Ecclesiastes 8:15-17 (Ants vs. Albert Einstein)

¹⁵ So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun. ¹⁶ When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe the labor that is done on earth—people getting no sleep day or night— ¹⁷ then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it.

Last week, we looked at some of the inequalities of this life: wicked people getting what the good people deserve and good people getting what the wicked deserve, for example.  And Solomon wraps it up today by saying, "You can try as hard as you want, stay up all day and all night, research it, analyze it, question it, but you will never fully understand God and His ways." 

How anti-climactic!

But it's true.  I need to get it into my little skull that I will never fully understand God and what He does.  I am an ant, and He is Albert Einstein.  No matter how hard I try, it is not within my human capacity to understand His thinking.

Just this week, I was talking with a friend about how upset the world gets when Christians say there is only one way to Heaven -- Jesus Christ.  The world thinks we are being judgmental and intolerant (to which I remind myself, it's not I that has made it that way, but God, so really they should be taking it up with Him).  And as we were talking, she quoted someone (whom I cannot remember now) who said something along the lines that rather than be offended that there is only one way to get to Heaven and be in the presence of God, we should be knocked to our knees that He made any way at all.

Why does Albert Einstein care about the little ants at all?  Why would he willingly leave the comforts of the human world and take on the form and ways of an ant just so the ants could understand him better?  And when he became an ant, why did he put up with the ways the other ants treated him, when he could've easily snapped his fingers and become a human again?  He chose to remain an ant until death because he loved the ants that much, and he wanted to prove it to them.

I don't know the ways of God.  I never will fully understand them.  But based on what God did for me, I know that He is Love.  I know that He is trustworthy and good.

So, I don't need to figure it all out.  Admitting that and owning that really does relieve some weight off of my shoulders.  

He is God, so I will let Him deal with the God-sized problems.  In the meantime, I will deal with my own ant-sized problems and try to live obediently for Him.  I can enjoy life, as Solomon says in verse 15, and eat, drink, and be glad -- I don't have to carry around the burdensome load of worry just because I don't have it all figured out.  It's okay to be joyful without all the answers.

Being a Christian does not mean that life will be easy, prosperous, and good all the time.  God wants more for us than the easy road that leads to no where.  But being a Christian does mean that when the road starts to become winding, I can be still and know that HE is God.  A good, trustworthy, and loving God.  And He's way smarter than Einstein, anyway.