Ecc 11: 1-6 - Perfection Through Impotency

Ecclesiastes 11: 1-6

1 Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. 2 Give a portion to seven, or even to eight for you know not what disaster may happen on earth. 3 If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves on the earth, and if a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie. 4 He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap. 5 As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. 6 In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.

The overall sense that this small passage conveys is of the transcendence of God. Not only is He omnipotent, but His ways are beyond our understanding. He has indeed revealed much about Himself to us, culminating in the incarnation of His Son, but even the Son cannot be truly known unless He is revealed to the human heart by the Spirit, just as the Son Himself reveals the Father to whom He wills. {Lu 10:22, Joh 16:13-15, Ga 1:15-16} And that itself is an act of God. Apart from revelation, He is unseen and his ways are unknowable.

However, just because God’s ways are beyond our natural understanding does not mean that the natural man does not have enough knowledge of God to stand justly condemned. The visible, created universe is ample to make known the fact that there is a God who is good {Romans 1: 18-20} - but the natural man does not seek after God and cannot know enough of God to be saved.

Here in Ecclesiastes even we believers are put firmly in our place. Our place is as creatures who must live by faith in God - and not by sight. When we act, we necessarily do so without the exhaustive knowledge that God has. He is both omniscient and infallible, and we are not.

The lesson is that, in our creaturely limitations, we must not be immobile on account of our fallibility. We must not have the mindset that refuses to do anything unless the end is clearly and infallibly knowable to us. That is to make ourselves God - as if we could. Nor are we to stand still out of the fear of making a mistake, as the parable of the talents clearly shows. {Matthew 25: 13-30}

It is indeed a narrow way - and deliberately so - for only those with faith from God will indeed move forward. Only those with true faith can live under the tension of the "must" and the "cannot" - or the paradox of striving towards a perfection that they cannot reach, neither need to obtain, through their own meritorious effort.

Faith trusts God when the end cannot be seen. Faith believes that God is good and perfect and wise and true - and that His ends will always be right. Faith accepts that everyone will inevitably fall short of the justly righteous and perfect standards of God. Faith ceases to strive for justification. Faith accepts the impotency of unaided human efforts, while bowing to the command that the effort must nevertheless be exerted.