All the books under the sun won't help

Ecclesiastes is a sermon with a text:

"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." Ecclesiastes 1:2

Is this the confession of an embittered cynic now seeking to share with us his sense of the cheapness and nastiness of life? Or is he speaking as an evangelist trying to bring home to the unbeliever the impossibility of finding happiness ‘under the sun’ apart from God?

Packer says it is neither.

The author speaks as a mature teacher giving a young disciples the fruits of his own long experience and reflection:

Be happy, young man, while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you to judgment. Ecclesiastes 11:9

Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, "I find no pleasure in them"-- Ecclesiastes 12:1

Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. Ecclesiastes 12:12

Apparently the young man though that wisdom was the same as a wide knowledge, and that disciplined book work would yield the desired results – the reasons for God’s various doings in the ordinary course of providence.

What the preacher wants to show him is that the real basis of wisdom is a frank acknowledgment that this world’s course is enigmatic, that much of what happens is quite inexplicable to us, and that most occurrences ‘under the sun’ bear no outward sign of a rational, moral God ordering them at all.