The Vanity of Living Wisely

Passage: Ecclesiastes 2:12-17

Remember who is speaking.  Qoheleth, The Preacher, the shepherd king of Israel in Jerusalem, Solomon.

After Solomon’s opening poetic introduction to the vanity of life under the sun in chapter one, which he repeatedly calls a striving after the wind, he makes it the work of his life to exhaustively explore the meaning and purpose of life.

He is conducting a grand experiment.  Remember he’s the wisest, richest king who ever lived.  He has all the wisdom, time and resources to do the most thorough research ever conducted.

Don’t commit the sin of chronological snobbery that says no one from so long ago could ever have done as good a job of it as we could today.  Let us not proudly assume we could do better than those who have gone before us.  We are in no way wiser than Solomon or better equipped to find the answers he looked for.

CS Lewis defines chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is discredited.”

Don’t commit the sin of intellectual snobbery and elitism that says only we in the twenty first century could possibly explore the depths of what he explored.

Here is what he has done so far.