Crooked Things Series

WISE LIVING: CROOKED THINGS

Ecclesiastes 7:1-29

#wiseliving2022

READ ECCLESIASTES CHAPTER 7:1-29 [person from congregation]

INTRODUCTION… Crooked Tree Story, english-for-students.com/The-Crooked-Tree.html

[ADAPTED]

I read an old English story this week that I thought was interesting. It seems a lot to me like the ugly duckling, but it is a little bit different:

Once upon a time, there was a huge forest where every tree was tall, upright, and had huge branches. Each tree was a perfect specimen of its kind. Now in that forest, there was one particular crooked tree. Its trunk was oddly shaped. Its roots stuck out in an ugly manner and all of its branches were twisted and sagged to the ground. Again, all the other trees around it were upright and reached to the sky and the crooked tree stood out. Why did it stick out? Because it was crooked.

The crooked tree looked around at them and thought, "How fine and straight they are!" Then it added in a very sad leafy voice, which sounded a lot like a bark, "I am so unlucky. Why should I alone, in this entire forest, be crooked and ugly? God, would you reach down Your Divine Creator Hand and make me tall and upright so I can reach to the sky like all the other trees?”

God heard the crooked tree and sent an angel with a message: “Consider the work of God: who can make straight what He has made crooked?”

One day a burly woodcutter came with a big axe to the forest looking for good timber. He looked at all the tall straight trees and saw dollar signs with all that he would be able to cut. He looked at the crooked tree and said to himself and aloud to no one in particular, 'This tree is absolutely useless for me.’ He selected all the fine upright trees and cut every single one of them down.

After that day, standing tall as the only tree in the entirely chopped down forest, the crooked tree had no more complaints and saw purpose from the Hand of God because it survived.

Now that story is not one I wrote, but I did fiddle with it a little bit for our purposes this morning. We are reading through Ecclesiastes 7 and the Teacher King who is writing to us, Solomon, uses a word that is only used 26 times in the whole Bible. Solomon uses the word 15/26 (58%) of the times it is used in the Bible. He uses it twice in Ecclesiastes and 13 times in Proverbs. He likes this word a lot.

The word is ‘crooked.’

The word we translate as ‘crooked’ in the Old Testament here in Ecclesiastes 1 and 7 means ‘to be bent.’ Not a complicated word. It means what it means. The first time the word is used in Ecclesiastes is chapter 1.

READ ECCLESIASTES 1:13-15 (ESV)

“And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 14 I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. 15 What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.”

Solomon says that he looks over life and sees the same thing over and over. In this passage, the words ‘unhappy business,’ ‘everything done under the sun,’ ‘vanity,’ ‘striving after the wind,’ ‘crooked,’ and even the word ‘lacking’ are all parallel words. Those words present to us a view of life that is pessimistic with a dash of anger and frustration. Life is at times all kinds of crooked. I am pretty sure we all would agree with that.

We have been these 7 weeks in a series of sermons on Wise Living in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Depending on your English translation the word: vanity, meaningless, pointless, futility, fleeting makes its appearance often. Much of life is temporary, perishable, unsatisfying, and mundane and in verse 15 Solomon says also ‘crooked.’ We are meant to think that life gets crooked because of things we do, but also life in general is not fair and ends up crooked. Crooked things are allowed to happen and we hate that because it is completely unfair.

Now this week we are in Ecclesiastes 7 and Solomon again uses the word ‘crooked.’

RE-READ ECCLESIASTES 7:13-15 (ESV)

Consider the work of God: who can make straight what He has made crooked? 14 In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him. 15 In my vain life I have seen everything. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing.