The Emptiness of Knowledge

Over 20 years ago, I remember sitting at my brother's high school graduation, which if you're in elementary school is a pretty boring event.

! I don't remember as the graduation speaker got up. I don't remember most of what he said during his speech. I don't remember his name or what he did.

But I remember to this day one thing that the graduation speaker said because it really struck home to me when I was in elementary school.

He said, you know, when you graduate high school, you think that you know and you've learned a lot about the world.

When you graduate college, you realize how little you actually know about the world.

And when you graduate graduate school, you realize how little your professors know about the world.

Maybe that resonates with some of you as you've gotten various degrees in your education career.

This graduation speaker was articulating a great paradox about the pursuit of knowledge.

And it's a paradox that resonates a lot with our Old Testament reading this morning in Ecclesiastes chapter one.

This week, our Old Testament lesson takes a bit of a detour in the book of Ecclesiastes.

And we'll be making a brief pit stop there over the next two weeks.

If you're not familiar with the book of Ecclesiastes, many people aren't, especially if you are not super familiar with going to church.

Ecclesiastes is a book in the Old Testament that fits within the genre of what we would call wisdom literature.

Wisdom literature. And in the Old Testament, there's kind of two main styles or approaches of wisdom literature.

The first approach would be that of the book of Proverbs, where the book of Proverbs teaches us that there are norms.

There are created norms in the world and in the universe.

And wisdom is about living according to those norms.

Just as wood has a grain, wisdom is about aligning ourselves with the grain of the universe.

But there's a second approach to wisdom literature that emphasizes that there are painful exceptions to this.

That in a fallen world, there are painful exceptions to the grain of the universe.

It acknowledges the world we live in has been deeply broken by sin and things are unfair and unjust.

There are all kinds of exceptions to the grain of creation.

And the book of Ecclesiastes fits within this second approach to wisdom.

So the book of Proverbs is going to sound a lot like this.

The righteous will prosper and the wicked will perish.

And Ecclesiastes is going to sound like this.

Yes, but sometimes, maybe often, it's the wicked who prosper and it's the righteous who are oppressed.

Two angles, two approaches, two styles towards wisdom literature.

And if you read the book of Ecclesiastes, you see that one of the central themes in the book is that life pursued under the sun,

life in and of itself is futile, it's empty, it's meaningless, it's a chasing after the wind.

And this is an honest confession of someone who pursued life for all it's worth, who pursued life for all that it has to offer.

The author of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon, inherited his father's throne, King David's throne.

And he was wealthy, he was powerful, he was brilliant.

He knew it all, he had it all, he tried it all.

He experienced everything that this life could possibly offer him.

And at the end of the day, his conclusion was that life pursued in and of itself leaves you empty and feeling like everything is futile and meaningless.

And in the first two chapters of Ecclesiastes, we see his story.

We see him recounting to us how he pursued things like wisdom and knowledge, how he pursued pleasure and happiness, how he pursued work and success.

And so our passage this morning focuses on Solomon's pursuit of wisdom and knowledge.

That's what we're going to look at this morning.

We're going to look at the emptiness of knowledge.

And then next week, we're going to look at the emptiness of success.

But from Ecclesiastes 1, verses 12 through 18, we're going to look at two things.

Ecclesiastes 1:12–18

We're going to look at the futility of knowledge and the fullness of knowledge.

The futility of knowledge and the fullness of knowledge.

So first of all, let's look at the futility of knowledge.

Look at verses 12 through 13 in your bulletin or your own copy of God's word.

Verses 12 through 13, Solomon says this.

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

I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens.

Solomon gave himself to the life of the mind.

This is something that we see elsewhere in 1 Kings chapter 4, verses 29 through 34.

1 Kings 4:29–34

It says this, that God gave Solomon wisdom and very great insights and a breadth of understanding as measureless as the sand on the seashore.

Solomon's wisdom was greater than the wisdom of all the people of the east and greater than all the wisdom of Egypt.

He spoke 3,000 proverbs and his songs numbered 1,005.

He spoke about plant life from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls.

He also spoke about animals and birds, reptiles and fish.

From all nations, people came to listen to Solomon's wisdom.

Solomon was what you might consider an ancient Renaissance man.

He was the world's most famous philosopher and scientist and poet.

He was Immanuel Kant and Stephen Hawking and Jay-Z all in one.

He was the Renaissance man of his day.

And what was his conclusion?

After pursuing wisdom and knowledge, we see it in verses 14 through 15.

He says, what a heavy burden God has laid on mankind.

I have seen all the things that are done under the sun and all of them are meaningless.

A chasing after the wind.

And if that sounds like a bit of a Debbie Downer, welcome to the book of Ecclesiastes.

Why does he conclude this?

Well, he shares why he concludes this in two separate proverbs in chapter 1.

The first proverb goes like this.

What is crooked cannot be straightened, and what is lacking cannot be counted.

What is crooked cannot be straightened, and what is lacking cannot be counted.

What is he saying in that proverb?

Well, the first observation he's making about knowledge is this.

That the more that we know, the more we realize how much we don't know.

The more we know, the more we realize how much we don't know.

What is crooked cannot be made straight.

Just because we might know a lot about the world and how it works,

doesn't mean that we know how to fix what's wrong with it.

We can, for example, we can know a lot about the science of weather.

We could be an expert meteorologist, perhaps the smartest one in the world.

But we can't stop Hurricane Helene from releasing destructive floods in the southeastern United States

and destroying lives and families and entire towns.

Or think about something like poverty.

You could get a PhD studying the economics and the sociology and the politics of poverty.

But being a world expert on poverty doesn't mean that you know how to fix it.

For all we know about what the causes of poverty are, no one has ever been able to solve it.

And the second half of this proverb restates the same thing in a different way.

Solomon says, what is lacking cannot be counted.

What is lacking cannot be counted.

Scientists understand this proverb.

They understand that there are all sorts of things.

There are all kinds of things that we know that we don't know.

Let me give you an example.

Caleb Scharf is a senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA.

He taught at Columbia University.

And he wrote this article when the Scientific American were entitled,

This is what we don't know about the universe.

He says, it's easy for scientists to talk about all that we know about the universe,

but what we often don't talk about is how much we don't know.

And in this article he lists a lot of things about what scientists don't know.

Let me list three.

He says, first of all, we don't fully understand our own biology.

He said, if we actually understood everything about DNA and genetics,

we'd be able to totally eliminate disease.

Of course, we haven't been able to do that yet.

He said, secondly, in the field of math, we can't prove or solve many of our own mathematical conjectures or theorems.

There's a long list of unproven, unsolved problems and unsolved conjectures.

And these are things that mathematicians rely on, and yet they can't even prove them.

Third, he says, we don't really know what dark matter or dark energy is in the universe.

He says, the matter, the stuff that you and I can see and feel and touch,

only accounts for about 5% of what's in the universe.

He talks about this stuff called dark matter and dark energy,

which is the remaining 95% of the universe.

We know it's out there, but we really don't understand a lot about it or how it works.

We have little to no idea about 95% of what exists in the universe.

Now, this is incredibly humbling.

It's incredibly humbling if you stop and think about it for a second.

There are all kinds of things that we know that we don't know.

And this makes the pursuit of knowledge deeply elusive and deeply paradoxical.

It's why Solomon says to pursue knowledge in and of itself is like chasing after the wind.

So that's the first observation that Solomon tells us about the pursuit of knowledge,

that the more we know, the more we realize how much we don't know.

The second observation that Solomon gives us about the pursuit of knowledge comes in verses 16 through 18.

I invite you to look there with me.

Verses 16 through 18, Solomon says,

I said to myself,

Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me.

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.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow.

The more knowledge, the more grief.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow.

The more knowledge, the more grief.

When I was a college student at the University of Maryland,

I had learned throughout middle school, high school,

I learned a lot about the civil rights movement.

I thought I knew a lot about the civil rights movement in America.

I learned up growing in school about MLKs.

I have a dream speech about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott

about Brown versus Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But then I took a class in college.

It was one of my favorite classes.

And the title of the class was called The Rhetoric of Black America.

And it was in that class as a 20-year-old

that I first learned about somebody named Emmett Till.

And I learned that his story was one of the primary catalysts

for the civil rights movement that I thought I knew a lot about.

If you don't know his story,

Emmett Till is a 14-year-old black boy who grew up in Chicago

who was visiting his family in Mississippi.

in the summer of 1955.

And that summer, he was kidnapped.

He was brutally murdered in the middle of the night.

And his body was dumped into a river.

And in that class, we read the memoir of Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley.

And we read her deeply moving story about what it was like to be a mother to a son

who was murdered because of hatred and racism

and her gut-wrenching decision to put the picture of this casket

on the front page of a newspaper

so the whole world could see that this is what hatred does,

this is what racism does.

It was a heart-wrenching book.

And it's the only book I remember reading in college

that I remember sitting there and crying and weeping as I read it.

I gained more knowledge.

I gained more perspective, more wisdom about the Civil Rights Movement,

but it was not a knowledge or a wisdom that made me happy.

It was a knowledge and a wisdom that made me more sorrowful.

That's what Solomon is saying here.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow,

and the more knowledge, the more grief.

Perhaps you can think of examples from your own life,

your own expertise, your education, your training, your work,

maybe classes you've taken, books that you've read,

training you've received in your workplace.

Maybe you've experienced how the more knowledge you've gained,

the wiser or smarter that you've become in a particular topic

or a particular field,

the more grieved you have become

about how unjust and sad and terribly unfair the world is.

I love the way Eugene Peterson puts it in his translation,

the message.

He puts it like this.

The more you know, the more you hurt.

The more you know, the more you hurt.

This is Solomon's conclusion.

This is why he concludes that a life pursuing knowledge

as merely an end in itself is an unsatisfying life.

It can't lead us to the kind of fullness and happiness

that we all long for.

It can't satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart alone.

It will lead us down an ever-increasing path of despair

of how little we can actually know

and how terribly sad the world is.

And so this raises some questions for us.

It raises questions like this.

Is there another way

to pursue wisdom and knowledge

in a way that doesn't end in such futility?

Is there a way that can actually lead us

to experience the fullness of what it means to be human?

If what Solomon concludes is true,

how should we think about

and pursue the life of the mind,

especially if we're followers of Jesus?

Does this mean that

knowledge is not worth pursuing at all?

Does this lead us to a place

of anti-intellectualism?

Or is there a way for followers of Jesus

to pursue the intellectual life

in a way that leads us away from futility

and towards fullness?

Away from futility and towards fullness.

And that's what I want to look at secondly.

We're going to look at the fullness of knowledge.

The fullness of knowledge.

If you study Ecclesiastes,

part of what you learn right away

is that part of the key to understanding this book

is this phrase, under the sun.

Under the sun or under heaven.

It's the most repeated phrase throughout the whole book.

It's even repeated twice here in our short passage.

And this phrase helps us to understand

what Solomon is saying.

He's saying if you look at life

just by itself,

if you look at life

just as it appears to be under the sun,

if you study it,

if you observe it,

if you experience it,

it eventually is going to lead you

to a place of despair.

But this should lead us to ask us,

this should lead us to ask an important question.

And the important question is this.

What if?

What if everything under the sun

isn't all there is?

What if there's more than just the material world

that we can hear and taste and see and touch?

Ecclesiastes should lead us to ask the question,

what if there is fullness to be found beyond the sun?

Every other religion and philosophy in this world

teaches that true knowledge and true wisdom

is out there somewhere

and it's up to us to go and pursue and find it.

But Christianity tells us something radically different.

That true wisdom and true knowledge

isn't just out there,

that it has come to find us.

And John chapter one,

verse one says,

in the beginning was the word,

the logos.

And the logos was with God

and the logos was God.

In the ancient world,

the logos was the great pursuit

of all of the philosophers in the known world.

It was the one unifying source

of all wisdom and knowledge

that would explain everything else in the universe.

And John is telling us in John chapter one

that the logos,

the true wisdom beyond the sun,

isn't just an abstract idea out there.

It's a person.

It's a person.

The apostle Paul says the same thing,

a similar thing in Colossians two,

verse three,

he says,

all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge

are hidden in Christ.

All of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge

are hidden in Christ.

To know Jesus is to know

not only the source of all wisdom,

but wisdom itself.

He is the one who made all things,

sustains all things,

knows all things.

And he is the one who became wisdom incarnate,

knowledge in the flesh.

And it's in knowing Jesus as the logos,

it's in knowing Jesus as our divine wisdom

that takes the futility of the intellectual life

that Solomon describes,

that takes us away from that

and towards the fullness that is found in Christ.

And so I want to suggest three ways.

I want to suggest three ways

that knowing Jesus as the logos,

as the divine wisdom,

transforms our pursuit of knowledge

and the intellectual life.

Three ways that knowing Jesus as the logos

transforms our pursuit of knowledge

and the intellectual life.

First of all,

knowing Jesus as the logos means

that everything is worth knowing.

Knowing Jesus as the logos means

that everything is worth knowing.

Everybody has a starting place for their epistemology,

for how they know what they know.

Whether you're an atheist or agnostic,

whether you're religious,

nobody knows anything about the world in a vacuum.

What it means for Jesus to be our starting point,

what it means for him to be our foundation,

is that then we know that we know that everything matters.

Colossians chapter one says it like this,

that all things, all things have been made by Jesus and for Jesus.

That includes everything in the world.

We have been made in his image to know him

and to know about the world that he's made.

And so when we study math or science or literature or biology

or engineering or art,

we are not just pursuing knowledge under the sun.

We're not just pursuing knowledge for its own sake.

We are pursuing knowledge and learning about the world

so to better understand God and to commune with him.

Every Sunday, we read the great commandment.

We're to love the Lord our God with all of our heart

and with all our soul and with all of our mind.

This is what it means to love God with all of our minds.

If Jesus is our starting point for knowledge,

then we should care about the life of the mind

and intellectual pursuits

because we should expect,

we should expect to find truth and goodness and beauty

wherever it is to be found.

The fact that Jesus is the Logos

isn't the end of the intellectual life.

It is only the beginning.

It's the foundation for knowing and pursuing truth.

So that's the first thing.

Knowing Jesus as the Logos means everything matters.

Everything's worth knowing.

Secondly, knowing Jesus as the Logos

frees us to say,

I don't know.

It frees us to say, I don't know.

Solomon says there's this deep futility in knowledge

that the more we know,

the more we realize how much we don't know.

And for some of us, this is an incredible burden.

In some of our workplaces,

our classrooms,

among your peers,

some of us may feel the very visceral pressure

to have all the answers,

to be the smartest person in the room.

But if you feel the pressure

to be the smartest person in the room,

chances are you have made your intellect

your identity.

And if your intellect is your identity,

then you're not free to admit

what you don't know.

Because not knowing something crushes you.

David Foster Wallace,

in his famous graduation speech

at Kenyon College,

called This Is Water,

puts it beautifully like this.

He says,

if you worship your intellect,

if you worship being seen as smart,

you will always end up feeling stupid,

a fraud,

on the verge of being found out.

But if Jesus Christ has become your wisdom,

if he has become your starting place for knowledge,

then your intellect is no longer

where you get your sense of identity and self-worth.

Because there is only one,

there is only one who is wise enough

to know all things,

and it's not you.

And it's not me.

If Jesus Christ is the Logos,

that means that Christians

should be too radically things at once.

On one hand,

they should be deeply intellectual.

And at the same time,

they should be radically free and comfortable

to acknowledge what they don't know.

and to be open to learning

from anybody and anyone

who is pursuing goodness and truth and beauty.

Thirdly, finally,

knowing Jesus as the Logos

frees us to hope

when knowing makes us hurt.

Knowing Jesus as the Logos

frees us to hope

when knowing makes us hurt.

If it's true

what Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 1,

that the more wisdom,

the more sorrow.

And the more knowledge,

the more grief.

That's true.

And it's also true

that Jesus Christ

was the most sorrowful person

who ever lived.

Because he is the eternal Logos.

He is the eternal wisdom

made flesh.

And in him,

we see someone,

we see what wisdom looks like.

It's someone

who takes on flesh

to suffer and die

for the sake of the world

and to raise it up again

by his resurrection power.

And this is what has the power

to transform

the kind of despair

and futility

that we see

all over Ecclesiastes.

This futility

that the more that we know,

the more sorrowful we become.

I just want to speak

for a moment

to all of the kids

and youth in the room.

If you're in school,

elementary school,

middle school,

high school,

college,

the more time

that you spend as a student,

the more time you spend in school,

the more you learn,

the more you're going to learn

about hard things.

You're going to learn

more examples

like the story of Emmett Till.

Things that make us sad,

things that make us angry,

things that make us grieve.

Perhaps you can already

think of things

that you learned in school

that have made you grieve

or sad or angry.

But the incredibly good news,

if Jesus is our starting place

for knowledge,

if he's our Logos,

then all of those things

that we learn about in school

that make us sad,

whether it's poverty

or injustice

or wars

or hatred or violence,

we can learn about those things

from the perspective

and knowing

that one day

Jesus is going to renew

and restore

all of those things.

that even as we study

the sorrows of this world,

we don't study them

in despair,

we study them in hope

that the eternal Logos

makes all things new.

not surprisingly,

C.S. Lewis

said this a lot more eloquently

than me many years ago

in an essay

that was originally a sermon

called Learning in Wartime

where he's speaking to students

at Oxford and he's answering

very similar questions

that are being raised

in Ecclesiastes.

And he was writing

during the 1940s

in his day.

People were calling into question

the value

of a college education

while World War II

was raging on

around the world.

And people were asking

questions like this,

why study literature

and philosophy

and science

when the whole world

is in a crisis,

when the whole world

is in the middle

of a global war.

And Lewis says this

in his essay,

he says it's actually

a crisis like a global war

that reminds us

of what pursuing knowledge

is really about.

That it's not just

pursuing knowledge

for the sake of knowledge,

it's about pursuing knowledge

for the glory of God.

That the intellectual life

if humbly offered to God

can be a means

of pursuing truth

and goodness

and beauty

in a way that offers

real meaning

and hope.

to a world

that is hurting

and broken.

And here's how he ends

his sermon.

He says,

if we had un-foolish,

or sorry,

if we had foolish,

un-Christian hopes

about human culture

before the war,

they are now shattered.

If we thought

we were building up

a heaven on earth,

if we looked

for something

that would turn

the present world

from a place

of pilgrimage

into a permanent city,

satisfying the soul

of man,

we are disillusioned

and not a moment

too soon.

But,

if we thought

that for some souls

and at some times,

the life of learning

humbly offered to God

was,

was in its own small way,

one of the appointed

approaches

to the divine reality

and the divine beauty,

which we hope

to enjoy hereafter,

we can think so still.

And friends,

that is what it means

to have Jesus

as our logos,

as our wisdom

and our knowledge.

As Solomon reminds us,

pursuing knowledge

for its own sake,

it's going to lead you

into incredible futility

and despair.

But to pursue

the intellectual life

as a Christian

is one of the greatest

exercises in hope.

In the hope

that Jesus Christ,

the eternal logos,

makes all things new.

Pray with me.

Father in heaven,

we thank you

that in you

we see

eternal wisdom

and knowledge.

In you

is ultimate truth

and goodness

and beauty.

Lord,

I pray for all of us

as we

give ourselves

to the life

of the mind,

to the pursuit

of knowledge

and wisdom

in this world.

Even as it makes us sad,

even as it shows us

how much we don't know.

Lord,

I pray that you

would help us

to understand Jesus

that you make

all things new

and therefore

that everything matters

and that we can

give ourselves,

we can give our minds

to you,

we can love you

with all of our minds

and that we can

offer this

as a humble sacrifice

to you

and offer truth

and meaning

and hope to the world.

We pray all this

in the name of the Father,

the Son,

and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Amen.