The End of Wisdom

"And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." Ecclesiastes 12:12

This verse is very ironic. The "these" that the son is to be admonished by are the "good heed" and "proverbs" (vs. 9), the "acceptable words" and "words of truth" (vs. 10), the wise words that are like "goads" to prick the people with truth and "nails" to fasten them in place (vs. 11), all of which are given by the "one shepherd" who Solomon would know as God (Ps. 80:1), and we would later know more specifically as Christ (John 10:14). The "these" are every word of God-given wisdom that Solomon wrote down.
And what do the "these" admonish the son (and us) to do? All of the "these" are vanity as well. Wisdom is good, but (as I've said about other things) it is not THE THING, the thing that matters. What good does all that wisdom do a man if he does not know what will come after him (Eccl. 10:14), or whether anything he does will succeed (Eccl. 11:6)? The uncertainty of life makes wisdom a vanity, and to understand that IS true wisdom: it is the end result of being admonished by all those acceptable, godly words of truth.
That is the irony: wisdom's end reveals its own inadequacy. It can never give man what he wants are take him where he wants to go.
C.S. Lewis, in his book The Pilgrims Regress, there is a gorge that separates man from God. Mr. Wisdom's house is placed farther over the edge of the gorge than anyone else, so far that one would swear if they got a running start that they could jump the gorge. But those who look closely see that if they ran and jumped, they would still miss it. Here is Wisdom (with a capital "W"): wisdom is vanity. May God make us wise enough to see that we will never be wise enough.