Well, it has been a while, but we are blessed, I think, to get back into our study of Ecclesiastes. So if you would, please take out your Bibles and turn to Ecclesiastes chapter 7. Ecclesiastes chapter 7. God willing, we will be starting on verse 19 and finishing the chapter. Chapter 7, verses 19 through 29. Wisdom strengthens the wise more than ten rulers of the city. For there is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin. Also, do not take to heart everything people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. For many times also your heart has known that even you have cursed others. All this I have proved by wisdom. I said, I will be wise, but it was far from me. As for that which is far off and exceedingly deep, who can find it out? I applied my heart to know, to search and seek out wisdom and the reason of things, to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness. And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God shall escape from her, but the sinner shall be trapped by her. Here is what I have found, says the preacher, adding one thing to the other to find out the reason, which my soul still seeks, but I cannot find. One man among a thousand I have found, but a woman among all these I have not found. Truly this only I have found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. Amen. Let's pray. Our blessed God, we thank you for your holy word, the glorious truth that it presents to us, And when we come to Your Word, we feel so incredibly incapable, so small, so humbled by it. And we are reminded very quickly how desperately we need Your Holy Spirit to grant us understanding. not only to grant us understanding that we might know it and know it well, but, Lord, that it would please you to apply it to our lives. And so, Lord, we pray humbly now, God help us, help us to understand this glorious passage, and might it please you to apply its truth to our lives, that we would know you better, that we would walk ever more closely with you. God help us. We pray and ask you through Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. So there's a phrase in basketball, we can't stop him, we can only hope to contain him. We can't stop him, we can only hope to contain him. I googled that and was curious, to whom do they refer? Where did that originate? And when you go on a message board and you see this question asked, everybody's opinion comes out, basically nobody knew. Some said, oh, it's Shaquille O'Neal, the great and mighty Shaquille O'Neal, long retired now. Some said, no, no, no, no. It goes way back, goes much further back than that. It goes back to Will Chamberlain. Will Chamberlain. You couldn't stop him. You could only hope to contain him. And that's a lesson in life. You can't stop some things. You can only hope to slow them down. We're limited, as it is in basketball. Sometimes the defense is limited with what it can do. Sometimes there is someone so powerful, so strong, a player so dominant that the defense can't stop him. They're limited. All they can do is try to slow him down. And we understand that. Limitations are a part of life. We kind of get used to that. It's just part of living in this world. We are limited. And so it is, the question that we have to ask is, is that applied also to wisdom? We've been looking at that. We've been considering that in the passage we've been reading of late here in Ecclesiastes. Is even wisdom limited? It is a part of this world. It is something that we can understand. Some people have wisdom. Some people don't. Some people have more wisdom than others. Is wisdom itself limited? Well, we know it's important. The book of Proverbs, chapter 4, we read it this morning in the morning service. Solomon instructing his children says this, get wisdom, get understanding. Wisdom is the principal thing. Wisdom is important. You need to get it. And as we've been studying here in Ecclesiastes, Solomon has been trying to find the answer to Havel, to vanity. And so we've come to this chapter, chapter 7, he's turned his attention to wisdom. He's been looking at wisdom. Is wisdom the thing that can answer that question? Havel, the brevity of life, the fact that Life doesn't have anything that will carry on. It's short. It is weightless. It's here and it vanishes like vapor. Literally the meaning of the word. Is wisdom the answer to that? And the short answer is no, it is not. Wisdom has limitations. And so I've titled this message, The Limitations of Wisdom. The Limitations of Wisdom. We will be looking at what Solomon has to tell us as far as it relates to those limitations. What are those limitations? How are they applied? So last time we looked at Solomon where he was addressing this idea that if you were wise, if you lived a wise life, if you attempted to live a righteous life, would that obtain you God's blessings? In other words, simply wisdom in and of itself would equate to the blessings of God. And the answer to that was no. Someone might say, well, if you pray really hard, I mean, that's something wise, is it not? If you pray really, really hard for something, does just the fact that you try so hard somehow obtain God's favor? And the answer, of course, is no. Then we looked at the opposite response, the pendulum swing, as it were, to the other side. Okay, fine. If wisdom won't obtain for me God's blessings, Then I'll just live a life of frivolity, a life of foolishness. I will just live for the here and now. And of course Solomon condemns that as well. Proverbs 9.10 says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. And if you remember, that was the conclusion of our last study. What is the middle road? If those two pendulum swings, the two extremes, aren't the answer, then what would be the answer down the middle? Well, that would be the fear of God. That's where wisdom itself begins. But, as we will see, even wisdom is limited. But before he gets to that, in our text, he tells us in verse 19 that wisdom does have benefits. Wisdom has benefits. Verse 19, he says, Wisdom strengthens the wise more than ten rulers of the city. So wisdom is a good thing. It strengthens the wise. Not just a little bit, mind you. It strengthens the wise a great deal. More than ten rulers of a city. Ten rulers, that's a lot of people. There's strength in numbers, in other words. It's good to have a plurality of leaders, and we are certainly familiar with that. God, in his wisdom, has ordained that the church, each individual assembly, would be overseen by a plurality of elders. Our nation understood that. When our government was created, what did they do? They spread the power out over a great many people, over three branches of government. And of course we've seen that erode over the last few years, last number of years, as one particular branch, one part has tried to seize more and more power. There is wisdom, there is a goodness in spreading out the power. Proverbs chapter 11 verse 14 says, where there is no counsel, the people fall. But in the multitude of counselors, there is safety. And so a city ruled by ten rulers, that is a very strong leadership, very strong rulership. Lots of wisdom there, at least potentially. But Solomon says that if you are a wise man and you have wisdom, You are stronger even than those ten rulers in that city. So, wisdom is good. Wisdom is a good thing. But there's a problem. It's not with wisdom. Where is the problem? If wisdom has its limitations, where do those limitations come from? It's not from wisdom itself. It's from us. And that takes us to verse 20. He says, for there is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin. So where is wisdom's limitation? It's sin. It's us. We are the problem there, not wisdom itself. Every single person is a sinner, no matter how foolish or how wise. We all are limited by our sin. Even the wisest of all is still a sinner. Solomon, of course, is example A for that. He had been given the greatest degree of wisdom ever in all of history. God blessed him with tremendous wisdom. Kings and queens came from far and away to hear him, to test him, to put his wisdom to the test. It was profound. They gave him great riches because they couldn't even take in his wisdom. He was incredible in his wisdom, and yet we know how it all ended. He turned to sin. He had many wives, many concubines from foreign lands, and they had their foreign gods, and they led him into idolatry. So sobering truth. As Christians, as much as we desire wisdom, no matter how wise we might get, no matter how much God might bless us with wisdom, we still sin. There's still that limitation. And so, that is the foundational thought from which Solomon presents the rest of his argument. And he gives us a practical example in verse 21. He says, Also do not take to heart everything people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. For many times also your own heart has known that even you have cursed others. And so again, this is a practical example from life. We might take offense when we hear someone cursing us, someone saying something about us behind our back, but Solomon says, stop, just wait, just think about this. Have you not said things yourself behind their back? Oh, you haven't, okay. Have you not thought things about them where nobody else knew? Of course you have. That's life. And so he says, be slow to get angry. Don't take it to heart, he says, because you yourself have engaged in the same thing. And so we need to keep that in the forefront of our minds before we get all worked up, before we get our feelings hurt and our noses bent, as it were. We need to know that we need to treat others, always, with the ever-present reality that we, too, are sinners. When someone does something that upsets us, we say, that's wrong. Well, guess what? We do things that are wrong as well. So what is it that makes us differ from the fool? Why are we not like everybody else as Christians? Well, 1 Corinthians 4.7 says, For who makes you differ from another? And what do you have that you did not receive? Now if you did indeed receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it? And so when someone does something in our life and upsets us, we need to keep in mind that the only reason that we aren't doing the same thing is because it's God who caused us to differ. What should upset us more? What that person did to us or what perhaps we do to them. In other words, when your head hits the pillow at night and you're running the day's events through your mind and you think, so-and-so said this to me, so-and-so said that to me, this person did this to me, this person did that to me, and it's troubling your mind and you're thinking about it, should that trouble you or should you be thinking, I wonder when I said this, was that appropriate? When I did this to this person, how did they really take it? Could they have mistaken that? Should I have been more gracious with my words here? Should I have been more patient here? What should keep us up at night? Or what should be running through our minds as we drift off to sleep? If such things do run through your minds, I would say it's the latter. We should be far more concerned about how we treat others than how they treat us. And that's Solomon's point. He provides more evidence for the limitations of wisdom, verses 23 through 26. He says, all this I have proved or tested by wisdom. I said, I will be wise, but it was far from me. Then verse 25, he says, I applied my heart to know, to search and seek out wisdom and the reason of things, to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness. So he says, I put these things to the test. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? You remember back in chapter 2, he says the same thing. I tested these things. He's trying to find out the answer to Havel, the answer to the vanity of life. Is there some kind of answer here in this life to this problem? And remember what he did. He created beautiful homes, mansions. He had vineyards. He had gardens. He had slaves to take care of all of this. He had tremendous wealth. He created all of these things. He worked hard at it. And what was his answer when it was all said and done? It's Hevel. It's vanity. It's all meaningless. It's all vapor. It's here. It's gone. It carries no weight. It has no lasting value. And so he says the same thing here. I put these things to the test. I tested both wisdom and folly. And what was the result? It was Hevel. And then if we go back to verse 24, He says, as for that which is far off and exceedingly deep, who can find it out? So, I would submit to you that it's not only our sin that is the limit to wisdom, but it is also just our creatureliness. Just the fact that we are creatures is a limitation to our wisdom. He says, who can know that which is far off or exceedingly deep? We looked at that in the opening this evening. God is unsearchable. He is exceedingly deep. I love Job. The wisest man on the earth in his day, one that God mentions even to Satan, and calls Job his servant. Have you considered my servant Job? But of course we know what happens, and Job is struck, he's tested tremendously. And in Job chapter 38, I love this, verses 1-5, God answers Job. We looked at this before, but I truly love this chapter. Verse 1, God says, He answers Job out of the whirlwind and says, Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Now prepare yourself like a man. I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know." And we know the response, the ultimate response from Job. What was it? I'm done. I'm covering my mouth, not saying anything more. I'm shutting up. God tests Job. He calls him to stand up. Stand up like a man. Hear this. Answer me. Can you know the exceeding deep things, the things that are far off? And the answer, of course, is no. And neither can any of us. Why? Because we're creatures. The best of us, and Job certainly was at that time, cannot know the exceedingly deep things of God, the things that are far off. We're limited. We're just creatures. And so, no matter how wise a man or a woman is, they're going to be limited in this regard. I did something that ended up being somewhat humorous this week. I decided to Google something. I typed into Google this phrase, famous people of wisdom. I was just curious what would come up. It was a rather lengthy list, but these were some of the first names that popped up on my screen. Albert Einstein, Confucius, Plato, Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Winston Churchill, Aristotle, Mark Twain, Nelson Mandela, and Oprah. That was the humorous part. Oprah made the list, and she made the list pretty high up. People put stock in all of these names. They follow these people, most of whom are long since dead. They consider them to have great wisdom, and in some cases, they had great wisdom. But as wise as some of these people were, what did that wisdom get them before God? You die apart from Christ, no matter how much wisdom you might have in this life, what does it do for you when you stand before the Almighty? Nothing. Nothing. You stand before God Almighty in your sins. You have to give an account for every one of your sins, whether you lived a life with a certain degree of wisdom, or whether you just threw it all into foolishness and frivolity. Wisdom has its limits in and of itself. So to prove this point even more, Solomon provides another practical example in verse 26. He says, And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God shall escape from her, but the sinner shall be trapped by her. So here the woman is pictured being purposely deceitful. She's trying to entrap a man. Her heart is snares and nets. Her hands are fetters or chains. And this, of course, could certainly be applied to men as well. This is not something that is purely women only. No, this would apply to both male and female. And we could step back and look at this From a wider perspective, what is he saying here? People try to control other people. People try to manipulate one another. And we certainly see that in our society, don't we? Our society, it's everywhere. Our government tries to do that. Advertisers certainly try to do that. People in general try to do that. We have to be on guard. We have to be wise to not get misled, to not get manipulated, to not get controlled. Our brother Cornell and his wife just bought a brand new car. And so that thought came to my mind, going into a car dealership, is there any place on this earth where you feel more controlled than in a car dealership? I mean, they want to control everything you do. They want you to think that they absolutely love you. They are your best friend. As soon as you walk through the door, they are your best friend. They've been waiting their whole lives to see you. And then, of course, if you say, you know what, I want to have a little bit of time to think about it, you realize they're not your friends. But that's life. That's life not just in our culture, that's life in humanity. That's life everywhere. That was how it was in Solomon's day. But he says, the one who pleases God escapes that. And how does he escape it? Through God-given wisdom. Yes, wisdom is limited, but it is something that is good. It is something that is profitable. It is something to be prized and valued. Verse 27, he says, "'Here is what I have found,' says the preacher." And here Solomon refers to himself again as the preacher or the teacher. We saw that back in chapter 1, this is how he likes to refer to himself. He says, "'Here is what I have found,' says the preacher, adding one thing to the other to find out the reason." And so what he's saying here is he's adding experience on top of experience. Test on top of test. Remember, he's been testing these things. He's been experiencing these things. He's been watching and observing these things. He's been doing it and doing it and doing it. In verse 28, he says, My soul still seeks, but I cannot find." This is not something that he had stopped when he wrote this. This was something that he was continuing to do. He hadn't concluded. He was continuing to look. He wasn't done. And this was his observation. Verse 28 again, he says, One man among a thousand I have found, but a woman among all these I have not found." And so, so many people stop at that point, and they say, what's he got against women? Is he a misogynist? He hates women? What's going on here? Well, this is where we have to stop and back up just a little bit. It's not like he has a high view of men either. He says, I've only found one in a thousand, and he doesn't even tell us who that is. I think a better way to look at this is that he is condemning everyone. He's condemning all of mankind, both male and female alike. He tested this. He looked, he observed, and he found that no one passes this test. During this test, he searched. And he couldn't find wisdom among anyone. Among anyone. No one had wisdom that could solve the problem of Havel. There was no answer to be found. Not in any of the women, not in any of the men. Nowhere did he look could he find that answer. But what he did find, he did find something. He found that you can't blame God for it. You can't blame God for it. Verse 29, he says, "...truly this only I have found." So he didn't find anything in humanity, but this he did find. He says that God made man upright. But they have sought out many schemes. God made man upright. It's not God's fault. God made man upright. Adam was a man who was upright. But he fell. He fell in sin. And we are fallen in Adam. We are sinners. All of us. You can look to all of men. You can look to all of women. We're all fallen in Adam. So true wisdom, true God-given wisdom teaches us who we are before God. And so wisdom, with all of its benefits and blessings, even then it has its limitations. But those limitations are the result of our fallenness, our sinfulness, our creatureliness. And so, what's the takeaway there? The takeaway is that we need God's grace. We need God's grace every day. And it's easy for us to say that when we're in church. You know, we're all hard-carrying Calvinists. We love sola gratia, grace alone, salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone. We believe that. But when it is brought to bear in real life, life comes to us in very painful ways. Do we rely on ourselves or do we acknowledge that we need God's grace? No matter how wise we might be, no matter how skilled we might be, no matter what giftedness we might need, don't ever think that somehow you've got it. Somehow you've arrived. See it all the time in our society. Certainly the elites of our society think that they are all that is. They can do it. They can achieve it themselves. But that's not the case. We need God's grace. As God's redeemed people, we know this. And it's one thing to acknowledge it here, in church, when we're all together. But when the bottom of life drops out, And we're facing the end of ourselves. Wisdom has run out. We have nothing left. We have to acknowledge God's grace is sufficient. Amen? Amen. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this reminder, the sufficiency of your grace. Thank you for your grace that as good as wisdom is, it has limitations. And so, Lord, we are utterly and completely dependent upon you. We confess that, O Lord God. And so, Lord, we pray that you would bless us this week as we go into our week, as we go into the work week, that we would do so not just acknowledging but rejoicing in your grace. And always keeping that in the forefront of our mind, that everything we do is because of your grace, and it is by your grace that we are saved. And so we should be a very thankful people. We should be a people who are constantly praising you and thanking you. And so, Lord, may that be true of us this week as we go into our various Ascendiary callings. God bless us. We thank you. We love you. We praise you. And we ask it through Jesus Christ. Amen.