Ecclesiastes 7:23 - Meaning and Application

Solomon had already been showing how empty the world is, and how it cannot make people happy. Here he turns to show how evil sin is, and how certainly it leads to misery. He proves this from his own experience, and it was a costly lesson. In this chapter, he sounds more like a man who is truly repentant than at almost any other point in the book.

He looks back over what he has said and makes it clear that he is not guessing. “All this have I proved by wisdom” (Ecclesiastes 7:23). He is saying that he tested these things carefully, and he stands by what he learned. He also admits the limits of his own wisdom.

His search was earnest. God had given him unusual wisdom, and he had more chances to grow in knowledge than anyone else. So he said, “I will be wise.” He truly wanted wisdom, and he treated it as something worth striving for. Many people are not wise simply because they never seriously decide to be.

He did more than wish for wisdom, he worked hard for it. He set his heart to know, to search, and to seek out wisdom. He left no effort unused. He wanted to understand useful learning, deep thought, and the things of God. If he had not applied himself so closely, it would have been empty for him to say he would be wise.

Solomon was a gifted man, but he did not use that as an excuse to be lazy. In fact, his gifts should have made him even more diligent. The better a person’s abilities, the more careful he should be to use them well. Solomon did not stop at surface matters. He wanted to go deeper, to find the reasons behind things, and to understand them fully.

Yet his success did not match his effort. He wanted wisdom, but it stayed out of reach. The more he learned, the more he saw how much he did not know. He found that some things are far off and very deep, beyond his grasp. He especially means God himself, along with God’s plans and works.

When he tried to press into those deep matters, he found himself blocked by darkness. He could not fully explain them or arrange his thoughts clearly. Some things are not given to us to know. But blessed be God, the things we must know and do are plain enough, and his word is near us (Proverbs 8:9). The secret things belong to God, not to us.

Solomon likely also laments something else here, his own sinful blindness. His pleasures and the distractions of royal life may have clouded his mind. Those things may have kept him from reaching the true wisdom he had wanted. If so, this only adds to his grief.

He also turned his heart to the evil of sin, to know the wickedness of folly and madness. That kind of knowledge is hard to gain, because sin hides itself. It does not like to appear as sin. It wraps itself in excuses and disguises, so we often need careful effort to see it clearly.

This kind of knowledge is also necessary for repentance, which means turning from sin with grief and change of heart. Just as a disease must be understood before it can be treated, sin must be understood before it can be rightly mourned and forsaken. Paul valued God’s law because it showed him his sin (Romans 7:7). Solomon had once used his mind to invent pleasures and make room for the flesh, but now that God had opened his eyes, he was just as earnest to uncover the shame and damage of sin.

Penitent people should speak as strongly against sin as truth allows, because we can never say too much against it. Solomon wanted to see more of its sinfulness and more of its folly. He may especially have in mind his own sin with many foreign women, which Scripture later condemns (1 Kings 11:1). At the time, he likely treated it lightly, but now he sees its true evil.

That remembrance weighed heavily on his conscience. The thought of his wickedness, foolishness, and madness brought him deep pain. He found that memory more bitter than death.

The more he thought about this sin, the more it filled him with terror, as if death itself had seized him. That is what happens when a person is truly convicted of sin and sees it clearly before God. Such sins become bitter, even deadly bitter, to all who truly repent. Sexual impurity is, by its nature, more harmful than death itself. Death can be made honorable and even peaceful, but this sin brings only shame and pain (Proverbs 5:9, Proverbs 5:11).

He also saw how dangerous the temptation to this sin is. It is extremely hard, and almost impossible, for someone who walks into the trap to escape the sin, or for someone who has fallen to recover through repentance. The heart of the adulterous woman is full of snares and nets. She works with as much skill and deceit as a hunter who catches a foolish bird. The ways of such sinners both deceive and destroy, like snares and nets. Careless souls are drawn in by the bait of pleasure. They seize it eagerly and imagine they will find satisfaction, but they are caught before they know it, and often caught beyond recovery. Her hands are like bands, because under the cover of tender embraces she holds fast those she has trapped. They are held in the cords of their own sin (Proverbs 5:22). Lust grows stronger when it is fed, and its appeal becomes more powerful.

He counted it a great mark of God’s favor when God’s grace kept a person from this sin. “He that pleases God” will escape from her, whether by being kept from the temptation or by being kept from falling under it. Anyone who is spared from this sin must admit that it is God who keeps him, not his own strength or willpower. He must also count it a great mercy. And anyone who wants grace strong enough to guard him from this sin must make it his aim to please God in everything, by keeping God’s commands (Leviticus 18:30).

He also saw this sin as one of the ways God punishes other sins in this life. “The sinner shall be taken by her.” First, those who allow other sins to rule their minds and weaken their consciences are more easily drawn into this one. Second, it is just for God to leave such people to themselves and let them fall into it. See (Romans 1:26, Romans 1:28, Ephesians 4:18, Ephesians 4:19). In this way Solomon, with horror, almost blessed himself from the sin into which he had once fallen.

He then saw more clearly than ever the deep corruption of human nature. He traced the stream back to its fountain, as his father had done before him on a similar occasion, saying, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity” (Psalm 51:5). He first tried to count his actual sins: “I thought I could understand my errors and make a full list of them, at least in their main parts. I thought I could count them one by one and get the full account.” He wanted to find them as a penitent, so he could confess them more fully. In general, the more carefully we confess sin, the more comfort we have in knowing it is forgiven. He also wanted to do this as a teacher, so he could warn others more clearly. A true conviction of one sin will lead us to examine the whole company of our sins, and the more we see wrong in ourselves, the more carefully we should look for more faults, so that what we do not yet see may be shown to us (Job 34:32).

Soon, however, he found himself unable to finish the count. He saw that his sins were beyond number: “My soul still seeks this, and I still keep counting, but I cannot find the end of it. I keep making new and shocking discoveries of the desperate wickedness in my own heart” (Jeremiah 17:9, Jeremiah 17:10). Who can know it? Who can understand his errors? Who can tell how often he offends? (Psalm 19:12). If God were to enter into judgment with him, or if he were to judge himself by all his thoughts, words, and actions, he would not be able to answer for one out of a thousand (Job 9:3). He shows this by comparing the corruption in his own heart and life with the corruption in the world around him, where he could scarcely find one good man in a thousand. Even among his thousand wives and concubines, he did not find one good woman. In the same way, when he looked back over his own thoughts, words, and actions, and over the whole course of his life, he might perhaps find one good thing in a thousand among the more outward and serious parts of life, and that was all. The rest, even among those, had some fault in them. He had already said that he had sinned even in doing good. But among the parts of life given over to pleasure and self-indulgence, everything was bad. In that part of his life, there did not seem to be even one good thing out of a thousand. In our hearts and lives, there is little good at best, and sometimes none at all.

This should not be taken as a charge against women in general. There have likely been, and still are, more good women than good men (Acts 17:4, Acts 17:12). He is speaking from his own painful experience. He may also be pointing to something he had already warned about in his proverbs, namely the dangers of both the evil man and the strange woman (Proverbs 2:12, Proverbs 2:16, Proverbs 4:14, Proverbs 5:3). He had noticed that evil women often used more deceit and danger than evil men, and that their tricks were harder to spot and avoid. That is why he compares sin to an adulteress (Proverbs 9:13), and why he says he could no more fully understand the deceitfulness of his own heart than he could the ways of a strange woman, whose paths are changeable and impossible to track.

So he gathered up all streams of actual sin and traced them back to the fountain of original corruption. The source of all the folly and madness in the world is man’s turning away from God and his fall from his first upright condition. “This only have I found,” he says. When he could not sort out the details, the broad truth was plain enough. It is as clear as the sun that humanity has become corrupt and rebellious, and is no longer what it was made to be. Notice, first, how man was made by the wisdom and goodness of God: God made man upright, Adam, the first man, as the Chaldee says. God made him, and he made him upright, fit for what he should have been. As a rational creature, he was made in every way as a rational creature should be, upright, with no disorder in him. No fault could be found in him. He was upright, set on God alone, unlike the many inventions he later turned aside to. Man, as he came from God’s hand, was, as we may say, a small picture of his Maker, who is good and upright.

Second, this shows how much human nature has been damaged, and in a way undone, by its own foolishness and evil. “They have sought out many inventions” means that people, starting with our first parents, Adam and Eve, and continuing through the whole human race, have turned from God’s good gift and made their own paths. Some take the phrase to mean “great inventions,” meaning plans to become great, like gods (Genesis 3:5). Others understand it as the schemes of the great ones, even the fallen angels, or simply many different schemes.

Instead of resting in what God had already provided, people wanted to improve on it for themselves, like the prodigal son who left his father’s house to make his own way. Instead of being content with one good rule from God, they wanted many. Instead of living by God’s design, they chose their own ideas and desires. Human pride refuses to stay within the bounds of the Creator’s will, and so people keep running after their own shifting plans.

Foolish man wants to be wise, even wiser than his Maker. He is restless and unstable in everything he chases, and that is why he comes up with so many schemes. Those who leave God keep wandering without end. Their actual sins also multiply. Solomon could not count them all (Ecclesiastes 7:28), but he saw clearly that they were very many. There are many kinds of sins, and they are repeated often. They are more than the hairs on our heads (Psalm 40:12).