Obedience: Living in Reality
There is a kind of religious zeal that can quietly become an attempt to escape reality.
We want to know exactly what God is doing. We want to know whether we are pleasing Him, whether suffering means something has gone wrong, whether silence means He has withdrawn, whether temptation means we have failed, whether peace means we have finally gotten everything right.
And then Ecclesiastes speaks with almost startling simplicity:
“Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.”
It sounds almost too ordinary.
Eat your bread.
Drink your wine.
Live the life in front of you.
For a person trying desperately to live faithfully, that can be harder than it sounds.
The Temptation to Live Somewhere Else
There is a difference between zeal and obedience.
Zeal wants to run ahead.
Obedience receives what has actually been given.
Zeal can ask, what more can I do? What am I missing? What does this mean?
Obedience asks a simpler question:
What has God placed before me today?
This does not make the Christian life passive. Christianity demands repentance, sacrifice, prayer, works of mercy, self-denial, and perseverance.
But none of those require us to invent another life.
God has already given us one.
And Ecclesiastes continually forces us back into it.
We do not know everything God knows. We cannot see every consequence, understand every suffering, predict every tomorrow, or determine why one person prospers while another struggles.
That is reality.
And strangely, accepting that reality can become an act of humility.
A Living Dog Has Hope
Earlier in the same chapter comes one of Scripture's strangest little sayings
“But he who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion.”
The lion is magnificent.
The dog, in the ancient world envisioned here, is hardly impressive.
But the dog is alive.
And therefore, there is still possibility.
There is still repentance.
There is still prayer.
There is still obedience.
There is still another opportunity to love.
There is still another opportunity to return to God.
That changes the way we understand the spiritual life.
Salvation cannot become a project in which I constantly measure myself, manage every outcome, and attempt to secure myself through perfect religious performance.
Christ saves.
My task is to remain with Him, repent when I sin, receive His grace, obey what He commands, and continue walking.
As long as I am among the living, there is hope.
God Knows What I Cannot Know
Ecclesiastes repeatedly confronts us with the limits of human knowledge.
That can initially sound depressing.
It is actually liberating.
I do not need to know everything.
God does.
I do not need to control everything.
God remains God.
I do not need to interpret every difficulty as either divine approval or divine rejection.
I need to remain faithful within the reality I have actually been given.
This is where obedience begins to cure scrupulosity.
Scrupulosity keeps turning inward:
Did I do enough? Did I understand correctly? Was that temptation already a sin? Did I pray correctly? Is God disappointed? Am I inside or outside?
Obedience looks outward:
What has God commanded?
Do that.
And then continue living.
There is tremendous humility in allowing God to possess knowledge that He has not given to us.
We often say that we trust God while still demanding enough information to make trusting Him unnecessary.
Ecclesiastes refuses us that luxury.
Proverbs With Skin
Proverbs often tells us how wisdom works.
Ecclesiastes shows us what wisdom feels like when it has to live in a world where everything does not appear to work according to the formula.
The righteous suffer.
Fools sometimes prosper.
Our plans fail.
Bodies weaken.
People disappoint us.
Death comes.
We cannot see God's entire design.
And nevertheless:
Eat your bread with joy.
That isn't shallow optimism.
It is obedience lived inside reality.
God gave us creatures to love, work to perform, food to receive, prayers to pray, duties to fulfill, sins to repent of, sacraments to receive, and ordinary moments in which to become holy.
We can spend so much time searching for God's hidden will that we neglect His revealed will sitting directly in front of us.
The Humility of the Ordinary
Perhaps one of the hardest lessons of the spiritual life is discovering that holiness does not require us to constantly feel extraordinary.
Sometimes faithfulness looks remarkably ordinary.
Get up.
Pray.
Go to work.
Care for your family.
Keep your promises.
Confess your sins.
Receive the Eucharist.
Forgive.
Eat dinner.
Laugh.
Rest.
Begin again tomorrow.
None of this means sin does not matter. Ecclesiastes itself ends by reminding us that God will bring every deed into judgment.
It means something different:
Because God is Judge, I do not have to become my own omniscient judge.
I can examine my conscience honestly, repent sincerely, obey faithfully—and then entrust what I cannot see to Him.
Living Before God
Maybe that is the deeper freedom Ecclesiastes offers.
Not freedom from obedience.
Freedom through obedience.
I do not need to manufacture holiness.
I need to receive grace and cooperate with it.
I do not need to understand Providence before trusting Providence.
I do not need to know tomorrow before being faithful today.
And I certainly do not need to become God in order to follow God.
The Christian lives within an extraordinary tension:
God knows everything.
I do not.
God remains sovereign.
I remain responsible.
Christ saves.
I follow.
And today, while I am still among the living, there is hope.
So perhaps the wisdom of Ecclesiastes 9 is much more Christian than its apparent simplicity first suggests:
Repent when repentance is required.
Obey when obedience is required.
Work while there is work to do.
Receive the good God places before you with gratitude.
And stop demanding knowledge that belongs to God alone.
You are alive.
There is still time to love Him.
There is still time to obey.
There is still time to become a saint.
And sometimes the most humble act of faith is simply to live the life God has actually given you.