Rise & Inspire | Wake-Up Calls — The Sunday Series | Sunday, 23 August 2026
Sunday Bible Series No. 2 — Ecclesiastes 7:29, read with Mark 4:22 and the verses of the week
OPENING
There is a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with work.
It is the tiredness of the rehearsal. You are in the shower, or on the road, or lying awake at half past two, and you are composing. Not a poem — a version. The version of yourself you will present tomorrow at the meeting. The sentence that will make the refusal sound like generosity. The tone that will let you say the difficult thing without ever having to own it. The paragraph in the email that could be read two ways, so that if it goes badly you can point to the other reading.
Nobody teaches us this. We are astonishingly good at it without instruction.
And here is the strange part. The rehearsal is exhausting, and we know it is exhausting, and we do it anyway — because somewhere along the line we became convinced that the straight version of ourselves would not survive contact with the world. So we build. We build approaches, angles, hedges, fallback positions, plausible deniabilities. We build them at work and we build them at home. We build them, God help us, in prayer.
Three thousand years ago, a man who had spent his life examining human beings with unsentimental care sat down and wrote the one conclusion he was prepared to stand behind. It is a single sentence. It explains the tiredness better than anything written since.
THE PASSAGE
See, this alone I found, that God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes. — Ecclesiastes 7:29
And its companion for this week, from the lips of Jesus:
For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light. — Mark 4:22
Read them together and a whole spiritual life opens up. One tells you what you have built. The other tells you how long it will last.
BIBLICAL CONTEXT
Who is speaking, and why it matters
The book calls its speaker Qoheleth — a Hebrew word usually rendered “the Preacher” or “the Teacher,” though it more literally suggests one who gathers or assembles, whether a congregation or a body of findings. He presents himself in the opening chapters as a son of David, a king in Jerusalem, and the Solomonic voice is unmistakable in the experiments of chapters 1 and 2: wisdom, pleasure, building, wealth, all tried and all weighed.
Most scholars today read that royal voice as a deliberate literary persona rather than a claim of authorship, largely on linguistic grounds — the Hebrew of Ecclesiastes carries Aramaic influence and at least two Persian loanwords, which points to a period long after Solomon, somewhere in the later Persian or early Hellenistic centuries. Not everyone agrees, and the question does not finally alter the meaning of our verse. What matters is the posture the persona creates: here is a man with every resource a human being could want, reporting honestly on what he found when he used them all to search for the meaning of things.
Where the verse sits
Our sentence is the last line of chapter 7, and it is the conclusion of a specific and rather anguished passage. From verse 23 onward, Qoheleth describes a search that failed. He set out to be wise and found wisdom beyond his reach. He describes turning his heart to know, to search out, and to seek the reckoning of things — and coming up short again and again. Verses 26 to 28 are among the most difficult and disputed in the book, and honest readers should say so; the speaker is at his most bitter and most obscure there, and interpreters differ sharply over whether he is stating a conviction, quoting a proverb he intends to undercut, or recording the sourness of a mind that has looked too long at human deceit.
Then, at verse 29, the fog lifts. This alone I found. One thing, and one thing only, came back clean from the whole investigation.
That is the literary weight of the verse. It is not one observation among many. It is the single load-bearing conclusion of a long and frustrated search — the one finding Qoheleth was willing to put his name to.
The theological background
Behind the sentence stands Genesis. Qoheleth does not cite the creation account, but he is clearly standing inside it: God made humanity, and God made humanity good. He is not offering a doctrine of the fall in any technical sense; he is offering an observation that any careful person can verify. The design was simple. The execution is not. And the gap between them was not manufactured in heaven.
This is wisdom literature doing what wisdom literature does. It does not thunder. It watches, and then it tells you what it saw.
LEXICAL NOTES
Two Hebrew words carry the verse, and one of them contains a small shock.
*יָשָׁר — yāshār. Straight. Level. Even. The word belongs first to physical description — a road without bends, ground without dips — and from there it moves naturally into moral description: upright, honest, right. It is the word behind the great biblical image of the highway made straight. To be yāshār* is to have no detour in you: what you appear to be going towards is where you are actually going.
Notice that Qoheleth does not say God made us holy, or perfect, or innocent. He says God made us straight. The original human design was not complicated. Point to point. Word matching intention. Face matching heart.
*חִשְּׁבֹנוֹת — ḥishshəbōnôt. Translated “schemes,” “devices,” “contrivances.” Here is the shock: this noun appears only twice in the entire Hebrew Bible. Once here — and once in 2 Chronicles 26:15, where King Uzziah installs on the towers and corners of Jerusalem the engines*, devised by skilful men, for shooting arrows and hurling great stones.
Siege engines. War machines.
The same word. Qoheleth looks at what human beings have made of themselves and reaches for the vocabulary of military engineering. Our complications are not idle. They are ordnance. They are built by skilled hands, mounted on the walls, and aimed at somebody.
The root beneath both words is ḥāshab — to think, to calculate, to reckon, to plot. And this quietly ties the verse back to Qoheleth’s own search, because the noun ḥeshbôn, the “sum” or “reckoning” he was hunting for a few verses earlier, comes from the same root. He went looking for the reckoning of life. What he found instead was that humanity is full of reckonings — of its own devising.
One further detail. The Hebrew shifts number mid-sentence. God made hā’ādām — humanity, singular, one — straight. Then: wəhēmmāh, “and they,” plural, sought out many devices. The unity of the design fractures into a plurality of contrivances within a single line. God made onestraight thing. They made many crooked ones. The grammar itself performs the fall.
And from Mark 4:22, one Greek observation worth having. Jesus uses two words for concealment — krypton, hidden, and apokryphon, secret, tucked away — and attaches to each a purpose clause: hina phanerōthē, “in order that it may be made manifest.” The construction is startling. He does not say hidden things will eventually be found out, as a warning. He says hidden things exist for the purpose ofbeing disclosed. Concealment, in the economy of God, is never a permanent state. It is a stage.
READING THE PASSAGE CLOSELY
Slow down over the sentence and several things surface.
“This alone I found.” Not “among other things.” Alone. After everything, one certainty.
“God made.” The straightness is not our achievement, and therefore not ours to be proud of. It is given. It is original equipment.
*“They devised” — or more exactly, “they sought out.” The verb is biqshû, from a root meaning to seek, to search for, to pursue. This is the crucial thing the English “devised” slightly softens. The schemes did not descend on us. We went looking for them. There was an appetite. There was effort. Complication is something we want*.
“Many.” The contrast is not merely straight versus crooked. It is one versus many. Straightness has a single form. Deviousness is infinitely various — which is exactly why it is so absorbing, and why it feels so much like intelligence.
Now, what the text does not say, because the discipline matters:
It does not say that human inventiveness is evil. Qoheleth is not condemning engineering, planning, or forethought; the same book urges us to work with all our might. It does not say we are incapable of good. It does not name Adam, or the serpent, or offer any account of how the schemes began. And it does not, in this verse, offer a remedy.
It simply tells the truth about the gap, and leaves the reader standing in it.
THE WEEK’S SEVEN VERSES
Each of the seven verses shared this week by His Excellency, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of the Diocese of Punalur, turns out to sit somewhere along this one line of thought — from the exposure of what we hide to the God who meets us when we stop hiding.
Monday, 17 August — Mark 4:22. Nothing hidden that will not be disclosed.
Tuesday, 18 August — Hebrews 6:3. And we will do this, if God permits.
Wednesday, 19 August — Wisdom 1:2. He is found by those who do not put him to the test.
Thursday, 20 August — Jeremiah 15:20. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail.
Friday, 21 August — Hebrews 1:6. Let all God’s angels worship him.
Saturday, 22 August — Psalm 59:10. My God in his steadfast love will meet me.
Sunday, 23 August — Ecclesiastes 7:29. God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes.
SCRIPTURAL CONNECTIONS
The first scheme was a hiding place. In Genesis 3, the very first consequence of the first disobedience is not violence or theft. It is concealment: a covering hastily assembled, and then two people among the trees, listening for footsteps. Ecclesiastes 7:29 is Genesis 3 rendered as a proverb. The devices came in with the hiding, and they have never left.
And hiding has a shelf life. This is where Mark 4:22answers Ecclesiastes. Jesus is teaching in parables about lamps and measures and seed, and he says plainly that nothing is concealed except in order to be revealed. Set that beside Qoheleth and the whole arithmetic changes. Yes, we have built many devices. But every one of them is temporary construction on land that God intends to clear. Luke records the same teaching with sharper edges — what was whispered in inner rooms will be announced from rooftops. Paul says the Lord will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and disclose the purposes of the heart. The New Testament is remarkably consistent: exposure is coming, and for those who belong to Christ, exposure is mercy, because it is the end of the exhausting rehearsal.
The most religious scheme of all is hedged trust.Wisdom 1:2 says God is found by those who do not put him to the test, and shows himself to those who do not distrust him. The Greek peirazō means to test, to try, to put through a trial — and it is the language of the wilderness, where Israel demanded proof before it would walk. Testing God looks like faith and is actually a device: it is trust with a fallback position, belief that has quietly reserved the right to withdraw. It is the ḥishshābôn of the spiritual life, a siege engine mounted on the walls of the heart and aimed at heaven. Wisdom’s promise is beautiful in its simplicity — put down the machine and you will find him. He was never the one hiding.
Even our calendars can be un-schemed. Hebrews 6:3 contains four of the most quietly counter-cultural words in Scripture: if God permits. The writer has just rebuked his readers for lingering over elementary teaching when they should have moved on to maturity, and he says: we will go forward — if God permits. He does not say it as a pious flourish. He says it as a person who has stopped assuming that his plans are the same thing as his future. James says it more bluntly: you do not know what tomorrow brings, so learn to say if the Lord wills. This is straightness applied to ambition. Most of our scheming is simply an attempt to guarantee an outcome that was never ours to guarantee.
Straightness costs something, and God knows it.The obvious objection to all of this is practical: the schemes exist because the world is dangerous. Drop your defences and you will be eaten. Jeremiah 15:20 meets that objection head-on. Context is everything here. This is God’s reply to one of Jeremiah’s bitterest complaints — the prophet has accused God of being unreliable, like a stream that dries up in summer. God’s answer begins with a correction: if you return, I will restore you; speak what is precious and not what is worthless. Only then comes the promise — a wall of bronze, opposition that fights but does not prevail, because God is with him to save. The order is not accidental. First the call to straightness. Then the promise of protection. God does not tell Jeremiah to build better defences. God tells him to be honest, and then offers to be the defence.
And the God who defends us arrives first. Psalm 59:10 is sung from a house under surveillance — the superscription connects it to the night Saul’s men watched David’s door. It is a psalm written by someone who has genuine reason to scheme. And its confidence is startling: my God, in his steadfast love, will meet me. The Hebrew verb qādam means to come to meet, to go before, to anticipate. Translations differ slightly on whether the love in question is called his or mine — a small textual question the versions handle in different ways — but the movement is unambiguous. Ḥesed, that great covenant word for a loyal love that will not let go, does not wait at the destination. It goes on ahead. It is already there when you arrive. You are not walking towards a God who must be persuaded. You are walking towards a God who set out before you did.
Finally, the one who never needed a scheme.Hebrews 1:6 places before us the Firstborn, brought into the world, worshipped by all God’s angels. The Greek prōtotokos speaks of rank and inheritance rather than mere chronology — the position of the heir, the one in whom everything is summed up. And the Firstborn was, in the most exact sense, yāshār. Straight. There was no gap in him between word and heart, appearance and reality, public face and private self. He had no rehearsal. He needed no fallback position. When he was silent it was not evasion, and when he spoke there was no second meaning held in reserve. He is what Ecclesiastes 7:29 says we were made to be — and he came, in part, to give it back.
INTERPRETIVE INSIGHTS
Our defences are aimed at people who are not attacking us. The siege-engine image cuts deep once you sit with it. Uzziah’s machines were built for a city under genuine threat. Most of ours are not. The carefully ambiguous email, the managed version of the marriage we present at gatherings, the qualification added to the compliment — these are war machines trained on colleagues, spouses, children, friends. We are in a permanent defensive posture against people who never laid siege.
Complication feels like competence. This is why the schemes are so hard to surrender. Deviousness is genuinely clever. It requires memory, timing, social intelligence, a capacity to model other minds. The straight answer, by comparison, feels naive — almost embarrassing. Qoheleth’s verse quietly refuses that valuation. He does not call the schemes stupid. He calls them many, and he sets them against the one thing God actually made. The many are impressive. The one is true.
Concealment is more tiring than exposure. Every hidden thing must be maintained. It requires a running account in the background of the mind: who knows what, which version was given to whom, what must not be mentioned in front of which person. Anyone who has lived with a secret knows that the fear of discovery is often worse than discovery itself. Mark 4:22 is usually preached as a warning. It can equally be heard as a release: the maintenance contract has an expiry date, and you are permitted to let it lapse early.
Straightness is not the same as bluntness. This needs saying, because the verse can be misused. Yāshār means no gap between what you are and what you show. It does not mean saying every true thing you think to every person you meet. Scripture praises restraint, discretion and the well-timed word as consistently as it condemns deceit. Silence is not a scheme. Tact is not a scheme. The scheme begins where the intention diverges from the presentation — where you are steering someone towards a conclusion you would not defend openly.
Where interpreters differ. Ecclesiastes has always been read in more than one register. Some read Qoheleth as a resigned pessimist whose book is redeemed only by its final editorial verses; others read him as a faithful realist clearing away illusions so that genuine trust in God has somewhere solid to stand. Our verse arguably supports the second reading, since it affirms both a good Creator and a real human responsibility. But honesty requires acknowledging the debate rather than flattening it.
THE CENTRAL TENSION
Strip everything away and this passage asks one question, and it is not a comfortable one.
Do I want to be safe, or do I want to be known?
Every scheme is a bid for safety. Every one is also a small refusal to be known. That is the trade we make, usually without noticing, often before we are twenty, and then we keep making it for forty years and call the resulting exhaustion “life.”
The passage does not tell us the schemes never work. Sometimes they work beautifully. It tells us something more disturbing: that they were never part of the design, that we went looking for them ourselves, and — reading it alongside Mark — that they are built on ground scheduled for demolition.
Which leaves each of us with a genuinely open decision. You can dismantle the machinery yourself, in the presence of a God whose steadfast love has already come out to meet you. Or you can wait until it is dismantled for you.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR US TODAY
In the family. Most households run on unspoken arrangements: things that are not discussed, versions of events everyone has agreed to accept, a peace maintained by careful avoidance. Some of that is ordinary kindness. Some of it is a siege engine on the roof, and the whole family can feel it up there.
In marriage. The most common marital device is not deception; it is editing. The report of the day that omits the conversation. The feeling registered and immediately filed. It is understandable — we edit to avoid conflict. But a person who is only ever given the edited version is, over years, living with someone they have never actually met.
At work and in leadership. Institutions reward the ambiguous sentence. The minute that could be read two ways, the approval that commits to nothing, the praise engineered to make a later refusal easier. Anyone who has spent a career near files and committees knows exactly how this is done, and knows that it is often called professionalism. Straightness in institutional life does not mean indiscretion. It means that when you finally do commit yourself to a position, everybody knows it is really yours.
Online. Social media is ḥishshəbōnôt at industrial scale — a technology purpose-built for the maintenance of a curated self. The tiredness people report after an hour of scrolling is partly comparison, but it is also the strain of curation: we are all up on the walls, adjusting the machines, checking the angles.
In prayer. This is the strangest place to find schemes, and the most common. Prayer that reports rather than confesses. Prayer that presents the acceptable version of a grief. Prayer that bargains — the hedged trust Wisdom 1:2 gently refuses. Nothing is hidden from God in the first place, which means prayer is the one room in the universe where the machinery is pure dead weight.
In ageing and in failure. There comes a point, often in the second half of life, when maintaining the devices simply costs more than it returns. People sometimes call this decline. It may be the beginning of straightness — the recovery of something that was there before we ever started building.
A RISE & INSPIRE MOMENT
We were made as a road. We have turned ourselves into a fortress.
A road exists to connect. It is judged by whether it reaches. A fortress exists to withstand, and it is judged by whether anyone gets in.
The tragedy is not that we are bad at defending ourselves. The tragedy is that we have become very good at it — and that the walls went up around a life that was designed to be travelled.
LIVING THE PASSAGE THIS WEEK
1. Retire one machine. Identify a single specific device you routinely deploy — the deliberately vague reply, the excuse you have used so often it has become furniture, the topic you steer conversations away from. Just one. Retire it for seven days and observe what actually happens. Not what you fear will happen. What happens.
2. Send the straight sentence. This week, one message that you would normally hedge, write plainly. State the position, own it as yours, and do not append the softening clause that would let you retreat from it later. Courtesy stays. The escape hatch goes.
3. Pray one unedited prayer. Sit down and say to God the thing you have been giving him in a revised version — the resentment, the doubt, the request you consider unspiritual. Jeremiah accused God of being an unreliable stream and received an answer, not a rebuke. Nothing is hidden anyway. You are not informing God; you are stopping the pretence.
4. Add “if God permits” to one plan — and mean it.Take a plan you are quietly determined to force into existence, and consciously hand the outcome back. Say the words of Hebrews 6:3 over it. Then notice how much of your scheming was only anxiety about an outcome you were never in charge of.
5. Let one thing be disclosed early. Is there something small you have concealed that will eventually surface — an error at work, a forgotten commitment, a debt of honesty to someone? Mark 4:22 says its disclosure is only a matter of time. Choose the time. Disclosing on your own terms is almost always cheaper than being disclosed on someone else’s.
QUESTIONS FOR PERSONAL REFLECTION
1. What exactly does Ecclesiastes 7:29 claim about how God made us — and what does it claim about what we have done since?
2. Where in my life is there the widest gap between the version of me that people see and the person I actually am?
3. Which of my complications did I inherit from fear, and which did I go looking for because they made me feel capable?
4. Am I testing God — trusting him while keeping a fallback position — and what would trust without the fallback actually require of me this week?
5. If nothing hidden will remain hidden, what is one thing I would rather bring into the light myself than have brought there for me?
PRAYERFUL RESPONSE
Lord God,
You made me straight, and I have spent years learning to bend. I have built defences against people who were not my enemies, and rehearsed versions of myself that even I no longer believe. You know how tired it has made me.
Forgive the ingenuity I have spent on hiding, and the trust I have offered you with conditions attached. Take down what I have built. I will not manage the demolition well, so do it patiently, and do it kindly.
Teach me to say the true thing plainly, to hold my plans loosely and say honestly that I will do this if you permit, and to believe that your steadfast love has already come out along the road to meet me.
Make me straight again — not hard, not blunt, but whole: one person, in the light, at last unafraid to be seen.
Through Christ, the Firstborn, in whom there was never any gap at all.
Amen.
KEY TAKEAWAY
You were not made complicated. Everything crooked in you is construction — and construction can come down.
THE DEEPEST TAKEAWAY
Stop spending your life managing appearances. God already knows the unedited version of you. You can therefore live in the light, speak truthfully, hold your plans loosely, and trust His steadfast love.
CLOSING
Somewhere in the day ahead you will feel the pull to rehearse. A conversation you are dreading, a message you are drafting, a version you are preparing. When you feel it, you might try just noticing it — not defeating it, only noticing.
That noticing is where straightness begins. Qoheleth searched a lifetime and came back with one finding. Jesus added the second half of it: nothing built in the dark is permanent. Between the two of them there is enough truth to change a week, and possibly a life.
Which passage of Scripture have you always wanted to understand properly, rather than merely read? Tell me in the comments, and it may well become a Sunday.
JohnBritto Kurusumuthu Founder, Rise & Inspire
Sunday Bible Series No. 2 · Ecclesiastes 7:29 |
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