That is a difficult lesson for some to learn. If he withholds it, no amount of effort is going to extract enjoyment from things. Enjoyment does not reside in increased possessions, it is a gift which God must give. The key to all of this is in the words, "God does not give him power to enjoy." That lesson is pounded home to our hearts over and over again throughout this book. Can there be anything more frustrating than getting something you always wanted to have, and then discovering that it had lost its luster, you no longer enjoyed it, so you passed it on to somebody else who could not afford it and he had a ball with it? That would make one very frustrated, even resentful: "Why couldn't I enjoy it?" he would be entitled to ask. What a boring thing that is! Observe the jaded lives of those who have everything but cannot enjoy anything they have.įurthermore, the Searcher says, material wealth and abundance can be frustrating: imagine a stranger enjoying what you cannot enjoy. They sit there, unsmiling, pulling those one-armed bandits, but they have no sense of enjoyment, they project no feeling that there is anything pleasurable about what they are doing rather they are involved in deadly serious work. There I saw people intent on finding riches, on getting more enjoyment out of life, but they looked like death warmed over. I have on occasion stepped into the casinos up in Reno or Las Vegas to see what these places look like. They drive shiny new cars, they have the latest electronic equipment in their big luxurious homes, which they are trying desperately to enjoy, yet their faces have a hollowness about them, their eyes betray an emptiness inside. Immediately, the Qoheleth recognizes that to have abundance and possessions - all that money can buy - and yet lack the power to enjoy them is a very heavy burden to bear.
There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy upon men: a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them this is vanity it is a sore affliction. In Chapter 6 he sets out four statements about prosperity to show us that material wealth and abundance are not always good. The Searcher here gives us the true view of good and evil. The wonderful thing about Scripture is that it does just that. We would save ourselves much heartache if we could do that.
#Another word for things that are not important how to#
What we need, of course, is a true view of good and evil: how to tell good when it is good, and how to recognize evil for what it is. In Chapter 6, the Qoheleth, the Searcher of Israel, says that prosperity may not always be good and in the first fourteen verses of Chapter 7 he takes up the opposite and accompanying truth - that adversity may not always be bad. The thesis of our passage this morning is that we may be reading everything that is happening to us entirely wrong. We think life is one way and it turns out to be something quite different. That is what the Searcher tells us this morning in the passage we will be looking at in Ecclesiastes 6, where he declares that things are not what they seem to be.
Yet our view of life may be so distorted that if hard times actually do come to us they may be the best years of our lives. That makes everyone's heart sink a little we tend to react emotionally to these circumstances. We are all facing to one degree or another the hard times ahead. To face the coming winter, a bleak and empty season, without a job is a fearful and painful prospect for many. Unemployment is reaching record levels in many parts of our country.
Someone has said that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, while a depression is when you lose yours. In some places it is being described as a return to The Great Depression. We are facing a tremendous recession in the United States.
Anyone who listens to newscasts these days knows that the economic news is pretty bad.
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