Corruption of Wealth

I find it disturbingly ironic that the wealthiest king in the history of kingdoms hated wealth so much that he dedicated more page space to it than any other worldly pursuit of happiness in Ecclesiastes. Of all the things that Solomon could have pointed out as failures in attempt to reach the joy that only Christ can give, he spent the most time railing on wealth. The page space is ridiculously disproportionate.

Solomon even goes so far as to say, “When you see people being bribed and swayed by money to oppress others, don’t be surprised! If it gets them more profit, they’re going to do it.” In his actual words, it reads like this:

Ecclesiastes 4:8-9, “If you see oppression of the poor and perversion of justice and righteousness in the province, don’t be astonished at the situation, because one official protects another official, and higher officials protect them. The profit from the land is taken by all; the king is served by the field.”

And while I generally want to avoid talking about current times in an effort to make this blog friendly to all individuals and a break from the ridiculousness that is our world, there is no more perfect example than America’s current government. There really isn’t.

We’re dealing with judges who let rich kids get off easy for raping a girl after three months of jail time but sentence poor kids to years for a drug charge. We have a system designed to allow people to get away with murdering unborn children because it brings in more tax money. The upper government appears to be infested with a pedophile ring that covers for each other. (This is not a statement of my political affiliation or thoughts in any way, for the record. I will avoid stating any of that here. It’s merely a report of facts for the sake of proving Solomon’s point from Ecclesiastes.)

But really, you shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve been dealing with the wealthy and powerful breaking systems and taking advantage of others since the beginning of sin. Be righteously upset and work to end it, but don’t be surprised it’s happening. People will do anything for money, even though it never satisfies.

Verses 10-12 say, “The one who loves money is never satisfied with money, and whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with income. This too is futile. When good things increase, the ones who consume them multiply; what, then, is the profit to the owner, except to gaze at them with his eyes? The sleep of the worker is sweet, whether he eats little or much, but the abundance of the rich permits him no sleep.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. Those who love and have money will never be satisfied with it because it is empty. What is money but paper? What is wealth but metal coins? It can’t buy happiness. It can’t buy salvation. It might as well be useless. At some point, even, you may end up with so much wealth that you can’t buy enough to put a dent in your stockpile of cash. Then what good is it for but to stare at?

Interestingly enough, too, another conundrum around wealth appears from verse 11. The more money you have, the more you need to spend. Think about it this way: the more money you have, the more luxuries you can afford, but the more money it costs to keep those luxuries functional, so the more money you need. As a further example, say you’re married, and you desire to make enough money to have a child. Once you get there, it requires money to continue to raise that child. The more you get, the more wants you can have, but the more you need to satisfy the upkeep on those wants. It’s a fairly futile circle if your whole goal for money is to satisfy your desires.

Another point Solomon makes is the satisfaction of a hard worker in contrast to the despair of the rich, who likely no longer needs to really work to maintain his riches. That’s a pretty simple connection; the harder you work, the better you relax. If you never work, you’re always high strung, especially if part of your wealth goes towards the corruption and oppression of people.

I don’t know about y’all, but I always sleep better if I had a busy day working my body and mind. It keeps me from wasting time in bed overthinking and gets me right to dreaming, whereas a day of relaxation gives me time and energy for my mind to worry and obsess over problems, making the relaxation pretty difficult. That’s the concept Solomon was aiming for. If all your time is relaxation, is relaxation really relaxing?

Another thing that plagues the rich is the heartbreak and disaster that can come from mismanaging wealth.

Verses 13-14 say, “There is a sickening tragedy I have seen under the sun: wealth kept by its owner to his harm. That wealth was lost in a bad venture, so when he fathered a son, he was empty-handed.”

A lot like the example of the prodigal son, mismanagement of wealth can be horribly detrimental, and many a wealthy person has found themselves without any money at all from a lack of discretion when it comes to spending.

Then Solomon attacks the popular Egyptian worldview of death again in verses 15-16:

“As he came from his mother’s womb, so he will go again, naked as he came; he will take nothing for his efforts that he can carry in his hands. This too is a sickening tragedy: exactly as he comes, so he will go. What does the one gain who struggles for the wind?”

The Egyptian idea of the afterlife was that anything you were buried with could be enjoyed in the next life, and this is a refuting of that idea. What is the point of hoarding your wealth? You can’t use it when you’re gone, and there’s no guarantee that your kids will manage it wisely either (not that this means you shouldn’t leave them something).

But the most powerful verse, to me, in this section of chapter 5 is verse 17:

“What is more, he eats in darkness all his days, with much sorrow, sickness, and anger.”

I could unpack this verse for a long time in a lot of detail, but suffice it to say that this is, once again, Solomon saying that without the joy of the Lord, everything is dark and futile, void of satisfaction. Literally speaking, if God is light, which He is, then believing that money is satisfaction and joy will literally leave you sitting in the darkness—that is, without God—living in sorrow, sickness, and anger at your lack of joy.

Solomon ends this section of his rant against wealth with a reminder that we shouldn’t take wealth or lack of wealth to extremes in verses 18-20:

“Here is what I have seen to be good: it is appropriate to eat, drink, and experience good in all the labor one does under the sun during the few days of his life God has given him, because that is his reward. God has also given riches and wealth to every man, and He has allowed him to enjoy them, take his reward, and rejoice in his labor. This is a gift of God, for he does not often consider the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with the joy of his heart.”

This is a great reminder that joy can only be found in God, but that He has also given us the opportunity to have some happiness in the things of this Earth. But we can only have fun with what’s here because we are not occupied with the existential dread that comes from worrying over wealth and other pursuit of this world.

Life is Empty

Ecclesiastes chapter 2 expands upon the pointlessness of earthly pleasures, going so far as to call everything achieved in this life emptiness. My personal Bible has subheadings for parts of the chapters, and three of them in this chapter are titled “The Emptiness of Pleasure,” “The Emptiness of Possessions,” and “The Emptiness of Work.”

It’s really interesting how Solomon hits on the three main things that we consider the largest vices in today’s times: pleasure: sex, partying, and the like; possessions: money, a house, nice cars, etc.; and work: a solid career, things built by your own two hands, and more. These three things are the trifecta of unfulfilling tragedy.

Let’s start examining the emptiness of these with pleasure. Verses 1-3 say, “I said to myself, ‘Go ahead, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy what is good.’ But it turned out to be futile. I said about laughter, ‘It is madness,’ and about pleasure, ‘What does this accomplish?” I explored with my mind how to let my body enjoy life with wine and how to grasp folly—my mind still guiding me with wisdom—until I could see what is good for people to do under heaven during the few days of their lives.”

Sounds dreary, doesn’t it? It might even sound untrue to many. Because, surely, laughter can’t be madness! It’s happiness in a sound. It’s contentment. It’s joy. And pleasure absolutely accomplishes something! It gives happiness, comfort, and contentment. But do these things really do that? I say no, and here’s why.

Look at laughing from an outside perspective: how long does it last? When you laugh, you may go on for as many as few minutes, but when you’re done laughing, the effect is gone. Your eyes uncrinkle, your lips settle back into a relaxed position, and the sound of merriment is snuffed out. As soon as the moment has passed, so too has laughter. So too, has any benefit. It’s fleeting.

And what about pleasure? Parties, alcohol, foolishness. It all feels great temporarily, but what happens when you leave the party? When you sober up? When you face the consequences of your foolishness? All of what you experienced in the midst of these actions is gone. You break free of the monotony for a few moments, and then it comes right back.

Next is possessions. Verses 3-10 described all that Solomon gained in his life. He had houses, vineyards, gardens, parks, every kind of fruit tree, a whole irrigation system to water his trees, tons of servants, more cattle and sheep than he knew what to do with, silver, gold, and all kinds of treasures, his own private musicians, more than 700 wives and 300 concubines. As he says in verse 10, “All that my eyes desired, I did not deny them. I did not refuse myself any pleasure, for I took pleasure in all my struggles. This was my reward for all my struggles.”

So, if there was any person to ever exist who could have found joy in things he owned, it was Solomon. Yet, he didn’t. Verse 11 says, “When I considered all that I had accomplished and what I had labored to achieve, I found everything to be futile and a pursuit of the wind. There was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

Even though he worked hard to get all those things, they weren’t worth it. I find that this part of Ecclesiastes fits really well with Mark 8:46, “For what does it benefit a man to gain the whole world yet lose his life?” Clearly, it benefited Solomon in no way. As we know from the book of 1 Kings, he had the kingdom he presided over taken away from him and given to David for the things he owned and did.

And finally, we get to the emptiness of work. In verses 18-19, 23, it says, “I hated all my work that I labored at under the sun because I must leave it to the man who comes after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will take over all my work that I labored at skillfully under the sun. (23) For all his days are filled with grief, and his occupation is sorrowful; even at night, his mind does not rest. This too is futile.”

Man, talk about dreary, yet again, with Ecclesiastes. But really, take some time to think about this. Personally, I’ve had those moments where I’ve thought deeply about my life on this Earth, having to wake up early in the morning, drive to work, work all day, drive home, work at home, and then sleep, just to do it again the next day. If I think too hard about it, I nearly have an existential crisis worrying about how meaningless those actions are. Just thinking about the monotony of it could drive me insane, and I doubt I’m the only one who has considered this.

Don’t you spend some nights wherein you consider just giving up going to work because you’re not accomplishing anything, anyway? That’s what Solomon’s talking about here. Solomon was wise and skilled at many things, and he dreaded the idea of passing on the achievements of his work to someone who would not do it as well as him. He dreaded it to the point that he dreaded doing the work, and he realized that there’s no point to it all.

Here’s the conclusion: Everything about this Earth and life on it is empty. Your happiness is empty because it cannot hold you up. Your possessions are empty because they are worth nothing in the grand scheme of things. Your work is worth nothing because after you’re gone, someone else will come along and ruin it. Not to mention that there’s nothing satisfying about the monotony of 50 years of a career.

As I’ve mentioned before about Ecclesiastes, its whole job is to drill it deep into your heart and mind that the things on this Earth cannot and will not satisfy you or bring you joy because its goal is to point you to the only one who can: God.

Let me tell you that I did not write all this down and post it online to disenfranchise you about life to the point you decide to do nothing with yours, and neither did Solomon write Ecclesiastes for this reason. In fact, now that I’ve made the point that you can’t find joy and satisfaction in these things, I’m going to tell you to go out and do those things anyway. Because while you can’t find joy and satisfaction in them, you can find happiness.

This is about perspective. In the long term, yes, this life means very little. But in the here and now, God has given us time here to do these things. I think Solomon says it best in verses 24-26:

“There is nothing better for man than to eat, drink, and enjoy his work. I have seen that even this is from God’s hand, because who can eat and who can enjoy life apart from Him? For to the man who is pleasing in His sight, He gives wisdom, knowledge, and joy, but to the sinner He gives the task of gathering and accumulating in order to give to the one who is pleasing in God’s sight. This too is futile and a pursuit of the wind.”

See, as Christians, we can have happiness in the things we do here because we have the joy of Christ in knowing that, once we’re done here, there is everlasting joy to look forward to. We can enjoy the things of this world because we are already satisfied by Christ. We will never be satisfied by the things of this world, but we can have a little fun doing the things that are not sinful. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing some of these empty things if you’re already full.

Earth is Pointless

Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible because it has an absurd amount of experiential wisdom. It’s the troubleshooting guide for life, at its essence, because it cuts past all the clutter of living and gets straight to the point. It’s the book wherein Solomon says, “Look, I’ve tried to find satisfaction in literally every way you could possibly attempt. There is not a single thing on this planet that can satisfy you.”

Consider the things we believe will satisfy us: money, relationships, a career, aggrandizement, knowledge, pleasure, happiness, etc. Solomon tried all of that, and best of all, he wrote about how pointless it was so we wouldn’t waste our lives trying them, too.

Verse 2 says, “‘Absolute futility,’ says the Teacher. ‘Absolute futility. Everything is futile.’”

The ESV and KJV have “vanity” in place of futility here, but Strong’s Hebrew Concordance says that the word can be translated as emptiness, vanity, transitory, or unsatisfactory, and futility fits that definition just as clearly as vanity can. Futility means useless, pointless, and ineffective.

So, Solomon says that everything is pointless, and then he asks a question. Verse 3, “What does a man gain for all his efforts that he labors at under the sun?”

Take a moment to think about that, and don’t try to be optimistic about it. Solomon wasn’t being optimistic here. What do you really get for waking up early in the morning and working hard all day? You get some money, but what’s that worth? You’re just going to spend it. No, you don’t get money. You get to wake up and do it again the next day just to survive. It’s pointless. Even if your goal is to set up your children for their own life, it’s pointless. Why?

Verse 4, “A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.” Even if you set up your children for a little better life on Earth, they’re going to do the same thing you did: wake up every morning and work all day, then go to sleep and do it again the next day. And their children will do it, and their children’s children will do it.

This is the bleak reality of this world. What you’re doing is going to repeat ceaselessly because what is here is the same forever. It’s an unbreakable cycle because there is nothing to add and nothing to take away. You can apply that to almost everything you do: help someone? Sure, you’ll feel good about it, but there are always more people to help, and that good feeling goes away, soon. It’s depressing, it really is, but that’s the point!

Solomon breaks this down with a few metaphors in verses 5-7, “The sun rises and the sun sets; panting, it returns to its place where it rises. Gusting to the south, turning to the north, turning, turning, goes the wind, and the wind returns in its cycles. All the streams flow to the sea, yet the sea is never full. The streams are flowing to the place, and they flow there again.”

Verse 5 refers back to verse 3. You work hard, like the sun, to do your daily routine, then you return home to rise and do it again.

Verse 6 is another reference to the repetition and pointlessness of everything. If you know anything about weather patterns, you’ll know that wind has its cycles and seasons. There are occasional variations, just like our lives occasionally have some energy injected into them via unscripted, irregular events, but in the end, they always go straight back to where they came from. That’s the thing about spheres: no matter which way you go around it, you’ll always end up right back where you started.

The point that Solomon makes with verse 7 is simple, in essence, and it’s that nothing that you do in this life will fill you up. If you’re the ocean in this metaphor, then the things you pour out into—the money, the friends, the career—are pouring back into you. But, as with the oceans and rivers of Earth, you don’t become more full as those things you’ve emptied yourself into pour back into you because you empty into them at the same rate they give their return. It’s a net gain of zero.

It’s a wearisome prospect, as Solomon says in verse 8. “The eye is not satisfied by seeing or the ear filled with hearing.” Think about that for a second. Your eyes and ears were literally designed to see and hear, and yet they’re not satisfied by doing their job. Neither are you. But as 8a describes, “All things are wearisome; man is unable to speak.” This problem we have can’t even be put into words. I think the closest we get is when we get fed up with it all and say “I’m tired.”

Verses 9-11 are Solomon affirming what I mentioned at the beginning of this article. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Can one say about anything, ‘Look, this is new,’ It has already existed in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of those who came before; and of those who will come after there will also be no remembrance by those who follow them.”

Take a moment to think about a circle: it’s one continuous line bent around to meet itself. It has no definable starting or ending point. In fact, it’s pointless. Now think of a sphere: what is a sphere except an innumerable amount of circles put together to create a 3-D object? That’s us and Earth. We’re in a cycle on this sphere where everything on it and in it has been tried before, but just as we finish going around in our lives, another generation will follow and do the same thing.

Every generation of the human race has tried and tries the same things available to us on Earth to achieve satisfaction, not knowing that it’s all been done before, and it has never worked and never will. The sins and behaviors that plague us today are the same ones that plagued the people in Biblical times because we’re all walking in circles looking for pointless things because we’re missing the point.

I said earlier that Ecclesiastes is the troubleshooting guide for us because it has all the attempted fixes in it. But the final step of the guide is a finger pointing to the rest of the Bible, to Christ, because He is the only one who can satisfy us. So skip to the back page of the guide, don’t try all the things of this Earth. You won’t find satisfaction here. Skip straight to Christ.