The Conclusion Of The Matter Series

School is pretty much a reality. School is a reality all of life. You could probably say that really all of life is a school. The only problem is that sometimes we learn the lessons after we fail the exam, which is not too good. But that is the way it is. Fortunately, as we continue to look through the book of Ecclesiastes, we can see that we had a teacher throughout the entire book. A teacher who was not only willing to give us the life lessons before we would take the actual exam but, as we see today, he actually gives us the answer key to life itself; through the phrase “Fear God and keep his commands.” We have been going through this series all summer. I think we started sometime in June and it is called Under the Sun. It is one man’s search to find meaning in this world alone, only to come up short. Last week, the concluding verse was “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Everything is meaningless!’” The Teacher, we know, is this guy named King Solomon who lived about the first century B.C. He was a guy who had the time, money, and power to be able to pursue pretty much every avenue of life only to conclude that from man’s perspective, everything is meaningless. As I mentioned last week, I actually said that this verse, 12:8, was actually believed to be possibly the last verse that Solomon would have written, at least in the book of Ecclesiastes. If you have your Bible, you know that there are about six more passages that go on. Some people suggest that these remaining passages were not written by Solomon but written by some sort of an editor that added some words after Solomon. They are words that give an endorsement for the book but also a nice, fitting summary to the book. As we have been doing through the whole series, I would like to have somebody read from the New International Version chapter 12 of Ecclesiastes starting at verse 9 and taking it all the way down to the end of the book, which is verse 14. (Scripture read here.)

What we see here is that it is easy to consider this little addition as possibly written by an editor because he refers to the Teacher in the third person when he writes “Not only was the Teacher wise, but also imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs.” He is referring to the Teacher in the third person. Some suspect that maybe Solomon didn’t write these words and they were written afterwards that are kind of an endorsement for the book. Even today, we know that a lot of people put words in books that serve as an endorsement for certain books. In fact, some people won’t read a book unless it is endorsed by certain people. That was very common also in that first century B.C. for somebody to place words following the end of the book that would serve as an endorsement. Whatever the case, whether Solomon wrote it or not, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that probably Solomon would agree and receive the endorsement but also would probably agree with the conclusion. When we think about the endorsements words, he writes “Not only was the Teacher wise, but also imparted knowledge to people.” We know that Solomon was one of the wisest persons around. As we talked about sometime during the series, wisdom is not just an accumulation of knowledge. It is not just this intellectual knowledge. Wisdom is knowledge being applied to a certain circumstance. We know that Solomon had that. We saw it throughout the book when he was able to observe the cycles of nature and the cycles of life and be able to come up with some very creative nuggets of truth that would be applied even today. The good thing about Solomon was that he didn’t hoard that knowledge. He didn’t keep all those nuggets of truth to himself but actually it says that he imparted that to the people. He “imparted knowledge to the people.” In other words, he gave people what he knew. He had the power of observation and of writing down things and he would give it to the people around him, including the readers today. I think about how much wisdom there has probably been in the cumulative history of the world, including history or wisdom within this room, that sometimes people never take the time to share. People never impart it to others, and that is a shame. He talks about the idea that “He pondered it and searched out and set in order many proverbs.” A side note: when he is talking about proverbs, he is not just talking about what we consider the book of Proverbs. Really, he is talking about the collection of wise sayings that would be found in this book. There were a lot of illustrations, word plays, metaphors, and figures of speech. All those types of things would probably collectively be considered wise sayings or proverbs. It says that he pondered these proverbs. Pondered in this sense has the idea of weighing them out to see if they really have substance worthy of the book. Then he put those proverbs in an order. We may not agree with the order he put them in. The order may not make sense to us, but I am sure it made perfect sense to a guy like Solomon.