So, how is your life working today? Do you have all your ducks in a row? Is everything humming right along and you’re on schedule? Or do you sometimes feel as if the world is just falling apart? Even King Solomon had these troubles. In Ecclesiastes 4, this great, wise man said this:

So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. Therefore I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are yet alive.

Only a fool plunges on without listening to the words of those who have gone before. I want to know why he felt like he did. I want to know what he had stumbled over—where the pitfalls and booby traps and land mines are. Don’t you? Well, he tells us a lot in this rather unusual book of the Bible. And in the process of studying our way through it, a lot of very important things come to the surface.