Kaleo San Diego Church

INTRODUCTION

Last week in this great book we talked about the four main branches of philosophy- Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Ethics (specifically social ethics). I laid out that foundation because it is the very tagline of our church- Meaning, Beauty, Truth, and Community.

Last week we began to hear the final analysis of Solomon’s metaphysical question; what is the purpose for our existence. His conclusion will be repeated this week- meaninglessness, emptiness, and futility apart from God, or as he puts it “under the sun.”

This week we are going to spend some time on the subject of epistemology (how do we know what we know?). This is a broad term and it includes things like “what is truth?”, “how do we know God exists?” “can we be certain about God’s existence?”, “is the bible true, and how would we prove it?” These are all questions that could be placed in this category because this discipline primarily deals with TRUTH and KNOWING. I’m not going to give a classroom lecture on this subject because our time is limited, but I would suggest you jot down some notes and think through what we’re going to be discussing as our great pseudo-existentialist philosopher Solomon preaches to us from his sermon.

RECAP

The book of Ecclesiastes is a sermon that we get to eaves drop and listen to. But the man that is called the Koheleth in verses 1 and 12 is no ordinary preacher. This is the King of Israel set in the most holy city of Jerusalem. He is the great man Solomon. The one revered for his tremendous wisdom. The man that wrote over 3000 proverbs, over 1000 songs, and was the author of the most beautiful poetry that has left human lips. The man who studied the laws of nature as he scientifically observed the world in which he lived. This great legend of old speaks to us and calls our attention to the meaning and purpose of our existence.

He plunges deep into the icy cold of human wisdom and searches for the hidden pearls of man’s greatest intellectual accomplishments. Yet this is no man who simply observes on the sidelines and then jots notes about what he sees. This is a man whose experiments are important because the experiments have been at his own hands. He is the subject under the microscope for observation. He is the one that drinks his own strange brew. He volunteered to participate in this trial as he walked away from God’s infinite wisdom to see what his own freethinking could accomplish apart from an infinite, objective source. In this empirical test, each of his senses are engaged as he surveys life under the sun, apart from God, and in his own wisdom.

What conclusions will this mad scientist come to? What profound insight into our human condition will this passionate philosopher give us? What noble and worthwhile proverb will be penned for our advantage by this powerful king?

This week we get to see his first experiment. What advantage is there in wisdom?

Verse 12- I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem.

The great king reminds us of his power and status during his experiment. This isn’t a speech writer for a president, or someone that worked for the kings court. This is the king himself who reigned for 39 years with all the rights and responsibilities possessed by a king. This is also no ordinary people; this is the chosen people of God, Israel. The one’s whom God called to be His own among all nations of the world. The race that would eventually see Jesus the Savior, come from their lineage. Solomon rules as a chosen king, for a chosen people, in a chosen land to rule by the wisdom he requested and was granted by God.

This gift that God had bestowed upon Solomon was special because it was clear that it came directly from God and there was no doubt or question. Yet Solomon does what many of us do when given a gift and a calling from God, he tries to usurp God with the gift. His greatest strength became his most vicious enemy. He began to worship the gift instead of the giver of the gift and found himself with his tether cut from God. And like many of us, instead of repenting and returning to our first love in humility, we forget God’s kindness and blessings upon us, and we shake our fist is rebellion as if we are going to teach Him a thing or two.

Solomon reacts to this disconnection with God by trying to find other ways to have meaning and purpose in this life apart from God. He decides that since he and God are not speaking, he’ll go it alone and find worth and meaning to fill his infinite hole with finite thoughts and things.

Notice the first thing he does is to try to change his thinking. He begins a worldview shift before he embarks into full-blown hedonism. He has to justify himself intellectually and make excuses so that he can pacify his conscience before he goes buck wild!

So what does he decide to do?

Verse 13- And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven; this burdensome task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised.

He sets his heart to seek and search out by human reasoning all things that are done under heaven. He determines that he will give everything he has to this great pursuit of philosophy. This isn’t a student cramming for a test as he tries to remember who came first, Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle. This is someone who studied, and thought, studied and thought, and searched out all viewpoints, perceptions, speculations and opinions of all that is done in the hearts and minds of men under heaven.

He starts out by telling himself “I’m going to find meaning in thinking,” “I’m going to learn what can be learned and find my purpose.”

Since nothing is new under the sun, it isn’t surprising that we live in a culture that follows this model. We are trying to find meaning and purpose, hope and joy, apart from God.

We talk about good and bad, right and wrong, as if we have some basis for our words. Yet in a world void of God there is not such thing, no such standard, no such need for those words.

Yet in searching out these things God is not an option, He is a necessity, He is not possible, He is inevitable. A man searching for true truth, and for profound wisdom will eventually come to the living God, unless he is predisposed to the non-existence of God, or he is in rebellion much like Solomon. If we nix God from the equation, we find the same result as Solomon.

The result is that we are left with a burden that can’t be lifted, an angst that won’t be pacified, and an empty void that we can’t expect to be filled. This task is burdensome and was made this way by the same God who made you and I. This burden, or we should say curse, was pronounced by God upon Adam and Eve that desired to be autonomous from God and find wisdom in knowing good and evil apart from the very standard of good and evil.

We are each born sons of Adam. We are each born under the burdensome curse. We are perplexed, we are exercised, and we are confused about this life because apart from God the end goal is pointless. This burdensome curse demonstrates to you and I what rebellion and meaninglessness sounds, looks, and tastes like so that we are left unsatisfied until we are satisfied in Him.

We hear people say “life sucks and then you die.” Yep, it sure does apart from God. The only caveat I would add is this… “life sucks and then you die and stand in judgment before a perfect and holy God guilty of pursuing a life apart from Him as you disregard His clear commands.” Sounds even worse doesn’t it?

God gave Adam the task of searching out by wisdom all of God’s works and his own as well. But this task becomes a heavy burden for Adam and his children, and the thing for which we were created becomes unbearable when pursued apart from God, under the curse, in the shadow of death. Yet God doesn’t take away the task. We are still called to it. And so man is hard wired with this task and he works hard and labors to that end.

Solomon had tried and observed these works that are done under the sun, apart from God.

What advantage and meaning does this work give us?

Verse 14- I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.

There is that dreadful word again- vanity. That empty futility that yearns for but finds nothing. That great let down of expecting a payoff and receiving nothing. It is all futile and meaningless. It is empty when it should be full. It isn’t the despair of tragedy Solomon has in mind but the despair of triviality. That nothing really matters.

All our thinking and working done under the sun, apart from God is worse than nothing. Is less than empty. It is like a black hole that pulls meaning and purpose into is never satisfying downward spiral.

In the days of late when Hurricanes in Florida are causing death and destruction as the wind chases humans by an outward force, this inward creation of death and destructions comes from us trying to chase the wind.

Verse 15- What is crooked (Hebrew “avath”- bent/perverted) cannot be made straight, And what is lacking cannot be numbered.

Solomon is teaching us about the condition of mankind. He’s preaching to all that deny that air exists as they take another breath to deny its existence. Man tries to live as if God exists and make arguments to that end all the while he is sitting upon the lap of God to try to slap Him in the face and tell Him he’s not there.

Attempting to straighten ourselves by secular psychology, self-affirmation, or deep introspective analysis apart from God becomes another exercise in futility.

We are crooked and can’t be made straight apart from God. We are bent and burdened by the despair and pain of a cold universe that doesn’t play by our rules. We may care, but in a chance universe without God as its creator and sustainer, nothing cares back. It’s as if we’re trying take an unwound coat hanger and reshape it back to its original form…it simply doesn’t happen. We are not able, we are not wise enough, we are not powerful enough, and we are not smart enough to fix the human condition of empty futility no matter how much meaning we try to place upon our great intellect.

Finite man attempts to fill an infinite hole with finite thoughts and things. He finds himself wearied and disheartened and the solution escapes him because he can never reach the infinite starting with his own intellect, his own faculties of reason, his own fallen emotions and spiritually stillborn condition. Only the infinite and eternal can fill the yearnings of the eternal soul man. Only an infinite and personal God has the capacity, the power, the eternal wisdom, and the right conclusion to the philosophers dilemma. Only He can answer the question that He placed in each of our hearts.

We are told to follow our hearts, and yet through my own personal history my heart seems to be blind and stupid. It lies to us and tells us that it can be filled with things here and now and so we strive and toil to make it happy, to give it rest, to offer it our own forms of sacrifice to appease its endless desire.

This is as futile as trying to count the bricks of a wall that doesn’t exist. That what he means by saying “what is lacking can’t be counted.”

Our heart gives us a false sense of security as it tells us that it holds the key to eternal bliss if we would just listen to it more carefully.

Solomon understands this as he tells us that when he sat and communed with his heart, his heart said “peace and safety” when only despair and danger was true reality.

Verse 16- I communed with my heart, saying, "Look, I have attained greatness, and have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge."

He began his philosophical inquiry with his heart as the ultimate reference point. He thought deeply and his conclusions were drawn from comparing his speculation against what his heart told him.

When man begins with man, he ends with less than man as his conclusion. Man only has meaning if we start with God as our reference point. We can’t expect chaos and chance from an impersonal force to give us respect or to call others to the same. The impersonal and chaotic will breed dehumanized and chaotic people, actions, and thinking.

Verse 17- And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is grasping for the wind.

Solomon says that he “set his heart to know.” In the time that Solomon existed there began stirrings of early epistemology, in other words- how do we know what we know? Or can we really know anything with certainty? But for the most part there seemed to be a general consensus that man could know about reality from truth he received outside of himself. In other words, that revelation didn’t occur from his imagination but was granted by God both in the universe of created order to the God who spoke His word so that man wouldn’t remain ignorant of Him and His world.

Setting our hearts and minds to know something, specifically wisdom, assumes that something can be known. This is where our epistemology comes in.

While Solomon probes his listeners with metaphysical questions about meaning and being, we look at epistemology- which asks how we know the truth. And though there are several ways in which we categorize how we know something, really the two most basic and historical are inductive and deductive reasoning.

Solomon, much like scientists and empiricists, starts with himself and his experience and tries to move from human experience to God.

This method tries to work from the parts to the whole, from the particular to the universal, from the finite, to the infinite, from human experience to the truth, from effects to the cause, and from evidences to God.

It holds is conclusion until all data is collected and analyzed and then it attempts to conclude whether it is true or not. The conclusion or law is developed after experience.

The problem is that nothing conclusive can be proven. All we can logically conclude from inductive reasoning is a certain degree of probability. The “conclusion” or so called “law” or concept has either a low, medium, or high probability of being true.

However, in logic, if you want a universal conclusion, you must have at least one universal in the premise. You can’t logically leap to a necessary truth no matter how many particular experiences you pile up. Since the inductive method begins only with particular human experiences, its conclusions are only probably true to a certain degree.

This method has been dominant in much of Christian theology since the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. We see this in all of our evidential apologetics today that tries to mount a case for belief in God by using evidence. Aquinas adopted Aristotle’s epistemology of induction and this method became the official method in the Roman Catholic church, and this approach to truth is the basis for much of our current apologetics as well as modern science.

Aquinas replaced the deductive method which was followed by the early church fathers, i.e., Augustine and later by the reformers. In the last century theologians have committed themselves to this method because they want theology to be accepted by the academic world as a legitimate science like math or biology.

By making human experience the Origin of truth instead of the God of the Bible, they made man the judge of God instead of God the judge of man.

In contrast to the inductive method, the deductive method moves: from the whole to the parts, from the universal to the particular, from the infinite to the finite, from truth to human experience, from the cause to the effects, from God to the evidences.

We know the saying “don’t interpret the Bible according to experience, but experience according to the Bible.” This is the soul of deductive reasoning. Instead of beginning with human experience as the measure of all things including God, we should begin with God as the measure of all things including man and human experience.

The existence of God is a given, it is axiomatic, because the truth of it didn’t originate from human experience, but from special revelation. Any concept of God which has its Origin in human experience should more properly be labeled psychology, or anthropology, rather than theology.

If we wanted to learn about a car, we can approach it two ways. We can begin with the whole car and tear it down and into individual parts. Or, you can begin with the individual parts and put them together to make a whole car. Your knowledge will either come from above, or below.

We begin with the existence of God and then ask “what must also be true in order for the existence of God to be true. We start from God or the Bible and then see if what we would expect in reality conforms to this truth.

Someone might say that this method is not fair because we begin with God as our starting axiom or a priori and then proceed to the evidences. We admit that we are beginning with the infinite personal, Triune God of the Bible for two reasons.

1. This is where the Bible begins in Genesis 1:1. The Biblical writers do not begin with an appeal to human experience to prove God exists. His existence is never an issue in the Bible. The authors of the Scripture begin with God as the explanation for the existence of man and not vica versa. To them God is the measure of all things- including man.

2. The non-Christian begins with his own set of assumptions or presuppositions. He assumes that his principles are truths. So just as the Christian begins with the assumption that God is the measure of all things, the humanist begins with the assumption that man is the measure of all things.

To the Christian thinker, the existence of man is justified by the existence of God, while the humanist believes that the existence of God is justified by the existence of man.

But God’s existence, the validity of the bible, and the meaning of life is either true or false, it remains true or false regardless of the arguments man creates for or against. God’s existence is not dependent upon our ability to prove that He exists to those that want it proven.

Since God exists and He made man in His own image, then science is exactly what we would expect to find. Why? Science presupposes an intelligible universe. But this is only possible if it is the product of a higher intelligence.

If the universe were simply a product of chance, plus matter, plus time, then science would have never developed because the universe would be random and chaotic without design or purpose. No one would ask about the purpose of something, if the universe were pointless. We assume we can figure things out because everything has a purpose and a design.

Since God exists, then we would expect to find that man is a moral being who makes moral judgments according to a moral code that exists independent of his approval or disapproval. The non-moral cannot be the Origin of the moral. Without God as the infinite reference point and, thus, the Origin of truth, morality is possible.

Since God exists and He made man in His own image, then the existence of beauty and art is exactly what we would expect to find. Beauty is only possible if we assume God’s existence as the Great Artist who made colors and shapes. True beauty is in the eye of the ultimate Beholder of all things because God is the measure of all things including beauty. This answers the old question, “Is a flower in the desert beautiful even though no man ever sees it?” Since the God who created it sees it, it is beautiful regardless of whether man ever sees it.

Since God exists, people naturally strive to find meaning to their existence and the things around them because God put that desire within each of us. Particular things cannot have meaning without an infinite reference point. If you begin with man as the measure of all things and attempt, inductively, to find a sufficient basis for truth, justice, morality, beauty and meaning, you will fail because that which is finite and relative by nature, can never become infinite and absolute by nature just because we want it to be so.

What must be there in order for what is to be what it is? This is the question which provides a solid method by which we can discover truth. We begin where the Biblical authors began, with the existence of God as the ultimate Origin of true truth, true justice, true meaning, true morals, and true beauty. This is how we know we know.

If God exists, and if the Bible is in fact true, then we would expect to see this conform to reality. We would expect to “know” certain things can be true because our starting position is proven in reality. It is a basic if/then deduction.

Isn’t it interesting that his initial pursuit of meaning and purpose in wisdom, apart from God, ends with his heart now toying with madness and folly.

Verse 18- For in much wisdom is much grief, And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Talk about an overarching view of how man has decided to pursue wisdom apart from God.

0 Comments | Login to Post Comments

Comment:

Name:

• Calendar
• Agenda