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King of the Mountain

Wisdom for the Heart / Dr. Stephen Davey
The Truth Network Radio
December 9, 2024 12:00 am

King of the Mountain

Wisdom for the Heart / Dr. Stephen Davey

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December 9, 2024 12:00 am

Are you searching for meaning but finding only emptiness? In this episode, learn from King Solomon’s pursuit of wisdom, power, and knowledge. Despite being the most powerful and brilliant man of his time, Solomon discovered that life under the sun is like chasing the wind—frustrating and empty. This episode unpacks why human achievements, no matter how great, leave us wanting more. Using stories from history and modern examples like Muhammad Ali, understand why lasting joy isn’t found in accolades or knowledge alone. Discover Solomon’s ultimate realization and how it points to the deeper fulfillment that comes from looking beyond human wisdom to divine purpose. If you’ve ever felt that success didn’t bring the happiness you expected, this episode will show you why and guide you to what truly satisfies.

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If all you pursue is the wisdom and knowledge of this world, you're going to come up empty.

He's come to realize that the people earning one degree after another can be just as unsatisfied as people who barely made it out of fifth grade. If all you have is life here, Solomon is described for us under the sun. If you don't pursue the wisdom of God who reigns beyond the sun, all you're going to catch in life is a fistful of air.

Welcome to Wisdom for the Heart. On today's broadcast, Stephen Davey continues through his series from Ecclesiastes. We've come to Ecclesiastes chapter 1 verses 16 through 18. In this section, Solomon continues to write in his journal about the sad truths he's discovered as he searched the world for wisdom and knowledge. Solomon asserts that no matter how much we know, there will be problems, frustrations and challenges we simply can't solve with human wisdom.

You need to trust in the wisdom and the Word of God, and Stephen's going to help you with that right now. In my studies, I have come across steles or stone slabs that have been excavated predominantly in Egypt, declaring the glory of the king who reigned at that present time, certainly juxtaposed perfectly with the glory of the king we worship today who reigns forever. One of them who evidently enjoyed this kind of self-propagation or approval or applause commissioned a number of them, Amenhotep II, and one of them that survived reads this carved into stone. There was no one like him. There was no one who could draw his bow like him.

He could not be surpassed in running. There is none who can fight in his vicinity even though they have come against him in the millions. Nice little humble profile there. About 350 years later, another king from a neighboring region wrote this on a stone tablet it was carved that reads, I am the king of the world, king of all four rims of the earth, the courageous hero who overthrows all his enemies. I am king of the world. Did I mention I was king of the world just in case you missed it? There it is again.

Can you imagine? Now the truth is, if you study history of that part of the world, these guys were king of the mountain. They owned the world, their world. Their world was sort of their own playground and their own office suite all rolled up into one.

They were uncontested. In fact, 300 years after the one I just read you, another king comes along who is on top of the mountain, his mountain. In fact, he has the pharaohs who were writing their own little granite monuments. He has them paying him tribute in solid gold.

He's master over them. In fact, he spends some time in his memoirs regarding his own profile and because the Spirit of God happened to inspire what he would write to lead us ultimately to the truth, we have a copy of what he wrote of himself in our Bible. So let's go back to his memoir. It's the book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon, who's at the top of his world, is introducing himself. He is telling the truth about what he has observed and he began in the summary statement, if you were with us last Lord's Day, by picturing himself as a great explorer and he was exploring everything. Let's go back to verse 12 and sort of get a running start. I, the preacher, the convener, the lecturer, had been king over Israel and Jerusalem and I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven.

It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of Adam to be busy with. I've seen everything that is done under the sun and behold, all his brevity, all his futility, all his vanity and a chasing after wind. I explored everything. I turned over every rock. In fact, the rest of his journal will give us the details of his explorations, his experiments, his observations. He says, I couldn't find anything that would bring lasting satisfaction.

Happiness was as elusive as chasing wind with a net. Now what he does that these pharaohs didn't do before him is tell us, now here's the truth. Here's the brutal truth and he delivers it to us in the form of a couple of proverbs. We looked at the first one last Lord's Day, verse 15, what is crooked cannot be made straight and what is lacking cannot be counted.

We broke that proverb down into two principles. What is crooked cannot be made straight. In other words, no matter how hard you try their dilemmas, you can't straighten out. The world is broken and you can't fix it. In fact, you cannot fix yourself.

If you cannot fix yourself, you ought to at least have a little patience with the rest of the world. Solomon goes on to add, what is lacking cannot be counted. In other words, no matter how much you have, there are deficiencies you can't supply. You don't have enough money in the bank. You don't have enough talent and resources in yourself if you want to be honest for once.

You can't handle the challenges of life. You come up short-handed. Now even though Solomon is king of the world, he's on top of the mountain, he knew in his heart that humanity was broken and his own life was deficient. God is leading him even in the depressing introduction to reveal honest truth. Now what Solomon does next and that brings us to our exposition today is describe himself not as a great explorer but as a great scholar. I want you to notice verse 16. I said in my heart, I have acquired great wisdom surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. I surpassed in wisdom.

Remember that word, hakma, is broad. Depending on the context, Solomon is talking about worldly wisdom. He's talking about intuition. He's talking about analytical skill.

He's talking about discerning that even an unbeliever can fulfill. He says I observe more and with greater skill my world around me than anybody else. Now he's not exaggerating as Pharaoh is before him. Solomon is essentially the valedictorian of the human race.

He really is. In fact, the Bible records in 1 Kings 4 this biographical description. God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore.

This is what God is saying. So that Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. He was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ezraite and Haman and Calcol and Darda.

I don't know who they were but they probably got straight As too. And his fame was in all the surrounding nations. He spoke 3,000 proverbs. He composed songs of a thousand and five. He lectured on trees, everything from the cedar to the hyssop that grows out of a wall. He lectured of beasts and of birds and of reptiles and of fish and people of all nations came to hear Solomon. He really was the most brilliant man on the planet.

Materially, financially, he had it all. Then he adds this interesting phrase, verse 17, and I applied my heart, that is I dedicated everything I had in me to know wisdom, the wisdom of the world and to know madness and folly. Now what we need to understand here is that he's giving us a spectrum, not just a positive side of scholarship. He couples these words madness and folly here. He's going to do it three times in his journal.

This is one of the three. And when he does it, he isn't contrasting the valedictorian of the graduating class with some of us who just were thrilled to get out of class. He's not doing that. He is using madness and folly to refer to someone who behaves badly, irresponsibly, wildly. See, he's contrasting the extremes of human behavior, those that seem to have it together and those who don't. So he's not only touring, you know, the university library, he's walking out in the back alley. He's inspecting human life from all the angles, the morally upright and the morally uprooted who have no compass.

He's interviewing, you can think of it this way, he's interviewing Supreme Court justices and murderers on death row. He's studying the entire range of human behavior. He's examining, one author wrote, the extremes and everything in between.

And he's asking one basic question. Do any of them on this spectrum, from wisdom to madness, do any of them have any kind of advantage over any of the other individuals on this spectrum in catching happiness, meaning, purpose? And apart from God, the answer he's going to deliver to us is none of them have any advantage over each other. Verse 17, the latter part, I perceive this also as but a striving after win. There's that phrase, striving after, chasing the win.

Nobody has any advantage. Nobody can catch it. You think you've found lasting meaning and happiness in life?

Well, hang on because it's going to slip through your fingers. He's come to realize that a Supreme Court justice can be just as confused about the meaning of life as an inmate on death row. He's perceived, that means he's come to know, he's come to realize that people who have it all and people who've lost it all can be either sad or happy in the state they're in. He's come to realize that people earning one degree after another can be just as unsatisfied as people who barely made it out of fifth grade. He's come to realize that somebody living in a Parade of Homes winner with a three-car garage can be just as unsatisfied as the guy who lives in a mall with three cars out in the front yard.

None of them will start. Solomon has come to realize that being king of the mountain doesn't bring any more lasting joy when he arrived than when he was clawing his way up there. How about you? Have you realized it yet? Have you ever been on top of the mountain? How long did the euphoria last? Maybe you thought, well, it's not this mountain, it's another one. I see one over there, I'll go climb that one. And you got to the top.

What did it mean? Ernest Hemingway, who became a literary sensation, in fact, biographers say he influenced a century of how to write fiction. He would win the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize.

I mean, he can't get any higher than that. Produced novels that would become bestsellers. He was known as a man's man, kind of tough, vigorous, a war veteran, a correspondent, philosopher. He loved everything from big game hunting in Africa to watching bullfighting in Spain.

Outspoken, wealthy, independent. Before he took his life at the age of 61, he wrote these words, and I quote him, life is a dirty trick, a short journey from nothingness to nothingness. Sounds like Solomon. Doesn't matter who you are, what you're doing, if all you have is life here, Solomon is described for us under the sun. If you don't pursue the wisdom of God who reigns beyond the sun, all you're going to catch in life is a fistful of air.

It'll disappear. And keep in mind now, in this opening statement, Solomon is not including the wisdom of God. He's not praying.

He references God once, but it's the technical term of his sovereignty, not the personal name of his relationship. He isn't being guided by the words of Moses. He's being guided by the knowledge of man, the intuition, the perception of an incredibly brilliant mind who runs itself into a dead end. Solomon arrives at another brutal truth about this dead end. Look at verse 18, for in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. So let's break down his concluding proverb in this opening summary statement.

It sort of sets the stage for all that he'll reveal in his experiments and his exploration and his exploits. Let's break it down into two principles. Principle number one, no matter how much we know, there are frustrations we cannot solve. In much wisdom is vexation.

That Hebrew word, vexation, could be translated very simply, frustration. In other words, the more you know, the more frustrated you become. It's true, isn't it? The more you learn, the more you realize you need to learn. The more you know, the more you realize you didn't know.

That verse gives rise, by the way, to the little axiom, ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is bliss. The less you know, the less you have to worry about.

You really ought to try to plug your ears and not know anything. Ignorance is bliss. It's just better not to know so much. Reminds me of a teacher who wrote on a boy's report card before he headed home. The teacher wrote these words for his parents to read, if ignorance is bliss, your son is going to be the happiest person in the world. Now Solomon is not disparaging education, science. I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of years in school. He's not disparaging doing your homework. You know, don't leave here and say, well, you know, a pastor told me I could drop out of middle school. You missed the whole point of that's, you know, what you tell your parents, or graduate school. He's simply arriving at something that is true.

He'll tie it up, chapter 12, but knowledge without God leads to frustration. Think about it. We know more today about the universe than any other generation preceding us. How secure do we feel? I think the average person out there is now terrified somebody's going to show up in a spaceship and blow us out. We know more about medicine and disease than ever before, and yet in that knowledge we have more insecurity of some kind of epidemic. Just watch the movie.

It's going to wipe us out. Knowledge without understanding. A sovereign God who has a purpose for the human race, and you can read how it ends up in the book of Revelation, leads to a dead end. Becoming smarter is not the pathway to becoming happier. Have you ever thought about the fact that if the solution to frustration and irritation was education, the happiest places on earth, at least in our region, would be the university campuses, right? I mean, the happiest place would be NC State, UNC, ECU, Campbell, Meredith, Duke. Well, maybe not Duke, but the happiest people on the planet would be professors.

How's that working out? You ever talk to one who doesn't believe in the creator of God? Human reason doesn't bring about satisfaction. It isn't what I can learn from the outside, it's what the Spirit of God does on the inside. So that whether it's a parade of homes or a mobile home, whether it's barely getting out of fifth grade or having a couple of doctorates, happiness and meaning and purpose in life come by means of the Holy Spirit's transforming power that begins at salvation so that you begin to evidence the fruit, the evidence that He's at work in your life, which produces love, joy, peace, patience.

I mean, you're going to learn some things here today, I hope. How's it going to work out there in the parking lot after church when that guy cuts in front of you? You know, you're leaving church. You're in church, that's as close to perfect as you've been all week.

How's that working out there? Keep your windows rolled up. Solomon writes with rather acid ink, no matter how much we know, there are problems and frustrations and challenges we simply cannot solve. Yet in the face of that God-given reality, the humanist manifesto I came across recently, volume two declared when it was published in 1973 when I was about in ninth or tenth grade, and I quote, reason and intelligence are the most effective instruments humankind possesses. Conclusion, I quote, no deity will save us. We must save ourselves.

I've got a better solution. Call upon the name of the Lord and you will be saved. And by the way, you'll be saved from yourself because we're the ones that are driving ourselves into that dead end as we pursue ourselves and our knowledge and our pride. Now follow this as Solomon adds a final phrase to this summary. Notice the latter part of verse 18, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Let me put it this way. No matter how much we learn, there are sorrows we cannot avoid. The more you learn, in fact, the more sorrow you end up with. You can get the news 24 hours a day. Your parents had to wait until, you know, six o'clock in the evening or your grandparents to get an update on what happened in the world.

A lot of times it was already sort of halfway resolved by the time they watched it. You can see the latest terrorist attack, the latest random shooting spree, the latest high crime and misdemeanor, the most recent moral collapse of whatever it is on the hour. And you live with yourself. The longer that goes, the longer the list of regrets and inadequacies and failures and sin and trouble. Some people want to be king of the mountain and they never do get up there and they live with this sense of sorrow and dissatisfaction.

I believe the greater sorrow and the more dissatisfied is in the individual who made it up there and then realizes it's a fistful of air. Without a savior who reigns above the sun like Solomon, without a redeemer to lead you and forgive you and give you a future and a hope, purpose and meaning along the way, whether you're on top of that mountain or you're trying to crawl your way up, you're heading toward a dead end. I couldn't help but think if I could interview Solomon as he finishes this opening summary. And after studying this opening summary, I now know why no preacher I ever sat under did a book study through Ecclesiastes.

In fact, I was reading one well-known expositor on his treatment of a particular text in Ecclesiastes this past week and he said, you probably ought to plan on preaching eight sermons covering the book of Ecclesiastes. Well, it took us five to get through chapter one. I know you can't wait until chapter two starts. Don't leave me, okay?

Don't leave me. Well, you know, if I could interview Solomon, I thought, what would I ask him? And the thought occurred to me of the different things I could ask him. One of the things that I think I'd like to ask him is Solomon. Solomon, whatever happened in that memory of yours, which never forgets anything, whatever happened to the music of your father, David. When you heard it sung over and over again as you were growing up into your adult years, you heard the festivals, you heard the music and the choirs, these great songs, what happened? They reminded you not to trust yourself, not to follow yourself, not to pursue things of this life, not to trust in human reason, to understand this is not the end. What happened?

What about this one? One of his most famous, the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. You anoint my head with oil.

My cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and then, I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Now that's what you hang on to.

Sing that one again and again and again. That was Stephen Davey and this is Wisdom for the Heart. Solomon knew what it was to reach the top, yet he found only frustration and emptiness without God.

Reflect on his lesson. Life's true meaning is found in trust, not pursuits. If you haven't already, sign up for Friends of Wisdom. It's free and you'll receive weekly emails from Stephen filled with encouragement, Bible insights and answers to questions that people like you are asking. You'll also receive a free resource every month to help you grow in your faith. Signing up is simple. Visit wisdomonline.org forward slash friends. Fill out the short form and you're done. As a bonus, you'll get two of Stephen's most popular booklets, Blessed Assurance and The Coming Tribulation. Join Friends of Wisdom today at wisdomonline.org forward slash friends and start receiving these valuable gifts today.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-12-09 00:17:24 / 2024-12-09 00:26:14 / 9

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