Hearing The Message Of Ecclesiastes--Ecclesiastes 1:18

Day 4

Writing Ecclesiastes correctly is taking some doing.  I’m starting to be able to type it out without throwing the “e” after the “cc”.

Kind of like it took me the longest to be able to write “Isaiah” correctly without having to slow down and order all the vowels.

When I would go looking for sources on Ecclesiastes in some of my books, I finally figured out that Ecclesiastes is right after Proverbs in the Bible.

Which is ironic, when I think about it, because Ecclesiastes, which seems like a negative and unhappy book of the Bible, seems to directly contradict some of the happy, quotable Proverbs.

Like Christopher J.H. Wright puts right there in the title, Hearing the Message of Ecclesiastes:  Questioning Faith in a Baffling World, understanding Ecclesiastes, hearing the message, is baffling to me.

Solomon/Qoheleth upends my nascent study of Ecclesiastes at the end of chapter 1:

Ecclesiastes 1:18  Because in much wisdom there is much grief; and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.

I’m already thinking Ecclesiastes is a tough book because it’s not happy, peppy, and bursting with love.

Verse 18 torches ALL of the reading, reflecting, studying, and writing I’ve been doing over the last 31/2 years to learn more about God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

Wright describes how Solomon/Qoheleth felt about getting educated and studying hard:

“Solomon/Qoheleth’s great learning didn’t satisfy or answer the deeper questions of life.  It was a fruitless search.  And a painful one in the end.  He discovered the ironic truth of the common saying that “ignorance is bliss.”  He would have been happier if he hadn’t learned so much for it seems that “the more you know, the more it hurts.”

Solomon/Qoheleth wrote Ecclesiastes somewhere between 450 and 150 BC. (I don’t use BCE and CE because I”m not religiously neutral).

Lao-Tse, the Chinese philosopher and the founder of Taoism, wrote this about 500 BC:

“Abandon learning, and you will be free from trouble and distress.” 

I guess only smart guys get around to actually noticing that increased knowledge leads to increased pain.

French philosopher MIchel de Montaigne wrote:

“We need but little learning to live happily.” 

So the less I know, the happier I would be.

The less vexed I would be about understanding life.

I will say that learning more and more about God’s Word has exposed my frailty as a good Christian.  The more I learn about God’s Word, the more I realize I have to live up to, to imitate Christ, and that means changing ME.

For the better.

The more I study, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

That’s distressing because I did nothing with His Truth for 55 years before picking up the Bible and other resources to understand God’s Word.

Plus, the more I know, the more I realize how much my ideas are changing.

And I’m set in my ways and to do something different is HARD.  Inertia tends to rule.

So, yeah, I could look at all of this learning and DAILY cognitive dissonance as attacks on my happy state of mind and put the Bible down (and more so this studious book on Ecclesiastes), and just be happy–and ignorant.

In When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook on Bible Difficulties, Norman Geisler gets at the kernel inside of the distress of all of Solomon/Qoheleth’s learning:

“For Solomon, wisdom is first and foremost living a successful life of righteousness and peace in obedience to God. Knowledge alone does not bring wisdom. Indeed, the message of Ecclesiastes is that knowledge alone brings only sorrow. Wisdom is the accumulation of the right kind of knowledge coupled with a life that is in harmony with God’s commands and at peace with Him.”

Wisdom in Solomon/Qoheleth’s day didn’t just mean being book smart or even Bible smart.

That means wisdom for me will be APPLYING the Bible to my life.

Living as close to God’s Truth as I can with the understanding I won’t always get it right.

Especially knowing that.

Lord, we are humbled by the limitations of our finite minds.  We recognize that true wisdom comes from You and apart from You, our knowledge is but chasing after the wind,.

Lord, help us to trust in You with all of our hearts and not our own understanding and knowledge.

Lord, grant us the wisdom to recognize the foolishness of pursuing knowledge for its own sake, without You.

Amen.