“I said in my heart, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.’ But behold, this also was vanity. I said of laughter, ‘It is mad,’ and of pleasure, ‘What use is it?’ I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine—my heart still guiding me with wisdom—and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life. I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house. I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the delight of the sons of man. So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

There are people – I can’t say what the overall percentage is, but I know there are some because I was certainly one of them – who see Ecclesiastes as just being sort of a “Proverbs 2.0.” It’s still Solomon, he’s still dishing out wisdom, but this time, he’s a lot more bleak. There’s less of the cautionary, yet optimistic encouragement, and a lot more, “all is vanity and you’re going to die.” And so it can be really easy to pull some nuggets from Ecclesiastes and leave it mostly untouched – but this misses the big picture, and does a disservice to the work as a whole. Solomon isn’t just writing another work that displays and shares his God-given wisdom – Ecclesiastes is part shared wisdom, but it also reads as a confession and a lament. This is a man who was blessed by God to be wise and discerning beyond measure, who has used that gift to exceed all who came before him in greatness and riches, and who has abused the very same gift to his own amusement and curiosity. Solomon is not just the wise man at the top of the mountain, dispensing wisdom from a place of detached purity. He counsels as someone who’s been there – he’s the recovered addict, the grizzled war veteran who has seen and done much, and touched the stove enough to know and warn others of exactly how hot it is. Ecclesiastes may not be quite as easily understood and digested as Proverbs, but we water it down or disregard it to our own detriment. This book can read as rather bleak, but that’s because we’re seeing a man’s confession of the ways in which he’s wasted so much of his own life, and even darker, a commentary on the condition of the world as a whole. Interspersed in the midst of Solomon’s observations, we are pointed toward God – God, who is not the cause or source of the problems with creation, but their solution. To aim downward into the passions of the flesh is vanity, to aim outward and chase the toil of the world is vanity as well, but to aim upward – to aim toward the One who is not vapor or mist, but is the eternal Rock, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is something far, far greater. The words of Solomon are wise – truly wise. This man was not a puffed up pretender, or empty philosopher – this is someone who, before taking up the mantle of king of Israel, humbled himself before God and asked for wisdom, and his prayer was answered. Solomon was a king of peace, a leader of deliverance after the man of war that his father was – but for all his wisdom, for all of Israel’s prosperity, for the glory of the temple that he was allowed to build, and for the peaceful relations he conducted with many nations, Solomon was never the King of Peace. Ecclesiastes is not a call for us to be like Solomon, but the call that resonates throughout all of Scripture that we be like Christ. Over the course of his reign Solomon succeeded and failed in spectacular fashion, doing both great and terrible things – he was blessed to build the temple, and he also restored the pagan high places in Israel. He was blessed to make Israel more lavish and prosperous than any nation the world has seen, and his sin laid the groundwork for it to be split in two and eventually crumble. He was blessed with divine wisdom and discernment, and he abused this gift to his own ends. Solomon has been there, he’s done that, he has risen and fallen, triumphed and failed, and Ecclesiastes stands as a monumental warning that we might not stumble in the same ways that the once mighty king and preacher has. But we must remember that for every path of vanity that Solomon points out, for every avenue of misspent time, energy, or resources, there is another path – a path of rightness and righteousness, a path of eternal life and glory, a path where the days we spend on this earth are not wasted fruitlessly for ourselves, but are spent in the service of the eternal kingdom of the Living God. Ecclesiastes stands as many things – a lamentation, a warning, an observation of the human condition, a counsel against foolishness and vanity – but above all it is a call that in all things, and at all time, we might not become bogged down in worldliness, and live out our days seeking the glory of God.

The Empty Life that is Lived to Self

1. The Selfish Heart of Man

“I said in my heart, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.’”

I’ve heard it said before, and seen it more times than I could count where what someone is struggling with in their faith and obedience isn’t what we would call a “head problem” but rather a “heart problem.” Romans 1:18–20 gives us a clear picture of what worldly hearts look like,

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

You can’t acknowledge God, honor God, worship God unless He calls you, unless He makes himself known – but He makes Himself known to everyone, creation itself testifies to the Creator. So whether it be the atheist who explains the world through the lens of cold and sterile science, ignoring the fact that they have no scientific explanation for how reality as we know it came into being, or the pagan who insists that there is no single God, but many gods and our world is just a product of their mysterious activities, both are equally guilty and without excuse. Both are delighting in the lie that what is right in front of their face – this world, this universe, consciousness itself – was a product of something other than the hand of the Living God. They cannot look with their eyes because they’re blind, they cannot think with their minds because they’re darkened – they don’t have a head problem, because logic and reason and simple observation of creation all point to God. They have a heart problem. Jeremiah 17:9 tells us,

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

And God promises in Ezekiel 36:26,

“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”

This is all so relevant because, as we see in starting chapter two of Ecclesiastes, Solomon’s foray down the path of vanity begins with a decision in his heart – a decision that makes no mention of God, that in no way reflects a devotion to or pursuit of the Lord. This is a man who says, “let me see how happy I can make myself, within myself.” It’s pure foolishness, and yet with a keen mind and sharp wisdom, Solomon devotes himself to letting his heart run unchecked among the pleasures and curiosities of the world – and so should it be any surprise that the result is nothing but empty disappointment?

“But behold, this also was vanity. I said of laughter, ‘It is mad,’ and of pleasure, ‘What use is it?’ I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine—my heart still guiding me with wisdom—and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life.”

There’s a thing that happens when you play certain video games – specifically the large, open world, deep storyline, roleplaying kind. The main storyline takes you thirty hours or so to play through, you spend another forty to fifty on side quests and extra content that is released over time. By the time it’s all said and done, the main bad guy is long dead, the princess is saved, and the character that you’re playing as is basically a demigod. You’ve well beaten the game, but there are still random places to explore, random enemies to kill, and above all else, your lingering curiosity to sate. As wildly overpowered as you’ve become, how high can you climb? How deep can you swim? How many enemies can you kill without using a weapon? All the risks you never would have dreamed of taking in the vulnerable early hours of your gameplay, when the campaign ahead still mattered to you, now seem like nothing more than a way to test what you can get away with in the confines of the game. In this state of mind you waste untold amounts of time accomplishing nothing, just venting random curiosities of, “I wonder if I can do that.” You’re no longer invested, it’s all just novelty. If you’ve played these kinds of games then you know exactly what I mean, and if the idea sounds foreign to you then good, that’s a pit you’ve never wandered into. Regardless of whether or not you can relate directly, the example of an overpowered, late-stage, video game protagonist gives us a decent illustration for the state we see in king Solomon. It’s hard for us to really comprehend what the wealth of Solomon’s reign looked like, but it’s not just the vastness of his riches that are astounding, it’s how he got them. 2 Chronicles 1:14–17 tells us,

“Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen. He had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen, whom he stationed in the chariot cities and with the king in Jerusalem. And the king made silver and gold as common in Jerusalem as stone, and he made cedar as plentiful as the sycamore of the Shephelah. And Solomon’s import of horses was from Egypt and Kue, and the king’s traders would buy them from Kue for a price. They imported a chariot from Egypt for 600 shekels of silver, and a horse for 150. Likewise through them these were exported to all the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Syria.”

Here’s the thing – you don’t have to know exactly how much a shekel weighed (it’s approximately 11.4 grams), or how many horsemen and chariots it took to constitute a large army (this was massive for that era), to understand that we’re reading a description of great prosperity and might. But despite the size of his army, we have to remember that Solomon was a king of peace. This isn’t like the prosperity we see historically from empires – the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Romans – these aren’t nations, they’re an empire comprised of many nations. They boasted great wealth and extravagance because their respective conquests gave them dominion over much of the known world. Solomon didn’t glean the wealth of Israel from war and expansion, but from diplomacy and trade. So not only was Israel wildly prosperous under his rule, it was peaceful and secure in its borders. Solomon was exceedingly wise, and his wisdom also grew the wealth and fame of Israel. 1 Kings 10:23–25 tells us,

“Thus King Solomon excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom. And the whole earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom, which God had put into his mind. Every one of them brought his present, articles of silver and gold, garments, myrrh, spices, horses, and mules, so much year by year.”

What we see in Solomon is a man who found himself in a very secure and luxurious position – I do not mean to say that he was a greedy man, there’s nothing that necessarily insinuates that, but he was certainly someone who lived in extreme opulence by virtue of God’s blessing upon him and the nation. We know that in the beginning of his rule that Solomon sought God much as his father David had, and that the pursuit of the will of the Lord was his primary driving motivation. But we know that in certain areas of his life he was not fully obedient, and what began as isolated compromises eventually led to rebellious works and a fallen heart. 1 Kings 11:1–4 says,

“Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the people of Israel, ‘You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.’ Solomon clung to these in love. He had 700 wives, who were princesses, and 300 concubines. And his wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.”

 For all his wisdom, wealth, for all his promise and potential, Solomon was a man in whom we can track a growing complacency – not simply secure, but spiritually lax in his security. In this complacency we can see how his heart, no longer fully turned to God, followed the paths of gratification and amusement of the flesh, forgetting for a time that the days of man are numbered, and that our greatest calling is that our lives be led in service to God, that His will and glory be at the forefront of our minds, that we might have direction instead of the listlessness of self-indulgence. In this we can see Solomon’s heart problem, and we can also see how later in life he identified his own foolish digression and the profound waste that came from his days being led chasing nothing but his own mortal delight.

• The Selfish Work of Man

“I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house. I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces.”

Returning to what we addressed before about head and heart issues, there can be many cases of disconnect between the two. You may think in your heart that you know what is right, that you can discern what is pleasing to God, and yet your actions are ones of blatant sin and revelry. Or, you may be the reverse of this, as Jesus described the Pharisees in Matthew 23:25–26,

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.”

There are many who put on an outward show of righteousness and good works and yet inside have no love of God or their fellow man. I’m not accusing Solomon of necessarily having no love for God, but at the same time, what he admits to here shows us the ways that what had gone wrong in his heart spilled out into how he ordered the environment around him. To ground this message very practically in our world today, I have met many people who are convinced that they are living their lives correctly because of the things that they’ve acquired. A man wakes up early, he works a long, full day, he comes home. His truck is new, his home was custom built. From the hand-laid stone steps in the front, to the in-ground pool in the back, from the flat screen on the wall, to the starched and pressed shirts that are hanging in the closet – everything in his world affirms that he has worked hard, spent his money well, and surrounded himself with lasting, quality things. There’s no deep thought behind the action, no significant spiritual consideration, but without acknowledging it, his life, his security, his peace, and his purpose have all become the things and possessions that make up his world. There is nothing exactly wrong with having nice things, but when it all becomes about the things, then you have ventured into a dark and sinful place whether you realize it or not. A verse I come back to a lot that really puts things into perspective is 2 Peter 3:10,

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.”

People live and die, and we live out our days with this sort of illusion that the earth has some kind of greater permanence, but this world and everything in it, the heavenly bodies and the universe itself are all destined to be burned up and made new without the stain of sin. But this isn’t meant to be some pessimistic, fatalistic, gloom and doom kind of outlook. James 1:16–17 tells us,

“Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

And Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:53–55,

“For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ ‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’”

The things of this world will pass away, but all that is good and pure, all that is righteous and truly meaningful, these precious gifts from God will endure forever. Jesus closes the Sermon on the Mount by saying in Matthew 7:24–27,

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

What Solomon gives us a very real and painful illustration of is what it looks like to build for the sake of building, to work for the sake of work, and to forget entirely what foundation you’re building upon. As we read, he has collected and ordered many things to make up the world around him, but in his accumulation he’s forgotten the One who made all the things he now surrounds himself with. There is no drop of rain that falls, nor blade of grass that grows that does so without the will and blessing of God. There is no man or woman born that God did not fashion in their mother’s womb, and no animal lives out its days on the earth by anything more than the Lord’s provision. Solomon collects, he works at collecting, he amasses fortunes – be they of the beauty of the land, the commodity of servants, the security of livestock, or the weight of precious metals – and he does it all as he himself confessed, for himself. And again we must remember that what we read are not the words of a man who is boasting, but one who is confessing where he steered so horribly wrong. We are given counsel and warning from the richly wise and tragically foolish king as to the emptiness of the work of man.

“I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the delight of the sons of man. So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem.”

As we arrive at the matter of concubines we can see the sin more open and exposed than in the others. You may think to yourself, “I don’t know about that, bragging about how many slaves you have doesn’t seem particularly sinless.” This is a fair point to raise, but you have to remember that when we read of slaves in the Old Testament, especially when we read about them in Jerusalem as permitted under the Law, this isn’t talking about the kind of chattel slavery that we saw in the North Atlantic slave trade (or countless other examples throughout human history), where humans are reduced to nothing more than property. A slave in the context of the Law and what Solomon is talking about here is closer to an indentured servant than what we would traditionally think of when we hear the word “slave.” Conversely, as we read this passage you may come to the word “concubine” and not be certain as to what that is, and certainly not think it as a big deal. A concubine is essentially a secondary wife – she is a woman taken as a wife, but typically lacking the same marital and inheritance rights. But in essence and function you live with her as you would a wife, you have children with her as you would a wife. People will act like, because Scripture so often looks at figures like Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon in a positive light, that despite their practice of polygamy the Bible is somehow endorsing having multiple wives. They overlook the fact that all of these men suffered as a direct result of their impure romantic pursuits – sometimes it was indirect, as with rival people groups rising up from the children born from second wives, and sometimes it was very direct, as with the matter of David and Bathsheba. But of them, Solomon exceeded the others by an almost inconceivable margin – as we read earlier, 700 wives and 300 concubines. Mere lust – be it of sexual desire, or for power and status can’t fully account for these numbers. This admission we read shows us that in this sin as with all the others, Solomon was chasing the novelty of excess. He was working for the sake of working, his heart nor his mind turned to God in these things, as he toiled in various pursuits to see just how lavishly he could make the environment around him – but all this too was wasted effort and empty vapor.

• The Selfish Desire of Man

“Also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil.”

Jesus teaches in Matthew 6:2,

“Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.”

Now, Solomon hasn’t done the things he has so that he would be thought well of by the crowd, but he has done them for the sake of themselves, for his own amusement, entertainment, or satisfaction, and not in obedience to, or pursuit of God. And so the pleasure that his heart took in his toil was the reward that he received, and that was the extent of it. Isaiah 40:6–8 tells us,

“… All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”

Man may work and build, he may explore the depths of his own knowledge, he may pursue the paths of desire and pleasure, and he may find a degree of satisfaction in these things, but nothing that will last. Not only will they not last eternally, they won’t even last for one fleeting human lifetime. This is part of what Jesus is communicating to the church at Laodicea when He says in Revelation 3:17–18,

“For you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,’ not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see.”

And this is what Solomon is illustrating for us as he reflects on and understands – that in bringing all his great wisdom to bear, and in pursuing every avenue of flesh that he could, he has found nothing that has any worth, it’s all vapor, it’s all nothing. Now, we tend to see the word “flesh” and immediately think of sin, and this isn’t an altogether wrong response in most cases, but it’s not exactly the case here. Some of the things that Solomon has done were unquestionably sinful – the many concubines if nothing else most certainly are. But there’s a certain thing he continues to say that points us quite clearly to what makes his actions into moral transgressions – “myself.” He built houses and planted vineyards, he made gardens and parks, he made pools, he gathered gold and silver – none of these things are inherently wrong, but in each of them he acknowledges that he did them for himself. There is also the confession, “I kept my heart from no pleasure,” an experimental condition where it seems that Solomon sought to find all that life had to offer through testing and trying any and every form of enjoyment that came to mind. But Galatians 5:22–23 tells us,

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”

And 2 Peter 1:5–7 says,

“For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.”

Both passages making it abundantly clear that a life lived for God, a life that is obedient before the Spirit is not one of impulsiveness or unrestraint, but of self-control. But Solomon has given us a picture of a man who is ruled by his desires, yet one who finds himself in a position where what he already has is far beyond what any ordinary man would dream of. While Solomon is not a violent or warring king, he shows us that regardless of where it comes from, be it war or peace, a man can lose himself in the selfish acquisition of more, and that there is no virtue in unrestraint. The only reward of this abundant selfishness is a momentary sweetness that can only end in bitter emptiness.

“Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

The most staggering part of all of this (for me at least) is to read and really process that Solomon’s wisdom didn’t depart from him in all this – it wasn’t as though a fit of idiocy seized him, and stripped of his wits, he pursued the wrong things. It was with his faculties intact, his intellect still sharpened that he chased after empty things, that which ultimately amounted to wind. Solomon himself wrote in Proverbs 9:10,

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.”

This is a man who most certainly began in wisdom, was placed there by God Himself, but a miraculous beginning does not guarantee that things will remain so. Adam was in the paradise of Eden, in the presence of God, before he and Eve sinned and brought the fall through their rebellion. The Israelites were delivered from Egypt to be brought into the promised land, before they doubted, sinned against the Lord, and were punished to roam the wilderness for forty years. Israel was established as a nation, secure in its borders and lavish in their wealth, and yet they went after other gods and sought the protection of other nations rather than submit before the Lord, and because of their wickedness their nation was destroyed. The beginning is important, but we are called to be secure in our faith, not complacent. We are not told to start our race with great energy only to grow distracted or faint, but are told to run the race set before us with great endurance, our eye always fixed upon Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. What Solomon shows is, wisely, vulnerably, and with a lifetime’s worth of successes and even more failures behind him, what it looks like for a man to lose his foundation, and to move listlessly through life with no direction or purpose, living only for the perishable and fleeting joy of living. If we hear his wise warning and learn from his mistakes, we are blessed with an opportunity to aim up, to continually seek the face of God, and to live a life that is full in Christ, rather than one of emptiness, lived out for ourselves.