Risk, Investment, And Getting Old - Ecclesiastes 11:1-12:8 Series

That is how the Queen of Sheba and various other world rulers became so impressed with Solomon’s amazing wisdom – through his international business deals. And the idea here is not so much that it has to be overseas necessarily. The point he is making is about long term investment. You don’t get any return until after many days. In ancient times, doing business overseas meant waiting a long time to get a return on your investment.

And so he is establishing a very basic principle about preparing for the future. Invest. Wise people invest. Fools don’t. Fools care about right now. They are not interested in deferred gratification or deferred anything. They are not interested in sacrificing now in order to have a better situation in the future because they never plan ahead very far. So instead of investing, they prefer gambling. They don’t have to wait for an investment to grow over the course of years - they just want a big payoff right now. So they do stupid things like buying lotto tickets or going to casinos or any number of get rich quick schemes. When you try to get rich quick, the quick part works fine – just not the rich part. You get poor quick.

Not Just Money

It is foolish to gamble; it is wise to invest. And don’t just think in terms of financial investment. You can invest other things, like your time. Wise people will pour their time into things that have no immediate benefit. Like training – taking some courses. Or planning. You invest the time to get some training or come up with a plan or schedule, and it takes up some of your time now, but it is like a stock that skyrockets in value. In the years to come it saves you far more hours than you invested.

You can also invest energy. You spend some energy now working out and getting in shape, and later it pays off because you have more energy all day long.

Ministry is an investment. I remember multiple times when some stranger would contact my dad out of the blue and say, “You probably don’t remember me, but years ago you stopped and shared the gospel with me. And I just want you to know that totally turned my life around. And now I’ve led the rest of my family to the Lord.”

And my dad had no idea until they told him years later.

Raising children is an investment, isn’t it? You are working to build things into them now, some of which won’t really yield any significant return until they are adults. One of the characteristics of a wise person is they tend to place a high value on investment.

Do Not Overreact to Risk

That is an important thing for him to tell us at the end of this book, because he has said so much in this book about the risks and dangers of this fallen, cursed, futile world. He keeps on telling us, “You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, all kinds of things can and will go wrong; not even wisdom can guarantee good outcomes; very often outcomes are the opposite of what they should be; time and chance can strike at any time; fools can foul things up at any moment; terrible things can befall you,” etc. And he knows some people will read all that and think, “Man, there’s a lot of risk out there. I’d better just try to lock down what I have in case the worst happens.” So they hug all their possessions and money and everything as tightly as they can to try to avoid suffering any kind of loss. That is the wrong response. If your approach to the dangers of life is to tighten your grip on all your money and resources, eventually something will pry those things from your grip and you will be left with nothing. The best way to guard against the threats of time and chance is not hording, but investing. You need to take the resources you have and pour them out into something that will be likely to multiply them. Make an analysis of time and chance – discern what is likely to happen, and use that to get an increase on what you have so that when you take losses you will still be ok. But in order to do that, you have to take some risks.