396: Failed Strategy #1: Wisdom | Dave Sloop

Introduction

Thank you, Miss Barbara. Welcome to everyone. Good to see you. I wanted to start today—I meant to say this last week, but I forgot. We have a group of kids in the house that are part of Young Life. Just a couple of weeks ago, I get these updates from Landon, his staff team, and his volunteers, many of whom are part of our church. I want you to know, if you went to Young Life Camp and you have started coming to check out our church, we’re thrilled that you are here. I know that maybe a dozen or more, maybe 15 kids, began new life in Christ because of the great work of it.

In fact, raise your hand if you met Christ in Young Life. Just a room full of—I’m an adult too, you know? Okay, yeah. Just lots of people. I’m one of them, by the way. We’re thrilled that you guys are here.

The Context of the Passage

Now I want to say a quick word. I hope you’ve been enjoying our study in the book of Ecclesiastes. Maybe at first glance, not the best book to start with if you’re a new person following Christ, but maybe when you take a second look, it’s actually a great book to look at. Because what Solomon, who writes this book—at least most people believe that—what he’s writing about is life under. Under the sun.

We’re talking about life in the seen world, life that we experience here on Earth. And if you’re just reading this book for the first time, it almost feels like a book that does not belong in the Bible. I mean, he says in verse two of chapter one, after he introduces himself, "Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless," and then he repeats it. I think he says the word vanity or heaven five times. There’s only seven words in verse two. Meaningless, empty, vanity.

But it’s because we are talking about life under the sun. It is about man’s attempt to try to make sense of this life apart from the God who made us, and it will always end in confusion, chaos, and despair.

For the next four weeks, we are launching into a part of our series where we’re going to be looking at man’s failed strategies to try to satisfy this ache or this longing that we all intuitively know exists inside our hearts. And there’s a couple of things these four strategies share in common—number one, they are instinctive. These are not things that we are taught to do. These are things that bubble to the surface. They rise to the surface of your heart, and they present themselves as viable solutions to the emptiness, chaos, and longing.

That is the first thing. These things all bubble to the surface. They are instinctive in your heart. But secondly, they are all failures. They do not work. They are counterfeits. Maybe a better way to describe it is to say that they are limited in their ability to solve our deepest problems. It’s not that these things are inherently bad, and here’s what they are: we’re going to talk about wisdom, wealth, work, and pleasure.

And these things are not inherently bad unless, and until, we look to them to provide for us something they are not capable of delivering. At that point, they become harmful. They become a counterfeit to the genuine thing, and they lead to despair—emptiness, frustration.

The way we will handle this over the next four weeks is—we’ve decided we’re going to teach the thing that we have the most experience in. So this week, I’ll do wisdom. Next week, Quig will do pleasure. It’s going to be a good time.

But we are going to be looking at Ecclesiastes, starting in chapter one, verse 12. If you have a Bible, or an app on your phone—this is one of those occasions—we’re going to look at six or seven verses together, and it will be helpful to follow along.

So if you have your Bible, let’s turn to Ecclesiastes 1:12. And here’s what he says:

I, the teacher, was king over Israel and Jerusalem.

Let’s stop there. Most believe, as I already mentioned, that this was Solomon. He was the king over Israel and Jerusalem. He was also known as the wisest and wealthiest man to ever live.

In other words, if there was a man who, by the faculties of his own mind, was going to be able to find meaning in life through the accumulation of wisdom and knowledge, this was the guy. He had the resources— not only financial resources, but he had the intellectual capacity to go looking for it.

In 1 Kings 10, we hear a story of a Gentile queen, Queen of Sheba. She had heard the rumors about this king in Israel who was wise—who knew more than anyone—and she went to test his knowledge. He answered every question she had. No problem. And she left there, and what she actually said was, "You far exceeded even the rumors that are told about you." It’s pretty rare.

Solomon was the guy that, if you were going to be able to figure out what this life was all about, the problem of meaning, he was the guy who was going to do it. That is his credibility.

Listen to what he set out to do in verse 13:

I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven.

It says he devoted himself. Maybe your version says he applied his heart or he set his heart. The heart is referring to his inner life. There was a deep longing inside Solomon to do two things: to seek, and to search.

That first verb, "to seek," is the idea of studying intently, looking at something, observing it closely. He was going to do a deep dive on the things he knew about to see if he could discover meaning.

But the second one, "to search,"—it’s the same word used in the book of Numbers when Moses sends out spies to investigate the land of Canaan. He was going to search deep, and wide. And here was his scope: everything under heaven. It’s a synonym for under the sun. It is life on this planet, the seen world.

He was going to do whatever it took to find meaning, purpose, significance, and fulfillment through his pursuit of wisdom and knowledge under the sun.

And he comes to three pretty quick conclusions. Listen to what they are. This is in the second part of verse 13:

What a heavy burden God has laid on men.

It’s an interesting verse. If you have the ESV, what it said was, "It’s an unhappy business that God has given to the children of men to be busy with." It is an unhappy business, seeking and searching endlessly but never finding what you’re looking for.

And that is what seeking and searching is about. But what’s most interesting about what he says here is that this perpetual, unsatisfied seeking and searching is what is given to men by God. It’s perplexing—that’s a pretty confusing thing to say.

He is suggesting that the origin of this longing and searching that we cannot fulfill is from God himself. In fact, he says this again in Ecclesiastes 3:11:

I’ve seen the burden that God has laid on men.

And then he says:

He has set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

In other words, God has put in your heart and mine an instinctive, intuitive knowledge that there is something beyond what we experience under the sun. But the problem is, He has left us in a world for which there is no fulfillment to that longing.

We’ll come back to this later.

His first observation is that what looks like a conscious commitment to apply himself—to seek and search—in verse 12, is actually also a subconscious, an involuntary, inescapable reality of human existence. We seek and search. Some of you, if you’re honest, know this all too well. We seek and search, but we never find.

Here’s his second conclusion:

I’ve seen all things that are under the sun. All of them are meaningless, chasing after the wind.

He said he searched high and low. If somebody was going to find it, it would be him. And he said, "It is all meaningless." The word there is vanity in the ESV. In Hebrew, it’s Hevel. It’s the word we hear over and over again.

The NIV translates it as "meaningless," but that’s not a great translation. The literal meaning is vapor or smoke. It’s smoke, it’s vapor—mysterious. It’s not that there’s no meaning; it’s that I see that there must be meaning. I just can’t quite get my hands around it.

See, smoke looks like a solid. It’s mysterious. It’s changing shapes. It keeps us from walking through it. But the moment we try to grab smoke, it slips through our fingers.

That second phrase he uses, "chasing after the wind," is a descriptor of what he means by vanity. It’s ambition for something you will never obtain. It’s endless searching. And he says, "It is a waste of time." That’s his second conclusion.

And here’s his third:

What is twisted cannot be straightened. What is lacking cannot be counted.

He’s observing that there are some crooked things that cannot be straightened. Throughout your Bible, crooked often refers to immorality, evil. When he sets out to look for meaning in the world, some things can be explained. But what he cannot explain is why there is evil in the heart of every man.

Do you know, for all our technological advancement, for all our intellectual pursuits and discoveries, we have not discovered one thing the university cannot teach you or our children: why evil and suffering exist?

We have not gotten one inch closer to that mystery. We see some crooked things—those that are supposed to be straight—and we sense it. We know in our hearts this is not the way it ought to be, but this is the way it is.

He observes that some things that are lacking cannot be counted. This is a truism: you can’t count what you cannot see. You cannot observe something that’s not present. He’s frustrated. He’s seeking and searching, and he keeps never finding.

Then in verse 16, he basically does the same thing he did in verses 13-15. In verse 13-14, he made a statement about the vanity of wisdom and knowledge under the sun. Then he supported this claim with a little proverb.

Now, in verses 16 and 17, he makes another statement about wisdom and knowledge and the vanity of searching for it under the sun. And in verse 18, he gives a little parable that supports that statement.

But there’s a slight difference. Listen:

I thought to myself, Look, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me.

I experienced much wisdom and knowledge. Then I applied myself to understanding wisdom and also madness and folly. But I learned that this too is a chasing after the wind.

In verse 13, wisdom and knowledge are in front of him—there’s the anticipation of discovery. Here, in verse 16, he looks in the rearview. A life lived in pursuit of knowledge and wisdom under the sun.

And here’s what he observes: I am smarter, I am wiser than anyone on the planet. Maybe what he hopes is that his wisdom, his intellect, will give him some sense of meaning, purpose. But he concludes that this too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind—a pursuit of something you will never catch.

Then he offers this little proverb—darker than the first one:

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow. The more knowledge, the more grief.

That’s where our text ends. And in unison, we might say: Thanks be to God.

I almost laughed when we said that. It’s depressing. He says, "With much wisdom comes much sorrow. The more knowledge, the more grief." What does he mean?

I’d like to offer three possibilities. Number one: it’s true that the more you know, the more you realize how little you know—the more you search, the more you see crooked things that should be straight but aren’t. Things that should have gone one way but didn’t. The more you discover, the more you see gaps, holes, frustration, confusion—it’s enigmatic.

Second: in verse 13, he’s at the beginning of his pursuit, and there’s always hope—maybe he will find something in wisdom and knowledge. But in verse 16, he’s already gotten all the wisdom and knowledge he’s going to get. And instead of hope, it’s replaced by despair. He already reached it—he already grasped it—and he couldn’t catch it. He’s disappointed; he’s unfulfilled because what he hoped in did not deliver.

You know, there’s a Dutch study often cited—that our anticipation of a thing is actually more fulfilling than the thing itself. Have you experienced that? You plan a vacation for months, you get there, and it’s maybe a 7 on the Enneagram. The actual experience isn’t as fulfilling as the anticipation.

But especially when the thing you obtain is a letdown—that’s the second reason.

And third: Solomon could not have fathomed the world we live in today. We live in the information age. We have more knowledge available at our fingertips than ever before. Tomorrow, we will break that record again. Every day, that record is broken.

With artificial intelligence making the exponential growth even faster, it’s insane. But do you know what’s unexpected? That amid all this knowledge, we are the most depressed, anxious, worried, lonely, and empty generation ever. There is an inverse correlation between the accumulation of knowledge and happiness in our hearts.

There’s a scientific term for this: information overload. I want to read you a few statistics:

Information overload, also known as info obesity, intoxication, or information anxiety, occurs when someone has too much information about a topic or issue, making it difficult to understand and make decisions.

It can happen when the mind’s ability to synthesize information is exceeded by the amount of information received.

Have you experienced this?

Some symptoms include inability to make decisions, lack of focus or concentration, difficulty sleeping, lack of creativity, and poor memory. Scientifically, this proverb proves true: the more knowledge, the more grief.

Why? Because you and I are finite, trying to hold infinite knowledge in our minds.

I’ll give you one personal example: when I left Young Life staff in 2019 and started a business as an entrepreneur, I was reading books, learning things, listening to podcasts. Maybe some of you are like me—just trying to absorb everything, constantly. Then I had problems and fires to put out. My mind was racing, running at all times. I couldn’t sleep.

My wife once looked at me and said, "Dave, even when you’re here, you’re not here."

And I thought: okay. I need to recalibrate. But what I was experiencing was information overload. We’re not meant to carry that much information. There is no answer. Solomon’s conclusion: there is no solution to our longing for meaning through wisdom and knowledge under the sun. It always and forever leads to despair.

The Limitations of Human Effort

Should we close in prayer? No. There’s more. But it is a depressing place for our passage to end, isn’t it? And it’s not just that there’s an absence of information—not just that he doesn’t have answers. It’s that God has appointed the struggle. He has ordained that we have this sense of eternity in our hearts, but we live in a world with no fulfillment for that longing.

Would it be reasonable to say, “God is cruel to allow that”? How can He give us a thirst that cannot be quenched, hunger that cannot be satisfied?

But remember, Solomon is talking about life under the sun, in the seen world. If you try to find meaning only under the sun, it will always lead to frustration. What he was talking about was trying to find meaning—wisdom and knowledge—apart from God—even instead of God.

Do you know someone from the Bible who sought wisdom and understanding instead of God? When she saw that the fruit was pleasing to the eye and good for food and, get this, desirable for what? Wisdom and knowledge. She took, she ate, her eyes were opened—and she did not like what she saw.

The history of philosophy—from ancient to medieval to modern—is Genesis 3:6 on repeat. It is man’s attempt to find wisdom and knowledge apart from the one who made the world, and it always leads to despair.

Because the world we live in is crooked, bent, lacking. Is it because God is cruel? No. It’s because He was pleased to allow our efforts to find life apart from Him to be utterly frustrated—so that we would long for more. Because you see, Solomon knew more about wisdom than he let on in this book.

In fact, Jesus references something Solomon says about wisdom in Matthew chapter 11. Do you know the passage where the Pharisees and the tax collectors are accusing Him? They say, "Some man comes eating and drinking. He’s a drunkard and a glutton, a friend of tax collectors and sinners." And Jesus, in Matthew 11:19, says:

Wisdom will be justified by her deeds.

This verse is odd unless you know the passage Jesus is pointing to. Do you know a chapter in your Bible where wisdom is personified as a lady? It’s Proverbs chapter 8. Why would Jesus point to this chapter? You tell me.

I’ll read a few excerpts from Proverbs 8—this is wisdom speaking:

The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works before his deeds of old.
I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began.
I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,
when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
when he gave the sea its boundary so that the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.

Then listen:

Then I was the craftsman at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence, delighting in his whole world, and delighting in mankind.

Now then, my sons, listen to me:

For whoever finds me, finds life.

This is not just poetic—this is prophetic.

What Jesus was pointing to—and what Solomon foresaw—is that wisdom and knowledge are not merely philosophies or thoughts to be discovered. They are persons—who would one day be revealed. Someone who seeks and searches. Because he knew that in our endless seeking for life under the sun, we would never find life until we found life in the sun of God.

He is, as 1 Corinthians 1:24 says, the wisdom of God.
In Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, as Colossians 2:3 states. He is the one who makes crooked things straight, Isaiah 45:2.

He comes to fill in the gaps—the one for whom you were made.

Application

You know, there’s a song written by a man named David Wilcox. I don’t know if he was Christian when he wrote it, but it always captures me. It’s called, That’s What the Lonely Is For. Listen to the chorus:

When I get lonely, that’s only a sign.
Some room is empty, that room is there by design.
If I feel hollow, that’s just my proof that there’s more for me to follow.
That’s what the lonely is for.

God has placed eternity in your heart and mine. He’s pleased to allow this ache so that we might search and long for something above the sun—for the sun itself.

He seeks and searches endlessly for you. He came to seek and save what was lost—because He knew that in your seeking and searching, you would never find Him. You would look below the sun, always.

But He came to us.

Do you know that in Philippians 2, we’ll end with this?

He, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped.
But He emptied Himself. That Greek word is kanoo—and one of its translations is to be in vain.
He made Himself vanity. He made Himself emptiness—He identified Himself with the heavil of this world so that you and I could know the wisdom of God, who is a person, not a thought.

And as Saint Augustine says, you and I will be restless in our hearts and minds until we find our rest in Him. And when we find Him, it is much more like yielding than striving. We rest, not because we have all the answers now, but because we know the One who holds them. He holds the whole world.

And so we rest.

Have you been seeking, searching? It will frustrate you all your days—until you bring your life under the real Sun. Would you come to Him? He is the one for whom you were made. He’s what the lonely is for.

Let's pray.

Father, we need You. We can’t do it on our own. Thank you for the book of Ecclesiastes that is so honest about the reality of a world apart from You. Forgive our arrogance in thinking we can discover meaning apart from You.

Thank You that You stepped out of heaven and came seeking, searching—so that we might be found in You. If you’re here today and you've been seeking and searching, don’t miss this chance to come and pray at these curved rails by yourself. Or if you'd like someone to pray with you, we have people at the straight rail rails, and they’d love to pray with you.

But you come. Christ’s name. Amen.

Please stand as we worship.