The Beginning of Wisdom is the Fear of the Lord: Ecclesiastes part 3

Here is what the book of Ecclesiastes is left us with. We have a longing for wisdom, because we need something that is beyond us and cannot complete what we know to be true or necessary on our own. And we have a longing to establish some kind of giver of life. That we are called to, and want to receive a life that God offers.

In all his searching the teacher in Ecclesiastes has left us with some kind of longing to really find wisdom and to really find something eternal. Something that lasts longer than us. And the teacher looks for this endlessly.

For all of the teachers exploits we can thank him that he has not left a page unturned or anything left behind. He has explored everything.

I think that the teacher is just so frantic with options and choices that he kind of lose any kind of narrative. We just have little snippets of stories that don’t seem to add up to much. And we lost the big picture for all the small things that confront us daily. We lose the forest for all the roots we trip over.

Anyone who has hiked in the New Hampshire woods understands losing the forest for the roots. Last week two of my kids and I hiked right on the border in Massachusetts overnight. And it is arduous hiking. You are constantly navigating rocks and roots on the trail. When you do that you are not always focused on the wonder of creation, you are focused on not breaking your foot.

2 pictures

So focused in on our little pictures, we lose the big picture, just trying to not break your foot.

We take all these little vignettes and try and create some kind of order to them. We try and cobble them together as best we can. The problem is we just don’t have the perspective that we need to make sense of them.

Scrolling on tiktok or instagram has become a helpful picture for our lives. We scroll and scroll looking for meaning but can’t seem to land on any one thing for long.

And maybe you aren’t on social media. But you are still looking for that depth of meaning in relationships or in politics or in hobbies.

We Create but are not the Creator

We are so often in all the complexity of life we are not quite sure what we are looking at or how we got to where we are. What is normal at some point can become strange and unfamiliar.

Think about your living room in the middle of the day vs in the middle of the night. Imagine getting up in the middle of the night for some water and you walk into the living room, like you’ve done a thousand times before. But this time the vaccuum was left in the middle of the living room. You glance at it and think it is some kind of home invader or wild animal. You get scared real quick! The same room presents two completely different environments.

This is what happens in the book of Ecclesiastes. What is shown as the normal parts and portions of our lives end up becoming strange and unfamiliar. We have lost the throughline, we have lost the narrative and need to recover it. And as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, being that we are dependent creatures, we will need to reclaim the story but will need someone with better perspective to do it for us.

And we will find of course that the better perspective is found in Jesus. He is the better perspective. But we need to be able to get us to understanding why He is the right wisdom and perspective.

The reason that some of the passages in the book of Ecclesiastes may resonate with us is because it holds such a personal perspective.

We have all tested the stuff of life, we have coached ourselves and others and have been left wanting. We have all experienced the toil of life and feeling like it is getting nowhere. We have all experienced being blindsided by the difficulty of life and having to pick up pieces of our lives after.

personal . Disappointment moving rural Ohio

the Teacher tries to take over for God as creator.

Most authors agree that Qohelet wrote Ecclesiastes with the creation narration in front of him (Ellul, 196; Bartholomew, 345).

He cannot get the created order out of his head. the Teacher maintains some kind and some form of order amidst the disorder. He gets it wrong in pointing to himself as creator in chapter two.

Ecclesiastes 2:4–8 ESV

I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house. I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the delight of the sons of man.

The Teacher sees himself as comparable to the Creator, building, accumulating, assessing, making and so on. It is not that he is creative, but rather the source of his own world, the creator. He is locked into forming the opinion of his own heart, “I said in my heart,”

The teacher tries to jump start his heart into belief, he tries to be able to navigate his own heart into understanding. But it never fully takes.

He cannot see outside his own frame. His confession to the self locks him in and only allows for toil and vanity. Coaching the heart seems to exhaust his resources.

(Coaching our own heart is a favorite human activity. We want to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we want to be able to move from limited health to full health. We want to say “its not too bad” or “it could be worse.” We are coaching our own heart. And while this is not an entirely bad thing, it exhausts our resources.

We cannot, as the the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin stated, “be the author of my own value, just as I cannot lift myself by my own hair.” (Bakhtin 98).)

You see where these positions become problematic. We do not have the ability to see beyond ourselves and we begin to see everything and everyone as a means to an end. (We make what is incidental or what is temporary permanent and think we are arbiters of that permanence. But our own creation demands control. And inability to keep it means anxiety

We say, along with Kierkegaard, that “something accidental is made into the absolute” (Ellul 62).)

The Teacher seems to throw everything against the wall to see what “sticks.” And finds it all wanting. To his credit, he doesn’t ever let go, he never resigns. He still upholds belief, upholds life, he just says it’s all so complex.

Remember Your Creator

The good news in the book of Ecclesiastes is that the teacher cannot let go of the creation narrative that says we are part of something larger than ourselves.

God you have placed eternity into our hearts.

This is central to being human.

His problem is that he cannot see a solution outside of himself. He has tried to build everything he can outside of God. (Bartholomew 2014, 276). He has tried to build his understanding, his wisdom outside of God .

He shouts to the universe and it is silent. How frustrating! He lives in a world that he thinks does not give back. That is his for the taking but does not offer anything that he cannot otherwise build for himself. Look at reciprocation.

But that can’t last forever.

But ultimately there is a recognition of something beyond him. Beyond his own dependency and the small gifts of toil he is given. It is because he cannot get creation out of his own head that he ultimately trips over himself to find the Creator.

It is not in spite of the struggle that the teacher arrives at a final confession of something much larger than himself. It is because of it. We are called as well not to simply let life pass us by, we are called to look at it, examine it, define it, call it into question. And for the Teacher, the struggle leads him to the creator. Ultimately all of us ask some version of “is this it?” And I hope we land at the same place he does. (Bartholomew 2014, 371).

mid life crisis; quarter life crisis. Is this it? creates anxiety.

we ourselves yell to the universe and it doesn’t speak back. but the reason we yell in the first place is because we can’t get the created order out of our hear. Nor should we.

Christ is the better Creator

It is good when we miss the forest for the roots we trip over. Because when we get up we realize we have landed at the feet of the Creator. This is a good path toward wisdom.

Wisdom is about understanding the way the world works through Gods creative intent. The better someone understands the world the better they can discern the path of wisdom. (Belcher 2018, 19).

Wisdom clearly defines where we end and God begins. And the Teacher finds this line. Even in the vanity of life, even in the complexity, even in the injustice we have a God who holds onto us more strongly than we hold onto Him.

The teacher wants to be the creator but in chapter 12, the last chapter, we see that he has found a different creator. The teacher is frustrated with his version of creation. He sees it wanting, that it is insufficient. In chapter 2 we get a vision of creation that seems to be brimming with life but is cracking under his inability to keep it together.

In chapter twelve we see that life is still complex, and unpredictable. In the passage we get a similar understanding of creation. But this is not a creation that the teacher can hold together. It is a more realistic picture of creation, where an entire world spins around and we are caught up in the action of it and cannot control it.

But it points to the way to finding out who can.

The Teacher, this time, doesn’t say I built! I did! I acted! He says Remember the Creator.

Ecclesiastes 12:1–4 NLT

Don’t let the excitement of youth cause you to forget your Creator. Honor him in your youth before you grow old and say, “Life is not pleasant anymore.” Remember him before the light of the sun, moon, and stars is dim to your old eyes, and rain clouds continually darken your sky. Remember him before your legs—the guards of your house—start to tremble; and before your shoulders—the strong men—stoop. Remember him before your teeth—your few remaining servants—stop grinding; and before your eyes—the women looking through the windows—see dimly. Remember him before the door to life’s opportunities is closed and the sound of work fades. Now you rise at the first chirping of the birds, but then all their sounds will grow faint.

We see the Teacher show us that when we fade, when we struggle, when we shatter or break, the dust returning to the earth, we are to remember the Creator. Not that we are the creator, but remember the reality of the Creator. He rights himself in the created order, returning to the fallibility and finitude of the self in order to find the Eternal nature of the Creator.

It’s like the teacher has been groping around, seeing parts and bits and pieces of things, getting parts of it right. Still rightfully seeing the difficulty of life, the complexity of it, but then arriving finally at a form of resolution, not found in himself, not even fully found in creation, but found in the Creator.

He says it is worthwhile remembering your Creator even when the light gets dim and everything doesn’t work like it should.

We needed a little light in the book and we found some!

Have you ever not been able to see, and just a little bit of light showed the full map of the room? Maybe you were trusting your job or spouse or ability to do for you what only God can do. And they let you down. They didn’t live up to whatever expectations you had for them. That’s a little bit of light.

The light we need isn’t in ourselves or in our relationships, but it is found in God. And He Himself has become the light that we see by.

John 1:9–13 ESV

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

Christ came as the light that we see by.

The Wisest Thing You Can Do is Let Someone Who Has Been Where You Never Have Lead You

This is wisdom, starting with God as Creator and seeing the ultimate end of all Creation in the incarnation, in Christ Himself. Not that Christ is Created but the Incarnation, Christ Himself is the fullest example of being able to see God in Creation. We live out a God centered world in responding to and following Christ.

Ecclesiastes 12:13–14 ESV

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is a God centered position that is a response of “humility, love and trust in God” that resolves in submission to His ways over ours (Belcher 2018).

If we are going to live a God centered life, one that starts with wisdom, it will mean that before you go strutting through a room, turn on the light. Before you jump into an activity, a conversation, a project, turn on the light. Meaning ask God for wisdom, remember your Creator. He knows what you need, and offers wisdom that is from Heaven.

Every time you turn on a light this week remember your Creator! He came to give light, to give wisdom, and to bring salvation to those who trust Him. May your lit up rooms be reminders of the wisdom God washes us with when we make Him the center of our lives.

This week ask Him before you jump into the middle of something, (before you run across the dark room). Allow His word to guide you, allow His Spirit to lead you. The wisest thing you can do is allow someone who has been where you never have to lead you. This is what Christ offers.

He guides us through dark rooms and through the valley of the shadow of death. We walks with us in first weeks of school and difficult days at work. He brings light into our sickness and dimness. He strengthens us and provides the life that we cannot provide ourselves through Christ for this life and the one to come.

Bartholomew, Craig G. 2014. Ecclesiastes. Paperback edition. Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms. Baker Academic.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1990. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. First edition. University of Texas Press Slavic Series, No. 9. University of Texas Press.

Belcher, Richard P. 2018. Finding Favour in the Sight of God: A Theology of Wisdom Literature. New Studies in Biblical Theology 46. Apollos.

Ellul, Jacques. 2021. Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes. Wipf & Stock,.