“Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil. Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon the earth: therefore let thy words be few. For a dream cometh through the multitude of business” (Ecclesiastes 5: 1-3 KJV).
In our text, Solomon is tracing the irrational mouth and illogical religious vow made in haste to the dream this individual had. They had a dream and acted on it and made the “sacrifice of fools” which is making a vow and not keeping it.
“For a dream cometh through a multitude of business” is the same as saying, the business we have during the day is the greatest influence on our dreams and therefore is not from God, should not be considered of great importance, and not be used as our guide for action. Often, what we experience during the day will be what we find ourselves doing in our dreams.
Dreams are real but not reality. Ordinary dreams are an exercise of the imagination. The thoughts in dreams arise out of the past and present circumstances of the dreamer. Dreams are best understood as something keeping us entertained while we sleep.
There are dreamers who place great importance on dreams. Among other things, they claim that when they dream, they have an out-of-body experience and return to the past and speak to human and animal spirits. They claim to travel into the future and see things that are ahead of them. They place great stock in their dreams and use the interpretation of their dreams as a guide for life. All of this is contrary to Scripture.
God’s word is objective truth, but dreams are subjective truth created in the imagination and should not be followed.
Dreams at one time were very important because they were given by God to His prophets as a way of revealing His will to His people. Vision is synonymous with dreams in such cases. God’s prophets had dreams or visions, which featured symbolic representation of current and future events that have and will come true.
After the events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ, we read of no more revelatory dreams as shown in the Old Testament. This is because Jesus Christ, the ultimate and final revelation was given by God, and we also now have a complete canon of Scripture.
Solomon gives another warning about dreams after telling of the bad consequences that come from acting on one’s dreams (v.4-6). “For in the multitude of dreams and many words there are also divers vanities: but fear thou God” (v. 7). In other words, stop paying attention to your dreams and just walk in the fear of the Lord (Ecc. 12: 13, 14).
