The Folly of Wisdom

Well, this morning we continue on in our study of Ecclesiastes, and this morning we'll complete

Chapter 1. We'll actually be heading toward Chapter 2 next week. But you should know that Chapter 1 does really carry into Chapter 2, and the section that we begin this morning with verse 12 properly belongs to Chapter 2, verse 26.

So the unit as a whole runs from 112 through 226.

And we'll have some comments about how that works structurally next week and perhaps the week after.

I'm not going to focus too much on structure and repetition this morning, but I do want to get us into the details of verses 12 through 18, which brings out one of the three prominent features that'll occupy this and Chapter 2.

Now, of course, the programmatic question we saw in Chapter 1, verse 3.

What prophet has a man from all of his labor in which he toils under the sun?

That is the question that haunts every chapter that will occupy this book, and it's part of the striving after the wind or the tending to the wind.

That's another possibility of that verb, a shepherding of the wind, trying to contain the uncontainable.

And the idea is that this is all taking place under the sun. That's the other important feature we've noticed for the past two weeks, that the framework of under the sun implies there's something also above the sun, a divine perspective, a place that wisdom can actually be secure, where even if the answers are not clear and present to us, we know that we can have a fixed hope and a surety that there is an answer.

Our hope can be in God, and that hope can be like an anchor for our souls. And so we're looking at Chapter 1, beginning in verse 12, and we have a total switch away from this introductory poem that in some ways corresponds to the whole book.

And now we're moving into, really, the body, and this is going to carry us toward another poem that will begin in Chapter 3.

So we have sort of an interlude between these two poems, and it's sort of a testimony. It's a testimony where Qohelet introduces himself properly speaking.

I, he says, beginning in verse 12, the preacher in our translation, was king over Israel and Jerusalem, and I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven, this burdensome task

God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and indeed all is vanity and grasping for the wind.

What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is lacking cannot be numbered. I communed with my heart, saying,

Look, I have attained greatness, I have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem.

My heart has understood a great wisdom and knowledge, and I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.

I perceive that this also is grasping for the wind, for in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Well this first section, beginning in Chapter 1, verse 12, finds

Qohelet reporting a series of reflections, of experiences that have brought him to that conclusion he's already stated at the outset.

All is vanity, all is striving, chasing, grasping at the wind.

All the accomplishments, all the wisdom, all the possessions that he'll boast, both here and in Chapter 2, are ultimately, in his eyes, futile.

According to John Golden Gay, there's really three parts to this larger section that ends in 226.

In this first section, that will take us up to verse 11 in Chapter 2, he's looking at the futility of achievement, of achieving wisdom or achieving possession, of seeking after pleasure or happiness in his life.

That will occupy the first section. Then in Chapter 2, verses 12 through 21, he begins to reflect on death, the ultimate futility that arises from the fact that nothing, no wisdom, no possession, no pleasure, can actually outlast or overcome death.

Death comes to all alike, whether those who have wisdom or those who lack it, those with great possessions or those with none.

Death as it is equalizes us all. And then in verses 22 through 26 in Chapter 2, he gives the sort of final conclusion on this, and he generalizes his own experience and reflects upon the experience of all man.

What good is there left in light of all of this? Well, let's look at our passage, the rest of Chapter 1, we'll go verse by verse and then come to some conclusions.

Beginning in verse 12, Ecclesiastes 1, verse 12, I, the preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem.

The first thing to note is the tense, I, the preacher, I, Kohelet, was king over Israel in Jerusalem.

There's a lot of speculation about why he's speaking in this tense. Solomon was a king to the very end, not to mention he speaks of a succession.

I had more than any who were before me in Jerusalem, most likely speaking to royal predecessors, but the only royal predecessor would have been

David, unless we account to sort of pre -royal figures. But here he's also speaking of himself in past tense.

This perhaps is simply Kohelet's way of looking over his whole life. Again, I'm going to treat it as historical

Solomon, though I'm open to literary device, but the idea is Solomon has almost removed his very identity as king as he reflects back on his life.

I was king. I had it all. I was the top dog on top of the world.

This past tense is a way of actually distancing himself from the life that he's lived.

He's sort of, as it were, taken his whole life and all that that life has amassed in status and achievement, in wisdom and in wealth, and he's put it on the examination table.

I was king. I sought out pleasure. I sought out wisdom. I had it all.

I was king over Israel in Jerusalem. This is taking the form of a testimony now, and that's very significant.

Think about the ways that we use testimony as Christians. When we share a testimony, especially to an unbeliever, what we're trying to do is explain something about what has happened in our life in a way that might correspond to their life.

In other words, as soon as we're testifying about our experience, about our life, we're inviting the person we're talking to to begin to compare and contrast their own experience and their own life with ours.

My life used to be this way, and then the Lord intervened, and he did a 180 in my life.

And when we're saying that testimony to someone, we're hoping that that person will go, well, I haven't done a 180.

The Lord hasn't intervened in my life. What would it look like for the Lord to intervene in my life? So a testimony is not a mere autobiography.

It's an invitation for comparison, and we're certainly meant to do that here.

Here is, as the figure of Solomon, here is the man who has achieved the highest statum of wisdom.

Think of 1 Kings 10. Think of the report of the Queen of Sheba. She herself testifies, truly this man has all the treasures of wisdom.

This man had the spirit of wisdom rest upon him. It's what he sought from the Lord, and he received it.

And so we're not going to be wiser than Solomon. If we're comparing this testimony, we can't think, yeah, but you don't know real wisdom, or you don't know real wealth, or you don't know real power.

No one can go toe -to -toe with this testimony. That's part of the point. And so the audience, us, we're meant to compare our life.

If the good life consists in us achieving our self -desired goals, who is a better foil to that than Solomon?

Solomon sought out for wisdom, for pleasure, for status, for gain, and he got it all in spades.

And what is his reflection now that he's putting it out on the examination table? Futility, vanity, a chasing after the wind.

We're going to see this again and again in chapter 2. If the good life consists in us actualizing our desire, actualizing our potential, achieving the things that we work so hard, that we seek after, that we hope for, that we pray for even, if the good life consists in this, then

Solomon has nothing to tell us. That for many of us sitting in this room, that's the good life, for me to actualize my goals, to fulfill my desires, to achieve the things that I'm seeking after.

Solomon's saying, you're not hearing me. That's not the good life. That's chasing after the wind.

If anyone sought a good life, it was me, and guess what? I was the king. You ever see

The Lion King, the great animated classic? What does

Simba sing in all this joyful exuberance when he's been out in the jungle in exile for all this time?

I just can't wait to be king. He has no idea of the toil and the burdens of being a king.

And that's what, if I remember the bird right, is it Zazu the bird or whatever? He's like, no, no, you don't understand. This isn't actually going to be a good thing.

You shouldn't actually desire to be the king, in his own way of saying, heavy the head that wears the crown.

So the sword of Damocles is dangling over Solomon's neck as it were. I was king.

If the good life consisted in this, I would have achieved it by now. I would have had it.

If anyone else was grasping after wind, I would have been the one that finally caught it. But no, I'm no different than anyone else.

That'll be his conclusion in chapter two. In this way, the wise king is speaking as a fool.

I love this interplay. Paul sometimes does this. I'm speaking like a fool. I hope you'll just allow me to speak in this way.

This is high rhetoric. When I think of the figure or the rhetoric of the jester, the fool, it's a foil to all the pageantry and wisdom and power of royalty.

In the medieval court, in the Renaissance court, this was a very enigmatic figure, the figure of the jester.

This one who, unlike the royal advisors, could actually be bold enough to mock the king and not lose his head.

Part of that was because he was the clown. He might have a very wise thing to say.

He might be bold enough to say it because everyone could dismiss him as merely being a clown. But the point of that figure, especially in later literary appropriation, is that he's foolish enough to speak wisdom to power.

In some cases, in some literary tropes, the jester is in the best position to speak wisdom.

In other words, the wisest of wise men is the fool. And I like to think of this in terms of what

Solomon, what Qohelet is doing here. I sought wisdom, and all of my wisdom amounted to foolishness.

I sought to get at the very heart of knowledge, and all of my knowledge rang hollow.

Even this pursuit to know, to have insight, to understand has been chasing after the wind.

To seek knowledge and lack it, to strive after insight and never achieve it, is essentially to be in the position of a fool.

There's things you can't understand, you don't know, you're ignorant, you're a fool. This is actually, in some ways, the genius of wisdom literature.

That by admitting our ignorance, we become wise. By owning or acknowledging our limitations, we actually become strong.

And so we're going to find this rhetoric again and again throughout the book of Ecclesiastes. I know some of you homeschoolers are in Shakespeare.

Maybe you've read King Lear. What a perfect presentation of what's going on here with Ecclesiastes.

King Lear, if you're unfamiliar with this story, he's an old man and he wants to bequeath his inheritance to his daughters.

And he's wondering, this is a rather foolish test, which of his three daughters love him the most? Two of the daughters would throw him out to the dogs.

They have absolutely not a thread of love for him. And so they put on this pageantry and this falsity and they try to schmooze him and win him over so they can receive that inheritance.

His true love, the daughter that loves him dearly, more than her own life, Cordelia, she won't feign it.

She's actually quite offended at this little game that he's presenting. And the other daughters, they use this as a reason to distance their father from Cordelia.

And so she becomes indignant and in an outrage, King Lear casts her away.

And she's cut out from the inheritance and cut off from his life and then shortly after, as a result of his other daughters' treachery, he loses his kingdom.

He loses everything, as it were, in a night except for the jester, the fool that accompanies him.

And then throughout the rest of this play, this fool is the only one that's speaking sense, wisdom, rationality, as King Lear, in a fit of madness, has lost his mind.

And the more ridiculous King Lear becomes, the more wise the fool appears. That is such a wonderful lens to think about what's going on in Ecclesiastes.

The more ridiculous some of these claims seem to be, the more wise they are, the more profound.

As Ian Cott, in a writing, Shakespeare, a contemporary, put it, the fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize the world as rational.

That's a very Kohelet -like statement. The fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize this world as rational.

Again, that cuts against the grain of our proverb's dominant model of, if I do the right things and I pull the lever,

I get this result. We introduced Ecclesiastes with this idea of the uncontrollability of the world.

You get these wonderful interchanges in the dialogue. In a fit of rage,

King Lear says, do you call me a fool? How dare you speak to power, to majesty?

But he's been reduced to rubble. And the fool says, well, all your other titles you've given away.

The fool says, I'm better than you are now, though I'm a fool and I'm nothing. Then he says to the king, if you were my fool,

I would have you beaten for being old before your time. And King Lear said, how is that?

And the fool said, you should not have been this old until you had been wise. So the fool in this play becomes the truth teller, the figure of wisdom.

He saw through the daughter's ploy. He saw that Cordelia was actually steadfast in her love.

He's actually loyal to King Lear, and now he's the only one speaking truly and rationally. And the idea here, as John Pageau says, had the king listened to the fool, his demise would not have been so complete.

What I'm saying with Ecclesiastes 1 is, if we listen to the fool, our demise won't be so complete.

Listening to the foolish words of the once wise king who's seen the hollow fragility of life for what it is.

Only when we're willing to stare down and walk in to that kind of darkness can we begin to appreciate the light and the solidity of the

Christian hope. In the same way I say, without true sorrow, you can never get true joy.

Without true darkness, you can never get true light. If you're not willing to stare at all of the challenges and uncomfortable facets of Ecclesiastes, you'll never understand the heart of wisdom that it gives to us.

First, verse 13. I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven, this burdensome task

God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised.

Notice first what Kohelet says. I set my heart to seek. So not only, as he said,

I've put my kingship on the examination table, he says, I've even put my heart on the examination table.

Notice how he speaks of his heart. I set my heart to seek it. It's like he's ordering his heart to go do something.

Heart, go and figure this out. So he's removed his identity from his heart, partly because he wants to analyze his heart.

He doesn't want to just acquire knowledge, he wants to understand the process of acquiring knowledge.

As he'll conclude, this too is vanity. So he sets his heart to seek out knowledge, to seek out insight or wisdom, and he's reflecting on perception itself.

He's reflecting on the process of discovery. It's as if he's watching the gears of his brain.

He understakes with the help of this heart, set now to work, in his words, all of the deeds or all of the happenings that take place under heaven.

And this could, again, speak of all action in general. There's actually a way to point to Hebrew that it would speak of his predecessors.

I think the idea is, in light of the poem we've just left, it's the scope of everything that takes place under the sun.

I sought it all. I've observed it all. I've studied it all.

I've been in the library. I've sent all my advisors. I've sent the very brightest, the sharpest knives in the drawer.

They've all been my henchmen in this endeavor. I listened to their surveys and their reports.

I've read all the summaries. I've come to all the bottom lines. And he says, this burdensome task

God has given to the sons of men, by which they may be exercised. What does that mean?

It's not the most helpful translation. This burdensome task God has given to the sons of men, by which they may be exercised.

The idea is that they'd be busy in this. So some translations, this sore travail, or this sad occupation, or this sorry business, this thankless, grievous task, this is what

God has given men. This heavy, unhappy burden to look at and survey and study everything that's done under the sun.

And he says, I was looking for some conclusion, some insight, some key to make sense of it all, but it was all frustrating.

It was all hopeless. Though I applied my wisdom, though I applied my strength and might, it all came up shorthanded.

It all came up empty. Now, we need to remember why he's saying here that God has given to the sons of men this task to search out all that is done under the sun.

I think that in some ways is going to correlate to where we're going in chapter 3, which is that God has put eternity within our hearts.

This is why God has given to man this task, this toil, this burden to actually study and observe and try to think through and conclude things about what life is and what life's for and where life's going.

We can't but do that because eternity is set within our hearts. This is the toilsome task that God has given to the sons of men.

No one opts out of this. The fool can distract himself, but those distractions in the end always become the haunting companions of the fool.

There's no distraction that is so complete that the fortress of the conscience isn't pressed in to the image of God.

Koholet recognizes, I didn't distract myself. I didn't turn away. I didn't try to run away from this task.

I put my shoulder into it. I scoured the earth, and all

I came up with was a labyrinth of meaninglessness. I love the idea of a labyrinth.

Doug Wilson in his book, Joy at the End of the Tether, he says, the fool thinks he has changed to a dungeon wall, but the wise man knows it's actually a labyrinth.

Pleasures, delights, sensations, all their cousins will only send a man first on this fool's errand, and then on that, and then on that.

A foolish man thinks there's just this static bondage that I'm chained to. If we understand what

Ecclesiastes is saying, he's saying, no, life isn't being chained to something static. Life is this labyrinth.

And I walked harder and more carefully than anyone has ever walked the labyrinth of life, and I couldn't find my way through it.

I couldn't get to the end. I couldn't put it all into perspective. And the idea is, if I couldn't do it, who could do it?

And yet, walk through this labyrinth, we must. One of my favorite authors,

Juan Jorge Luis Borges, who is obsessed with the image and the metaphor of labyrinths, and he wrote, he was a librarian in Madrid, and just incredibly well read, and you can look up some of his poetry and some of his writings, and he had these little short stories, and one of my favorite short stories is this image of the labyrinth.

Again, this was a favorite occupation of his. And the short story is called

Two Kings and Two Labyrinths, and it goes something like this. A Babylonian king orders his subjects to build him the most complex, convoluted labyrinth they could possibly create.

And when an Arab king, a vassal king, visits his court, the king orders this man to walk through the labyrinth and see if he can actually figure his way out.

Frustrated, desperate, as this man is nearing the end of his wit, the end of his life, perhaps, he begs to be released from the labyrinth, and the

Babylonian king lets him out. Well, the tides of war change, and soon it's the Arab king who has the upper hand, and he finds the

Babylonian king being brought captive to him, and he wants to take his revenge. But instead of building this complex labyrinth that he would be stuck traveling through, he just sets him into the desert.

And that's the short story. And the whole point was, the Arab king recognized the most complex labyrinth isn't something an architect can build, it's life itself.

That's the point of the story. That's what Qohelet is saying.

Verse 14, I have seen all of the works that are done under the sun, and all is vanity, all is grasping for the wind.

All the works, that doesn't necessarily mean just deeds, it can also mean the events.

Anything that happens, whatever it may be, if it's under the sun, it's vanity.

It's grasping after the wind. In other words, despite all of the deeds, all of the works, all of the events, all of the accomplishments of man throughout history, they're ultimately futile because, as we saw in this opening poem, the circuit of the sun, the circuit of the wind, and the circuit of the streams remains unchanged.

For all that man does to stomp terra firma, he's never actually able to overcome that which is crooked.

That's verse 15. What is crooked cannot be made straight. What is lacking can't even be counted.

Here you see the heart of the frustration. In all of his wisdom, with all of his wealth and might,

Solomon set out to have some insight, some understanding that could make sense of the labyrinth of life, some sense of why the world is the way it is, some sense of how to overcome and find meaning and joy and fulfillment in life.

He already had a pretty good head start compared to almost anyone else in the world, but his conclusion is, no, at some point you just keep staring ever closer and ever closer to things that are crooked, and things that are crooked cannot be made straight.

In fact, the more I've looked for things, the more that I've found lacking, the things that I tried to find

I found missing to such an extent I can't even count them. The closer my magnifying glass came, the more

I realized how futile, how hopeless this endeavor was. I realized in the end

I'm no different than the fool. Well, this first part, what is crooked cannot be made straight, is held out to be a traditional proverb.

It's not the only time we're going to see it in Ecclesiastes. It will reappear in chapter 7. What Kohelet is saying here is that there's something about the way the world is that is so fixed that all of man's ingenuity, all of the wisdom and power and prowess cannot actually fix it or address it or change it.

Notice also this construction. It's a passive construction which implies perhaps divine agency.

In other words, what God has made crooked cannot be straightened. That's the idea.

What is crooked cannot be made straight. God has built the status, the condition, the affairs of this world in a certain way that accords to his wisdom and his ends.

Solomon sought to understand that, to get in line with that, to master that, only to realize how hopeless that was.

In the end, he throws his hands up in despair and says, it's all crooked. I can't straighten it out.

I can't even account for what's missing. This isn't something that believers alone feel.

What's that great worship song? I think it's Chris Tomlin, Is He Worthy. And the whole opening of that worship song is, do you feel the world is broken?

And then the church is supposed to reply, we do. That's not just something that the church acknowledges.

Is there anyone that we've ever met that doesn't think the world is broken? Maybe a three -year -old, maybe a five -year -old.

Is there anyone who's lived this life, who's had human experience, that can't acknowledge the crooked things under the sun?

The things that can't be made straight? Here, already in chapter one, with this task of surveying wisdom as a potential gain for all of man's toil under the sun, we run headlong into the problem of evil.

And you're very familiar with treatments that alleviates

God of responsibility, and Ecclesiastes doesn't do that. Again, it's a divine passive,

I would argue. What God has made crooked, man cannot straighten out.

What God has allowed to be missing or to be lacking, man can't even number, much less fulfill.

We don't say God has nothing to do with earthquakes or house fires. That's part of the problem.

It's one of the reasons we can't even begin to encounter a book like Ecclesiastes. We want to have candyland renditions of divine sovereignty.

God is only responsible for the good things that happen under the sun.

What does Amos 3 say? Is there evil in a city and the Lord hasn't done it? There's a lot of preachers that want to exonerate or alleviate

God of any activity or agency. That's not what the Lord Jesus does. When the

Tower of Siloam falls, he doesn't say, oh, my father didn't know about that. He had nothing to do with that. That must have been the evil one.

He says, unless you repent, you will likewise perish. Clay doesn't talk back to the potter.

So the idea that God is to be kept away from any responsibility or accountability is not going to be the thing that Koholet is wrestling with.

What's crooked under the sun can't be straight. What's lacking, what's missing in this experience can't even be numbered.

Man can't straighten out. Man can't manage the effects of the fall. Spurgeon put it so memorably.

I remember how impactful this was to me when I first came across it when I was cutting my teeth on Calvinism 20 -something years ago.

Spurgeon said of Adam in the garden before the fall, he had perfect strength in his arm.

But even then, he couldn't obey the law of God. And if he couldn't do it when he had perfect strength in his arm, how will he complete that task when his arm has been broken?

And that's the point. Everything's crooked now. Fallen man can't straighten that out because fallen man is why things are crooked.

Fallen man can't account for the things that lack because fallen man is why things lack. This is what

Koholet is wrestling with. Think of how this accords with the book of Job.

Again, we hold together wisdom literature. You have Proverbs on one side, Ecclesiastes on the other, and in different ways, they both have some purchase on the life of Job.

They both explain and in some ways illustrate things about their core, about their focus.

If we could say loosely, roughly, a more positive, optimistic view of life, a more cynical or pessimistic view of life.

Both of those things come colliding together in the book of Job. And Job sets out at the very beginning with God's responsibility for the evil that befalls

Job and his household. It is not Satan that comes asking for Job so much as the

Lord that says, have you considered my servant? Right there, wisdom literature is introducing us to a cold splash of water that we're not very comfortable with.

It feels like a minefield to dodge some of these things theologically.

That's part of the point of this. Not to have that candy land theology, but actually get to the depth of the things that are so dark that after the day of trouble comes, we find

Job in a ditch, scraping himself with potsherds, having his own wife begging him to curse

God. And God brought that about. One of, in my mind, one of the great masterpiece films of the past century is

Terence Malik's Tree of Life, which is a meditation on Job. And it takes place in a mid -century family with a brother and a son that's lost in war and the impact of that loss on the family.

And the father who had all of this ambition was a very stern man seeking to be successful.

Had a real talent that he felt he spurned and he, in many ways, lived in the remorse of that and took it out on his family.

And it's the reflection of this older man on the meaning of that loss and his mother's faith in many ways and his sense of that presence and purpose of God that was as clear as it was bewildering.

The Lord has done it. That's clear. But why did he allow it?

That's dark. And in this film, one of my favorite scenes in this film, because it's so true to life, the whole thing's done like shards and glimmers of nostalgic memories, including him just climbing over pews and the family sitting there bored and him half paying attention to the preacher preaching from the book of Job.

So the whole family's there. They haven't even gone through the tragedy yet.

I love that they show, for all the things that seem so solid and real and tangible and secure at this moment, the word of God that's being preached from the pulpit from the book of Job seems like chaff.

It's just words. Words are weak things. Words are transitory and meaningless. And soon enough, by the end of the film, you realize, no, the thing that was chaff, the thing that was transitory like a passing vapor, was the life and the relationships and the things that seemed so secure.

The only thing that lasted was the truth of God's word that was being preached. All flesh is like grass, but the word of God endures forever.

And the scene captures that so well. Again, the family doesn't even have a place to receive this or apply it in their life.

But here's the sermon as I've transcribed it. Job imagined he might build his nest on high, that the integrity of his behavior would protect him against misfortune.

That's a Proverbs -dominant way of living life, isn't it? If I do the right things and I pull the lever,

I get the blessed, fruitful life. If something goes wrong, I've done something wrong.

I can fix that. I can account for that. Job imagined he built his nest on high, that the integrity of his behavior would protect him against misfortune.

And his friends thought mistakenly that the Lord could only have punished him because secretly he had done something wrong.

But no. Misfortune befalls the good as well. We can't protect ourselves against it.

We can't protect our children. We can't say to ourselves, well, even if I'm not happy, I'm going to make sure they are.

We vanish like a cloud. We wither like autumn grass, like trees that are rooted up.

Is there some fraud in the scheme of the universe? Is there nothing which is deathless?

Nothing which doesn't pass away? But we cannot stay where we are. We have to journey forth.

And we must find that which is greater than fortune or fate. Nothing can bring us peace but that.

Is the body of the wise man or the just exempt from any pain, from any disquietude, from the deformity that might blight his beauty, from the weakness that destroys his health?

That's actually just from Augustine's City of God. Job too was close to the

Lord. Do you trust him? Are your friends and children your security? There's no hiding place in the world where trouble won't find you.

No one knows when sorrow might visit his house any more than Job did. In the very moment everything was taken away from him, he knew it was the

Lord who had taken it away. He turned from the passing shows of time and began to seek that which is eternal.

And then, quoting Kierkegaard, the very moment everything was taken away, he knew it was the

Lord. Does he alone see God's hand who sees that he gives?

Does he not also see God's hand who sees that he takes? Does he alone see

God turning his face toward him? Does he not also see God turning his back from him?

This is essentially what Koholet is doing in chapter 1. Look at verses 16 and 17.

I communed with my heart. I set my heart out to seek and it came back and this is what it reported.

I sat down over coffee and said, tell me everything. And this is what my heart said.

Look, I've attained greatness. I've gained more wisdom than all who are before me in Jerusalem.

My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge. And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly and I perceive this is all grasping for the wind.

He can already tell where it's going. He can already see the foregone conclusion.

For all this pursuit of knowledge and wisdom of insight, the contrast of wisdom, which is madness and folly, there's nothing that he won't leave behind.

No stone unturned. He recognizes, verse 18, in much wisdom is much grief.

Kew increases knowledge, increases sorrow. Have you heard that phrase, ignorance is bliss?

Here's the other side of that coin. To increase knowledge is to increase sorrow. Now there's some commentators and there's some preachers who come to the end of chapter 1 and they're feeling down in the pits of despair and they're going, well, really, he's just pretending to be an atheist.

He's putting on a secular way of looking at the world and that's why he's talking in this way. Oh, don't worry.

This isn't actually how Christians think. Or they say, well, this was the Old Testament and surely it seemed hopeless, but now because of the fullness of time and the light of Christ, we know that there's actually nothing but joy and fulfillment and the things we can know.

I hope no one in this room thinks so superficially of a book like this. It is

Job. It is Kohelet. It is Solomon that has come to the right conclusion in much wisdom is much grief and increasing in knowledge increases sorrow.

The more insight he obtained, the deeper his grief became. He became vexed and sorrowful as he began to look at the strands and the fibers of what

God alone was weaving and that only God could actually fathom, only God could understand.

Wisdom was revealing not just the glories, but the troubles, the perplexities, the difficulties of life.

He sought meaning in madness and folly and frustration and pain. He sought the thing and its opposite and he only found that to be more vexing, more confusing, more frustrating.

It was an ecologist, Brent Niedergaul points this out in a devotional, it was an ecologist named

Aldo Leopold who was classifying plants that were becoming extinct and he said of these plants that no one had an eye for, no one really cared about their disappearance and he said, we grieve only for what we know.

We grieve only for what we know. You see the point there.

If we grieve only for what we know and Solomon sought to know everything, then Solomon grieved much.

Think about it in terms of a child. Some of you are children. I'm not speaking figuratively.

Some of you are literally children. What's the biggest problem in your life right now, children?

What's the biggest stressor? What's the biggest trouble? It would be the kind of trouble or stress that if you told an adult, they would laugh and think it's very cute.

As you increase in knowledge, so your trouble will increase and as your trouble increases, so will your sorrow increase.

At some point in God's mercy to us as human beings, we become so frail that our memories begin to fail and maybe that and that alone pads some of the sorrow and anguish of life.

We just can't remember as much as we used to. We can't even think. We become very narrow on just getting through the day.

That's a mercy from God that he gives to the elders. As far as Koholet is concerned, to increase in knowledge is to increase in sorrow.

We grieve only for what we know. It is a mercy that God shields us from the depths of knowledge that we could have.

Some of us are sorrowful enough just because we have certain headlines that blast our cell phones or our home screens.

We see some of the news headlines and at some point we even realize, I need to stop listening to these broadcasts.

I need to stop looking at my phone. This is putting me into a tailspin. There's so much evil and corruption and violence and injustice in the world.

My blood pressure is through the roof. To increase in that kind of knowledge is to increase in sorrow, in vexation.

If it's not for that, it's just to realize, as he says, I can't even count the things that are missing. For every one thing

I try to understand, there's two or three more things I can't understand. In this never -ending quest, we come right up against our limitations.

I don't think AI is going to help us in this endeavor. I think we're going to become so dumb that we won't be able to even use

AI to be an accessory for our intelligence. It's like we have that with Google.

Can you imagine what our predecessors would do with a search engine? Anything you want to know factually, historically, is just a few keystrokes away.

We have that right now and we don't even do anything with that. If you look at my search history, it's like, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?

That's about it. Everything else, it's like, I could know it, and therefore,

I'll figure it out some other day. What's AI going to do for that kind of ignorance?

We live with the bliss of ignorance as a society. We're only increasing in that.

Kohlet is evaluating knowledge and he's finding it to be, at its very heart, absurd.

The process, limitations, the inability, the inadequacy, the inexplicability of it all, it's absurd.

And he recognizes, at the very heart, those who seem to know the most are the most gloomy. Too often, the more you learn about life, the more reasons you have to be burdened by it, to even despair of it.

The more you learn about the way the world really is, the more problems you encounter and begin to understand, the more helpless you begin to feel.

You realize how impossible it seems to change anything. Truly, what is crooked cannot be made straight, not under the sun, not by crooked people.

So Kohlet is reflecting on all of these things. He recognizes, at some level, this pursuit toward wisdom has come up empty -handed.

In Chapter 2, he's going to have another pursuit. Okay, if that didn't work, then I'll try this, and I'll try something else.

We're going to see these futile attempts for what they really are as we work through Chapter 2.

We come to the conclusion that Jerome, a 4th century

Christian and commentator, he said this, Kohlet set his mind, first of all, to acquire wisdom.

And pursuing this beyond what is allowed, he wanted to know the causes and the reasons. Why children are so easily taken by the evil one?

Why the righteous and the wicked are both punished in shipwrecks? Whether these events happen as a result of fate or by the decree of God, and if by fate, then where is providence?

And if by decree, then where is justice? With such desire to know these things, he said,

I understand the torturing anxiety experienced in surveying, but this was given by God to man in order that man would desire to know that which he is not allowed to know.

That's well put by Jerome. God has put us in this life and experience under the sun that we would desire to know that which we are not allowed to know.

That too brings us back to Job, thinks he's finally understanding it all, and there is some fraud, there is some scheme in the universe, until God cuts him down to size.

The end of Job is not some light bulb recognition that he's figured it all out.

Neither will chapter 12 in Ecclesiastes be some light bulb moment of, now

I have understood it all. That doesn't come to us. It ends with Job repenting in ashes.

It ends with us realizing the only thing that we can do is to fear

God and obey what he's commanded. Because in much wisdom, there's just grief.

And increasing in knowledge just increases sorrow. I have this meme.

If I remember, I'll send it to everyone this afternoon. It's a throwback, but I love it.

It's like some faculty yearbook from some university, I have no idea. And it has two, perhaps, relatives.

They both have the last name Schumacher. One of them is apparently a professor of theology or of religion.

And it's this picture of a man with a rounded face and he has a nice mustache and he has this hearty smile.

Looks like Christmas morning, and he's this professor of theology, and he's like, yeah. And then the picture right next to him is another

Schumacher, and he's a professor of philosophy. And he's gaunt, and he has dark circles under his eyes, and there's no smile.

I like to think of Kohelet as the perfect marriage of these two Schumachers. A smile with really dark circles under his eyes.

And somehow you have to begin with the second of those two images, Kohelet the philosopher, before you get to Kohelet the theologian.

I was reading this week a tremendous little book by Alistair McGrath. The book's title is

What's the Point of Theology? Wisdom, Wellbeing, and Wonder. He says, many have a sense today of simply being overwhelmed with information and unable to discern meaning in wisdom.

And he points to this sonnet that was written in 1939 by a woman named

Edna St. Vincent Millay. Think 1939, what's happening in 1939. Europe is descending into war.

And we think of ourselves being in the information age, but she's reflecting on this. There's no shortage of information dropping into our lap with all of the hopeful promises that we'll finally be able to understand and make sense of it all.

And this is what she's reflecting. She says, it seemed impossible to make sense of things.

Upon this gifted age in its darkest hour rains from the sky a meteoric shower of facts.

They lie unquestioned, uncombined. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill is daily spun.

Let me say that again. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill is daily spun.

In other words, there's enough wisdom, enough insight, enough facts being reported that if we could somehow put it all together, surely there'd be no trouble.

Surely there'd be no ill. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill is daily spun, but there exists no loom to weave it into fabric.

It's a big pile of labyrinthine thread. We don't have the loom to put it all together, to make sense of it all.

This endless barrage of facts, unquestioned, can never be combined to the meaning that we seek.

You see the point? How can I live meaningfully in a world that appears meaningless?

And here, McGrath, in this chapter, points to the theology of Martin Luther, especially his early writings, because that's one of Luther's primary concerns.

How can we live meaningfully in a very dark and chaotic world, a world with all sorts of threats and unknown troubles awaiting?

For him, for Luther, the only reliable foundation was

God as he's made himself known in Christ Jesus. He puts this in the greater catechism of 1529.

He says, Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, really is your

God. Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, really is your

God. If we're being honest, there's a lot of things in our life that we look to, that we rely on, that we believe we can depend upon.

To the degree that we're relying and depending on them, they're pulling the support and the sight and the drive away from God.

Here we find this core belief, this attitude, this relationship that defines how we see ourselves and how we see the world.

That's Luther's concern. If you're not looking at the world through Christ who brings us to the

Father, if you're not understanding the difficulties and darkness of life through a theology of the cross, then you're going to be building a reliance and independence on something else, somewhere else, somehow else.

So in his early lectures on the Psalms, Luther was drawn to one of many, Psalm 18, verse 11.

It speaks of God dwelling in darkness. He made darkness his secret place. His canopy around him was dark waters, thick clouds of the sky.

Think of Exodus 33. This God who is somehow present, but in his presence he's absent.

He's inapproachable. He's not somehow obvious. He's not in the place we expect to find him.

He's veiled. Luther develops this theme. For Luther, faith is trusting in Christ in the darkness of the world, in the darkness of life.

God dwells in darkness, but in that darkness, by faith, we know he's present and he's for us.

Even if our life, our knowledge, our experience is unable to penetrate that darkness, this is faith.

This is the essence of faith. I can't bottle,

I can't contain, I can't point or photograph God's presence in the midst of the darkness.

My life seems to be very little different in terms of random trouble or trial than someone who has no faith whatsoever.

Blessing and trial flies upward like spark, but here is faith.

In the midst of that darkness, in that impenetrable presence, I know there is a God who is for me. I know there is a

God who is with me. This, for Luther, is the wisdom of the cross.

It's a theology of the cross because that's how Christ exercised faith in his Father.

In the midst of that impenetrable darkness, he trusted the Father that he was crying out to be revealed.

Father, Father, why have you forsaken me? For Luther, that's part of the lot of the

Christian life. Where is the presence of my Father? It's veiled in darkness. So then by faith,

I endure. By faith, I press on to fear and obey the one who is both present and hidden from me.

We opened our service with this response of reading. Where can wisdom be found? Where is the place of understanding?

Man doesn't know its value. You won't find it in the land of the living. Isn't that what

Kohilet is telling us? Even the deep says it's not here. The sea say it's not with me.

Where does wisdom actually reside? Where is the place of understanding? It's hidden from the eyes of all who live.

Who has wisdom? Who has understanding? It's spelled out for us in Job 28.

Only God understands its way. Only God knows its place. He looks to the ends of the earth.

He sees under the whole heaven. Why? Because he's above the sun. He's in the heaven of heavens. This knowledge, this wisdom, this insight, it's not possible for me to attain.

That's what Kohilet is saying. For the unbeliever, that's a cry of despair.

It's not possible for me to attain, to make sense, to understand, to finally close my jaws on that meaning, on that satisfaction, on that sense of purpose.

As soon as it seems near, it slips through my fingers. But to the believer, it becomes the basis of assurance.

I cannot attain, for the unbeliever becomes the Lord you know of the believer.

I don't need to attain. I don't need to understand. I don't need to have the path figured out to know all that lies upon it.

I don't need to have the plan and all the things that correspond to that to make it through.

I can't know it. I simply relinquish my life to the one who does.

That's what Psalm 139 says, isn't it? Lord, look at these verbs. Look at these verbs.

It's the opposite of what Colette is saying. I can't know. I can't understand.

I can't comprehend. I'm not acquainted. I can't make sense of it all. Look at Psalm 139.

Lord, you've searched me and know me. You know my sitting down, my rising up. You understand my thoughts.

You comprehend my path, my lying down. You're acquainted with all my ways. Lord, if there's a word on my tongue, you know it altogether.

You've hedged me in behind before. Altogether, you've laid your hand upon me.

What does he say? Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. I can't attain it. Do you see what

David is saying? I don't need to attain it. I couldn't attain it. I can't know.

I can't fathom. I can't understand. Only God can do that. Wisdom is of the

Lord. This is what Luther is saying. This is the wisdom of the cross.

The wisdom of the cross is you can't see how this is for your good and my glory.

You can't see how light is present in the veil of darkness. That's the cross, the wisdom of the cross.

Where we think God is active, how we think God is moving. Sometimes it's the very place he's not acting.

The very way he's moving against. That's what the disciples had to learn again and again and again. Who would expect

God's presence to be at this grisly execution scene on Mount Calvary? That's the whole point of it all.

That's what Paul is reflecting on when he thinks of wisdom. He says the message of the cross is foolishness.

To those that are seeking wisdom, you want the answer of life? You want the key to it all?

You want to know how to live the good life? The answer is a bloody stump on Golgotha.

Bring that to Richard Dawkins. Bring that to these peacock -like men of learnedness, men of letters.

It's foolishness to them. For us, it's the very wisdom of God. The message of the cross is foolishness to those who perish, to those who are being saved.

It's the power of God. It's written, God says, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise.

I'll bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age?

Didn't God make foolish the wisdom of the world? Koholet has surveyed it all.

He's found it all to be bankrupt, hollow, empty. That's what Paul is saying. God has done it in this way so that no flesh can glory in his presence.

That presence is a veiled presence. That's a presence that's only understood and encountered by faith.

Again, this is the lens. It's the theology of the cross. It's the heart of Luther's understanding of faith.

That God is somehow present to the believer in darkness, in loneliness, in lowliness, in despair.

Another novel, as we come toward a conclusion. Cormac McCarthy, a classic

American writer, and he wrote this novel a few years ago called The Passenger. And it captures the story of the protagonist,

Bobby, who at the beginning of it, he's tormented by his sister who's committed suicide. It's disrupted and torn its whole life in two.

But as he reflects on the passage of time and how that in some ways keeps erasing his sister's life and what that meant, he also reflects on how that's true of civilization itself.

Whole worlds have passed away simply by the incessant march of time. At first he found this very distressing.

He doesn't know what to do about it. By the end of the novel, as I was reading an article by Mark Johnson, a literary appropriation of it, he said, by the end of it, the protagonist is trying to connect to the transcendence of life.

He's trying to learn how to pray. Instead of searching for the origin of darkness, he ultimately accepts the mystery of creation.

That to me is Ecclesiastes 1 in a nutshell. I searched for the difference between wisdom and folly.

I went to the ends of the earth and tried to squeeze out every fiber of insight possible.

I looked for the origin of darkness itself, for why crooked things are crooked and how they could possibly be made straight.

And at the end of it all, like a fool, I realized all I can do is accept the mystery of creation.

There's a line in the novel that I came across. It's why I looked into the novel. Where he writes, people will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming.

This world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep. What I was saying last week is that we need to learn through Ecclesiastes how to trace our sorrows.

I fear we are nowhere near a theology of the cross. We are what Luther criticized, a theology of glory.

Theology so abstract that the life of Christ is abstract as our

Candyland eschatology. We might as well not read Ecclesiastes at all if we don't begin to learn how to trace our sorrow.

We can begin to ask the question in this way, do you really grasp what it means for Christ to be a man of sorrows?

Don't have a quick answer to that. Do you reflect deeply on what is contained in the sorrows that Christ experienced?

Christ, in his state of humiliation, became dependent upon the Spirit of God for all things.

He divested himself of anything that would make him something other than the mediator for his image bearers.

And so in that sense, he had to be in every respect as we are, yet without sin. There is no sorrow that you could plumb in your life that doesn't have its fullness in the life of Christ.

We just don't even reflect on that. A theology of the cross recognizes this dependence upon the

Spirit. Think about this, brothers and sisters. Christ lacked wisdom unless and until the

Spirit of wisdom granted it. We simply see this just by understanding

Isaiah 11. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding. Or in Luke chapter 2, he had to grow in wisdom and stature.

Do we lack wisdom? Are we dependent upon the Spirit? Does that put us into mortal combat with the ways of the world and the evil one?

Christ plumbed the fullness of that kind of life in a way that we don't even begin to reflect.

So when the Christ hymn in Philippians 2 says, let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, we take that and say, let this dependence be in you that was also in Christ Jesus.

Let this sorrow be in you that was also in Christ Jesus. And perhaps then and perhaps only then can you find the joy that was in Christ Jesus.

The joy of a perfect communion with his Father. Though he lacked wisdom and clarity and insight, in every respect as we were, he was dependent upon the

Word of God and the revelation of God and the illumination and guidance of the Spirit in every way as we are.

We need to reflect on the humiliation of our Savior in this way.

It's the only way we can begin to understand. Ecclesiastes chapter 1.

Who had more wisdom than Christ? Who increased in knowledge more than Christ?

This is Solomon's greater son. No wonder we can say, in much wisdom is much grief, and knowledge increases sorrow.

This is why he was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. He knew what was in man, the

Gospel of John says. I shudder to think of that.

The peerless Son of God, late in flesh appearing, knowing the full extent of what is in us.

And he's a man of sorrows, full of mercy. I, the preacher, was king over Israel and Jerusalem.

I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven, this burdensome task

God has given to the sons of men. By this they are exercised. I've seen all the works that are done under the sun.

Indeed, all is vanity grasping for the wind. What's crooked cannot be made straight. What's lacking can't even be counted.

I communed with my heart saying, look, I've attained greatness. I've gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem.

My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge, and I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.

I perceive this as a grasping of the wind, and much wisdom is much grief. He who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Where can wisdom be found? Where is the place of understanding? We don't know its value.

It's not here in the land of the living. The deep doesn't have it. The sea doesn't own it. Where does wisdom come from?

What place does it inhabit? It's hidden from all of our eyes. It's concealed to the birds of the air, but God understands it.

He knows its place. He understands its way. He appoints it as he sees the ends of the earth.

He sees under the whole of heavens. What's the conclusion of Psalm 90 to all of that? Teach us to number our days.

That's the conclusion to it all. That's exactly where Kohilet is going.

Teach us to number our days. In this way alone can we gain a heart of wisdom.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word,

Lord, an honest word, a challenging word, a word to wrestle with, a word to dislocate our hip with.

I pray, Lord, you'd help me and I pray you'd help this congregation to begin to loosen the hold of a theology of glory, of some abstracted theology of life and of purpose and of meaning that the points and the wounds that Kohilet so faithfully gives to us would actually resonate, would actually land, would actually make a difference to the way we think and act and operate.

Lord, I see in my own life this impact has largely been deflected.

Even still weeks in, Lord, I know it hasn't sunk to the place you desire it. My eyes are not fully open, my ears are not fully open to the wisdom that you seek to give your people.

Lord, help me, help us to number our days, to not raise our stiff necks as though we can finally take the crooked things of a fallen world, indeed the crooked things of our own life and make them straight, as if we know the days that only you have appointed, as if we can control or manage any of the things that come our way.

Lord, teach us in all of humility to have the mind of Christ, a mind that did not grasp for knowledge that should not be attained, who divested himself of things you did not desire for him to know as he lived a perfect life of dependence and faith, even on the cross, when he looked into a pitch black sky, never wavering in that faith, having that confidence of the joy set before him.

Help us, Lord, as we walk through the labyrinth and the darkness of this life to have that same faithful confidence in your presence, in your purpose.

And Lord, in that way, lead us, shepherd us, bring us through all that you have appointed that we may stand, and having done all, stand, that we may be more than conquerors through him who loved us.