Passage of the Day - April 16, 2011

Ecclesiastes 1:12-18

 ¹²I, the Preacher, have been king over Israel in Jerusalem.

 ¹³And I set my mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven It is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with.

 ¹⁴I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after wind.

 ¹⁵What is crooked cannot be straightened and what is lacking cannot be counted.

 ¹⁶I said to myself, "Behold, I have magnified and increased wisdom more than all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has observed a wealth of wisdom and knowledge."

 ¹⁷And I set my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly; I realized that this also is striving after wind.

 ¹⁸Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.

The more we understand about how the world and everything else works, the more we realize how powerless we are to change any of it.  The problems that plague this world are nothing new and no matter how hard we try, we can never get rid of them.  The additional problem is the more we investigate, the more prevelant we realize the problems are.  Talk about disheartening.  We have had poverty and hunger drilled into our heads since we were little, but the offshoots of these predicaments we aren’t as exposed to.  For example, when we take a closer look we will discover the spread of AIDS in poorer countries for multiple reasons including sex trading, sex abuse, and rape.  All of this disgusting behavior is disheartening and you can make yourself go mad trying to make sense of it all.

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®,
© Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation
Used by permission." (http://www.lockman.org/)