The Peace That People of Faith Enjoy

18I hated all my labor in which I labored under the sun, because I must leave it to the man who comes after me. 19Who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have rule over all of my labor in which I have labored, and in which I have shown myself wise under the sun. This also is vanity. 20Therefore I began to cause my heart to despair concerning all the labor in which I had labored under the sun. 21For there is a man whose labor is with wisdom, with knowledge, and with skillfulness; yet he shall leave it for his portion to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. 22For what has a man of all his labor, and of the striving of his heart, in which he labors under the sun? 23For all his days are sorrows, and his travail is grief; yes, even in the night his heart takes no rest. This also is vanity. 24There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and make his soul enjoy good in his labor. This also I saw, that it is from the hand of God. 25For who can eat, or who can have enjoyment, more than I? 26For to the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge, and joy; but to the sinner he gives travail, to gather and to heap up, that he may give to him who pleases God. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind.

Parents will choose sacrifice for their children, however hard it may be. Caring for children is a duty, of course, but parents also find meaning and joy in watching them grow up well. But when they have given their love without asking anything in return, and their children are ungrateful and act selfishly, their sense of futility is beyond words. When children recognize what their parents have given up and serve them with gratitude, that self-giving shines, and a child who has grown up rightly becomes a parent’s joy. A parent’s sacrifice cannot be measured in money. Every moment such parents worry about their child’s future, and they never take their eyes off them, lest trouble come their way. How could anyone put a price on that love?

God is no different. If his people do not forget the grace with which he sent his Son into the world, asking nothing in return, and if they thank him for it, he will protect all the more those who understand the pain of losing that Son. Yet it is no easy thing for frail human beings to satisfy their Creator. Even so, we see God pouring out power and wisdom in abundance on those who strive to fulfill the calling he has given them. He fills, without holding anything back, the children who understand his will.

Take, for example, a father who works hard to raise his children well. He hopes his child will grow up well and one day take over the business. He must hand on what he has built with all his strength, and if he has no confidence in his child, he will never be at peace. Many people, it is true, give their wealth back to society, but parents always think of their children first. In the past as now, we often see unprepared children inherit a fortune and, instead of expanding the business, split it apart or run it into the ground. If a father watched a child who had not grown up rightly tear down the work he had given his life to, he would feel that all his labor had been utterly vain, gone for nothing.

But if we believe that our life is a pilgrim’s passing, that we come and then go, we can see the world broadly, as God does, instead of being shaken by what our children can or cannot do. When people do not stand upright, we see God making them his children through suffering, even someone as bound to the law as the apostle Paul.

If you truly love your children, you need to see that they forge their own path. If you give them the chance to stand on their own feet, they will understand their parents’ love more deeply and learn through experience to make sound judgments. Children who have overcome hardship will lean on God all the more as their affairs prosper. They will see the world broadly and gain the wisdom to examine it closely, and as they work out skills that set them apart, they will come to trust God’s power more than their own. If, as things go well, they build a life that can bear the weight and rely wholly on God, who has been their great fence and support, they will never fall. Wise children serve God as their master and never betray him.

People like Cain and Achan, who tried to slip their own merit into God’s grace, could not let go of their greed, and their lives ended in failure. Their sins occur again and again in the ordinary course of our lives, which is why we must cast off the endless greed of the human heart. Those who fall into Satan’s schemes will not find eternal rest though they labor all their lives; even if they succeed, they cannot see beyond themselves, and they live in constant anxiety.

In 1 Samuel 20:31, King Saul tells his son Jonathan that as long as David lives, the kingdom can never be his, and therefore David must surely die. To protect his own power, Saul set out to kill David, whom God had anointed, though David had committed no sin that deserved death. Saul had been called by God before David, yet once he stopped fearing God, he sought the life of righteous David.

The very thought of killing an innocent man for his son’s sake is a sin that obstructs the work of God. Saul acted this way because he could not give up his craving to possess, and he could commit such a sin because he did not fear God. Once he was gripped by the selfish idea that his own child must inherit his power, he came to hold life cheap.

It was God who made Saul king. Israel wanted to prosper like the nations around them, and they cast off the God who had led them and cried out for a man to rule over them. God granted their wish and set Saul up as their first king. Had Saul not forgotten that God had raised him, a man of no account, to the throne entirely of his own accord, he would never have acted as he did. In this way desire breeds sin, and sin breeds death.

The difference between those who see themselves standing before God and those who see only themselves, without God, is revealed after death, and it divides them into heaven and hell. David had risked his life to fight Goliath for the name of God and for Israel, yet once Saul saw him as an enemy who endangered his throne, he tried to kill him. Had Saul kept God in mind, he could never have laid a hand on David; but in the grip of greed, he could look on David as his foe.

Selfish people have this evil in their hearts: they keep others close while it suits them and throw them away the moment they are no longer useful. Saul wanted to pass the throne to his son, but because the people esteemed David more highly, he lived in constant fear of losing the crown. He devised a scheme to kill David. As the condition for marrying his daughter Michal, David was to bring a hundred Philistine foreskins. Saul did this because he reckoned that David might well die at Philistine hands in the fighting.

But David was under God’s protection. He went boldly into the Philistine camp, killed the enemy, and brought two hundred foreskins to Saul. David believed that life, and every battle on earth, rests in God’s hands, and he was not a man Saul could kill merely because he wished to. Because unchecked temper leads people in the end to murder or strife, we need to lay all our hurt, anger, and anxiety down at the foot of the cross. Greed, worry, and temper cloud our judgment, and since they can harm both ourselves and others, they must be put away.

Had Saul acknowledged that God was Israel’s king, he would not have thought that his power must pass to his son. Greed and jealousy narrowed his vision until he could see no one but his son, and that is what made such folly possible. But however much Saul hated David, Jonathan loved him sincerely, believing that God had anointed David as king. Saul looked at this son of his and was exasperated: here was Jonathan thoughtlessly helping the very man who threatened his throne.

Because Saul was king, Jonathan would naturally have succeeded him. But his son had no ambition, and Saul feared that this would cost them the crown to David. As rage swallowed him, he finally tried to kill even Jonathan, the son he loved. When a father is in Satan’s grip, his son cannot escape the harm.

How can Saul, who wanted to kill his son for being so foolish as to spare David’s life, be compared with God, who hung his Son on the cross to save the lives of sinners? Grasping does not make life turn out as we want. Who does not want to do well in the world, and what parent does not want to leave their children a good start? Yet life will not bend to our will.

Anyone who cannot get free of the thought that “I and my children, at least, must do well” will always live in darkness, frustration, and unease: theirs is a life like hell. We should work hard in the circumstances given us, but if, like Saul, we clutch at everything so as not to lose a single thing, we will spend our years utterly in vain. Solomon, too, thought of Israel as his own possession, and he wanted to hand everything on to his son Rehoboam. But he was not sure whether his son would be a wise man who would build up his father’s labor, or a fool who would tear it down. Just as he feared, Rehoboam was a fool without wisdom; he failed to keep the glory of David and Solomon and ended by splitting the kingdom.

Nothing is as unsettling as being unable to trust your own child, and Solomon’s grief at his distrust of Rehoboam would have deepened his sense that life is vanity. Power and wealth are the kind of thing an unprepared child can scatter to the wind in a moment, however much is handed down. Because that is so, Solomon, looking at Rehoboam, would already have guessed how Israel’s future would unfold.

Ecclesiastes 2:22

22For what has a man of all his labor, and of the striving of his heart, in which he labors under the sun?

Solomon is asking what use it all is once a person dies: all the labor of a lifetime, and all those days spent in the striving of the heart, aching as if one’s very insides were melting away. He had spent his whole life chasing pleasure and satisfaction, but when he realized that no one gets past death, all those years seemed empty to him. He had enjoyed every kind of wealth and honor a person can know, and he grieved over a life in which he must leave it all behind. It is right to look after our health while we live; but because life belongs to God, no one knows their own end and makes ready for that hour.

I hope you will think about your own last day as well. Suppose you have worked hard without a moment’s rest, and just as things have become a little settled, your body has grown old and sick, and before long you must return to God. All your toil until now would feel futile. You might find yourself laughing in disbelief at how you ran, looking only straight ahead, or feel deflated, wondering what you sacrificed so much for. If the sacrifice proved worthwhile, that would be some comfort; but most people find it hard to gain a reward that matches what they gave up.

If we feel this way, how much emptier must it be for someone like Solomon, who had enjoyed every glory, to stand at death’s door and realize that the world he had used as his own was never his! Whatever they own, hardship begins for all who are born into this world from the moment of their birth. Think of parents whose children have applied to prestigious universities: until the results come, they wait in anxious suspense. The hours spent waiting to learn whether their child has been accepted are agonizing, as though their insides were melting. But the joy of acceptance is brief, and soon they have to start worrying about tuition.

The children who get in must again lose sleep studying for good grades and then prepare to find work, and so life turns out to be one hardship after another. The world, though, holds a contradiction we do not expect. Doing well in school does not mean doing well in life, and doing poorly does not mean faring poorly. This, too, is vanity of vanities.

Young people hearing this sermon may conclude that they need not study. But when Solomon calls it vanity, he is voicing what he felt at the end of his life as he looked back on the years he had lived. For now, then, they must work hard to gain more opportunities. Having come to understand all this, he tells us that to give life meaning, we need to serve God all the better. His reason was that his own life, lived without walking with God, had come to look empty.

One day Solomon noticed people with neither wealth nor power living at peace, and he wondered where their calm came from. Until then he had looked down on those who had little and treated them with contempt, yet poor as they were, they were always at rest. When he learned that their peace and joy were given by God, he found it beautiful that they were content with God alone and lived so serenely.

He himself had eaten and drunk for pleasure and the cravings of the flesh, but he saw that they ate and drank for the eternal Kingdom and lived lives that counted. Then he understood that such a life is blessed, full of rest and peace. The measure of blessing is not how much or how little we own. It lies in whether our souls enjoy good in God or whether we live anxiously by mere human instinct. Seeing people far beneath him actually living far happier lives than his own, Solomon came to think that his great power was no blessing at all. So he called his own life, the life everyone envied, vanity.

Ecclesiastes 2:26

26For to the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge, and joy; but to the sinner he gives travail, to gather and to heap up, that he may give to him who pleases God. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind.

Solomon says that it is vanity, too, when God gives wisdom, knowledge, and joy to those who please him, and vanity again when he gives what sinners have gathered all their lives to those he wishes. He does not mean that the grace and material blessings we receive in life are worthless. He is stressing that in the face of death, everything in the world is vanity.

Though God may take from the sinner and give to the good, if they make that grace their own possession and fall into corruption as Solomon did, it is a curse, not a blessing. God’s grace does not change, but how it is used depends on the one who receives it, so there is no reason to grow proud for having received much, nor to lose heart for having received little. Someone may live with wealth heaped up like a mountain, but if they have not received Christ, they will fall after death into a place ruled by darkness, and their life will come to nothing. But those who live now by decisions of faith, for the God they will meet after death rather than for wealth, will find eternal rest in the light.

In other words, what we cannot do without in this life is to believe in Christ and be saved, and for that, the years that seem so vain are necessary. If we do not know why God has given us life, these thoughts of Solomon’s may sound absurd, but those who know the truth understand them deeply. With death before him, Solomon came to realize that anyone who had lived as he had would stand before God after death as a sinner with no excuse to offer.

Look at the books Solomon wrote, the Song of Solomon, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, and you see that he was a man of wisdom. Wisdom is a tree of life to those who strive to keep the faith, and that he held it shows that his wisdom came from God. This same man, though, failed to live as a good man who exalted God. Still, God did not take away the wisdom, knowledge, and joy he had given him, and he caused him to leave behind books of wisdom.

God gave him wisdom, knowledge, and joy so that through the words he handed on, later generations might know God and be saved by faith. Because the wisdom he had was God’s, the words he left have led many people to God, which makes it all the sadder to hear a man of such wisdom say that life is futile. Through the life of one man who held both good and evil within him, who repented of his sin and longed for grace, we can see God carrying out his work to the very end.

Ephesians 2:8

8for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,

I hope you will not mistake God’s gift for wealth or success. May you never forget that the salvation you have received through faith is itself the gift of God. Because those who set their hope on heaven do not set it on this earth, they live with pure hearts, free of greed and lust.

Solomon launched great building projects and strengthened the nation, but his self-righteousness and arrogance, which loved no one but himself, made him many enemies. He had been raised on David’s steadfast faith; Rehoboam, by contrast, was raised watching a father who enjoyed the world, and he did not become wise. With a pleasure-seeking father as his example, Rehoboam never learned what it means to trust God wholly, and in the end he split the kingdom. He drank as his father drank, indulged in pleasure as his father indulged, and treated the people harshly, as his father, who did not love them, had done. As a result, every trace of the great Solomon was wiped away, and the wealth and honor he had enjoyed vanished, a glory that could not match even a lily of the field.

Now we understand why Jesus, looking at the lilies of the field, said that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of them. Because a lily of the field leaves its seed as it dies, year after year it blooms with the same flower, just as God made it in the beginning, and displays his glory. But the glory people enjoy is forgotten as the years pass; it can never be brought back or enjoyed again.

Having realized how vain life is, Solomon came to envy the faith of the poor in spirit, who feared God. The peace and rest those ordinary people enjoyed is something the world cannot give, and he went through life without that joy. Only with death before his eyes did he regret that he had not lived in the fear of God, and his regret must not become yours. When you see Solomon, a king with absolute power, envying people who lived poor and ordinary lives in faith, you will see how great is Jesus Christ, whom you now serve. If wealth and honor are like sand that slips through your fingers however tightly you grasp it, you must not live for the pleasures of the world. Because the world we go to after death is decided by our faith now, you have to hold fast to the word of God while you have the chance, no matter what.

I hope you will not live a hesitant life, afraid that God may tell you to put your life in order and come to him. May you live always ready, enjoying peace and rest even here on earth, with a faith that will go whenever God calls. Once you realize that the wisdom and protection the Holy Spirit gives are things the world can never give, you will be equal to a great many tasks in your lifetime.

May you remember the repentance of Solomon, who regretted that he had not spent more of his days serving Christ, and live wisely by faith, one day at a time.