The Wise Man's Blues
Introduction: The Dead End of Earthly Wisdom
We live in an age drowning in information but thirsting for wisdom. The modern man has his self help gurus, his life coaches, his productivity hacks, and his five step plans for a meaningful existence. He is convinced that if he can just organize his life correctly, think the right thoughts, and optimize his routines, he can outsmart the human condition. He wants to use earthly wisdom to solve the ultimate problem, which is the problem of his own mortality.
But this is nothing new. The Preacher, Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, apart from Christ, already ran this experiment. He had more resources, more power, and more raw intellect than any modern motivational speaker could ever dream of. And in the book of Ecclesiastes, he gives us the lab report. This book is a divine gift, a controlled demolition of every attempt to build a meaningful life "under the sun," that is, in a closed system without God. It is inspired pessimism. It is the necessary black velvet on which the diamond of the gospel is displayed.
The Preacher is not trying to depress us. He is trying to vaccinate us against the false hope of humanism. He takes every path to earthly fulfillment, wisdom included, and follows it to its logical conclusion. And he finds that every single road, when pursued without God, terminates at the same dead end: a graveyard. This passage is Solomon's clear eyed assessment of the value of wisdom, and it is a brutal one. He shows us that wisdom is vastly superior to folly, but then he shows us that this superiority ultimately doesn't matter when the finish line for everyone is a hole in the ground.
The Text
So I turned to see wisdom, madness, and simpleminded folly. What will the man do who will come after the king except what has already been done? And I saw that there is an advantage in wisdom over simpleminded folly as light has an advantage over darkness. The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I know that the fate of one becomes the fate of all of them. Then I said in my heart, “As is the fate of the fool, so will my fate be also. Why then have I been extremely wise?” So I said in my heart, “This too is vanity.” For there is no remembrance of the wise man along with the fool forever, inasmuch as in the coming days all will be forgotten. And how the wise man dies with the fool! So I hated life, for the work which had been done under the sun was grievous to me; because everything is vanity and striving after wind.
(Ecclesiastes 2:12-17 LSB)
The Undeniable Advantage (vv. 12-14a)
The Preacher begins his investigation by acknowledging an obvious and important truth.
"So I turned to see wisdom, madness, and simpleminded folly... And I saw that there is an advantage in wisdom over simpleminded folly as light has an advantage over darkness. The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness." (Ecclesiastes 2:12a, 13-14a LSB)
Let us be clear. The Bible is not anti-intellectual. It does not praise foolishness. Solomon states plainly that wisdom has a real, practical, and immense advantage over folly. The comparison he uses is absolute: it is the advantage of light over darkness. It is the advantage of sight over blindness. The wise man has his eyes in his head; he can see the ditch in the road and walk around it. The fool walks in darkness; he stumbles right into it. This is not a close contest.
In this life, under the sun, it is always better to be wise than to be a fool. It is better to be prudent with your money than to squander it. It is better to be diligent in your work than to be lazy. It is better to think before you speak than to blurt out every foolish thought. Wisdom provides a massive practical benefit. It helps you navigate the world, avoid unnecessary pain, and build a stable life. God is not telling us to be idiots. He commands us to get wisdom (Proverbs 4:7).
So the first point is established. On a horizontal, earthly plane, wisdom wins. It is not a vanity in and of itself. The problem is not with wisdom, but with its limits.
The Great Equalizer (vv. 14b-16)
Just as he establishes the clear superiority of wisdom, the Preacher slams into the great brick wall of mortality.
"And yet I know that the fate of one becomes the fate of all of them. Then I said in my heart, 'As is the fate of the fool, so will my fate be also. Why then have I been extremely wise?'... For there is no remembrance of the wise man along with the fool forever, inasmuch as in the coming days all will be forgotten. And how the wise man dies with the fool!" (Ecclesiastes 2:14b-16 LSB)
Here is the crisis. Here is the intellectual and spiritual agony of the passage. The wise man may navigate life more skillfully, but he arrives at the very same destination as the fool. Both die. The grave makes no distinction between the Ph.D. and the dropout. The hearse does not check your resume. This one, brute fact, death, threatens to nullify the entire advantage of wisdom.
This leads Solomon to a devastating internal monologue: "If my fate is the same as the fool's, why have I bothered being so wise?" If the game ends the same for every player, what is the point of playing well? This is the question that every thoughtful unbeliever must eventually ask himself. He can distract himself, he can numb himself, but the question remains. What is the point of a life that is erased?
And it gets worse. Not only do both die, but both are forgotten. "For there is no remembrance of the wise man along with the fool forever." The legacy you leave, the reputation you build, the books you write, the monuments built in your honor, it is all temporary. In a few generations, you will be a forgotten name on a crumbling tombstone, if that. The universe, from a purely materialist perspective, has a very bad memory. This great equalizer, this shared fate of death and oblivion, leads the Preacher to his first conclusion: from this vantage point, the pursuit of wisdom is "vanity."
The Rational Despair (v. 17)
The logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is not a shrug of the shoulders. It is a deep, soul-crushing despair.
"So I hated life, for the work which had been done under the sun was grievous to me; because everything is vanity and striving after wind." (Ecclesiastes 2:17 LSB)
This is one of the most stark statements in all of Scripture. "So I hated life." This is not an emotional outburst. It is a rational deduction. If death is the end, and oblivion follows, then all the toil, all the struggle, all the achievements of a life lived "under the sun" are not just meaningless, they are grievous. They are a bitter joke. It is like spending your whole life building a magnificent sandcastle, only to have the tide of death wash it away without a trace. The Preacher is telling us that atheism, followed to its logical end, does not lead to liberation and joy. It leads to hating your own existence.
Everything becomes "vanity and striving after wind." The Hebrew word for vanity, hebel, means vapor, smoke, or a puff of air. It is something that has no substance, no permanence. You cannot grasp it. Trying to build a meaningful life on a foundation of godless wisdom is like trying to catch the wind in a net. You will end up exhausted and empty handed.
Conclusion: Looking Over the Sun
So, is this the final word? Are we left in despair? No. The entire force of this book depends on that key phrase: "under the sun." The Preacher is locking us in a room with no windows or doors to the transcendent. He is forcing us to feel the suffocating logic of a world without God.
The entire Christian faith is the announcement that God has broken into this closed system from "above the sun." The despair of Ecclesiastes is the problem to which the gospel is the only answer.
Consider the logic. The wise man dies just like the fool. And this is true. The wisest man who ever lived, the incarnation of divine Wisdom, the Lord Jesus Christ, died the most foolish death imaginable, the death of a criminal on a cross. He shared the fate of fools and sinners. He was laid in a tomb, and for three days, the Preacher's logic held. It was all vanity.
But on the third day, God blew the hinges off the door of that tomb. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the event that shatters the premise of Ecclesiastes 2. Death is no longer the great equalizer. It has been defeated. For the one who is in Christ, death is not the end of the story, but the beginning of the next chapter. The wise man in Christ does not die like the fool. He dies and goes to be with the Lord.
Because of the resurrection, our remembrance is not temporary. Our names are not written in the fading memory of men, but in the Lamb's Book of Life, which is eternal. And because of the resurrection, our work is not a grievous striving after wind. Paul concludes his great chapter on the resurrection by saying, "Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:58).
The Preacher's despair is a holy despair. It is designed to drive us out of the dead-end street of humanistic wisdom and into the arms of the resurrected Christ. He is the true Wisdom, and in Him, and only in Him, does life cease to be vanity. In Him, our lives, our work, and our wisdom have eternal weight and significance. He is the one who catches the wind.