The Vanity of Man's Wisdom

Introduction

The first section of Eccl. 1 introduced us to the preacher or “Qohelet” and gave a summary of his conclusions about life under the sun. It’s vanity. It’s an endless repetition and cycle that seems to lead nowhere and have no ultimate goal or purpose.

After that summary, verse 12 brings us to the voice of the preacher himself. This is where we see Qohelet introduce himself as “I the Preacher.”

He is the king over Israel in Jerusalem. What we read about the preacher sounds a lot like Solomon. And whoever ends up writing the book of Ecclesiastes, he is either telling us what Solomon concluded or, perhaps, he is setting before us this unnamed figure who fills a role like Solomon - someone who has great wisdom and wealth and power and who relates what he finds out about the world using his own wisdom.

For now, let’s just call him what the writer calls him and what he calls himself - Qohelet or the preacher.

From here and through chapter 2 = a rundown of his experiments with the pursuit of wisdom and pleasure and toil in the search for answers - for ultimate meaning and fulfillment. And he comes, basically, to this conclusion, that it is all vanity and striving after wind.

In passage we read this morning - the rest of the first chapter - we learn about the preacher’s method, his problem, and his experience.

I. The preacher’s method.

A. Verse 13 - Preacher tells us about his project.

Might call it a quest for discovery - to evaluate “reality” and try and find meaning or coherence in it all. And this was a purposeful and serious effort.

The “heart” = the center of one’s being - including intellect, the emotions, the will. And we find that Qohelet’s investigation is not something he does from a distance - some sort of ivory tower, academic exercise, but he puts his whole heart into it. He sets out to test things by his own experience - of wisdom and knowledge and folly and madness.

And, the scope of his investigation is wide. It is “all that is done under heaven.” That includes all human activities - whatever people do. But it’s probably even wider than that and means everything that happens. Whatever can be observed and experienced in the world is part of what the preacher determined to seek and search out - to evaluate in terms of meaning and purpose. The only limit to the scope of this investigation is, really, “under heaven.” In other words, it’s limited to the world in which we live - the things that we can see and hear and know and experience.

And he tells us the method by which he carried out his experiments. It is “by wisdom.” Wisdom is to be the “lens” through which he will look at all observable reality - all that happens under heaven.

Wisdom sets the parameters for the experiment with “all that is done under heaven.”

B. 2 kinds of wisdom.

But what kind of wisdom is he talking about? I think it’s critically important to understand this if we’re to rightly understand the message of the whole book of Ecclesiastes.

When we look at the book of Proverbs and its positive message about wisdom, Proverbs also tells us the basis for true wisdom - it’s in the fear of the Lord.

Proverbs 9:10 ESV

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

So, true wisdom - the wisdom that Proverbs commends - starts with God, and not just some generic idea that there may be a god or something like that. It takes the ultimate reality of the Triune Creator God who reveals himself in the Scriptures as the foundation for knowledge and wisdom that is ultimately meaningful and truthful.

Just to be clear here as much as I can, this is not to say that wisdom means examining all the observable facts about reality and coming to the conclusion that God exists. True wisdom starts with knowing and believing that God is as he says he is, that he is the ultimate reality and source of everything, and that the whole world is what it is because of his perfect, comprehensive, sovereign, and inscrutable purpose from eternity.

He is the one with the answers - with complete and perfect knowledge of the creation, because it is his creation. And if we are to know things the way they really are, we need to have his Word as the lens through which we understand all that we observe - all that is done under heaven.

There’s another kind of wisdom. And, ultimately, there are just these 2 contrasting “viewpoints” or approaches to wisdom in the world. What we could call human wisdom or “worldly wisdom” is the wisdom that doesn’t start with the fear of the Lord. It starts with man. It takes man and his own ability to reason and interpret and draw conclusions apart from the revelation of God as the ultimate source and foundation for knowledge and wisdom. It’s man-centered and not God-centered.

And if we look, carefully, at what Qohelet is doing in much of Ecclesiastes, he’s employing a model of worldly wisdom.

He’s limiting his exploration to his own experiences, his own observations, his own conclusions. God is kind of “in the background”. It’s not atheism - like there’s no God. But it’s an approach to the realities of the world that says, “I will see if I can make sense out of things without falling back onto the revealed Word of God as the source of meaning and ultimacy.”

Now, if you think about it, the whole history of human philosophy is really nothing but the history of worldly wisdom.

Philosophy - the word itself - means “love of wisdom.”

And the purpose of philosophy is, basically, to try and “explain” reality. And human philosophy is man’s attempt to do that apart from God - without starting with “the fear of the Lord” as the beginning of wisdom. It takes another starting point.

And it doesn’t matter if you go back to Aristotle or if you look at more contemporary philosophical systems - like post-modernism - there’s this same common thread. It’s man trying to make sense of reality on his own. It’s man starting with his own reason or his experience and observation and trying to form a model or system that explains things like truth and existence and meaning and so on.

And it is vanity and striving after wind, as we see in verse 14.

Paul, in the NT, in 1Cor. 1 and 2, refers to these 2 kinds of wisdom and sets them over against one another.

There’s “the wisdom of this age” and then there’s the wisdom of God. The wisdom of God is revealed. The wisdom of man rejects God’s revelation - suppresses the truth of God in unrighteousness - and, so, fails to come to recognize true and ultimate wisdom. In the OT context, we see wisdom has to start with the fear of the Lord. In the NT context - as Paul shows us - it still starts with the fear of the Lord but, now, God’s wisdom is more fully revealed in Christ. And to fail to submit to the revelation of God in Christ is to fail to reach the goal of wisdom - to come to the true source of meaning and purpose.

It’s doomed to fail, because man was never intended to find ultimate fulfillment and purpose and meaning apart from his Creator - independent from God as the source of everything and the only one with the full picture - with completely true and perfect knowledge.

Well, this is the preacher’s method, then. He is going to seek to come to some ultimate conclusions - look for real meaning and purpose - by using wisdom. But it’s a wisdom that doesn’t start with God. It starts with “I.”

II. The preacher’s problem.

A. It is an unhappy business...

The preacher sets out to discover by wisdom - to seek and to search - and immediately sees this conclusion - that it is an unhappy business given to man by God.

This is literally something like “an evil task” - other translations have “grievous toil” or “burdensome task” of “heavy burden”.

And this is something, says the Preacher, that God as given to the children of man to be busy with. And that sounds almost scandalous!

God has assigned man this task - something he can’t really avoid or opt out of. But what God has given him is something burdensome - something grievous. It’s an unhappy business.

The business God has given is the very task that the Preacher is going to set his heart on - to seek out purpose and meaning in all man’s activities.

We have to see what the Preacher’s saying, here, in the light of the first chapters of Genesis. God created man in his own image. And he made man to live in this creation and to be active in it. Specifically, man was to work and to subdue the earth and to exercise his great God-given capacities to build, to create, to love, to laugh and enjoy good things, to live out the image of God in the world to his glory. We were created to find meaning and fulfillment in living life under God’s rule, to God’s glory, in God’s world.

So, in the beginning, what God “assigned” to man = a good task.

The fall changed everything. And the whole creation was subjected to futility and corruption. And part of the curse that fell on man was this toilsomeness and futility of his own God-assigned task in creation.

Genesis 3:17–19 (ESV)

... in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

There are real resonances, there, with the pessimistic message and outlook in Ecclesiastes - that man toils and labors all his life and then just dies and goes into the ground and is forgotten in generations to come.

So, now, looking at life in this fallen world from the perspective of human wisdom - what can be observed - it’s an unhappy business - trying to find ultimate purpose in it all - trying to make sense of it all.

B. Verse 14

Why? The answer comes in verse 14. It’s because all that is done under the sun is vanity and striving after wind.

vanity = what is empty, meaningless, devoid of real substance.

striving after wind = like chasing the wind - even if you could catch it, you wouldn’t really have anything!

Man, fallen in sin, is separated from God. He’s cut off from the right knowledge of God as the source of meaning and the foundation for understanding his whole existence. Yet, he’s not “free” from the task of “doing” and living in the world. And I mentioned this last week - that the very fact of the “questions” - the deep-rooted desire to find ultimate meaning and purpose is evidence of the fact we’re created in God’s image for his purpose. We’re supposed to find fulfillment in life in communion with God.

So, in essence, fallen man can’t escape his own identity as God’s creature and God’s image.

He’s made to think and to reason and to seek out answers. But he was never intended to do so apart from subjection to God and his authoritative interpretation of the world.

And, so, there’s a sense in which even “worldly wisdom” - in a very limited sense - can still be called real wisdom.

Fallen man can come to some true conclusions. We’re able to recognize facts and observe reality as it is and comprehend things that are true. But we can’t, apart from God, in our own fallen rebellion and sin, arrive at what is ultimately true. There’s always a frustration.

Philosophy always ends up running up against a brick wall.

So, now, man is busying himself groping in the darkness - grasping after a sense of purpose and meaning and ultimacy that is always elusive.

SO, it is, in this fallen world, for fallen, sinful people, an unhappy business.

C. Verse 15

The Preacher illustrates his point with this proverbial saying.

Ecclesiastes 1:15 ESV

What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.

The sense of “straightness” is embedded in our nature as God’s image-bearers. But there are things that are “crooked.” We observe the reality of the world and we find we can’t explain some things. We can’t “fix” what’s crooked. And we can’t account for what is lacking - the gaps, in other words, in understanding.

Human philosophy always comes up short of a comprehensive explanation of the way things are in totality.

examples:

Philosophers, for millennia have struggled to explain the relationship of the “one and the many.” We see “unity” and we see “diversity” in the world and we can’t, on our own, adequately account for how these realities fit together.

How, for instance, there’s a oneness to “humanity” but, at the same time, each human being is a distinct individual.

Some forms of philosophy emphasize the “one” but fail to take into account the diversity of the many. Others may err in the opposite direction and view the world as so many individual parts and entities, but then fail to really account for the unity and oneness in the creation.

How do we account for the presence of evil in the world? Or, for that matter, how there can be “evil” or whether there is such an objective reality.

Human philosophy - unaided reason - can’t resolve the big problems of life and existence and meaning. It can arrive at some truth, but it can’t form a consistent, comprehensive interpretation of the fullness of reality in the world. And that’s because it fails to begin with God and submit its understanding to God’s revelation.

Paul tells us about the course of human rebellion in Romans 1, and he says, “they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”

When we try to understand our lives, our work, our experiences in this world apart from the revelation of God in Christ, we find it is, ultimately, an unhappy business. It’s vanity and striving after wind.

And it’s painful. And that brings us to the Preacher’s experience, in verses 16-18.

III. The preacher’s experience.

The Preacher can boast great wisdom and great experience of wisdom and knowledge. He’s not just a detached commentator. He has life experience.

And he says, in verse 17, “I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.”

So, again, here’s something of the comprehensive scope of the Preacher’s investigation. He’s open to all angles, so to speak. To consider the value of wisdom and knowledge, but also to set this against the experience of madness and folly.

But the conclusion is that it is all a striving after wind.

And, with another proverbial saying, he tells us why, again.

Ecclesiastes 1:18 ESV

For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

We have a saying too, that sort of expresses a similar meaning: “Ignorance is bliss.”

In a paradigm that relies on human understanding, without revelation from God, more knowledge and wisdom only leads to more frustration and pain.

Wisdom, in itself, can’t bring fulfillment. Knowledge can’t bring us ultimate answers, apart from the knowledge of God. And, in some sense, it only compounds the problem. Because we’re faced with the reality of our finiteness - our limited perspective - and the painful truth that, for all our knowing and discovery and wisdom about life - we still can’t harness the creation and bend it to our will, and we can’t control the course of nature and history - and in the end, we die.

There’s pain, frustration, futility to the life of fallen, sinful man living in fallen, sin-cursed world. And human wisdom - the greatest of human knowledge and insight and achievement - can’t take it away or fix it.

The ache that is left when we’ve tried and found that we can’t straighten what is crooked - can’t count what is lacking - can’t solve the really big problems of life - that very pain and futility - the empty “space” - is ultimately a sign-post God has left us. It tells us that we were made for him and to find meaning and fulfillment in him and him alone.

As Augustine put it so long ago, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Conclusion

Let me leave us, this morning, with a final couple of thoughts to consider and apply.

We must recognize, as Christians, the failure of human wisdom - human philosophy in life.

People - all people - are able to observe facts and draw conclusions that are true. Human beings are created in God’s image with a great capacity to explore and discover and know.

Fallen, sinful man still lives in God’s creation and, by common grace, can do some pretty awesome things!

But, without a biblical worldview that starts with the fear of the Lord, man’s wisdom can’t put all the facts into a true and coherent whole. We can’t understand or create a “system” of knowledge that reflects what’s ultimately true and real.

Man can’t put the reality of this world into a “box” where the facts all fit neatly into a system.

Human philosophy does not mix with God’s revealed truth. There will be “overlap”, so to speak. That’s because, again, man can’t escape his own identity as God’s image-bearer of the fact that he really does live in God’s world. But, see how Paul warns the believers in Colossae:

Colossians 2:8 ESV

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

In Christ, Paul says, are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” True wisdom - wisdom that “works” - begins with Christ and is rooted and grounded in God’s revelation in Christ and the gospel.

You can’t rightly understand the world and the course of history and the human experience and the human problem unless you begin with Christ as the expression of God’s eternal purpose and God’s eternal wisdom.

3. Being a Christian doesn’t mean, either, that you can put everything in a neat little “box” of your understanding either. We live with mystery. And we live, for now, in a world where things are crooked and we can’t make them straight - where what is lacking can’t always be accounted for - where we don’t and won’t have all the “answers.”

But, we know that this world of futility is not ultimate, and our own limited understanding is not ultimate either. We serve a God who is ultimate. And his purpose will be carried out - and is being carried out, in Christ, through the gospel and through the course of history.

We can rest - leave our unanswered questions in the mystery of the Infinite and Triune God.

We know suffering and pain and frustration in this world. But we can also rest and have joy in knowing that it’s not meaningless. In Christ, there’s an ultimate purpose. In Christ, we have redemption. And nothing is ultimately futile and ultimately meaningless, for those who belong to him.