A Quest for Meaning
Ecclesiastes 1:12 – 18
In the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams writes about Deep Thought, the powerful supercomputer that is tasked with determining the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. It takes the computer a long time to check and double-check its computations—seven and a half million years, to be exact—but eventually it spits out a simple, unambiguous answer: the meaning of life is forty-two.
“Forty-two!” someone yells at the computer. “Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?” “I checked it very thoroughly,” Deep Thought replies, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you have never actually known what the question is or used the right source of information.
In our lesson last week, we heard the wisest man ever known, King Solomon establishes his thesis, his proposition for the meaning of life; he says that life is Meaningless, Utterly Meaningless, everything is meaningless! And as we talked last week, we listed off several things in our current times that seem to agree with his point of view. When we look around there are a myriad of things that just confuse us, that confound us.
We wonder, is this really the best that God has planned for humankind? Is this the best that God has for us? From the continuation of pandemic fears to the war overseas, the fighting, shooting, killing of little ones in schools. The economic uncertainty that we face, the gas prices, the food prices, the energy prices. It all just seems so useless, so needless. In the same way, Solomon has perceived a seeming lack of significance, of usefulness in the repetitive nature of the world, and the toil that mankind has put into life. It makes no sense to him, and to us. And so, we wonder, Solomon wonders, what is the meaning of life.
Solomon is convinced that because of the gift wisdom that he has been given that he can, he must uncover, unravel the mystery of the meaning of life. So, Solomon is prepared to try and understand how this any of this makes sense, for him, for believers, and for seekers. Today we see that Solomon is embarking on a Quest for Meaning. Friends over the coming weeks this is our quest in Ecclesiastes, to come to a true and accurate understanding of life, the universe, and everything in it. We come today to join Solomon on his spiritual journey, to discover the meaning of life. It is a Quest for Meaning!
King Solomon, our guide on this Quest, was by nature a seeker of the things of knowledge and wisdom. Today he writes that “I applied my mind, to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 1:13). Understand Solomon is not undertaking this quest as a trivial brain teaser but rather he is committing himself to purposeful and intentional investigation in this Quest for Meaning. He is personally committing himself to answering the ultimate question; what is the meaning of life. He is doing this not only for his benefit but also for the benefit of the people of Israel. Solomon wants to know, he desires, make that, needs to know the meaning of life.
As you may recall from last week, when Solomon became king, God gave him the opportunity of a lifetime: he could ask for anything he wished. Solomon chooses wisely. Rather than asking for money or fame, he asked for wisdom because he desperately desires to govern the people of God well.
But that gift, that blessing does not isolate or insolate him from unsettling confusion about the orchestration of the world. This divine gift of wisdom did not mean that the king instantly understood everything about the way the world works. He, like all mere mortals still had to apply himself to the pursuit of knowledge, Solomon devoted his life to learning. Solomon’s quest was sincere.
Solomon focused his mind and disciplined his heart to yearn for the truth, He wanted to understand the meaning of life. His quest was as extensive as it was intensive, it was almost obsessive. He wanted to investigate every area of human endeavor— “all that is done under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 1:13).
Please understand that Solomon was not seeking to reach beyond his status. This kind of “wisdom” that he had in mind was not divine wisdom, it was not the divine Creational intellect of God but rather Solomon was looking for perfected human wisdom attainable by mere mortals. This wisdom does not refer to spiritual wisdom that comes only from God. But it refers to that which human beings can learn about the world without any special revelation from God.
Seeking such wisdom is a worthy and God engendered pursuit. All truth about the world around us, about humans and the rest of Creation, is a divine revelation of the truth found in greatness and awesomeness of God’s power and sovereignty. When and if we learn anything that is true in the universe, that truth comes as a gift, as a blessing from God. Since Solomon is seeking truth, he begins his Quest for Truth through Wisdom
So, with all that he applied to the Quest, what did he discover? The reality is that not only does Solomon feels like he came up totally empty, but he says that the search, the quest was burdensome, it was a heavy burden laid on mankind! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted.
Again, we find that the mood, the tenor of these verses is gloomy. Solomon confesses that this quest is an unhappy business, an unhappy task, that God has given to the children of man to be busy with” The “unhappy business” Solomon talks about may be the very quest that he is on, the very pursuit of knowledge itself that turns out to be such an unhappy business. The longer he looked for answers and the harder he tried to understand life, the more burdened he became.
Friends, the more we try to understand the way that God has ordered and orchestrates the world, the more confused we get with life and all its unanswerable questions. Solomon believed that the quest for knowledge was his God-given, God appointed task, to try and understand the meaning of life. He believed that the wisdom that God gave him was intended for him to unravel the mystery of the Meaning of Life. Solomon believes that this is part of the spiritual business that God has given to humanity. Yet the very business of that quest leads to conflict with the evil ridden world around us.
Solomon concludes his own empty, unhappy quest for the meaning of life with a proverb. “What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted” (Ecclesiastes 1:15). Friends we know, some things in life are so challenging, some things are so bent out of shape that they resist all our efforts to straighten them out again especially if it turns out to be something God wants to leave crooked, to leave challenging in order to force us to think and grow. Life is what it is, and there is nothing we can do to fix it or undo it. There are so many things that we are powerless to change. We certainly cannot bend life to our own will by the exercise of human wisdom. So, it was for Solomon. Human wisdom could not give him the answer to the meaning of life
For Solomon, in our lesson today, human wisdom failed him in his Quest for Meaning because no matter how much he tried, he could not straighten out the things that were made crooked, or inconsistent by God, nor could he count the things that were purposely unseen through the human intellect.
Friends, the Quest for Meaning provided no positive results, because he was on this spiritual quest without God’s help. Solomon once said that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). But what role did godly respect and honor play here?
There is no suggestion that he turned to God in prayer, he did not consult Scripture. Instead, he was off and running on his quest for knowledge without ever stopping to consider the majesty and sovereignty of God. He was probing “into the depth of matters by his unaided and unenlightened reason without spiritual insight and edification of eternal truth that God has grants to God worshiping man.”
If we take a secular perspective, trying to understand the Meaning of Life on our own terms rather than on God’s terms, asking the wrong questions, we will never escape despair and despondency. Solomon is proof that human reason will only take us so far, which is why God tells us not to boast in our own wisdom, but only in our knowledge of him.
As we go through the Season of Sanctification, we should see that in Ecclesiastes God is destroying the pretenses and arrogance of human wisdom by showing how empty all our learning of Eternity is without him. But it is not in the nature of God to seek to frustrate or confuse us, God does not, will not leave us in despair IF we turn to him and find answers to life and eternity in Him.
Everyone wants to know the meaning of life, but to get the right answer we must ask the right questions and we must have the right information. Dear ones if we are seeking the answer to our Quest for Meaning through human means, through human intellect and wisdom then we are doomed to fail! If we rely on the wisdom discerned by man’s perception and behaviors, we will be searching like Deep Thought for seven and half million years and still come with the wrong answer to the wrong question!
At the end of all our questing, we must find meaning in the person of Jesus Christ and the purpose that He was sent into the world. His way is the way of faith, in which we trust God to be true to his word. It is the way of hope, in which we look forward to what God has for us in the future. It is the way of love, in which we find meaning in life by living for others rather than for ourselves. Friends hopefully this is a lesson that Solomon and we have learned a lesson today as we continue A Quest for Meaning! Amen.