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 choose sacrifice for their children, however hard it may be. Taking care of their children is of course a duty, but parents also find meaning and joy in watching their children grow up well. Yet if children are not thankful and act selfishly even though their parents gave them love without asking anything in return, the emptiness the parents feel is beyond words. When children recognize their parents’ sacrifice, are thankful, and care for them, that devotion shines, and children who have grown up rightly become their parents’ joy. A parent’s sacrifice cannot be measured in money. How could anyone put a price on the love of parents who worry every moment about their child’s future and never take their eyes off the child so that no trouble comes?

In the same way, if believers do not forget, and give thanks for, the grace of God, who sent his Son into the world without any condition, God would protect all the more the believers who understand the pain of losing his Son. But it is not easy for weak human beings to satisfy their Creator. Even so, we see God give abundant power and wisdom, overflowing, to believers who strive to carry out their mission. He fills without holding back the children who understand his will.

For example, a father who works hard to raise his children well hopes that his children will grow up well and take over his business. He has to hand down the business he built with all his effort, and if he is not confident about his children, he will always be uneasy. Of course, many people give their wealth back to society, but parents always think of their children first. In the past as now, we often see children who are not ready inherit wealth and then, instead of growing the business, split it apart or fail. If the father sees a child who did not grow up rightly bring down the business he gave his whole life to, he will think that all his labor was utterly vain and empty.

But if we believe that our life is a coming and going like a sojourner’s, then instead of being shaken by what our children are capable of, we can see the world broadly, as God does. When believers do not stand upright, God makes them his children through suffering, even those bound by the law as the apostle Paul was. We can see this.

If you truly love your children, you must let them find their own way. If you give them the chance to stand on their own, they will understand their parents’ love more deeply and will be able to make right judgments through experience. Children who have overcome hardship will rely on God all the more as things go well. They will see the world broadly, have the wisdom to analyze it closely, conceive distinctive skills, and come to believe in God’s power more than in their own. The better things go in the world, if they build a structure that can hold up and rely wholly on God, who has been their great fence and support, they will never collapse. Wise children serve God as their master and do not betray him.

People like Cain and Achan, who tried to slip their own merit into God’s grace, could not give up their greed and lived failed lives. The sins they committed happen countless times in our everyday lives, so we must throw away the endless evil greed of human beings. Those who fall into Satan’s scheme not only fail to gain eternal rest though they labor all their lives, but even when they succeed, they cannot have a broad view and so always live an anxious life.

In 1 Samuel 20:31, King Saul told his son Jonathan that as long as David was alive, this kingdom could never be Jonathan’s, and so David must surely be killed. Saul tried to kill David, whom God had anointed, to protect his own power, but David had committed no sin that deserved death. Saul had been called by God before David, yet once he stopped fearing God, he tried to kill the righteous David.

The very thought of Saul killing the innocent David for the sake of his own son is a sin that hinders God’s work. He acted this way because he could not give up his desire to possess, and it is a sin that one can commit only when one does not fear God. Once he was gripped by the selfish thought that his own child must inherit his power, he came to hold life cheap.

It was God who set Saul up as king. When Israel, wanting to prosper like the other nations, abandoned the God who had led them and cried out for a man to be made their king, it was God who granted their wish and made Saul their first king. If Saul had not forgotten that God had made someone as insignificant as him king entirely of God’s own accord, he would not have acted this way. In this way greed invites sin, and sin invites death.

The difference between those who see themselves standing before God and those who, without God, see only themselves is revealed after death, and it divides into heaven and hell. When Saul came to see David, who had fought Goliath at the risk of his life for God’s name and for Israel, as an enemy threatening his position, he tried to kill him. If Saul had thought of God, he could never have harmed David, but once he was gripped by greed, he could regard David as an enemy.

Selfish people like this have an evil heart that keeps others close when it suits them and easily throws them away when they are of no use. Saul wanted to hand the throne to his son, but because David was more highly regarded by the people, Saul was always anxious that the throne might be taken from him. He devised a scheme to kill David: as the condition for marrying his daughter Michal, David was to bring a hundred foreskins of the Philistines. Saul did this because he judged that David might be killed by the Philistines while fighting them.

But David, under God’s protection, went boldly into the Philistine camp, killed the enemy, and brought two hundred foreskins to Saul. David believed that life and the battles of the world depend on God, and he was not a man Saul could kill simply because Saul wanted to. If people cannot calm their hot temper, in the end they kill or quarrel, so we must lay down all our hurt, anger, and anxiety at the foot of the cross. Greed, anxiety, and hot temper cloud our judgment and can harm both ourselves and others, so we must throw them away without fail.

If Saul had acknowledged that the king of Israel was God, he would not have thought that he absolutely must hand his power to his son. Greed and jealousy narrowed his view until he could see only his own son, and so he could act foolishly. Yet however much Saul hated David, Jonathan believed that David was the king God had anointed and set up, so he loved him sincerely. Watching such a son, Saul was exasperated with Jonathan for thoughtlessly helping David, who was threatening Saul’s position.

Because Saul was king, Jonathan could naturally succeed to the throne, but Jonathan had no ambition for it, and because of that Saul was anxious that the throne would be taken by David. When rage swallowed King Saul, he finally tried to kill even Jonathan, the son he loved. When a father is seized by Satan, his son too cannot help but suffer harm from it.

How can we compare Saul, who tried to kill his son because he thought him pathetic for not taking David’s life, with God, who hung his Son on the cross to save the lives of sinners? Life does not go the way we want just because we are greedy. Who does not want to live well in the world, and what parent does not want to hand down a good situation to their children? But life is something that does not go as we please.

Those who cannot get free of the thought that at least they and their children must live well will always live in gloom, frustration, and anxiety, and so they live a life like hell. Work hard in the situation you have been given, but if, like Saul, you try to clutch everything so as to lose nothing, you will live a life of vanity of vanities. Solomon too thought Israel was his own possession, so he wanted to hand everything down to his son Rehoboam. But Solomon 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 Solomon feared, Rehoboam was a fool without wisdom. So he could not keep the glory of David and Solomon, and he ended up dividing the nation.

Nothing is as unsettling as being unable to trust one’s own child, and Solomon, grieved that he could not trust Rehoboam, probably felt all the more that life is vanity. However much you hand down, if your children are not ready, power and wealth are things they can blow away in an instant. So when Solomon looked at his son Rehoboam, he had probably already 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 saying: all the labor people do in life, and all the time they spent aching as if their insides were melting, what use is it once they die? He lived his whole life pursuing pleasure and satisfaction, but when he realized that in the end no one gets past death, he thought all that time had been empty. He had enjoyed all the wealth and glory a person can enjoy, but he grieved over his own life, in which he had to leave all of it behind and depart from the world. Of course, it is necessary to work at our health while we live. But life belongs to God, so no one knows their own end in order to prepare for that hour.

I hope you will think about your own last day as well. Suppose you worked hard without resting a single hour, and just when things had settled a little, your body had grown old and sick and you had to return to God before long. Then all your toil until now would feel vain. You might find yourself laughing in disbelief, wondering why you ran so hard looking only ahead, and feel hollow, wondering what you sacrificed so much for. Of course, if the sacrifice was worth it, you can take comfort in that, but ordinary people seldom find a reward equal to what they sacrificed.

If even we feel this way, then for someone like Solomon, who enjoyed every glory, it would be all the more empty to stand at the threshold of death and realize that the world he had used as his own was not his. For people born into the world, whatever they own, suffering begins from that moment. To give one example, when children apply to prestigious universities, their parents fret and worry until they learn the result. The time spent waiting to find out whether they were accepted or rejected is anxious and painful, as if their insides were melting. But the joy of acceptance lasts only a moment, and the parents then have to worry about tuition.

The children who get into university also have to study, losing sleep again, to get good grades, and then prepare for a job all over again. So in the end, life is one hardship after another. But the world has a contradiction you would not expect: doing well at school does not mean you will live well, and doing poorly at school does not mean you will live poorly. So this too is a life of vanity of vanities.

Young people hearing this sermon may think they do not need to study. But when Solomon calls it vanity, that is what he felt standing at the end of life and looking back on the years he had lived. So for now they must work hard to gain more opportunities. Having come to understand all this, Solomon is saying that to make life meaningful, one must serve God all the better. For his own life, which had not walked with God, looked empty to him.

One day Solomon saw people with neither wealth nor power living in peace, and he wondered where that peace came from. Until then he had looked down on people who had little and treated them carelessly, but though they were poor, they were always at peace. When he learned that their peace and joy were given by God, he felt that their lives, content with God alone and lived in peace, were beautiful.

He himself had eaten and drunk for pleasure and lust, but they ate and drank for the eternal kingdom and lived lives worth living. Seeing this, he came to know that such a life is a blessed life that enjoys great rest and peace. The measure of blessing is not how much or how little you own. The difference is whether you live enjoying delight of spirit in God or live in worry, following human instinct. Seeing people far below him in fact living far happier lives than his own, Solomon came to think instead that the great power he had was not a blessing. That is why he said that his own life, the life everyone envied, was 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 is saying that God’s giving wisdom, knowledge, and joy to the man who pleases him is vanity, and that God’s giving the wealth that evil people gathered all their lives to those he wants is also vanity. He does not mean that the grace and material blessings people receive in life are worthless. He is stressing that before death, everything in the world is vanity.

Even if God took from the wicked and gave to the good, if people make grace their own possession and fall away as Solomon did, it is not a blessing but a curse. God’s grace does not change, but how it is used depends on the person who receives it. So there is no reason to be proud for having received much, or to shrink for having received little. Even if people live with wealth piled up like a mountain, those who have not received Christ will fall after death into a place ruled by darkness, and so theirs will be an empty life. But those who live now making decisions of faith for the God they will meet after death, rather than for wealth, will gain eternal rest in the light.

So what is absolutely necessary while we live is to believe in Christ and be saved, and for that, the years that seem vain are truly needed. If you do not know why God has given us life, these thoughts of Solomon may seem absurd, but if you know the truth, they make deep sense. With death before his eyes, Solomon realized that a life lived as he had lived it would, on meeting God after death, be that of a sinner with no excuse to offer.

Look at the Song of Solomon, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, which Solomon wrote, and you see that he was a man of wisdom. Wisdom becomes a tree of life to those who seek to keep their faith. Seeing this, we can tell that Solomon had wisdom given by God. Yet such a man did not live as a good man who honored God. Even so, God did not take away the wisdom, knowledge, and joy he had given him, and he had Solomon leave behind books of wisdom.

God gave him wisdom, knowledge, and joy so that through the words he passed on, later generations would know God and be saved by faith. Because the wisdom he had was God’s, the words he left behind led many people to God. Yet it is a pity to see Solomon, who had such wisdom, say that life is empty. In the life of one man who had both good and evil in him, who repented of his sin and longed for grace, we can see God doing his own 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 think of God’s gift as wealth or success, and I hope you will not forget that the salvation you received through faith is the gift God has given you. Those who live with their hope set on heaven do not set their hope on this earth, so they live with a clean heart free of greed and lust.

Solomon launched great building works and increased the strength of the nation, but with a self-righteousness and arrogance that loved only himself, he made many mortal enemies. Unlike Solomon himself, who grew up watching the faithful faith of David, Rehoboam grew up watching the faith of a Solomon who enjoyed the world, and he did not grow up wise. Because Rehoboam grew up watching a father who chased pleasure, he did not know what a life of wholehearted faith in God was, and in the end he divided the nation. He drank as his father drank, enjoyed pleasure as his father enjoyed it, and treated the people carelessly as his father, who did not love the people, had done. As a result, every trace of the great Solomon was wiped away, and the wealth and glory he had enjoyed vanished as a glory less than that of the lilies of the field.

Now we understand the words of Jesus, who looked at the lilies of the field and said that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these. The lilies that bloom in the field leave seeds as they die, so every year they bloom the same flowers, just as they were when God created them, and reveal God’s glory. But the glory people enjoyed is all forgotten as the years pass, and it can never be brought back or enjoyed again.

After realizing that life is this vain, 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, so Solomon lived without enjoying that joy. Solomon, who regretted his life of not fearing God only when death was before his eyes: his regret must not become your regret. Look at Solomon, a king who held absolute power, envying the lives of people who lived poor and ordinary lives in faith. Then you will see how great Jesus Christ, whom you now serve, is. If wealth and glory are like sand that slips through your fingers however tightly you clutch it, you must not live for the pleasures of the world. The world we go to after death is decided by our faith now. So while you have the chance, hold fast to God’s word, whatever comes.

I hope you will not live a hesitant life, afraid that God might tell you to wrap up your life now and come to him. I hope you will live a life that is always ready, enjoying peace and rest even in this world, with the faith that you will go whenever God calls. If you realize that the wisdom and protection the Holy Spirit gives are something the world can never give, you can carry out many tasks while you live.

Remember Solomon’s repentance, in which he regretted not having spent more of his time serving Christ, and I hope you will live wisely by faith, day by day.