Uprightness or Schemes

DEVOTION

ECCLESIASTES

UPRIGHTNESS OR SCHEMES

Eccl 7:27-29

27 "Look," says the Teacher, this is what I have discovered:

"Adding one thing to another to discover the scheme of things— 28 while I was still searching but not finding — I found one [upright] man among a thousand, but not one [upright] woman among them all. 29 This only have I found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes."

NIV

It might be one of the interesting points of this saying about the Teacher that we should consider. The Hebrew word used here for Teacher means an assembler or preacher, but the most interesting thing is this particular word is a feminine active participle of another word for preacher. Then this “Teacher” Solomon speaks of is a woman preacher. Considering what he has just said about women being a snare who traps a man’s heart and her hands put him in chains, it is strange, in sort of a way that he is listening to what the woman teacher has to say. So, what is she saying? Not only all that Solomon just said about women, but that she is adding one more thing to discover about the scheme of things. We like the NLT version of these next few verses the best, as it does seem to see a clearer picture. 

Eccl 7:27-29

"I came to this result after looking into the matter from every possible angle. 28 Just one out of every thousand men I interviewed can be said to be upright, but not one woman! 29 I discovered that God created people to be upright, but they have each turned to follow their own downward path."

NLT

Just one man in a thousand is not very good at all. We would think there should be more than that. It is not even 1 percent, it is more like .001 percent. Yet the teacher, a women herself could not find one single woman who was upright. Now that is a sad state of affairs. What does this say about mankind? It appears the whole of the idea is that God created man to be upright, to be pure and holy. Adam was innocent of evil as so was Eve. They were pure without fault. They knew no guilt and no shame. But the temptation presented to them was too desirable and they submitted to its claim of being like God. They knew God as their creator, their Father who knew everything. They wanted to be like him, but with the wrong motives. We say we want to be like Jesus, but not in the same sense. We know we are man and he is God. We understand he is everything and we are not. We were upright in the beginning but Adam went down his own path. This is how we must be as well. Who among us can say, “I am upright”? If we were, we would not need Jesus. No, we have gone in search of many schemes. There are so many schemes it would take nearly a book to enumerate all the ways in which we try to find happiness, peace and contentment, but all of them, the material, emotional and even religious schemes leave us wanting. Mankind lives with a God shaped hole in its being. No matter the scheme we try, the God shaped void is still there. The only one who can fill that void, is God, and he is not a scheme. Confession of our emptiness, our constant searching, and our scheming to gain whatever is our first step to recovery of this empty life and filling that void. Once we have done that, we can accept Christ into our life and find everything we have ever needed. We cannot afford to go down that path of searching for some scheme. We cannot afford to go down any other path other than the one who leads to God. Because we are in Christ we have regained the condition of being upright, but only as we are in Christ. It is his uprightness which we are in.