Saturday - Ecclesiastes 8 - Knowing that You Won't Solve the Problem

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MAGINE yourself sitting in your high school classroom studying algebra.  Wouldn't it be rather exasperating if your teacher wrote out an equation on the chalkboard for you to copy and to solve, while simultaneously explaining that you would need to work on it for the rest of the year, and that the equation is ultimately unsolvable?  Maybe that would not be too bad though, if you at least knew that you would eventually exhaust your options by running out of possible processes to attempt.  But, if the work could continue ad infinitum, wouldn't any of us despair?  Or would we?  What if there were always new and useful mathematical discoveries all along the way in the working out of the impossible problem?  What if you learned to love math for math's sake, loved the mental exercise, loved the discoveries and loved to please your professor by showing your continuous scratch-paper work?

In Ecclesiastes 8:1 Solomon introduces this chapter by asking for a man who can answer any question.  But, he closes the chapter telling us that there is nobody who can answer all of the questions because some interrogatives are simply not answerable (Ecclesiastes 8:16-17).  The problem is not so much the absence of any wisdom in man (though the wisest man is at his best still inadequate), the trouble lies with the depth of the difficulty.  Since we are studying the actions of our infinite God, each step in our study leads us into one unsearchable truth or another.  But, despite it being unattainable, there are still some basic things that are knowable & worth knowing.