The Folly of Wisdom

Ecclesiastes 1:12-18 and the Burdensome Task 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 in 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.

Solomon’s Testimony as a Foil for Human Ambition

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 Goldengay, 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 two. 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.

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.

The Burdensome Task God Has Given to Humanity

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.

The Crookedness of the World and the Problem of Evil

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's 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.