Ecc 8:7  For he does not know what is to be, for who can tell him how it will be?

Let’s unpack this for a moment, Solomon is talking about the future.  Man doesn’t know what is going to happen and then follows with a rhetorical question, who can tell him what’s going to happen?  

A very salient point, no one knows when calamity will happen, like the Indonesian Tsunami for example, or the terrorist attacks.  We can be walking along and then suddenly our life undergoes serious change or worse yet…death.  

Not knowing can be very vexing, we have all had that one event that has happened in our lives where we flash back and think if I had just done X then Y wouldn’t have happened, like getting a car crash…maybe if I would have left 3 minutes later, I wouldn’t have gotten into this fender bender.  We can turn our brains into pretzels going through the shoulda, woulda, coulda’s.  And that is what Solomon is speaking about here, we don’t know what’s going to happen, and no fortune teller can read the horoscopes and say with unequivocal certainty what is going to happen and when?  

On the other end of the spectrum, we often kick ourselves in the butt when we look back at missed opportunities.  How many of us could be millionaires right now if we got in at the ground level on companies like google or amazon.  

So what do we do then?  We can let the unknown drive us bananas, and when we are outside of the Lord, not knowing and not being in control is going to frustrate any one, kicking that O-C-D into high gear.  On the other hand, as with all things related to God’s Word, it points to God.  Humans don’t know, but God does.  Another somber reminder that God is running the show, not man…God is sovereign, as the saying says; let go and Let God.  Once we relinquish control of our own destiny to Christ, the not knowing isn’t nearly as stressful.