"15 In my vain life I have seen everything. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing. 16 Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? 17 Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? 18 It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them.
19 Wisdom gives strength to the wise man more than ten rulers who are in a city.
20 Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.
21 Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. 22 Your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others.
23 All this I have tested by wisdom. I said, “I will be wise”, but it was far from me. 24 That which has been is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?
25 I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. 26 And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. 27 Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things— 28 which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. 29 See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes."
Ecclesiastes 7:15-29
The statements in 15-17 seem to belong together. On the one hand 15 underlines the inscrutable mysteries of life, and it seems to be in face of these that the sentiments expressed in 16 and 17 are made. Their message is to avoid fanaticism at either extreme. Even the extremely good meets the element of chance, and cannot exclude the possibility of tragedy (15). Therefore why court disaster? This is wisdom 'under the sun', and there is surely a higher wisdom, that explains the high devotion and dedication of lives given over utterly to the service of Christ. What would we have to say about the Apostle Paul, if 16 were to be the norm for one's life? All the same, we can glean another kind of message from these verses, which is that merely human righteousness (i.e. 'under the sun') can become self-righteousness and can lead to all sorts of ugly and distressing manifestations, feeding a voracious self that has refused to die the death that leads to true life. As such, there is little to choose between it and human wickedness (17). In this sense, the warning to avoid fanaticism is fairly timely, for the need to keep such impulses as we have described within bounds is very real. The relentless drive that one sees in some souls may sometimes own far more to basic psychological maladjustment and to the restlessness of a raging 'super-ego' within than to any really genuine spiritual dedication. How far removed from all this was the Apostle Paul when he spoke of his detachment and contentment in Philippians 4:11ff!