Sermon Tone Analysis

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.

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