Last time in Ecclesiastes, I discussed the importance of realizing that you cannot escape sin, so instead of beating yourself up when you do, you should seek forgiveness and repentance, and continue to chase after God. This time, I’m covering the other end of the spectrum: don’t flirt with sin and temptation or you’ll end up in over your head.
I hear things like this a disturbing amount these days: “it’s okay to sin because God will just forgive me.” Or “I’m just going to try it once, just to see what it’s like, then I’ll never do it again.” Or even, “This is the last time I’ll let myself do this sin, then it’s on the straight and narrow for me.”
And y’all, that’s an incredibly dangerous line of thinking, as Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 7:23, “I have tested all this by wisdom. I resolved, ‘I will be wise,’ but it was beyond me.”
We are incapable of just dipping a toe into sin. You may think it’s possible, but if the wisest man to ever exist failed at it, you will, too. Over and over Solomon says that he was testing all the things he could on this Earth to find satisfaction. Just testing. It’s very likely that he had no intention of having as many wives and concubines as he ended up with or falling into as many other traps and temptations as afflicted him. His goal was to learn, to experience. It was a mindset that is perpetuated in those examples I gave earlier.
In for a penny, in for a pound. This saying references a penalty for owing money in Great Britain. At the time of its first use, the penalty for owing someone a single penny was the same as owing someone a whole pound. So, if you were prepared to be in debt by one penny, you should be prepared to be in debt a pound. Sin is the same way. Not only is the penalty for sinning once the same as sinning multiple times, but if you’re prepared to dip one toe in, you should be prepared to jump in.
So, don’t even try it. Better yet, don’t even entertain the thought of trying sin.
Verses 24-25 say, “What exists is beyond reach and very deep. Who can discover it? I turned my thoughts to know, explore, and seek wisdom and an explanation for things, and to know that wickedness is stupidity and folly is madness.”
The thing you’re looking for in sin when you just give it a try is not there. To go back to the pool analogy, if trying sin once is dipping your toe in, what you’re trying to find in doing it is at the very bottom of the pool. And it’s not just any pool. It’s dark, murky, and incredibly deep. So deep that, even if you dove in, you’d never find the bottom. It’s unknown, out of reach, and dangerous. It would be madness, stupidity, to jump in and swim for the bottom, not knowing if you’ll even come close to making it.
You can even devote all your skills, everything at your disposal, and you’ll never find a way to get to the bottom. But, if you’re thinking to yourself, “I won’t know until I try,” stop it. Solomon is about to show us exactly what happens when you dive into the pool.
Verses 26-28 say, “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. ‘Look,’ says the Teacher, ‘I have discovered this by adding one thing to another to find out the explanation, which my soul continually searches for but does not find: among a thousand people I have found one true man, but among all these I have not found a true woman.”
Now, first, before people start hopping on Solomon for saying women are horrible, this is part of what happened because of his sexual sin and having one thousand wives and concubines. Solomon became incredibly jaded against women because he dove into the pool labeled “women over God” and was trapped in it.
When sin traps us, it changes how we see everything around us. That murky water from the pool gets in your eyes and makes it hard to see things as God intended them. And a result is that you start blaming the wrong things for the consequences you face for your decisions.
An alcoholic in the middle of alcoholism rarely blames the drink for his problems. A poor woman in debt and out of a house because of one too many shopping sprees rarely blames her greed for her lack of money.
Solomon used women as his example because it was likely easy for him to do so, and because he was writing for other men at the time, but let’s change this back to our pool comparison to bring the ladies into this, too. More bitter than death is the pool that is a trap, its murky depths in actuality a mire of quicksand waiting to suck you in and hold you down.
The one who pleases God, the one who ignores the call of the pool and runs away from it, will escape danger. But the one who sins, the one who desires to dive in and does so will be caught. When your goal is to please God, you’ll find it far easier to ignore whatever it is about the pool that calls to you and tells you to dive in.
If you think of it as two voices calling out to you, it’s much harder to hear a second voice if you spend all of your energy focusing on making out the first and listening to its directions. It’s like when you’re on the phone and you tune out all the noise around you. If you focus on God’s voice, you’re far less likely to hear, and thus entertain, the voice of sin that calls out to you.
Verse 29 says, “Only see this: I have discovered that God made people upright, but they pursued many schemes.”
Remember earlier how I said getting in the pool of sin makes it hard to see things as God intended them? This is kind of what I mean, and in a way, it’s Solomon acknowledging that his statement on women is because of his sin, the sin of women, and not because of God, how He made the world, or how He made women.
God made people “upright.” He made us to be righteous in His image, yet we pursued many sins. You know, a lot of people like to blame God for the things that are wrong in this world. Many people even reject Him because of this, but that’s because they are blind. If you see and know that God made everything good, you’d see and know that what’s messing things up, what’s wrong with this world, is the way we act.
When we sin, we see the world as Satan intends and all the good things God made we either cannot see, or we see differently. But make it your goal to see this: that God made this Earth, and it was good. When you see that, you can see what you should do, what is right, and avoid what you shouldn’t do, what is bad.