What times in your life have done the most to make you a better person: the easy times when everything was going your way, or the tough times, the crisis points, the hardships? Be honest now. I suspect most of us would have to admit that many of our deepest changes and moments of growth have come during times of stress, trouble, humiliation, and heartbreak.
Some folks claim that God has nothing to do with the bad times in life, that only the happy times come from God. But that’s not what the Bible says. Ecclesiastes 7:14 says, “When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other.“ So don’t try to avoid thinking about the hard side of life, and don’t pretend God has nothing to do with it. God has made bad times as well as good times, and the bad times are often do us the most good.
God teaches us things in the school of hard knocks that we don’t learn anywhere else. What’s the toughest and most effective teacher in the entire school of hard knocks? Death. The deepest, wisest people around are those who face death squarely instead of trying not to think about it. Ecclesiastes 7:1—4 says,
- A good name is better than fine perfume, and the day of death better than the day of birth. It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.
In other words, if you’re smart, you won’t spend all your time on movies, parties, and vacation cruises. You won’t avoid places that remind you of sickness and death. You’ll visit people in hospitals and nursing homes and funeral homes. You’ll do it for their sake but also for your own sake. You’ll go there to show love and offer encourage, but you’ll also go to learn. A party tickles your feelings, but a funeral grips your heart. It moves you to think about the big picture. What matters most isn’t whether you’re a cute baby at the time you’re born, but what your life amounts to by the time you’re buried. Don’t be so shallow that your highest goal is to have fun and be in style and wear the right perfume. Look ahead to your own death. The name you build over a lifetime, the identity you carry with you into eternity, matters far more than the momentary smell of perfume.
I know what it’s like as a nineteen—year—old to crawl out of a wrecked car, knowing how close I came to being killed. I realized as never before that my life is a precious and fragile gift and that I had better make the most of it. I know what it’s like as a young father to visit a hospital for months on end and then to hold my own dead child in my arms and dig her grave with my own hands. Never have I felt so strongly the desire for eternal life and for Christ’s return, and never will I take any of my living children for granted. I’ve heard people with terminal illnesses express faith and longing for God that were far stronger than when their bodies were healthy.
Having seen and heard and experienced these things, I’m still not nearly as wise as I should be, but I’m wiser than I would be if I had never walked into a hospital or nursing home or funeral parlor. Looking squarely at sickness and death isn’t fun, but it clears away the fluff on which we waste so much time and energy, and it forces us to focus on what really counts.
Sadness often does more than gladness to make us better people. That’s true of places we’d rather not go and things we’d rather not endure, and it’s also true of words we’d rather not hear. We don’t enjoy being confronted about something we need to change, but sometimes that’s exactly what we need. “It is better to heed a wise man’s rebuke,“ says Ecclesiastes, “than to listen to the song of fools. Like the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools. This too is meaningless“ (7:5?6).
If a friend or spouse insists that you have a problem with alcohol, you might prefer just to listen to the laughter of your drinking buddies—but it’s better to listen to a wise rebuke than to the song of fools. When someone at work points to problems in your performance, you may not enjoy hearing it, but that rebuke might make you a better worker and save your job. Flattery makes you feel better and become worse; an honest rebuke makes you feel worse and become better.
Four Sick Strategies
We can learn valuable lessons from hard times and hard—hitting words. But the learning doesn’t come automatically. Hardship can improve us, but it can also make us bitter. Criticism can set us straight, but it can also make us more stubborn. [What makes the difference? The key is faith. The key is trusting God, seeing him as the Potter and ourselves as the clay he is shaping. Trouble can bring out the best in us if we trust God to mold and shape us, but it can bring out the worst if we ignore God and follow our own sick strategies for coping. As we read further in Ecclesiastes 7, we see four sick strategies: dishonesty, shortsightedness, anger, and wishful thinking.
Verse 7 speaks of dishonesty: “Extortion turns a wise man into a fool, and a bribe corrupts the heart.“ If you don’t have faith, a harsh world can make you cynical and dishonest. If you fear people more than you fear God, you may cave in to threats and extortion and do what you know is wrong. If tough times make you feel you’re not getting as much as you deserve, you may try to get money any way you can, even if it means corruption and taking bribes. Dishonesty is one way of coping in a harsh world.
A second bad reaction to hardship is to be shortsighted. Verse 8 tells us, “The end of a matter is better than the beginning, and patience is better than pride.“ Patience waits on God’s timing; pride wants it all right away. Patience focuses on the end result; pride demands instant gratification. Some of the best things in life are things you must wait for, but you may be too shortsighted to know that. Sex is best if you wait until marriage; but if you’re a shortsighted single, you want sex now, and you harm your future chances for a healthy, happy marriage. Prosperity is greatest if you wait for your work to pay off and your savings to accumulate; but if you’re shortsighted, you want everything now, and you pile up credit card debts or buy lottery tickets hoping for instant wealth, harming your future chances to prosper. Your eternal destiny is best if you wait for heaven, aiming your life for eternal happiness rather than just living for the moment; but if you’re shortsighted, you just want to grab as much fun as you can right now and pay no attention to your eternal future. Why should you have to wait for anything? Why can’t you have it all immediately? Why should you be denied anything, even temporarily? You want what you want, and you want it now. If you have to go through things you don’t like, you get more impatient and shortsighted than ever. If you’re proud, delayed gratification makes no sense to you. But if you live by faith, the school of hard knocks makes you more patient and more sure than ever that some things are worth waiting for.
A third bad way of coping with hard knocks is to get angry. Verse 9 says, “Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit, for anger resides in the lap of fools.“ When your temper flares up, your brain shuts down. A hothead is a bonehead. The quicker you are to anger, the slower you are to learn. When you go through something painful, you might get angry at others and blame them for all your troubles; you might get angry at life in general; you might even rage at God. When you’re boiling with anger, you won’t learn what you need to learn in the school of hard knocks.
A fourth sick strategy for coping with tough times is wishful thinking. Verse 10 of Ecclesiastes 7 says, “Do not say, ’Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions.“ It’s been said that “the good old days“ are made up of a bad memory and a good imagination. Often the good old days weren’t nearly as good as we make them out to be. But even if your past really was happier than your present, the fact is that you can’t go back. You’re not living back then. You’re living now. No more living in the past! Learn what God is teaching you now.
If you’re going to learn from the school of hard knocks, don’t give in to dishonesty, shortsightedness, anger, or wishful thinking. Instead, seek to gain wisdom.
Gaining Wisdom
Ecclesiastes says, “Wisdom, like an inheritance, is a good thing and benefits those who see the sun. Wisdom is a shelter like money is a shelter, but the advantage of knowledge is this: that wisdom preserves the life of its possessor“ (7:11—12). Money can be useful, but true wisdom can enrich and protect your life.
And what is wisdom? True wisdom is to see your life in the light of God’s rule over you. Ecclesiastes 7:13—14 says, “Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked? When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other. Therefore a man cannot discover anything about his future.“
You can’t know what the future holds, but you can know who holds the future. In the school of hard knocks, the heart of wisdom is knowing that God is in charge, that good times and bad times alike are under his control. This wisdom helps us to know our limits and to depend on him. God sends enough twists and turns into our lives to keep us from thinking that we’re on a straight track to a future we’ve got all mapped out. There’s a lot we don’t know or control, but God knows and controls it all. “In all things God works for the good of those who love him“ (Romans 8:28). By faith we can enjoy good times as his gift, and we can receive hard times as his training in wisdom.
The school of hard knocks can teach us wisdom about God and it can teach us much wisdom about ourselves. At first we may not like what we learn, but we need to face it. When you believe that God is in charge, you might be tempted to think that you can measure up to God’s standards and guarantee a happy life for yourself by doing everything right: clear thinking and clean living guarantee God’s favor. But the school of hard knocks teaches otherwise. Real life reveals some fine people going through hard times and some rotten people who are healthy and wealthy. The writer of Ecclesiastes says, “In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these: a righteous man perishing in his righteousness, and a wicked man living long in his wickedness“ (7:15).
When it comes to the question of being righteous, you can’t guarantee your own prosperity through proper behavior. Still, you should beware of two extremes.
One extreme is to be a holier—than—thou know—it—all. You pride yourself on being a cut above the crowd. You’re never wrong. If you’re playing Scrabble and make a word which can’t be found in the official Scrabble dictionary, you simply assume that the dictionary must be wrong! If you get into a dispute with someone, it’s always the other person’s fault. When it comes to religion, you assume that your own goodness will send you soaring straight to heaven——if you don’t overshoot it!
At the opposite extreme, you can be a person who doesn’t really care about moral behavior or sound beliefs at all. You don’t pretend to be a goody—goody, and you don’t claim to be sure of anything when it comes to religion and morality. You figure you don’t have a pipeline to God, and neither does anyone else. Your motto is, “I do what I please and believe what I want—no apologies, no excuses.“ No behavior is too perverted, no belief too outrageous. Whatever works for you.
In the face of these extremes, Ecclesiastes says, “Do not be over—righteous, neither be over—wise—why destroy yourself? Do not be over—wicked, and do not be a fool—why die before your time. It is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other. The man who fears God will avoid all extremes“ (7:16—18).
Fear God. Take the Lord seriously. That’s the way to keep your balance and avoid extremes. You can’t possibly be holier—than—thou or a know—it—all in light of the infinite holiness and mind—boggling wisdom of God; but neither can you pretend that holiness and wisdom don’t matter. When you revere the holy and wise God, you know that holiness and wisdom matter enormously. You also know that you don’t have a corner on these things. God does. So instead of being an over—righteous, over—wise hypocrite or an unrighteous, unwise fool, seek the kind of righteousness and wisdom that only God can give.
Verse 19 gives another quick reminder of the great value of wisdom. It says, “Wisdom makes one wise man more powerful than ten rulers in a city“ (7:19).
The Sin Factor
Ecclesiastes then goes on to show how, of ourselves, we lack such wisdom and goodness. Verse 20 says, “There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins“ (7:20). Nobody is perfect. Nobody is guiltless.
Ever hear the story about the judge who visited a prison? He talked to various inmates, and they all insisted either that they hadn’t broken the law or that it really wasn’t their fault. The way they talked, none of them was guilty of anything. Finally, the judge met one prisoner who admitted to some awful crimes. The judge summoned the warden: “Let this man out of this prison. I wouldn’t want him to corrupt all the nice, innocent people who live here.“ That story may not be true, but many of us behave exactly like those prisoners who claimed innocence. We hate admitting we’re wrong; we’d rather pretend we’re just fine.
If only we could see our own sins the way we see other people’s sins! Here’s one area in which the school of hard knocks can knock some sense into us. When people insult us or offend us, we tend to be oversensitive and outraged. How dare they say such bad things about a fine person like me! But instead of getting upset at the nasty things people say about us, we should let hard knocks remind us how often we do the exact same thing and say nasty things about others. Ecclesiastes 7:21—22 advises, “Do not pay attention to every word people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you—for you know in your heart that many times you yourself have cursed others.“
Deep within our sinful nature is the tendency to maximize the sins of others and minimize our own sins. We need to turn that around. We need to be less critical of others and more critical of ourselves. We need to stop pretending we’re soaring to new heights of wisdom and purity. We need to face the truth about ourselves. We need to admit how warped and self—absorbed and limited our thinking is and see the seriousness of sin. As the Teacher puts it in verses 23—25, “All this I tested by wisdom and I said, ’I am determined to be wise’—but this was beyond me. Whatever wisdom may be, it is far off and most profound——who can discover it? So I turned my mind to understand, to investigate and to search out wisdom and the scheme of things and to understand the stupidity of wickedness and the madness of folly.“
In the school of hard knocks, one classroom, which drives home the stupidity of wickedness is the classroom of male—female relationships. The author says, “I find more bitter than death the woman who is a snare, whose heart is a trap and whose hands are chains. The man who pleases God will escape her, but the sinner she will ensnare“ (7:26). A wicked woman, says the author, is almost harder on a man than death itself. Of course, looking at it from a woman’s point of view, it would be just as true to speak of how a sinful man enslaves and wounds a woman. Either way, notice the sobering observation: if you were perfectly pleasing to God, you’d escape such a trap. If you’ve been hurt by someone of the opposite sex, don’t just get angry and bitter. Let it remind you of your own sin as well.
“Look,“ says the writer in verses 27—29, “this is what I have discovered: Adding one thing to another to discover the scheme of things——while I was still searching but not finding——I found one upright man among a thousand, but not one upright woman among them all.“ Upon hearing those words, women may protest and men may feel smug. Every man tends to think he’s that one man in a thousand! But this countdown from one to zero is really just a method of Hebrew poetry to say that nobody is perfect. After all, the author just got through saying in verse 20, “There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins.“ [But just suppose that you (mistakenly) took the one in a thousand literally. It would still mean that a man has 1/10 of 1 percent chance of being better than a woman. Some superiority! The point is that sin is everywhere, and sin is especially hurtful in the way men and women mislead and manipulate and mistreat each other.]
The upshot is not to rage against the opposite sex but to see that humanity is sinful, and that I am no exception. If I’m upset at a particular woman or at women in general, I must take to heart the fact that they probably feels the same way about me—and often with good reason! In the war of the sexes, both sides are usually wrong. Men and women are indeed equal: equally sinful. Is that the way God made us? No, we’ve done it to ourselves. Ecclesiastes 7 closes by saying, “This only have I found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes“ (7:29).
Our Only Hope
This chapter of the Bible begins by speaking of death and ends by talking about sin. The connection isn’t accidental. The Bible says that “death came to all men, because all sinned… The wages of sin is death“ (Romans 5:12, 6:23). Sorrow is good for the heart because it shows us our sin and misery and shows us that our only hope is in God.
At the time when Ecclesiastes declared, “There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins,“ that was the truth. There was not one sinless man. But then one upright man did appear, a righteous man who lived on earth and did what was right and never sinned: Jesus of Nazareth. He went through a school of hard knocks that made our lives look like easy street. But Jesus remained perfectly obedient to his heavenly Father, all the way to death on a cross. Jesus was holy but not holier—than—thou, perfect but not a perfectionist, good but not too good to befriend sinners. Jesus knew all things but wasn’t a know—it—all; he was wise but never over—wise; he never looked down on others who were less knowledgeable. Instead, he used plain words and stories from everyday life to teach people the truth; he even welcomed children. Jesus lived a perfect life, he died to pay for the sins of others, and then he arose again in triumph over death. He is the one righteous man we all need.
The best thing about the school of hard knocks, then, is that it drives us to Jesus. God uses the hard times to make us give up on ourselves and ask hard questions. We wonder where pain and death come from, and God drives us to the conclusion that though he made us upright, we’ve sinned and run off in pursuit of schemes which lead to misery and death. At that point, we long for a Savior. We long for someone to replace our folly with his wisdom, our sin with his righteousness, our death with his eternal life. And who can do that but Jesus? “If we claim to be without sin,“ says the Bible, “we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness“ (1 John 1:9).
But what if we already know Jesus? Well, we still haven’t graduated from the school of hard knocks. God often uses trials to teach and shape his children. “When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other.“ Bad times remind us to keep trusting a God we haven’t figured out, a God who works all things “for the good of those who love him“ (Romans 8:28). Bad times teach us to hold on to Jesus tightly and everything else loosely, to love this world less and heaven more, and to keep believing that the day of death is better than the day of birth, for at death we leave our sin—stained existence, graduate from the school of hard knocks, and go to eternal joy with Jesus.
David Feddes
Dr. David Feddes is pastor of Family of Faith Church and provost of Christian Leaders Institute, which supports mentor-based ministry training through online courses. David is also adjunct missiologist for Crossroad Bible Institute, which provides biblical distance education to more than 40,000 people in prison. Previously he served as broadcast minister for the Back to God radio program, reaching people in more than fifty countries. David earned his Ph.D. in intercultural studies from Trinity International University, Deerfield, IL and is a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Wendy, have nine children (one in heaven).
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