Eccl. 7-9
Solomon sounds tired to me. He has spent his whole life in great wisdom and riches, doing many great things. He no doubt had everything he ever wanted. We also know that Solomon loved women. He had many of them (an understatement!) and we know that he allowed them to draw his heart away from God. We tend to get much more retrospective as we age, and it seems to me that when Solomon reached that point he looked back and didn’t like what he saw. He realized that all the great stuff he had and did amounted to nothing and that he had been on a slow drift away from the one thing that did – God.
What I hear him saying is that the only thing that gives man any advantage in life is to fear God. And by “advantage”, I don’t mean gaining anything – even length of days – for himself. What I mean is that it is the only thing that has any lasting, meaningful impact. It is the only thing that has substance and is not what Solomon describes as “vanity”. And, I believe, it is the fear of God that allows one to “eat and drink and be joyful”, which he repeats yet again in Ecclesiastes 8:15 and alludes to in Ecclesiastes 9:7. Seek God, obey Him, and be content with what He gives you to have and to do.
Acts 10:1-23
The Pharisees and religious leaders were really into all those details about what was “clean” and “unclean” in the Old Testament Law. But I think they missed the point. I’m not so sure that God ever intended all those details to be strict laws to be followed at any cost for all time. Instead, I think He gave them to His people to reveal to us His holiness and purity and our utter unrighteousness. I believe their purpose was to demonstrate our need for cleansing, and that our sin debt required a payment of blood – of life. They were a foreshadowing of Christ’s death on the cross as the ultimate sacrifice for the cleansing of all our sin. And because He rose again, overcoming death once and for all, His sacrifice endures for all time, completely fulfilling the requirements of the law.
This is demonstrated to me in this passage about God’s vision to Peter and His commission to take the message of Christ to Cornelius, an “unclean” Gentile. God showed Peter all of those unclean creatures from the law and declared them clean, using the law once again as a metaphoric representation of His greater plan to take the saving work of Jesus Christ to all of mankind.