What’s the Point of Studying and Learning?
Ecclesiastes 1:12-18; 2:12-16
This week we will be thinking about one of the most practical issues of each of our lives, i.e., how we know the wise thing to do in those complex or difficult situations that come to us day by day. On this Mothers’ Day 2016, the question I have for parents is: When you are dealing with those challenges that come to you in parenting, is your only alternative to go to the parenting section of the bookstore to discover what the self-help authors are recommending? Or, is there something more that should be your main focus when you have made a decision to follow Jesus as Lord. Does your faith in Jesus help you make wise decisions in everyday matters?
In the verses we’ll be focusing on in Ecclesiastes, Solomon evaluates what happens when you make these decisions without any reference to God. As I read Eccl 1:12-18, I envision King Solomon, near the end of his life, telling us that he had devoted his life “to exploring by wisdom all that is done under the heaven (1:13).”
When he used the word “wisdom”, Solomon was speaking of something very, practical and very significant for the lives of his people. The word “wisdom” included both what we refer to as “street smarts” and “book smarts”. Don’t miss this: To understand this message, remember that Solomon was speaking about gaining great knowledge and great practical skills “under the sun (1:13 & 14)”, i.e., without reference to God. So, in this passage, he’s not speaking about God’s wisdom; he’s speaking about human wisdom apart from God.
Remember also that Solomon, was a man who was considered by everyone to be the wisest of all men in the ways of the world. If you would like to read about him, 1 Kings 4:29-34 describes the wisdom of Solomon. God had given him the gift to discern how to live and how to make decisions. As we know, and as he sometimes confesses in Ecclesiastes, he didn’t use always use that gift in a way that was surrendered to God. And in our passage today, Solomon tells us unequivocally that a gift for wisdom without surrender to the God of wisdom is meaningless.
Let me show you how he went about this. It’s clear to me that he wanted to talk about two related things: The Two Aspects of Wisdom
1) The practical aspect of wisdom (1:12-15) – what we often seek when we go to counseling or ask for advice from a friend or from books.
2) The intellectual aspect of wisdom (1:16-18) – what we seek to do when we devote our selves to learning, or to higher education.
Let’s follow what he said and then consider what God wants to say to our lives in this part of his Word:
Point 1: “Under the sun” those who teach you how to live still don’t know how to change your life (1:12-15). I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens…I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
As king over Israel in its most successful era, Solomon could have chosen to do almost anything he wanted to do. So, what he chose to do was explore how people find lived their lives. When he spoke in v. 13 of “exploring by wisdom all that is done”, he meant exploring what happens after people seek advice from counselors, read self-help books, etc.
In the ancient world, the life of providing wisdom for others – for helping people discern how to live wisely rather than foolishly – was considered the highest and most respected of all callings. That was true in almost all cultures. And, Solomon was considered to be the wisest of all wise people. Solomon was the original Dear Abby – the first Dr. Phil. If anyone was ever equipped to answer life’s difficult questions on his own, it was Solomon. After all, he was the one in 1 Kings 3 who gave the wise advice to the two women who each claimed that a certain baby baby was hers. (Do you know the story?) The story of his wise advice is so well known that the phrase “the wisdom of Solomon” is still used in many cultures.
But, Solomon considered it all and said in v.14, that trying to help people live wisely is a “heavy burden”, meaning a “lousy job”. “All my advice makes no difference” he said. Solomon concluded trying to live wisely without God was like “chasing the wind”, i.e., you can never catch it; but if you do, you don’t have anything anyway.
To make sense of his words, you need to grasp that the language in Eccl 1:13-15 takes us back to Gen 3:12-19 when sin entered the world and negatively affected everything. Telling people how to live well and change their lives is a lousy job, Solomon says, because the whole world is messed up by sin. So, God might give us the calling to live well and in keeping with his wise morals, but, says Solomon, ever since sin entered the world, everything is bent, twisted. So, he says, it is a “heavy burden” to try to live a good life – and, in v.15, he says that even the best human advice seems to make no difference in such a twisted world.
Look at v.15. In it, Solomon gives us this Hebrew Proverb: What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted. He’s saying that the entirety of our world is so bent that it cannot be straightened out fully through human wisdom and strategizing. Some problems in this world cannot be solved even if we pool all the wisdom of all people. Have you found that to be true?
Putting that proverb into my own words: Human wisdom can neither straighten everything out nor add everything up in our world. Why not? The sin that began with Adam and Even has affected everything in our world. Here’s what Solomon is saying: Something has gone wrong in our world so that no matter how many organizations we form to stop injustice, no matter how many hospitals we establish, no matter how many good people we get elected, no matter how much money we give away to good causes, no matter how many protests we hold, no matter how many bad guys we lock up, the world will remain crooked and messed up. We may want to straighten things out in our world but we cannot do it. And, the real problem is that not only is everything in our world messed up but every person in our world is messed up. Those of us who most want to straighten things out need to be straightened out ourselves!
It’s like Alvy Singer in Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall, “I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, the sick people, the crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.”
Solomon says that we don’t have the power to correct the horrible and miserable things in our world. We are imperfect people in a messed up world. If that’s all there is and there is no God, then think about where that leaves us: Crooked people cannot straighten out a crooked world.
Dustin Kensrue of the group Thrice has captured Solomon’s message well in his song, All the World Is Mad: Something's gone terribly wrong with everyone. All the world is mad. Darkness brings terrible things the sun is gone. What vanity, our sad, wretched fires
We can't medicate man to perfection again. We can't legislate peace in our hearts. We can't educate sin from our souls. It's been there from the start.
Here’s what we need: We need someone who is not crooked to get us, and everything else, that is crooked straightened out. In a crooked world, if all that is is a crooked world “under the sun”, where might we find that kind of person? Nowhere! Our only hope is that there might be a “Someone” above the sun who is willing to enter in and change things. At this point, we see Solomon pointing us to the kind of Rescuer from outside our twisted world that the Bible, and the Bible alone, points to, i.e., a God who knows the trouble we are in and loves us anyway. A God who might be willing to enter in and make straight all that has become crooked. So, we remember John’s words in John 1, “The Word (Jesus, the one through whom the world was made) became flesh and lived among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son of God...”
And we hear the words of Jesus in Jn 3:17: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him.” Only he can make straight what is crooked.
Point 2: “Under the sun” those who know much don’t know much (1:16-18).
I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.”Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind…
In 1:16-18 Solomon turns our attention toward the intellectual pursuit of learning. He considers, “Maybe the problem is that we don’t know enough yet. That might be our answer to living wisely.” In these verses, he speaks of the pursuit of meaning in life through gaining more and more knowledge. So, listen carefully: In the Book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon wants us to think, to learn and to discover what life is about. In fact, the Bible in general wants us to ask the hard questions and to use the minds we have to pursue what is true and good. This makes me think of a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. Calvin wanted to find out the meaning of life “under the sun” but Hobbes has no interest: https://cafewitteveen.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/q4sxj.png
Be assured of this: The Bible is not anti-intellectual and is not skeptical of education. In Jn 14, Jesus said he is the truth. Jesus was quite certain that when we diligently seek to know what is true, we will end up coming to him! When you become a Christian, you don’t leave your mind out in the foyer and just trust Jesus with no concern for the truth. Instead, when you seek the truth, the kind of truth that helps you make sense of the world you live in, Jesus was quite sure you will end up trusting him. And, that’s the message of Ecclesiastes too. When you ask the big questions – the questions about what really matters, you will know that there must be more in this world than is what is under the sun. There must be a God “over the sun.”
However, even in saying this, the Bible is also clear that even studying and learning can become a “god” – a false idol that can make us proud. The Apostle Paul, one of the best educated people of his entire society said that our knowledge can “puff us up” and keep us from love in 1 Cor 8:1. And Solomon lets us know here that we can be the best scholars in the world and that scholarship under the sun will still leave us knowing that there is more to existence than we can grasp “under the sun.”.
It’s interesting how Solomon gets at this in v.17 when he says, “I applied myself to the understanding 1) of wisdom, and 2) also of madness and folly.” What he’s doing is comparing the one who studies diligently to the one who foolishly chooses not to learn anything at all. And, if what is “under the sun” is all there is and there is no God, then both the PhD and the elementary school dropout have the same fate, i.e., what they do will not really change things, their accomplishments will soon be forgotten and ultimately death will take away everything from both of them. In v.17b, he says that either way, if they leave God out of their lives, the scholar and the non-scholar alike will find that whatever they are living for is like chasing after the wind.
To nail down his point, Solomon tells another proverb in v.18: With much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. He’s saying here that sometimes it’s better not to know so much – not if there is no God and no life after this life. I have found this to be true. The more that honest scholars learn about their fields, the more they realize how much more there is still to learn. As T.S. Eliot said in his Choruses from the Rock: “All our knowledge only brings us nearer to our ignorance.” The more we know, the more we realize how much we do not know. In his proverb, Solomon says that knowing this only adds to the burden of living -- if life “under the sun” is all there is to learn, then even learning will prove to be meaningless.
What Might God Be Saying to You?
In vv.12-15, I’m quite sure that God is not saying that you should give up being a therapist or give up going to counseling. The knowledge we can gain from good counseling about how we human beings function, about where relationships go wrong, and about how they can begin to be made right again – that’s a gift from God. And, I know there are many great books about friendships and marriage and parenting that can provide hope and new directions for your life. We seek to provide or direct you to good counsel all the time here at LAC.
But, Solomon is saying that all the good counsel you might receive will, at the end of the day, leave you empty if you do not have God at the center of your life. Good counsel is like so many of the good gifts God has given us in this world. Received as a gift from the God who is at the center of your life, good counsel can help heal and help you function. But, acted on without reference to God, it will leave you “chasing after the wind.”
And, in vv.16-18, in talking about the futility of gaining knowledge “under the sun”, Solomon is not telling you to quit school if you’re a student or to quit doing great scholarship at places like Cal Tech and Fuller Seminary. But, he is saying that we must always surrender not only our wills – but also our minds – to God. The first commandment is “There shall not be any gods before me” – and that includes our scholarship.
But the main thing I want you to consider today is how to bring God into the center of your life’s decisions. One point in this, of course, is I want you to learn a way of life in which you become aware of the fact that God is always with you. When you become more and more aware of that, you learn to commit each matter that happens to God. This is what Paul meant when he said, “Pray without ceasing.” The longer I follow Jesus, the more I am learning how to stop and say, “Lord, you are with me. What would you have me do?” “What is the most loving thing for this person I am talking to?” And, sometimes I just pray, “Help me, Jesus.”
In addition, I find that coming regularly to worship with your church family is a key to living wisely – when you come with an eager desire to hear something from God, and not just out of obligation or to be entertained. If you come longing to hear from God, then when God’s Word is opened and proclaimed faithfully, you will hear from him – even if the preacher is not especially engaging or exciting. When you are with your church family wanting to hear from your Father with them -- and the Word is taught -- you will hear God directing you.
Finally, you need a smaller group of people who will walk through life with Jesus together with you. Mothers, you need some other mothers who really want to live for Jesus that you can talk with and learn with. Or, you need some older mothers who have walked with the Lord through the kinds of situations you are facing. If you ask, “Where can I find a group like that?” -- we can help you if you will let us.
And this same principle applies not just to mothering but also to many walks of life. Business people who want to honor God: Read good business books – but also find a community of Jesus-loving business people you can walk with and learn from. I say the same to teachers, scientists, underemployed, pastors…
We should not simply follow the wisdom under the sun. Solomon said that without God, that wisdom will be meaningless. We need someone “greater than Solomon (Mt 12:42).” That one has come in Jesus. He has given us his Word, his Spirit and his church. Learn all you can from the world – but make sure you are seeking God first. I think that’s the main point of Ecclesiastes for you today.
I leave you with some words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who had to make some hard decisions in a very difficult time in our world. He found lasting wisdom through faith in Christ and lived out in Christ-centered community. This is what he wrote in his Life Together:
“The most experienced… scholar in any field related to human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the cross of Jesus. Apart from Jesus, the greatest psychological or intellectual insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the sinfulness of human beings. And so it also does not know that humanity is destroyed by sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this… The Christian brother and sister know that when I come to them: here is a sinner like us, a fallen person who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness. The brother or sister views me as I am without God and as I become through the merciful work of God in the cross of Jesus Christ.”
May you discover true wisdom from above through a recommitment to Jesus today – and through the prayers and support of God’s people here at LAC – to his glory.