The Crooked Made Straight: God's Unsearchable Providence Text: Ecclesiastes 7:13-14
Introduction: The Divine Plot
We live in an age that is pathologically obsessed with control. Modern man believes that with enough technology, enough legislation, enough education, and enough therapy, he can finally sand down all the rough edges of life. He wants a world that is predictable, safe, and entirely manageable. He wants to be the master of his fate, the captain of his soul. In short, he wants to be God. And when things go wrong, as they inevitably do, when the world refuses to lie flat and behave, his only two options are rage or despair. He either shakes his fist at the meaningless cosmos or he curls up in a ball because the universe is a blind, grinding machine that is utterly indifferent to his project of self-realization.
Into this therapeutic, control-freak culture, the Preacher, Solomon, drops a piece of granite. He presents us with a vision of the world that is utterly realistic and, to the unbeliever, utterly terrifying. It is a world governed not by chance, not by fate, and certainly not by us, but by a God who is exhaustively sovereign. This God is a master storyteller, a divine playwright, and He writes crooked lines into the story that we, in our finitude, cannot straighten out. He introduces plot twists that we cannot anticipate. He is not a tame God, and this is not a tidy world.
The modern evangelical impulse is often to rush in and try to clean this up. We want to defend God from the charge of making things difficult. We want to assure the world that God is nice, that He wants what we want, and that the hard providences are just unfortunate accidents that He will eventually sort out if we just have enough faith. But Solomon will have none of it. He confronts us with the raw, untamed sovereignty of God over everything, the good and the bad, the straight and the crooked. And he tells us that our peace is not found in understanding the whole plot, but in trusting the Author.
This passage is a direct assault on our pride. It is a frontal attack on the primordial temptation from the Garden: "you shall be as God." We want to know the future, we want to control our circumstances, we want to straighten what God has bent. But the Preacher tells us that true wisdom, true piety, and true joy are found not in seizing the steering wheel, but in joyfully confessing that we are only passengers, and that the one driving knows exactly where He is going.
The Text
See the work of God,
For who is able to straighten what He has bent?
In the day when there is good be of good cheer,
But in the day when there is evil see,
God has made the one as well as the other
So that man will not find out anything that will be after him.
(Ecclesiastes 7:13-14 LSB)
The Unalterable Work of God (v. 13)
The Preacher begins with a command, an invitation to observe reality as it actually is.
"See the work of God, For who is able to straighten what He has bent?" (Ecclesiastes 7:13)
The first command is to "see." This is not a call to blind faith, but to a clear-eyed, honest assessment of the world. Look around. Consider the circumstances of your life, the events of history, the very fabric of creation. This is the work of God. Not just the pretty parts, not just the sunsets and the babies' laughter, but all of it. The word for "work" here is comprehensive. It encompasses everything that God does and brings about in His creation.
And what is the nature of this work? It includes things that, from our limited perspective, are "bent" or "crooked." This is a profound statement. God is the one who makes certain things crooked. This doesn't mean that God is the author of sin, for the Westminster Confession rightly says that while God has ordained whatsoever comes to pass, "yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures." Rather, it means that God, in His sovereign purpose, weaves trials, difficulties, and what we perceive as adversities into the tapestry of His plan. A car accident, a lost job, a chronic illness, a rebellious child, these are not random events spinning out of God's control. They are crooked providences, bent by the hand of God for His purposes.
The question that follows is rhetorical and devastating to human pride: "For who is able to straighten what He has bent?" The answer is, of course, no one. This is the Creator/creature distinction in its starkest form. God is the potter, we are the clay. We do not get to tell the potter that He has made a lump crooked. We do not have the ability to reach up and alter His design. To try to do so is the essence of rebellion. It is to say to God, "Your story is not very good. I have some edits." This is the folly of thinking we can manage our own lives, fix our own messes, and secure our own futures apart from Him. We are finite, He is infinite. Our task is not to straighten His lines, but to trust that His crooked lines will ultimately make the most beautiful picture.
Two Days, One God (v. 14a)
Having established God's unalterable sovereignty, Solomon now applies this truth to the two basic conditions of human life: prosperity and adversity.
"In the day when there is good be of good cheer, But in the day when there is evil see, God has made the one as well as the other" (Ecclesiastes 7:14a)
Here we have the entire spectrum of human experience. There are days of good, days of prosperity, health, and blessing. And there are days of evil, days of adversity, sorrow, and pain. The world wants to assign these two days to two different sources. The good days come from us, our hard work, our cleverness. Or perhaps they come from a benevolent but limited God. The bad days come from bad luck, from Satan, or from a cosmic opponent to God. The Manichaeans believed in two rival gods, one good and one evil, locked in eternal combat.
The Bible obliterates this dualism. "God has made the one as well as the other." The same God who gives the day of prosperity is the God who appoints the day of adversity. He is not the God of the hills only, but of the valleys also. This is the clear teaching of all of Scripture. "Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?" Job asks (Job 2:10). "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things" (Isaiah 45:7).
This is hard doctrine, but it is the only foundation for true comfort. If God is not sovereign over the calamity, then we are victims of blind chance, and there is no hope. But if our heavenly Father, the God who gave His own Son for us, is the one who has appointed this day of evil for us, then we can know that it is not meaningless. It is part of His good and perfect plan, even when we cannot see how.
And notice the prescribed responses. "In the day when there is good be of good cheer." This is a command to rejoice, to enjoy the gifts of God without guilt. God gives us blessings to be enjoyed. I have often used the analogy of peaches. God gives all men cans of peaches, but only to His children does He give the can opener of a grateful heart. When the sun is shining, we are to thank Him for the sun. But in the day of evil, the command is different. It is not "be of good cheer," but "see." Consider. Reflect. Understand that this too is from the hand of your Father. The command is to think, to bring your theology to bear on your circumstances. We are not to be stoics, pretending the pain doesn't hurt. But we are also not to be faithless, acting as though God has lost control of the world.
The Purpose of Uncertainty (v. 14b)
The Preacher concludes the verse by giving us the reason for this divine arrangement. Why does God checker our lives with both good and evil?
"So that man will not find out anything that will be after him." (Ecclesiastes 7:14b)
God has arranged the world in this way to keep us humble and dependent. He has deliberately hidden the future from us. The word "after" here means the future, what comes next. We cannot, by studying the patterns of our lives, predict what tomorrow will bring. A man may have a decade of uninterrupted prosperity, and he begins to think he has the system figured out. He thinks he is secure. And then God sends a day of adversity to remind him that he is not in charge. Another man may have a long season of suffering, and he begins to despair, thinking it will never end. And then God sends a day of blessing to show him that hope is never lost.
God does this to destroy our self-reliance. He wants to wean us off of the idolatry of trusting in our own foresight and planning. If we knew the future, we would not trust God. We would trust our knowledge. If we knew for certain that we would be prosperous for the next twenty years, we would not pray for our daily bread. If we knew that a great trial was coming, we would try to scheme our way out of it instead of trusting God to sustain us through it. God keeps the future hidden so that we are forced to do the one thing necessary for spiritual life: trust Him one day at a time.
This is a great mercy. God is dismantling our pride and our anxiety in one stroke. Our pride wants to know the future so we can take the credit. Our anxiety wants to know the future so we can control it. God says no. You are a creature. Your job is not to know the future, but to know the One who holds the future. Your task is to walk by faith, not by sight.
The Gospel in the Crooked Places
How can a Christian read this and not immediately be driven to the cross of Jesus Christ? For the cross is the ultimate crooked thing that God used to make everything straight. From a human perspective, what could be more bent, more evil, than the perfect Son of God being tortured and murdered by wicked men? It was the greatest "day of evil" the world has ever known. Men did it in their wickedness, and yet the apostle Peter declares that it was all according to "the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23).
God took the most crooked event in human history and used it to accomplish the straightest possible thing: our salvation. He took the ultimate act of injustice and used it to satisfy His perfect justice. He took the day of greatest darkness and used it to bring the light of eternal life to the world. On that Friday, it appeared to all the world that God's plan was horribly bent and broken. But on Sunday morning, it became clear that this crooked cross was the very hinge of history, the instrument by which God was making all things new.
This is the paradigm for all our crooked providences. If God can take the murder of His own Son and turn it for our everlasting good, then what can He not do with our comparatively small trials? The day of evil comes so that we might be driven out of ourselves and our own resources, and find our only hope in Christ. The future is hidden from us so that we might cling to the One who is our future.
Therefore, Christian, see the work of God. When the day is good, be of good cheer, and thank the Giver of all good gifts. When the day is evil, see. See that your sovereign Father is at work. See that He who did not spare His own Son will also, with Him, freely give you all things. See that He is making you like Christ. And see that He is writing a story, and even the crooked lines from your perspective are, from His eternal vantage point, perfectly, gloriously straight.
You cannot straighten what He has bent, and praise God for it. For His bent things are better than our straightest accomplishments. Trust the Author. He knows what He is doing.