Ecclesiastes 6
Ecclesiastes 6: 12 For who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he passes like a shadow? Who can tell a man what will happen after him under the sun?
This is the last verse in the chapter, but it strikes me as the key to the chapter (and I know the chapters are somewhat artificial, but I have chosen to stick to this division).
Who knows what is good for a man in life? Can man create his own definition of “good”? Is it our ideal to identify our own true north? Am I the standard by which I should be measured?
Of course, the answer to these is “no.” The true answer can only be found in God. Absent God, we are reduced to chasing pleasure instead of that which brings true happiness (beatitudo, or fulfillment). Solomon had all the pleasure one man could ask for, it seems. Yet this did not satisfy; it did not bring true happiness.
Who can tell what will happen to a man after his time here, “under the sun”? Again, only God.
In other words, without God as the standard, without God as the judge, everything we chase is in vain; that which we pursue only leaves emptiness.
Ecclesiastes 6: 2 A man to whom God has given riches and wealth and honor, so that he lacks nothing for himself of all he desires; yet God does not give him power to eat of it, but a foreigner consumes it. This is vanity, and it is an evil affliction.
It isn’t really clear to me what is meant by “…God does not give him the power to eat of it…” I can think of a few possibilities: having so much wealth that it cannot be enjoyed in one hundred lifetimes (what can you not do with $1 billion that you can do with $10 billion?); health is taken before one gets to enjoy the leisure that comes with wealth; economic calamity that consumes wealth. Those are some possibilities.
Maybe Howard Hughes paints the best picture in our time of what is meant by this.
All lead to the same place, it seems: when is enough enough? The goal isn’t “more”; the goal is in what one does with what he has. If the “more” serves good, then more is better. But perhaps there are other ways to utilize our time on earth that serve the “good” better than more wealth does.
Ecclesiastes 6: 3 If a man begets a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with goodness, or indeed he has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better than he— 4 for it comes in vanity and departs in darkness, and its name is covered with darkness.
Better to not have been born; better to avoid the emptiness of a life “not satisfied with goodness.” This is a powerful statement – remember, written by Solomon. Is this how he saw his life in the end? It seems yes, as he is writing of his vanity.
Conclusion
Ecclesiastes 6: 7 All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the soul is not satisfied.
The soul that has created its own definition of “good” is never satisfied with what is chased in aim of this “good” – no matter how successful one is in the chase.