Wisdom is Good

Ecclesiastes 2:12–17: Wisdom, Madness, and Folly

Ecclesiastes 2, verses 12 through 17. So I turned to see wisdom, madness, and simple-minded folly. What will the man do who will come after the king except what has already been done? And I saw that there is an advantage in wisdom over simple-minded folly, as light has an advantage over darkness.

The wise man's eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I know that the fate of one becomes the fate of all of them. Then I said in my heart, as is the fate of the fool, so will my fate be also.

Why then have I been extremely wise? So I said in my heart, this too is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise man along with the fool forever, inasmuch as in the coming days all will be forgotten.

And how the wise man dies with the fool. So I hated life, for the work which has been done under the sun was grievous to me, because everything is vanity and striving after the wind. Let's pray. Lord, hard words from a man who understood better than we ever could.

Lord, how foolish the schemes of man are, and how wise is the wisdom in the heavens. Lord, help us to understand this morning. Help us to see wisdom in the light that you see it. Help us to identify the areas where we err, the areas where we set ourselves up as being very wise, and set ourselves up and against the decrees that you have made.

Lord, I pray for Houston this morning. I pray that you would give him wisdom, that you would give him clarity of speech. But even more than that, Lord, I pray that your spirit would nourish us this morning with the holy bread of your word.

And Lord, that we would be filled and filled and filled, and that we would be ready to come to this table, Lord, seeing that there is not vanity in your cross. And Lord, that all that is wise in the heavens is seemed foolish to man, but man is wrong.

And man strives after the wind as we as we go against your ways. So Lord, I pray for this congregation that we would be fed, that we would see the truth, that we would hear the truth, Lord, that we would be encouraged, exhorted, rebuked, and most of all changed.

Lord, that we would walk with repentance as we pursue holiness, and most of all as we pursue your ways. It's in your name I pray these things. Amen.

Life's Search for Meaning

There's been a question that man has wrestled with for just about as long as man's kind of sat down and stopped to think about where he is in his life. And he goes, why am I here? Why do I work? Why do I have to learn things?

Why do I go out and build things? Why do I suffer? Why do I enjoy good stuff? Why do I get pleasure? What is the purpose of these few years that has been given me on this earth? And man has come up with all kinds of answers for this across history.

Some men have said the answer is pleasure. That life is short and I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to eat good food, drink good wine, travel, buy nice things, and squeeze every ounce of pleasure and joy that I can out of this life.

Other men say no, that's wrong. Instead it is work and accomplishment. Build a big company, make a bunch of money, get promotions, build great things, accomplish something that when you reach the end of your life and you look back, you can say I did something and I mattered.

And that's the point of life. Others say no, that's still wrong. Just maybe the point of life is wisdom. That maybe the purpose of man's life is to know and understand the world. To learn how things work and to become wise enough that we can live well and avoid the mistakes that destroy others.

And Solomon throughout Ecclesiastes has been putting these different answers to the test and examining them in a way that no one else can. He has tested pleasure. He has tested labor and accomplishment.

He is testing wisdom and madness and folly. And the question that Solomon is asking is not, can wisdom, or not is wisdom useful, but is that can wisdom actually give man the thing that he is looking for?

Can wisdom be man's end? So before we answer that, we need to understand what Solomon even means when he says wisdom, madness, and folly. You see, wisdom is more than just simple knowledge. You can have a man that has hundreds of degrees and all sorts of knowledge and he's a fool.

Defining Wisdom, Folly, and Madness

Knowledge, I mean wisdom, takes what we know. It takes all of our knowledge, takes our experiences, takes God's revelation to man, and then it applies it to our lives. And we order our life according to it.

The wise man understands that actions lead to consequences. I mean, we all know the kid that does something goofy and we look at it and go, what did you think would happen? You jumped off the tree. Of course you hurt yourself.

What were you thinking? Because he's not using wisdom. He's not looking and saying, actions have consequences. Therefore, I'm going to do actions that have good consequences. Meanwhile, folly is when man should know.

He should have this information, but either he chooses not to know it or he chooses not to use it and he goes about life groping around in darkness, just chasing whatever's there. And then madness takes it one step further.

Instead of ought to knowing, the madman does know. Instead, though, of wisdom governing his passions, he allows passion to govern himself. So when we look at Solomon as he's looking at these things and he's testing wisdom as it compares to these other things, we have to know that Solomon can do this better than any of us.

He was king over all of Israel. He had wealth, power, and opportunity. And above all, God had granted to him extraordinary amounts of wisdom. He's wiser than we will ever be. And that's why Solomon says, and I turn to behold wisdom and madness and folly.

For who is the man that will come after the king of kings or the king in things which men now have done? In other words, who can do this better than Solomon can? Men have been trying to repeat this experiment for decades.

If you go to any philosophy class and you sit down, you'll hear utilitarians and hedonists and all sorts of people just bickering back and forth saying that they know the answer and that they can do this experiment.

But all they're doing is repeating what Solomon has already done. So Solomon asked, is it really better to be a wise man than be a fool? And Solomon's answer is yes, it is better. But more importantly, he asked, how far does this advantage of being wise go?

Wisdom Is Better Than Folly

Solomon says in verse 13, then I saw that there is profit in wisdom more than in folly, as light is more excellent than darkness. Wisdom really is good. There's profit to wisdom for us. Solomon compares it to the profit between light and darkness.

And we all know it's better to walk into a light room than a dark room. In verse 14, he continues and says, for the wise man eyes are in his head, but the fool walketh in darkness. The wise man has eyes and can see where he's going.

He can look down the road and say, if I do this, what's likely to happen? What are the consequences? And what has experience taught me to govern my actions? And those differences have real consequences in this temporal life.

As I was thinking about this, if you know me, I'm a history nerd. I love me some history. I'm also, I was in Boy Scouts and Eagle Scout and I love survival stuff. And as I was thinking about wisdom being profitable, I was thinking about like kind of life or death situations because that's where the rubber really meets the road.

And I thought of these two shipwrecks. In 1864, the ship, the Grafton, wrecked off of Auckland Island in the south of New Zealand. And that was a hard place, barren, snow, cold winds. If you didn't have your head about you, you were going to die.

There were these five men that survived the shipwreck and they found themselves stranded on this island with two months supplies. And what did they do? They used their wisdom. They scavenged from their supplies what they could.

They built them a shelter. They repaired tools. They established a routine to life. They even taught one of the members there how to read. And they planned ahead and they governed themselves and they knew what they needed to do to survive and they acted upon it.

And eventually, all five of them, after more than a year, survived and went home. That was wisdom governing their actions and it was profitable to them. They survived. Now compare that with the Batavia.

The Batavia was a Dutch East India Company ship that wrecked off the coast of Australia in 1629. There are more than 349 people on board. It's a fairly decent place. They had more than a year's worth of supplies.

Problem was that their leader, Jeronimus Cornelius, was a madman. He wasn't intelligent. He was a very brilliant man. He could organize and plan and persuade men but the problem was that he let his passions govern him.

And instead of using his abilities to do the duty that God had entrusted him to see these 349 people safely to rescue, instead, he used it to tyrannize them. He killed the men that were threats to him.

He enslaved the women and he abused them. Anyone that was a weakling that he thought couldn't survive and was taking too much food, he had murdered. His reason did not disappear but it became a servant of his lust.

And you put those two shipwrecks together and you see that the men on the grafting, they governed themselves and they survived. But on the Batavia, wisdom gave way to folly and madness and what followed was absolute disaster.

So there is profit in wisdom. It helps us govern our temporal lives. Wisdom will not guarantee us wealth or anything like that but it will give us profit in how we walk. The fool walks in darkness meanwhile the wise man gets to look down and see where he's going.

And if you're out there stranded on a desert island somewhere, it's probably better to be able to see where you're going than have your eyes closed and stuck in the sand. And as Christians, we should seek wisdom.

Asking God for Wisdom Through His Appointed Means

James tells us in chapter 1 verse 5, if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, which giveth to all men liberally and reproacheth no man and it shall be given to him. So ask God for wisdom. But we have to understand that when we ask God for wisdom and when we pray for wisdom, that that doesn't mean we get to say a prayer and we sit down on the couch and we go, all right, I'm going to be wiser tomorrow.

God gives his gifts through means. God is ultimately the primary cause of it, but he uses secondary causes. When we pray the Lord's prayer and we ask, give us our daily bread, we just don't expect we're going to walk into the kitchen and there's going to be a loaf of bread sitting there.

We intrinsically know that God has given us bread through rain, crops, farmers, our wages and bakers and the thousands of other ways that he shows his providence in our lives to give us our daily sustenance.

And it's the same for wisdom. So when we ask God for wisdom, we must use the means he has given to us. So if we know that wisdom is the ordering of our life according to truth, we have to begin with the ultimate truth.

That is God's word. Read scripture, study it, hear it preached. We know that if we want wisdom about the Bible, we don't just get to sit down and do nothing. We know we have to read it and know it. We have to study God's word.

If you want to have wisdom in finances, you have to study something about finance. And the thing that we make a mistake as Christians is all too often, we look at the world around us and we want to focus on the spiritual wisdom.

And that is good. We should read scripture. We should have spiritual wisdom and have discernment and pray for that. But wisdom isn't confined to just the spiritual life. What Solomon is talking about here is not just spiritual wisdom, but temporal wisdom.

How do we order our life on this earth? And in order to do that, we have to understand something about this world that we live in. It is the glory of God to conceal things and the glory of kings to search them out.

And I know that there is plenty of foolishness in men who profess themselves to be wise that are absolute fools in modern academia. However, the answer to this godless scholarship is not for us to spurn it and ignore it.

God made this world, study it. Read the history book, study science, know mathematics, ask God for wisdom. Do not glorify ignorance. Wisdom is profitable. Wisdom can preserve a marriage that mere folly would destroy.

Wisdom can help a father raise his children well. Wisdom will allow you to order your finances so that you can be a good steward of the finances that God has commanded you to be. Wisdom can help man as he establishes and runs a civil government.

There is real profit there. And that is what Solomon is saying. There's profit to it. It's useful for us. But there's a qualification. Solomon says that wisdom really is good. However, that is not him saying that wisdom can be the purpose of your life.

Wisdom Cannot Defeat Death or Make Us Immortal

Solomon says in the second half of verse 14, yet I know also that the same condition falls to them all. I thought in my heart it befalleth unto me as it befalleth to the fool. Why therefore do I then labor to be more wise?

And I said in my heart that this is also vanity. Wisdom is good. It can keep you alive for a little bit longer on a desert island, but ultimately you will still face death. You can't defeat it. Wisdom might allow you to delay it, but it's still coming.

Think about the man who devotes his life to his own health, like eats all the right food, does all the, you know, just devotes his life. His life is ruled by the wisdom of medicine, but eventually he's going to get blood work back that says, hey, you've got an incurable cancer.

Eventually his body's just going to give out on him. No matter what he does, the fact is that the guy who spends his entire life devoted to his health is going to meet the same end as the slob who gives himself over to every vice of food.

They're both going to die. Wisdom can help you live, but it cannot keep you from death. But as men, we look at that and say, fine, you know what? I'm going to die, but maybe my wisdom will make me live for eternity in what I have done.

Maybe if I can write enough books, gain enough knowledge, make a crucial enough discovery, I will leave something behind so that although I'm gone, my name will continue on for all eternity. But Solomon says, for there shall be no remembrance of the wise nor of the fool forever.

For that that is now in the days to come shall all be forgotten. How doth the wise man as doth the fool. Billions of men and women have lived on this earth. They've had conversations. They've had great discoveries.

They've accomplished great things. And how many of them do you know? Solomon, the wisest man that was ever king, probably had the greatest legal decisions ever. What do you know about him? What do you know about Solomon's jurisprudence?

Almost nothing except what we have in scripture. Even Solomon could not secure that future generations would remember everything about him. Even your own children might not heed the wisdom you impart upon them.

Solomon certainly knew his sons would likely not heed his wisdom at all. And that Ecclesiastes and Proverbs that are written for his children to give them wisdom, he knows that they're going to spurn it.

And it's a vanity. So yes, write that book, make the discovery, but don't ask them to make you immortal. They can't do it. Wisdom will not stop your death. And wisdom's not going to let you guarantee any remembrance after the fact.

Wisdom Cannot Bear the Weight of the Soul

And this points to the broader problem that can be seen from this is that knowledge cannot bear the weight of your soul. Anyone that has seriously studied a subject, whether it's science or math or history, knows that when you answer one question, you wind up having three more questions to answer.

And if you sit there and say that knowledge is the purpose of your life, that wisdom is the purpose, and that is the chief end, and you seek it out, it will destroy you. You know why? Because you will never read every book.

You will never answer every question. You will never master every subject. And then, all of a sudden, death comes along and it's over and you don't even get to continue. That's why Solomon declares, therefore I hated life, for the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me, for all is vanity and vexation of the spirit.

It's not that Solomon literally thinks that all is actual vanity and there's no point in it. It's that if you try and make wisdom your satisfaction in life and the fulfillment of your life, just like pleasure and great works, it will leave you with no fulfillment.

It will leave you with nothing. It is vanity. This is what happens when we take a good thing and ask it to do something it was not created to do. Wisdom is good. Knowledge is good. But they weren't designed to bear the weight of our lives.

An idol can't do that. And wisdom, so often for us, becomes an idol. And it's not that it's wicked. It's not that wisdom is bad. But we place the idol over what it's supposed to point to. And that is why wisdom can become so dangerous for us as Christians.

Because wisdom really is good and wisdom works and it helps us order our temporal lives and make good decisions in our lives. And it can give us a career and it can give you respect in this world. And it can put your name on a book and all these different things.

And then we can start to say, this is why I'm here. This is what makes me important. And the problem isn't wisdom. The problem is how we order wisdom. We take a means and it becomes the end. The gift from God has become God.

And that is why we have to watch. What are we asking wisdom to give us? Are we asking it to give you immortality? Because it won't. Are we asking it to give us permanent remembrance? It won't. Are we asking for it to give us our final satisfaction in this life?

It's just going to leave you wanting more, wondering more and more. And that's why Solomon says, why do I labor to be more wise? Now we have to be careful. We can read this and if you sit there and say, well, he's saying to be wise, but then he's saying it's vanity.

That's a contradiction. What do you mean? It's not. It's that Solomon's answered the questions in two parts. The first question is, is wisdom better than folly and madness? Yeah. If you're stranded on a desert island, I'd rather be with the guys from the grafting than the guy from the Batvia.

I'd rather be with a wise man than a mad man. But the second part of the question is, can wisdom become your end? No, it can't defeat death for you. It's good, but it's not that. So we have these two truths sitting beside us, that wisdom is good and it's useful, but that it also can't be our end.

Keeping Wisdom in Its Proper Place

So what do we do with that as Christians? Well, if you know anything about me, you know I'm a horrible driver. I can't drive. And Lanny's sitting there, I drove him home from beer night a few weeks ago.

He's probably like, I did not know that before I got in the car with him. Wow. No, I'm a horrible driver. And as I was driving and learning to drive, my mother would always tell me to keep it between the mayonnaise and the mustard.

Basically, don't run in this ditch, don't run in that ditch. Like keep it where you're supposed to be. I don't know how much it took. You can ask me later about my car wrecks. And that is exactly where we are with wisdom is that we've got to keep it between the mayonnaise and the mustard.

And I'm not saying that there's like this balance that we have to have of like, oh, we've got to find this perfect balance. No, it's that God has ordered wisdom for a certain purpose. And on one side, we make the error of we esteem it too highly.

We turn wisdom into the purpose of life. If I can just know enough, then I've done it. But Solomon's already shown us that that ends still in your death. It ends in you being forgotten. And it ends with all this wisdom going away.

However, there's another ditch that we hear all that and we say, well, if wisdom's just going to be forgotten, if my own kids won't even heed my words, if it won't do anything for me, then why bother becoming wise at all?

Why study? Because it takes time to be wise. You've got to study. You've got to gain experience. So why even bother with it? But Solomon has told us that there's profit in wisdom. Do we worship wisdom?

No. Do we despise wisdom? No. We put wisdom where God has put it. God has declared that wisdom is a means, not the end. Think about the picture that Solomon gave us, that the wise man eyes are in his head.

What are eyes for? That we can see where we are going. Our eyes help us to recognize where we're traveling. They help us to see, oh, there's a step there. I probably don't need to just sail off of it.

They plot our way. The point isn't just that you're looking around. That's not the point of it. The point is where you went because you can see. And that's what wisdom does. It helps us order our lives rightly.

It helps us recognize danger. It helps us govern our passions. It helps us turn this temporal life to good profit. Wisdom serves something beyond just being wise. And that's the pattern that we've seen throughout Ecclesiastes.

Pleasure's good. It's good to enjoy a good drink of wine. It's good to enjoy pleasure. Work is good. It's good to work. Wisdom is good. It's good to know things. It's good to be wise. The problem is when the good thing moves to the wrong place.

Pleasure makes a terrible God. As this course said, you're always going to be seeking the next thing. You will never get enough pleasure. Work is a horrible God. No matter what you do, it'll be left like the statue in Ozymandias of just a statue out in the desert with nothing there.

The problem isn't that pleasure and work are bad. It's the problem that we've disordered it. The means became the end. So we have to understand that our wisdom does not justify our existence. That you can simply toil for wisdom faithfully.

You can work faithfully. You can seek pleasure faithfully and enjoy those things without making them your end. And that's why we should know that we do not make wisdom a God to ourselves. We seek wisdom.

We know God's word. We study God's world. We learn from our experiences and we receive correction and consider consequences. So that brings us there. If wisdom isn't the end, if it won't save us from death, if it won't make us immortal, if it won't give us satisfaction, but it really is good, what is it here for?

Wisdom's Purpose: Fear God and Keep His Commandments

What is the purpose of wisdom? Solomon tells us exactly what wisdom is here for later in Ecclesiastes. He tells us, let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man.

There it is. That's why man is here and that is what wisdom is for. Once we understand what the end is, we can understand how everything falls into place. Wisdom is a means that God has given us to receive and to order our lives towards him.

There really is something beautiful that Solomon brings us. Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Wisdom begins with fearing God. Wisdom ordered takes us to him. That's why whenever you read the Westminster Shorter Catechism, it has this wonderful thing that what is the chief end of man?

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. And because of that, we know that wisdom allows us to govern our lives towards God. Why should we be wise? Why should we care about wisdom?

To order our temporal lives so it glorifies God. So we use our work, our pleasure and all these things to give the glory right back to God. Enjoy good things, work faithfully, read and study scripture.

Get wisdom, use wisdom and thank God. Thank God for wisdom. Let wisdom order your life under the sun and let it point you beyond wisdom itself, but to the one for whom you were made to serve. Do what Solomon tells us to do with our wisdom.

Use it to fear God and keep his commandments. For this is the whole duty of man. And that is the end of the matter of wisdom. Can you join me in prayer? Heavenly Father, Lord, you've given us so many gifts.

You've given us wisdom and pleasure and work. And far too often we take those and we move them around so that they don't serve you. But Lord, we thank you for giving them so that we can serve you. We thank you for giving us wisdom so that we can order our lives to follow you, so that we can order our lives to good profit under the sun so that we would enjoy the gifts that you've given us, Lord.

In Christ's name we pray, amen.