In preparing for this week’s message, I was taken back to one of the most profitable learning activities that I ever experienced during my seminary training. As part of my Old Testament introduction class, we were required to find articles from scholarly journals and write a three page evaluation of those articles.
One of the articles I read and evaluated came from a 1987 issue of the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. I was expecting to read an article that would help me to have a better understanding of the Bible, but I was in for a rude awakening. I suppose the title of the article should have prepared me at least somewhat for what I was about to experience:
“Dream Form in Genesis 2:4b-3:24: Asleep in the Garden”
The author, in his attempt to explain some of the apparent inconsistencies in the account of creation and the fall of man, claims that this passage is written in the form of a fairy tale with “before”, “during” and “after” panels and that the fall of man is merely a dream of Adam that is framed by the material which comes before and after the dream. I kid you not! There is just no way that I could ever dream this stuff up. As you can imagine, I had some major problems with the article which I explained in my paper. And I’ll never forget my professor’s response:
“You brave soul! This article is a classic example of “too much education!”…This article, in general, is the kind of nonsense that drives me crazy.”
To me, this was a real life example of the fact that it is certainly possible to be “too smart for our own good.” That’s the theme of this morning’s passage from Ecclesiastes:
12 I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13 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. 14 I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind. 15 What is crooked cannot be made straight, And what is lacking cannot be numbered. 16 I communed with my heart, saying, "Look, I have attained greatness, and have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge." 17 And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is grasping for the wind. 18 For in much wisdom is much grief, And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
Before we take a look at this passage, let me take a moment to see if I can’t clear up some possible confusion. Some people have asked why I’m using the word “Qoheleth” to refer to the author of Ecclesiastes. They’ve asked why I don’t just call him Solomon, or even the “Preacher”.
As I explained during our introduction to Ecclesiastes a couple weeks ago, we can’t identify the author of the book with any certainty. Although there are hints, as we’ll see this morning, that the author is at least taking on the persona of Solomon, he identifies himself only by the Hebrew word Qoheleth, which most of our Bibles translate either as “Preacher”, or “Teacher”. Those may very well be the best English words we have to translate the Hebrew, but in our culture those words give us a picture that is much different than the role of the author. So rather than identifying the author as Solomon, which is just not justified by the evidence, or using English words which may mislead us, I’ve chosen to just use the Hebrew word “Qoheleth” when I’m referring to the author of the book. That word identifies someone who convenes an assembly or possibly even someone who speaks to an assembly. The picture here is that the Qoheleth is assembling God’s people in order to impart royal wisdom to them.
We can’t read our passage for this morning without evoking images of Solomon. When the author claims in verse 16 that he had gained more wisdom than all who were before him in Jerusalem, it certainly sounds like this description of Solomon:
King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth.
1 Kings 10:23 (NIV)
But, as I’ve already pointed out, there is just no way we can determine whether these are the words of Solomon himself or whether the author is merely taking on the persona of Solomon in order to make his point. The great thing is that it really doesn’t matter. The principles that we can take from God’s Word here aren’t dependent on who wrote them since they are really God’s words.
So let’s take a look at three principles that we observe in this passage:
1. The search for wisdom and knowledge, apart from God, is a burden
It’s pretty easy to understand why Qoheleth at least takes on the persona of Solomon in this section. If there was anyone in history who had the opportunity to set their heart to know wisdom, it would have been Solomon. Not only had he asked God for wisdom and been granted that wisdom, he certainly had the resources to have access to the best and brightest teachers, scientists, philosophers and religious experts of his day.
But in spite of all the resources that Solomon had available for the task, Qoheleth describes his quest as a “burdensome task”. The problem is that Solomon did exactly what many of us do whenever we get a gift from God.
• The worship of the gift, rather than the Giver of the gift
God had given Solomon a great gift, the gift of wisdom. But over time, Solomon came to the place where he began to worship the gift itself rather than the God who had given him the gift. Instead of spending all his resources seeking God, he employed them in the pursuit of wisdom itself. But Solomon was neither the first nor the last to do that. In fact, that is exactly what took place in the Garden with Adam and Eve. God created Adam and gave him access to all of God’s creation with one exception:
And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
Genesis 2:16, 17 (NIV)
Adam and Eve had something much better than the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They had a relationship with the God who created that tree. And had they just continued in that relationship, God would have revealed everything they needed to know. He would have provided them with all the wisdom they needed. But rather than focus on their relationship with the Giver of wisdom, they decided to seek out wisdom by their own efforts. And we all know how that worked out, don’t we?
• As a result of sin, life is a burden
As a result of their choice to pursue knowledge rather than to pursue God, God pronounced a curse on Adam:
To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ’You must not eat of it,’ "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Genesis 3:17-19 (NIV)
Because they chose to worship the gift rather than the Giver of the gift, life became a burden to Adam and Eve, and, by legacy, to us.
So, in verse 14, Qoheleth once again describes life under the sun as “vapor.” Our efforts to try to obtain wisdom on our own, apart from God certainly are fleeting and temporary. But it is even worse than that. In that same verse, Qoheleth uses another phrase that we will find throughout the rest of the book: “grasping for the wind”. The word the author uses here is a word that literally means “to herd”, so it might be more accurately be translated “shepherding the wind.”
Adam and Eve had been given dominion over all God’s creation and given the responsibility and privilege of shepherding all the creatures that God had created. But in their quest for knowledge on their own terms, they ended up shepherding nothing but the wind, or at least attempting to do that. Talk about a burden! Obviously no matter how hard we try, man can’t make the wind do our bidding, like we could if we were shepherding sheep or goats.
• Human wisdom and knowledge bring grief and sorrow
While there is certainly nothing wrong with education and learning, but those who expect to find meaning, purpose, hope and joy in that process are always disappointed and frustrated. Just think about it. The more we learn about what is going on in the world, the more we tend to worry, especially if we fail to view those events through the lens of the Scriptures. The more we learn about the vast immensity of the universe, the more insignificant we become. And, as this clip demonstrates, the more we think we know, the more we realize just how ignorant we are.
[Clip from “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures” – Socrates]
That two minute clip is actually a pretty good summary of Ecclesiastes.
Since nothing is new under the sun, it isn’t surprising that we live in a culture that follows this model of seeking wisdom and knowledge apart from God. And unfortunately, as I discovered in my seminary class, the church is certainly not immune to that same process. We’re going to look at how we can guard against leaving God out of the process in a few minutes.
2. Man’s wisdom and knowledge are inadequate to deal with the consequences of sin
In verse 15, we find this curious statement:
What is crooked cannot be made straight, And what is lacking cannot be numbered.
This is another one of the phrases in Ecclesiastes that is often taken out of context and used to support teaching that would be totally inconsistent with the rest of this section.
There is no doubt that one point Qoheleth is trying to make is the futility of trying to change the realities that God has ordained and put into place. That would be consistent with the first part of the chapter that we looked at last week where he pointed out that man, no matter how hard he works, cannot impact the cycles of nature. And Qoheleth is going to return to that idea again later in the book:
Consider the work of God; For who can make straight what He has made crooked?
Ecclesiastes 7:13 (NKJV)
But since this section is dealing with the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, I think that the author has something additional in mind here. If the burden of the pursuit of wisdom apart from God has its roots in Genesis 3, as I believe it clearly does, then it seems that “what is crooked” and “what is lacking” must refer to the sin that occurred as a result of that pursuit.
Since sin first entered into our world, man has been seeking a way to overcome the consequences of that sin through the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. This is perhaps most evident in man’s attempt to deal with the promised result of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – death. We have certainly made great advances in medicine over the years, and I’m grateful for that, but the fact is that all we have succeeded in doing is to prolong life for a relatively insignificant amount of time as this chart clearly demonstrates [Chart of life spans on PowerPoint]. In fact, even those who live to be over 100 years old today don’t even approach the life spans of those who lived on earth before the flood, alone come close to overcoming physical death.
The crookedness of man and that which is lacking due to our sin can never be made straight or made up for by the natural wisdom and knowledge of man. That can only be accomplished through the grace of God and His work in our lives. In his first letter to the church at Corinth, Paul emphasized that same principle:
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
1 Corinthians 1:18-24 (NIV)
The fact is that we are crooked and we can never be made straight apart from Jesus.
Qoheleth doesn’t paint a very encouraging picture here. “Under the sun” - here on earth - the pursuit of wisdom apart from God is a burden and it is completely inadequate to deal with the consequences of our sin. But there are at least some hints here that wisdom and knowledge do have their proper place in our lives.
3. The profitable pursuit of wisdom must begin and end with God
There are a lot of technical terms that can be applied to the methods by which we pursue wisdom and knowledge, but for our purposes this morning, we can narrow these down to two main categories:
• Man-centered approaches
One such approach is known as empiricism. The basic idea behind empiricism is that knowledge can be derived through careful observation and that laws or principles can be derived from these observations. It is an approach that had its roots in Ancient Greece, but its influence here in the West came primarily as a result of Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. As we discussed briefly in the “Connections” class last Sunday, that was a period of great focus on the rights and liberties of the individual. Empiricism is the foundation for the scientific method which holds that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world.
A closely related approach is that of inductive reasoning in which one moves from specific observations to more general principles or laws.
For example, statistics from the World Health Organization show that those who live in the Mediterranean region have almost 50% fewer deaths from heart disease, cancer and diabetes than Americans. Studies have also shown that in general the people who live in that part of the world eat more fruits and vegetables, whole grains and healthy fats than the average American. So, using inductive reasoning, one would conclude that Americans could lower their rate of death by following a similar diet. That conclusion may or may not be true and it would require much additional study to try to confirm it.
This approach is what Dana and I have often referred to as a “Western” mindset. It is a method that works from the parts to the whole, from the particular to the universal, from the finite to the infinite, and, most importantly, from human experience to the truth about God.
• God-centered approach
In contrast to an empirical or inductive method, this is a more deductive method that begins with the premise that God exists and that He reveals Himself to us in His Word. This is the approach that Dana and I have often referred to as an “Eastern” mindset. It moves from the whole to the parts, from the universal to the particular, from the infinite to the finite, and from the truth of God to human experience.
The pursuit of wisdom and knowledge described here in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes was undoubtedly undertaken using a man-centered approach. In fact, the whole book of Ecclesiastes is written from the perspective of “under the sun” – man’s perspective from here on earth. It frequently documents man’s attempt to try and “figure out” God through what he can observe here on earth. And that approach, as we’ve clearly seen is a burden that brings only grief and sorrow.
On the other hand, there is a profitable pursuit of wisdom. But profit is only derived from a God-centered approach to pursuing wisdom. This has some significant implications for us in our approach to the Bible.
We can use the same approach Qoheleth employed. We can start with our own human experience and try to mold the Bible, and God, to fit what we observe here on this earth. That’s the “Western” mindset that even the church has often put into practice over the years. But we shouldn’t expect that the end result of being too smart for our own good is going to be anything other than the same kind of grief and sorrow that Qoheleth experienced.
On the other hand, we can start with the truth of God and the Bible and we can mold our thinking and our behavior to conform to that truth. That’s the “Eastern” mindset that will actually be of profit to us and will ultimately bring us meaning, purpose, hope and joy in our lives.
Which approach to wisdom are you pursuing in your life?
