14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun;
all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. (NIV)
15 What is crooked cannot be made straight;
what is lacking cannot be counted. (NRSV)
Solomon still hasn't said it, but he is gradually leading us to comprehend: Without God in our lives, any pursuit we follow will be meaningless. Without God, we can't make the crooked straight; without faith, we can't make the rough places smooth. The second half of verse 15 means this: A person who truly pursues wisdom will eventually discover that even those things that are missing from human knowledge are so vast that they are uncountable.
These things are not meant to frustrate us with the pursuit of knowledge nor with education or universities. These things are meant to point us to the place where everything that is lacking--as uncountable and impossible as it may seem--is filled in and supplied by Christ. What is missing from our human nature is the holiness demanded by God. What is impossible to us is obedience to God's commandments, but that's exactly the what Jesus has given to us with his perfect obedience.
What it so beautiful about Solomon's Ecclesiastes is precisely this persistent message: We are incomplete without God; we are condemned without Christ. And so we turn to Jesus again and again; every day we turn to him like it was the first time, answering his loving call in the gospel. Only in Christ can we say with Job, "I am pure and without sin, I am clean and free from guilt" (Job 33:9). But in Christ, we can say it with confidence, with faith, and with the assurance that all of our sins have been atoned for; we are truly clean, because we have been forgiven.
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