OR ASK GOD FOR DISCERNMENT

That's what King Solomon did. He desired knowledge. To go along with his wealth and natural ability to lead. So that's what he got.

Was he happy? He says in Ecclesiastes that he took whatever his eyes desired. Now, if you have the ways and means and knowledge, then you should be happy if you get whatever you desire. Right?

But in the early chapters of the book he says there was "nothing under the sun" that wasn't meaningless to him. Everything was like "chasing the wind".

And he was right, of course. A life without God, a life predicated on pleasure, a life in which one serves only one, and not The Only One is often like that.

Unfortunately for him, the knowledge led him to that conclusion in the later chapters of the same OT book. I remember when I first read the Bible all the way through in a year, that a fellow Sunday School class member and I talked about how depressing, how almost existential the book of Ecclesiastes is.

But we must have not finished the book when we made that comment. Because the King got it right in the end. He was prophetic, too, in stating that after all the toil one does in his life, it's meaningless, too, because who follows him may not be as wise and therefore, all his work has amounted to nothing. Well, his son Rehoboam inherited his kingdom and took some bad advice. Ignoring the good advice of the elders, and wound up dividing the kingdom, losing much of what his father had achieved.

So what do we learn from Ecclesiastes? Just what the wisest man Solomon shared with us. It's all meaningless. It's all like chasing the wind. There's nothing new under the sun. Without the Lord guiding our steps.