Translation
Consider the work of God, for who can make straight what He has made crooked?
Go to footnote numberParaphrase
Keep in mind how God works; remember that no one can make something easy and painless if He has determined it will be hard and costly.
Footnotes
1
This is symbolism. I have unpacked it for you by putting the Hebrew symbol in the left-hand column and the meaning of the symbolism in English in the right-hand column. The difficulties of life are among the lessons Solomon had been learning in the handful of years prior to writing this dark book. I believe this started when he was blindsided by the death of the Shulammite, his favorite wife.
Why would God intentionally make things difficult and costly? Adam and Eve’s sin separated man from God. God is doing more than His part to bring us back to Him, but there are some things we must do ourselves; He will not do our part for us. In order for man to reach out to God he must first recognize that he needs to repent before God. If everything in life were perfect, how would man acquire a sense of his need for repentance? As God has ordained it to be, we learn about our need for repentance because of the harsh consequences of sin, with death being the foremost of them. In summary, life is hard because we need to learn a few important lessons, the primary one being our need for repentance.
Consider a couple examples. When our children are about 1 year old, they want to learn to walk, and we allow them to try, even though we know they will fall many times and some of those time they will hurt themselves. Then there is a rare disorder called Congenital Analgesia, which is the inability to feel pain. Children with this condition will run into things, split open a lip or an eyelid, but keep running because they don’t know they have been injured. They have been known to steal cookies out of the hot oven, burning their hand and tongue as they eat them, but they don’t realize there is a problem with that. Damage is done to the tissues of their bodies, but the message of pain never gets to the brain; therefore they don’t associate an action with its natural consequences because they don’t feel those consequences. Pain is a gift that has been given to us as a signal that something is wrong. We may wish that life had no pain, but if that were the case, we would never realize it when there is a problem, be it physical or spiritual. Parents of children with Congenital Analgesia often say something like, “I would give anything for my child to be able to feel pain.” And that is why God designed life to include pain. It is a sign of His love and His wisdom.