The Sunday News
Itai Chapunza
Ecclesiastics 1 verse 7
ALL rivers flow into the sea, but the sea never fills up. The rivers keep on flowing to the same old place, and then start all over again.
A lot of people in one way or another often feel helpless. Some may want to say their efforts are meaningless or have no proper eternal outcome.
There is a feeling of lack of satisfaction with life because it seems to be a repetitive process of aiming for the next thing. Well, funny enough, it’s true. There is only so much you can do that has an eternal impact. Like Solomon says, there is generally no end in pursuit in life.
Each and every day we wake up, go to work, work hard, invest in yet another business that will keep us very busy. Once this one aspect of life has been improved we focus on the next.
Move from one house to the next better one, buy a car bigger than the one you last bought, buy more expensive clothes, divorce your current wife and try to find a younger, better looking one, have more cars, go back to school to get more educated. Still there is always something to aim for, there is something to strive for. With time the mind begins to feel like it’s just a tape on repeat and tiredness sets in.
It is the same for the rich and for the poor. The difference is the size of pursuit. A rich man’s pursuits will be in millions or billions, and a poor man’s may be far less.
Irrespective of one’s social standing, it is the same process. We are all locked in the same corkscrew of life. They all want to be something more. Both rich and poor. Some call it the greed game, but it’s the natural order of life. It is what it is.
Ecclesiastics 1 verse 9
What was, will be again. What has happened will happen again. There is nothing new on earth, year after year it’s the same old thing.
This is not a new thing. Continuing to do the same thing did not start with you. It has been since days of old. In the past rich people would buy horses.
When the industrial age hit the world, cars became the new thing, rich people began selling their horses to buy cars. When cars became too common, the rich began selling their cars to invest in horses. These days the rich go and buy old cars at millions of dollars.
Yet in the past they wanted the new cars. Clearly it’s repeating itself. It will continue to repeat itself and no one can escape it. Thus everyone in the world will feel tired after a while.
If the same fate awaits the poor and the rich, all striving to be better, and the same outcome is set for the smart and the stupid. One may wonder why then strive to be wealthy, why look for more property and money when the satisfaction is so short lived.
Ecclesiastics 2 verse 13
But I see that it is better to be smart than stupid. Just as light is better than darkness.
The answer is simple, get wisdom. Everyone has an option to choose if they want to be wise or foolish. By far the better option is wisdom. You would rather be a wise poor man, than be a rich fool.
Wisdom is something one goes after. When one seeks wisdom and knowledge one becomes a philosopher, he is distinguished for his sound judgement that he obtains from understanding of pre-existing concepts.
This means understanding common knowledge and its application. Further than that one can become a sage, when one is a sage, he is distinguished for his wisdom and experience.
The Bible says it is better to go after wisdom than to be foolish. Wisdom is far better because there is no end to the satisfaction of being wise. The feeling of tiredness from monotony is eliminated.
The desire to be wise is a lifetime pursuit that will keep one engaged and never experience that drowsiness of lack of achievement. The beginning of wisdom is knowing God. When one knows the Lord and has an understanding of how great He is, then that is a start to being wise.
The discoveries of God’s being are endless. No one can say I fully know God. Others know more than others, but not one can claim to fully know Him. So having a basic knowledge of God is the beginning of all wisdom. Knowing the Lord is loving Him and finding delight in His laws.
When one delights in the laws of the Lord, it becomes second nature to practice them and they transform you from within. Wisdom is a great tool to have.
When one is full of wisdom it makes everything else seem like common sense. Obtaining wealth is an easy thing for a wise man. It becomes easy because you begin to understand money.
A wise man hardly has health problems that he can control because the knowledge of how to avoid these health problems coupled with the ability to apply this is in him.
A wise man maintains his grip on life because wisdom brings life to its holder. Indeed the knowledge of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. The first step to learning is bowing down to God. Godly wisdom will not only attract the blessing of the Lord. The Bible says in Proverbs 16 verse 7, when God approves of your life, even your enemies will end up shacking your hand. So when God approves of your life, human beings cannot help but admire you.
The Bible says a fool says there is no God. When one believes there is no God, he behaves anyhow. He sleeps with whoever he pleases because he says his body is his. He eats and drinks what he wants because he says it goes into his body. He acts anyhow because he believes in his mind that the life is his.
Instead wisdom will tell you, you cannot sleep around because the body you defile is the temple of God and the Spirit of God is resident in you. Wisdom will tell you do not drink because you are a priest and king just like Christ.
Drinking is for the poor and suffering so that they may forget their problems. Wisdom will tell you that you cannot do as you please because the life you live is from God, it is not yours. Wisdom will preserve you and foolishness will only lead you to an early and painful grave.
Be blessed.
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