Chapter 12

2021 - Section title is Remember your Creator in your youth

This chapter seems like a continuation of 11.  Not sure there should have been a break here.

2021 - The first 8 verses seem to be about decline.  He's talking about a person getting old and being able to do less and less, to appreciate less, retreating inside, closing up shop, and only rousing to hear a bird rather than rising to accept some challenge.  But he is also talking about the earth I think.  All of creation is going to go that way, to get old, to waste away, to be used up.  Many things will start to fail.  Life will start to get harder, rather than the easier we all are expecting.  We are using up creation, and it groans at the abuse.  Eventually, like an old person, it will end, and nothing will endure, and it will all have been vanity.  I think that's what he's saying here.  It is not a pretty picture, but it is the right perspective.  This chapter is the long view.

1 Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, "I have no pleasure in them"; [Ecc 12:1 ESV]

Turn to God, remember God, before your time to die arrives.  The pleasures of life diminish with time, we all will die.  As our bodies crumble, pain, difficulty, loss of independence, acuity, and usefulness begin to pile up.  We can come to resent those things to the point where if we have not previously put our faith, our trust, and our eternity in God's hands, we may resent our present state so much, and blame God for it so much, that we refuse to turn to him at the end, sealing our fate in hell.  So the admonishment is to turn to God before the diminishing turns you against Him.

vs 9 begins a summary in the third person.  All before this was 1st person. 

2021 - This verse:

[Ecc 12:12 ESV] My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

With the two verses before it, I think Solomon is saying he's put together all you need to know, here and in Proverbs.  They are enough.  Do with what he's given us - after all, remember who Solomon is.  The wisest ever, and he wrote down (vs. 9 says he weighed and studied and arranged these proverbs with great care) the essentials - he wrote down sufficient proverbs to be sufficient for a life well lived.  We don't need more.

This is one of my favorite verses of all time:

13 The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. [Ecc 12:13 ESV]

I wonder how much of Ecclesiastes was written after God said this to Solomon:

11 Therefore the LORD said to Solomon, "Since this has been your practice and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and will give it to your servant. 12 Yet for the sake of David your father I will not do it in your days, but I will tear it out of the hand of your son. [1Ki 11:11-12 ESV]

God said this to Solomon when he was old, and when he had let his foreign wives lead him into idolatry and worship of abominable gods.  So he ended his life knowing that all he had build, all he had achieved, all that he had done with the long view in mind, had been wasted time, because a servant - a nobody from amongst the commoners, not even one of royal blood from elsewhere, was going to inherit all Solomon had done.  And as we see later, Jeroboam not only got most of it, but it took him very little time to undo it all.