The Great Audit of Man
Introduction: The Accountant of Vanity
The Preacher in Ecclesiastes is a man on a mission. He is a royal philosopher, a kingly accountant, tasked by God to audit the entire human enterprise "under the sun." He has looked at pleasure, and wisdom, and wealth, and folly, and he has rendered his verdict again and again: vanity of vanities. It is all smoke. It is all a chasing after the wind. But this is not the conclusion of a bitter nihilist. This is the clear-eyed assessment of a man who knows that if you want to find true substance, you cannot look for it in the smoke. You must look to the God who is sovereign over the smoke.
Here in the seventh chapter, after a series of proverbs that contrast the house of mourning with the house of feasting, the Preacher turns his attention to a more granular, statistical analysis. He is adding things up, trying to find an explanation, a final tally that makes sense of his observations. He is looking for a righteous man, a righteous woman, someone who has not been corrupted by the fall. He is searching for an exception to the rule of vanity. His search is exhaustive, and his findings are bleak. But they are not without hope, because in identifying the universal nature of the disease, he points us to the only possible cure.
This passage is difficult for our modern egalitarian sensibilities. It seems harsh, particularly in its assessment of women. But we must not come to the text with our cultural clipboards, ready to grade God's Word on its compliance with our fleeting modern standards. We must come as students, ready to be taught, ready to have our assumptions dismantled. The Preacher is not being a misogynist; he is being a realist. He is diagnosing the universal human condition as it manifests in both men and women, according to their created natures and their respective temptations. And his final conclusion does not lay the blame at the feet of one gender, but at the feet of all mankind, who were made upright and chose to go crooked.
The Text
"See, I have found this," says the Preacher, "adding one thing to another to find an explanation, which my soul still seeks but has not found. I have found one man out of a thousand, but I have not found a woman among all these. See, I have found only this, that God made men upright, but they have sought out many devices."
(Ecclesiastes 7:27-29 LSB)
The Frustrating Calculation (v. 27-28a)
The Preacher begins by showing us his methodology and his frustrating, preliminary results.
"See, I have found this," says the Preacher, "adding one thing to another to find an explanation, which my soul still seeks but has not found." (Ecclesiastes 7:27-28a)
The Preacher is a spiritual bookkeeper. He is taking inventory. The phrase "adding one thing to another" is the language of accounting. He is trying to make the ledger of human experience balance. He is looking for "an explanation," a final sum, a rational account that makes sense of all the data points of human behavior he has observed. He is not just emoting; he is reasoning, calculating, and seeking a conclusion.
And yet, his soul has not found what it seeks. This is a crucial point in Ecclesiastes. The man "under the sun," even the wisest man, cannot by his own efforts arrive at the final explanation. The answer is not found in the created order alone. The answer is not found by adding up all the bits of smoke. The answer must be revealed from outside the system. He is like a man trying to measure the size of his prison cell using only a ruler made of fog. The tools of this world are insufficient to grasp the meaning of this world.
A Bleak Census (v. 28b)
Next, he gives us the raw numbers from his survey of humanity.
"I have found one man out of a thousand, but I have not found a woman among all these." (Ecclesiastes 7:28b)
Now, we must be careful here. Is the Preacher saying that the ratio of righteous men to righteous women is one in a thousand to zero? Not precisely. This is proverbial language, not a scientific poll. The point is the extreme rarity of true, consistent, covenantal faithfulness in a fallen world. He is speaking of a certain kind of integrity, a steadfastness that is exceedingly rare.
So why the distinction? Why "one man among a thousand" but not one woman? We must read this in light of the rest of Scripture. Man was created first, and given the primary responsibility of headship and covenantal representation. Adam's sin was the sin that plunged the world into ruin. Man's temptation, therefore, often runs along the lines of overt, principled rebellion, a direct defiance of authority. Think of Cain, Nimrod, or Pharaoh. To find a man who truly fears God and walks uprightly, a Joseph or a Daniel, is a one-in-a-thousand discovery.
The woman's temptation, as demonstrated in the garden, was different. Eve was deceived. Her temptation was relational, subtle, and bent toward manipulation and the desire for a wisdom apart from God's plain command. The Preacher has just finished warning about the woman whose heart is "snares and nets" (v. 26). This is not a statement about all women, but about a particular kind of feminine wickedness that is uniquely destructive. Solomon, of all people, would know this. His hundreds of foreign wives turned his heart away from the Lord. His experience was a catalogue of feminine enticements leading to spiritual ruin.
So when he says he has not found a woman "among all these," he is likely referring to his exhaustive and bitter experience with the women in the royal court, a place of intrigue, seduction, and power plays. He is saying that in that context, a place where feminine charms are weaponized, he found no one who was truly and simply faithful. The point is not that women are inherently more wicked than men. That would contradict the final verse. The point is that sin corrupts both men and women according to their respective natures. Men's rebellion tends to be overt and structural; women's rebellion tends to be subtle and relational. And in the Preacher's vast experience, he found the latter to be a constant and successful snare, with no exceptions in his particular survey.
The Foundational Verdict (v. 29)
After his frustrating search for an exception, the Preacher finally arrives at the one truth he has been able to establish with certainty. This is the explanation he was looking for.
"See, I have found only this, that God made men upright, but they have sought out many devices." (Genesis 7:29)
This is the bedrock. This is the solution to the whole problem. The issue is not a flaw in the manufacturing process. The fault is not with the Creator. "God made men upright." The word for "men" here is the generic term for humanity, ha'adam, including both male and female. God's original creation was good. Adam and Eve were created in a state of integrity, innocence, and moral rectitude. They were straight, not crooked.
This is the biblical doctrine of the goodness of creation. God does not make junk. He does not create things with a built-in propensity to self-destruct. The problem is not in our hardware, but in our software, a virus we willingly downloaded.
The second half of the verse gives us the fall in a nutshell: "but they have sought out many devices." The responsibility is placed squarely on our shoulders. "They" sought them out. This was not an accident. It was an active, willful search. The word for "devices" can also be translated as "schemes," "inventions," or "artifices." It speaks of a perverse ingenuity. We were made for simple, upright obedience, but we have become complicated, crooked schemers.
Instead of trusting God's plain Word, we invent elaborate justifications for our sin. Instead of walking the straight path, we devise complex and winding detours. This is the story of humanity from the garden onward. Adam and Eve devised a plan to be like God. Cain devised a way to deal with his jealousy. The men at Babel devised a tower to make a name for themselves. We are endlessly inventive in our rebellion. We have a Ph.D. in self-deception. We are masters of the art of the excuse.
Conclusion: The One Man Who Was Found
The Preacher's audit of the human race came up with a devastating result. He searched for a righteous man and found the odds were a thousand to one. He searched for a righteous woman and, in his experience, came up empty. The whole race, made upright, had become crooked schemers. This is the diagnosis of our total depravity. As Paul would later summarize, "None is righteous, no, not one" (Romans 3:10).
If this were the end of the story, it would be the blackest despair. If our hope lies in finding that one-in-a-thousand man, our hope is slim indeed. But the Preacher's search was not the final search. His audit was conducted "under the sun." But God conducted an audit from above the sun, and He came to the same conclusion. "The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one" (Psalm 14:2-3).
Because no one could be found, God provided One. The search for the one righteous man ends at the foot of the cross. Jesus Christ is the "one man among a thousand," and infinitely more. He is the one man among all of humanity who was truly upright. He was made like us in every way, yet without sin. He never "sought out" a single device or scheme. He walked in perfect, simple, upright obedience to His Father.
And what of the woman? The Preacher could not find one. But at the cross, we find the true woman, the church, being purchased and purified. Christ, the second Adam, lays down His life for His bride, to make her holy and without blemish, to present her to Himself as the one truly faithful woman. Through faith in the one upright Man, we who are crooked schemers are made straight. Our "many devices" are nailed to His cross, and we are clothed in His simple righteousness.
The Preacher's accounting was true, and it was devastating. But it was not final. The final ledger was balanced by Christ. He took our infinite debt of sin upon Himself, and He credited to our account His infinite wealth of righteousness. That is the explanation that the Preacher's soul was seeking, and it is the only explanation that can ever be found.