Attention

DEVOTION

ECCLESIASTES

ATTENTION

Eccl 7:19-22

19 Wisdom makes one wise man more powerful than ten rulers in a city. 20 There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins. 21 Do not pay attention to every word people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you— 22 for you know in your heart that many times you yourself have cursed others.

NIV

Lots of little tidbits within all that Solomon writes as he is inspired by God. Evidently it does not take a lot of brains to be a ruler, or rather we should say wisdom. There are a whole lot of people who have attained some degree of education and have much knowledge on certain matters, such as governance, or how to be a politician, but that does not imply they have wisdom. However, the person who is wise has far greater power, or authority than those ten politicians do. However, no matter how much education or wisdom a person has, both of them are not without sin. Even those of us who would be considered by some, or maybe by ourselves, as righteous are still not without sin. If we think for one minute that we have no sin within us, or that we can live one day without committing sin we deceive ourselves and call God a liar. Who do we think we are, Jesus? How can we ever think we don’t sin? Maybe some get confused about this original and personal sin issue some denominations include in their statement of faith. But the fact is as a human being it is impossible to attain perfection and be sinless. However, we can say that because we are in Christ, God sees us as holy and blameless. Still, we have to understand being seen as blameless, does not make us blameless. God sees us through the work of Christ on the cross. He sees us through the blood of Jesus. The test would be if we got out from under the blood, then how would God see us? Certainly not holy and blameless. So there we go. The need of being in Christ is essential to life itself. As far as paying attention to all the words of people, we could be driven crazy. People might say some nasty things about us, even just because we are Christians. Although even setting our beliefs aside, we can find some people just do not like us and are rather nasty to us, even curse us. We know we have never done that, or have we? The key is in the meaning of the Hebrew word this translation uses curse. It is not really a cursing as a curse word, or a vulgar cuss word, or putting a curse on someone. This Hebrew word might better be seen as to make light of, to laugh at, to be of little account, to be trifling. So then it might be better to see how we treat each other, or consider how little we see others as. Which would then be considering ourselves more highly then we ought. When we make light of someone, we dismiss them as not meaning much as a person. We disrespect them, and in essence then disrespect God, for they too, like us, are the creation of God and he loves them just as he loves us. So then if they make light of us, or dismiss us, they are the ones failing to see the creation of God correctly and we should not pay much attention to this dismissal of us. But we surely need to pay attention, that we do not dismiss or make light of others, at least to the best of our ability to pay attention to the Spirit.