says the preacher) at the sort of world we live in. What do you see? You see life's background set by aimlessly recurring cycles in nature (1:4-7). You see its shape fixed by times and circumstances over which we have no control (3:1-8). You see death coming to everyone sooner or later, but its coming bears no relation to whether it is deserved (7:15). The wicked prosper; the good don't (8:14).

Seeing all this, you realize that God's ordering of events is inscrutable. Much as you want to make it out, you cannot do so (8:17). The harder you try to understand the divine purpose in the ordinary providential course of events, the more obsessed you grow with the apparent aimlessness of everything and the more you are tempted to conclude that life really is as pointless as it looks.

... then I saw all the work of God, 

that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. 

However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out. 

Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out.

Ecclesiastes 8:17

Picture ~ Zinnias in my garden by the driveway