Intro
Do you remember a few years ago when the Tide Pod challenge was circulating around the internet? What started out as a joke (“don’t Tide Pods look delicious, don’t you wish you could eat them?”) became a real thing when teenagers began posting videos of themselves actually ingesting these packets of dish detergent and daring other teens to follow their lead. That was followed up by the Benadryl challenge in 2020, where teens posted videos consuming large amounts of Benadryl and subsequently tripping out. Then there was the milk crate challenge of 2021, where people would climb stacks of unstable milk crates, resulting in all kinds of brutal injuries. This is all anecdotal, of course. Maybe that human inclination towards self-destruction has always been present. However, does it all somewhat symbolic of the death of wisdom in Western culture? You know, like when we’re eating dish detergent, have we taken a wrong turn somewhere?
I see this in all kinds of places. I see it in our technological addiction. So many platforms, like Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, keep people skimming along the surface, bouncing from one soundbyte to another, scrolling from one image to another, one dumb short video to another, continually decreasing our attention spans and our ability to actually think deeply about anything. I see it with journalists and reporters and other talking heads who give their hot-takes the moment something happens, because otherwise they’ll be irrelevant. Never mind how dumb or shortsighted their hot take ends up being. I see it in cancel culture: this relentless pressure to remove almost every major Western thinker, current or historical, from public discourse. I see it in the historical amnesia that has us blindly repeating mistakes of the even relatively recent past. I see it in the rejection and dismissal of truths that everyone agreed on until 15 minutes ago but now are to be wiped off the face of the earth in the name of supposed progress. I see it in the widespread biblical illiteracy among even Christians.
However, it’s easy to critique the lack of wisdom out there. It’s probably more important to be aware of it in ourselves. We come across so many situations in life that require wisdom. If you’re a parent, how many times do you come up against a situation where you think, “I have no idea what to do here”? How about with finances? How about tricky relationships in your family? Or tricky relationships with friends? What do you do when you need to have a hard conversation with someone but you don’t know how to say it in a way that they’ll receive it? How many of us find ourselves, like our culture, repeating the same mistakes over and over again and don’t know the way out? We desperately need wisdom and almost always feel we don’t have enough of it. Let’s dig into this more together.
9 Not only was the Teacher wise, but he also imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs.10 The Teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true. 11 The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one shepherd. 12 Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. 13Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. 14 For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
Ecclesiastes 12:9-14
1. Characteristics of wisdom
a. Upright and true
This section of Ecclesiastes, if you didn’t catch it, is written by an editor. Almost all of Ecclesiastes is composed of the sayings of someone called the Teacher (Qohelet in Hebrew). However, here at the end, we find that an editor has brought these sayings together and is now promoting them to his audience. In a book, you will often have a foreword written by another author. They will tell you why this is the greatest book ever written and how the person who wrote it is a genius who will single handedly transform human history with their writing. Or something like that. This is the foreword for Ecclesiastes, but it comes at the very end of the book. The editor is clear: what the Teacher spoke, while rugged and uncomfortable, represents wisdom. What follows is what characterizes these wise words from a wise man, and what the editor writes is true across the board for wisdom.
First, he says these wise words are upright and true. That’s what wisdom is. It is upright and true. Think about what those words mean. Truth is accurate. It represents things as they really are. Truth is consonant with reality.
I’ve watched a compilation of some clips of terrible sports announcing. In one of my favourites, you see a football player kicking a field goal. The kick goes far, far left of the uprights. The kick is no good, no points are scored. However, bizarrely, the commentator says, “and the kick bounces off the crossbar and goes through! That’s a huge kick for Fricano! Eastern Michigan answers with 3 points!” You’re watching it and you think, what in the world is he talking about? We just saw one thing, he’s describing something else entirely. It’s not true. It doesn’t represent things as they really are.
On the other hand, when someone is preaching or praying, occasionally you will suddenly hear people going “amen”, “mmm, yes”, “yes, Lord, yes, Lord”. You might think, be quiet, you unrestrained charismatic maniac, don’t you know that church is a place where you are supposed to sit passively and quietly? Let me disabuse you of that notion! If you hear something true, affirm it! Now, when people are making those holy sounds of agreement, it’s not that everything else the other person has said is false. It’s just that a phrase or a request they’ve spoken names a reality especially well. It resonates. That’s what wisdom does. That’s what Ecclesiastes does. It names reality, at least a significant part of it. It looks around at the world under the sun, under the curse of sin and death, and it says, “this is how things are. This is the state of humanity apart from God’s redemption”. That’s why Ecclesiastes is said to be one of the most contemporary books in the Bible, because the human condition apart from God’s redemption hasn’t changed. This is the way it is.
b. Like goads
The editor says that wisdom words are like goads. If you don’t know what a goad is, it’s a long pointy stick that people would use to prod animals to go a certain way. How do you do that? You jab it into their backside! A goad is a painful provocation that affects movement. According to the author, that’s what wisdom is like. It’s like a goad.
We’ve called this series Rugged Wisdom. It’s rugged because the words of Ecclesiastes are not always pleasant or easy. These are not words that you would generally choose to hear. Wisdom can be rocky and difficult terrain.
Once again, consider the opposite. In the New Testament, Paul writes to Timothy and names another reality. He says, “for the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4) Do you see that happening in our world? Do you see it happening in the church? People disregarding biblical truth and only listening to what their itching ears want to hear?
People are so determined to avoid difficult words of wisdom that even when they hear those words, they twist them in order to maintain comfort. This is what God tells the prophet Ezekiel:
“My people come to you, as they usually do, and sit before you to hear your words, but they do not put them into practice. Their mouths speak of love, but their hearts are greedy for unjust gain. Indeed, to them you are nothing more than one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well, for they hear your words but do not put them into practice.”
Ezekiel 33:31-32
I can resonate with that as a preacher, although I’ve never had anyone compare my speaking to love songs with a beautiful voice. How many times do I speak something and have people say, “thanks pastor, that was a great sermon”, but nothing changes? How often is that true in my own life? How often do I dismiss difficult and challenging implications of true, rugged wisdom even as I pay lip service to it?
The fruit of this obsession with comfort, however, is that no transformation can take place in our lives. C.S. Lewis said that “if you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” In the end, despair. We are creatures of habit and we are also sinful creatures, which means that our habits tend to lead in the direction of death. Without a goad, without incisive words that challenge us and shake us, there is no change.
Do not expect that the Bible will affirm your every belief and action. Don’t expect that a preacher will just tell you what you want to hear, like a pleasant love song or satisfaction for itching ears. Expect that you will get uncomfortable. Expect that words will be spoken that aren’t easy. Expect that truth will sometimes come like a goad, like a sharp prick in the butt. Sometimes, that’s the only way stubborn creatures will change course.
c. Like nails
Third, Ecclesiastes says that wisdom is also like firmly embedded nails. At first I thought this was a similar reference to the goads. I imagined one of those coffins filled with nails, like a torture device. I thought, man, that’s grisly! That’s morbid! But this is why it’s good to glean wisdom from others who have delved deep. The reference here, most likely, is to tent pegs that anchor a tent and keep it from blowing away. Which makes a lot more sense.
That’s fresh for me because of something that happened last week. When we were setting up for SummerFest here at The Bridge Church, a simply magical night of bbq and jazz music, we had set up one of those little 10×10 foot canopies. However, we didn’t weigh it down or secure it in any way. It seemed like a calm day. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew through the parking lot. Two things met their demise in that moment. One was the youth ping-pong table, which had been brought outside and was still in an upright position. The wind blew it over, smashing the already fragile and much-maligned table into the pavement, mercifully ending its troubled life. But then I heard people shouting, “Craig, the tent flew over the hedge!” And at first I thought, the canopy has flown into a neighbour’s yard and we’re all going to die. Thankfully, the canopy had taken the leap over the hedge but had gotten tangled up in some trees still on our property. Some pieces had snapped and I’m not sure if it was salvageable in the end.
See, life can be like that. A lot of people have figured out how to make life work from day to day. But when a gust blows through, the foundations are revealed for what they are. The tent flies over the hedge, mangled and snapped. Wisdom, however, enables the canopy of our life to remain in place and withstand storms because its foundations are strong and stable. The longer I go in life- if you were here last week, you’ll remember that I am apparently now in my middle-aged years- the more I find that certain beliefs and perspectives are more able to withstand the storms of life than others. Accordingly, I place more weight on those. The point for now is that wisdom anchors our life so that winds can’t blow them over the hedge.
d. Sufficient
Another aspect of wisdom named by the editor is that wisdom is sufficient. He warns of going beyond words of wisdom, of trying to add to them (v.12). This is especially important in an age like ours, where there are so many voices. There is so much noise! There are so many opinions! Since the advent of blogs and YouTube, anyone can broadcast their thoughts to the world, whether or not they have any credentials or education. There are positive elements to this, like the potential for increased accountability for those in power. Fact-checkers are everywhere! But this reality also creates confusion and fragmentation. It’s hard to know who or what to trust. With a million news organizations out there, who’s telling the truth?
This is why I think a significant part of wisdom is being rooted in the past, in what is tried, tested, and true, in considering what kinds of foundations have served well for those who have lived well in history. Of course, as a follower of Jesus, I believe this is especially true of the Bible, God’s inspired word. In an age where truth seems to change every other day, where the accepted dogmas of our culture seem to lack any real basis or deep consideration, the Bible represents a bedrock of truth. As God says through the prophet Isaiah, “all people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field…the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.” (41:6, 8). With all the sources of supposed wisdom out there, it is so crucial that we depend on the word of God.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be aware of what people are saying in the news, or that there aren’t contemporary voices that are worthy of your listening ears. But it means that you should measure what you hear against the wisdom of God’s word, which is trustworthy and sufficient for right living.
E. Functional
Sufficient for life. That’s gets at this last characteristic of wisdom. In verse 12b, the editor says there is no end of making books and much study wearies the body. Can I get an amen from you high school and university students? Some of you are like “truer words have never been spoken.” And it is true, isn’t it? Here’s a question for you: how many books do you think have been written in the history of the world? Google did an in-depth analysis in 2010 and found that up to that point, 130 million unique books had been written in the world. Because in the last decade it’s become easier than ever for people to self-publish books, some estimates put that number now at 170 million. Meanwhile, the fastest reader in the world, a man named Howard Berg, can read 25,000 words a minute and retain a 90% comprehension rate. He’s the Guinness world record holder for speed-reading. He has read something like 30,000 books in his lifetime and counting. That sounds impressive until you realize it means that the fastest reader in the world has read something like 0.018% of the books in existence.
The point is that wisdom is not reading everything ever written. It’s not being stuck in a library for the entirety of your life. In this way, wisdom is not synonymous with knowledge or education, though there is some overlap. Instead, the way wisdom functions in the Old Testament is inherently practical. It is functional. It has to do with real life, real relationships, real situations. God has created us not just to know things, but to live in a certain way, and wisdom shows us that way.
2. Where wisdom comes from
So, to recap: wisdom words are true, they are like goads, they are like anchoring pegs, they are sufficient, and they are for real life. Those are some of the characteristics of wisdom. That enables us to recognize wisdom when we see it. But there’s still the question of how we get wisdom. How do we become wise people? The Bible has a fairly straightforward answer to that. In Ecclesiastes 12:13, we read: “now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind.”
It’s no coincidence these words come right after a description of wisdom, because throughout the Bible it is affirmed that wisdom comes from God. If you want to know how to get wisdom, start with God, because He’s the source. That’s the implication in verse 11 when we read about wise words being given by “one shepherd”. That phrase, “one shepherd”, is used a couple of other times in the Old Testament to describe God. God is most famously described as a shepherd in Psalm 23:1, where David says, “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.” As a shepherd, God is immensely invested in the wellbeing of His sheep in a dangerous world. He wants to feed them. He wants to protect them from wild beasts that would devour them. Wisdom accomplishes these objectives, so God is determined to give us wisdom. Likewise, in the New Testament book of James, the author instructs us that “if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you” (1:5). If you want wisdom, God can give it to you because He’s the source.
Even more fundamentally, God is the source of wisdom in the sense that He is the truly wise one. It’s not just that wisdom is something external to Him that He can give. I can give seaweed to my kids to eat, because kids are weird and they like eating seaweed. I can do that without ingesting any of it on my own or taking seaweed to be any aspect of my own identity. But God is the source of wisdom in the sense that it is a fundamental aspect to who He is. Romans 11:33-34 says,
“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor?”
Romans 11:33-34
God is wise, He’s the paradigm of wisdom, the embodiment of wisdom, the originator of wisdom, the determiner of wisdom.
A principle in many aspects of life is that it is crucial to get to the source, or the root, of things. Growing up as a pastor’s kid, I heard Bible stories all the time. However, those stories didn’t impact me the way they did when I travelled to Israel as a 20 year old and actually took a boat across the Sea of Galilee and spent a night in the Judean wilderness. Or think about academics. I can read what 100 people think about St. Augustine, but it’s a whole other thing to actually read Augustine firsthand. As much as possible, it’s always best to get to the source, which in the case of wisdom is God.
However, as Ecclesiastes 12 says, God is not only the source of wisdom but He is the means of wisdom. Specifically, you get wisdom from fearing God. Proverbs 9:10 says this directly and clearly: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Fear in this instance is not the crippling, irrational emotion that some of us experience, for example, when it’s dark or there’s a little tiny non-poisonous spider crawling along the floor. It’s not even like the anxiety-inducing experience when we need to go against the flow and stand out in society in some way. Instead, this is a healthy reverence for a power much greater than us. Think about how you feel when you see massive waves or majestic mountains or a thunderstorm. That kind of awe-inducing reverence is appropriate when we consider who God is. When it comes to God, the maker of all, another word for that fear is worship.
I want to spend more time with this because it is so fundamental, but first let’s wrap up the thought here in Ecclesiastes. The editor tells us to fear God and to obey Him- that’s the natural response when we fear God, that we will do what He says. If you respect Him in this way, you will want to obey Him. And Ecclesiastes gives us two other motivations for that obedience. One is that it is our duty as humans. This is what we were made to do by God: to worship Him and obey Him, and in doing that to fulfill our calling to reflect His character in the world. We were made to obey. And second, we obey because of the reality of judgment. The fear of consequences is, after all, an effective deterrent from bad behavior. However, let’s go back to that worshipful fear of the Lord, because it is the root of obedience and the beginning of wisdom.
Here in Western culture, we tend to have a very domesticated view of God. Generally in our culture, there is very little respect for who God is. How many times do you hear the name of God or the name of Jesus used as a curse word in movies or just in everyday conversation? How many people feel comfortable rebuking God or implying that they would do a better job than Him at running the universe if they were given a chance? In the church in Western culture, it’s more likely that you will hear people talk about God as just another buddy, a pal, maybe a good luck charm or a friendly wish-giving genie. You may get the impression that He is something like a divine, cash-dispensing ATM.
That’s miles from the conception of God that the Israelites had. Imagine them standing at the foot of Mt. Sinai in the wilderness. They had been recipients of God’s favor and grace and love, they had been rescued from slavery in Egypt, but they had seen God strike the Egyptians with plagues. They had seen a sea split open before them. And now, as God met with Moses on the summit of the mountain, they witnessed Sinai on fire, with lighting and thunder. They were told that if they even touched the mountain, they would die because of the holiness of God. God is not like us! He is the Maker of all things! Think about those images we’ve seen recently from the James Webb Space Telescope- God is the One who made this massive, wild, beautiful universe.
And in case you think this is just an Old Testament thing, it’s not. The New Testament instructs, “let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:28-29). We see this holiness, this demand for reverence and awe, in Jesus, the Son of God, the fulness of God in human flesh. Think about Jesus telling the wind and the waves what to do, and they obey him, leaving the disciples in fearful wonder. They ask “who is this?” You see him casting out demons with a spoken word. You see him feeding thousands with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. You see him walking on the water. You see him enabling the blind to see, the paralyzed to walk, the leprous to be clean. You see him calling dead people out of the grave. You see him willingly going to the cross and having the sin of the world laid on his shoulders, you see him hanging there as the skies grow dark and the curtain in the temple tears in half as he breathes his last. You see him, three days later, rising from the dead, conquering death, and causing his disciples to proclaim, “my Lord and my God!” You see him ascending to the right hand of the throne of God His Father.
Yes, God loves you deeply. Yes, if you are a follower of Jesus, He has filled you with His Holy Spirit and adopted you as a child of His. But don’t miss the wonder of this. He is awesome, totally other than us, from everlasting to everlasting, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the creator of the heavens and the earth, the Almighty.
And so what I am learning is that the crucial tent peg of our lives, the wisdom we need, is worship. It is that when we are anxious and uncertain and stuck, what we need is to take our eyes off ourselves and fear the Lord. Worship Him habitually, continually, intentionally, because worship is wisdom and wisdom is worshiping. If you want wisdom, real wisdom, that’s how you get it and grow in it.
