Ecclesiastes Lesson 5

Wine, Women and Song – 2:1-11

The book of Ecclesiastes is written to show that the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence. We’ve been going through various elements of this book, one of which is the first experiment that Solomon describes for us, 2:1-11. We’ll finish that experiment and draw various conclusions from it. We ended at verse 3 and we had changed the translation slightly and you can check this by checking any modern translation, the ASV or the RSV. “I sought in my heart to give,” or actually “to lead my flesh with wine, but my heart was constantly in control with wisdom,” and we change that translation to correct it and make it more like the original Hebrew test, the point here being that Solomon is a believer who is out of fellowship. When believers are out of fellowship they always have problems. They always have problems because their flesh is in control, the functions of the soul, volition, the personal affections, the mentality, and the bodily affections all are affected when we are out of fellowship. We noticed that the human spirit, if we are believers, that affects us and works in us is cut off, not in the sense that it doesn’t keep us physically alive and give us psuchicos life but it doesn’t give us pneuma life, it doesn’t give us eternal life or zoa life.

Therefore since this is the case our whole soul is almost like a vacuum with negative volition and personal affections, mentality, bodily affections out of kilter there’s a tendency on the part of the carnal believer or the unbeliever for his soul to open up so that while his volition is negative, he has personal affections, mentality and bodily affections, while his soul is negative the tendency is to suck in things. Here, for example, the mentality begins to suck in something to fill up this vacuum that’s on the inside. The thing that is usually sucked in is human viewpoint. We also find that his bodily affections are the same way and we’re going to see that in this experiment. The experiment in chapter 2 is mainly the personal affections and the bodily affections that Solomon is trying to use to fill up a vacuum in his soul that is caused by his carnal condition.

In other words, his human spirit is not filling his soul with the satisfaction that the human spirit is designed to give for if you are a Christian God has done something special in your soul. He has done something by regenerating the human spirit and from the human spirit giving you spiritual life, eternal life in your soul, and this is what truly satisfies you. So the carnal believer has this cut off. If he can’t really experientially moment by moment enjoy eternal life, therefore he’s going to look around and find out something else that will fill up the vacuum, something else that will give him satisfaction and so he opens up bodily affections, mentality, personal affections, just like a vacuum, sucking in everything he possibly can to make himself happy, to find security.

In chapter 2 Solomon is going to specialize in two things; he’s going to open up his personal affection gate and his bodily affections gate, he’s going to suck in every possible satiating device that he can think of that will fill up his need for having personal affections and bodily affections and we see this in this experiment. But verse 3 tells us, as he begins the experiment, that it’s all under control; he’s not going out and getting drunk necessarily but he’s using wine and he’s using it skillfully to stimulate his body a little bit but not let it get the better of him.”

Beginning in verse 4 he begins to list what he has done. In the Hebrew text, as well as your King James text you’ll see the translators have faithfully reproduced this emphasis on me. In the Hebrew they have the preposition “to” or “for,” in the Hebrew it’s a Lamed and it’s plus me. So every time there’s a verb here in this passage saying “I did” this “for me.” I built this for me; I got all the girls for myself; I had all the parties for myself, and this goes on and on and you can see it in verse 4, “I made for myself great works; I built [for myself] houses; I planted [for myself[ vineyards.” You see the emphasis again and again is trying desperately to fill up this vacuum on the inside, this kind of a blah attitude toward life. And he can’t seem to get satisfaction in anything, no matter what it is, until he’s going to test, and the experiment is going to be can I fill up my soul with something satisfying from these things in life?

Now verse 4 it starts out with “great works” and the “great works” summarize everything that follows, “I built myself houses,” in other words Solomon was a city dweller and he built himself homes in the country, he built himself winter homes, summer homes, city homes and country homes. You see a lot of people like that today; they live in the city, so what to the city people do on the weekend? Drive out to the country; people in the country, what do they do? They drive into the city. Why? Because they want to find out something that’ll change lives, give them variety or something else; nothing wrong with it unless it means that they are actually seeking to fill up this vacuum that can only be filled up by the Holy Spirit working through your human spirit.

You see the difference between your human spirit and your soul is that your soul can never give life to anything; the human spirit is what gives life, not the soul. The soul can’t give life; the soul can only receive life and be sustained by the power of the human spirit. So what you’re trying to do in all these things when you’re involved in the same thing that Solomon is that you’re basically trying to let your soul enliven your soul. It’s trying to lift up yourself with your own bootstraps; you can’t do it. The soul doesn’t have within it capacity to life; the human spirit does and that’s where you’ve got to get it. This why in Ephesians 5:18 Paul said, “Stop being drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the Holy Spirit.” That’s what he meant; in other words, it’s got to come from the spirit, the Holy Spirit working through your human spirit is where you get this satisfaction and fulfillment in life. It doesn’t come from anything. So in verse 4 he goes on, he decides we’ll do a little landscaping, and so he planted vineyards, and in our vernacular today we’d say this fellow went out and he had 3 or 4 houses, tremendous houses and these didn’t satisfy him so he decided to spend a little more money and bought up some ranches, farms, some businesses etc. and thought well maybe if I do this, if I just buy a few more ranches, etc. then I can enjoy myself. So he’s basically trying to fill up his soul with things.

Verse 5, “I made gardens and parks,” now there’s only one thing wrong with verses 4-5 and that is that Solomon has forgotten something. He’s forgotten the fact that he is living in the old creation and the old creation has God’s curse upon it, the curse of Genesis 2:17. In Genesis 2:17 God said listen Adam, “the day that you choose this in violation and rebellion against Me is the day you are going to die. Now God wasn’t referring to some philosophical concept; God wasn’t referring to some idea of death or discouragement. God was referring to actual physical biochemical and spiritual death together as a unit. You can’t separate the two, they go together. And so God said in Genesis 3:16, after this happened, He said look, He said to the woman, all right, I’m going to go to Eve and I’m going to explain what the curse is going to mean to you as a woman; as a woman this is how the curse is most going to affect you. It’s going to affect the women in two ways. First, I will bring great sorrow upon you, “in sorrow you shall bring forth children.” In other words the childbirth that was to be something to look forward to in the Old Testament because Messiah was going to come and it was going to be a case where they were going to conquer the world according to the commandment of Genesis 1. In place of this the childbirth was to be sorrowful, painful, etc.

And the second way, a very frustrating way for a woman is that “your desire shall be to your husband and he shall rule over you.” And it meant that God was so working through the sin nature of the man and the woman that the woman would have a desire to be dominated by a man, to be led by a man, and yet this would vex her. And she’d chomp at the bit every once in a while because she didn’t like to be led by a man. We see this today in women, etc. involved in marriage relationships that it just gets to them after a while to be in bondage to this man. “Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.”

Then in Genesis 3:17-19 God spelled out what the curse would mean to the man and here’s what Solomon had forgotten, what the curse meant to the man. First, “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life; [18] Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; [19] In the sweat of thy face thou shall eat bread; till thou return unto the ground; for out it was thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shall you return.” The point there was that work was not the curse. The way some people act you’d think work was the curse; the worst thing that ever happened was a little work. That’s not true; work was not the curse, God gave work to Adam before the fall. The issue was and the frustrating thing of the curse is that when you work to build something up it crumbles. That’s the curse. No matter what you plan, no matter what you do it eventually falls into ruin; always does, ancient civilization, your works and everyone else works, they all turn to dust.

That’s the curse and that’s why Solomon’s little tactic in verses 4-5 is not going to work. It never will work because as he looks in verse 4 and you see he’s building houses, the houses are going to crumble, he looks at the vineyards they are going to be overtaken with weeds, he looks at the gardens and the parks and they’re eventually going to go. There’s only one thing basically in this whole list that you can go over to Palestine today and see, and that’s the pools. But that’s the only thing in this list that’s left for us today to look at. It’s amazing, all these great things, all gone. And that’s what’s going to happen in your life when you start putting all your eggs in the wrong basket. Someone is going to come along and trip you up and the basket is going to break and all the eggs with it, and Humpty Dumpty and all the king’s men aren’t going to put it back together again and that’s the way it’s going to be.

This is why Christians who are always looking to satisfy their souls with a lot of things… you know the old slogan Christians have—if I had _________ (blank) I would be happy. And blank could be a girlfriend, blank could be a boyfriend, could be a wife, a husband, could be money, it could be lots of money. You know a lot of people have money say oh, Lord if I just didn’t have all this money I’d be happy, and the people that don’t have the money say well if I had more money I’d be happy. It works both ways, and it’s always Christians trying to fill in the blank and they forget it’s always worse because everything they put in the blank is a part of the old creation and a part of the curse.

So in verse 5 Solomon makes up these gardens. The word translated “orchards” in the King James is actually a Persian word, paradise; it’s the Persian word used three times in the Old Testament and it means park. That’s what paradise means. So Solomon not only built himself gardens and parks, he “planted trees in them of all kinds [of fruits].” Now what were these trees of all kinds? Turn to 1 Kings 10:11, here is an actual description in history of some of these trees. You say what’s so great about a few trees. These were some of the most fantastic trees that the world has ever seen. This was the arboretum of arboretums. Verse 11, “And the navy also of Hiram, that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir a great plenty of almug trees, and precious stones. [12] And the king made of the almug trees pillars for the house of the LORD, and for the king’s house, harps also, and psalteries for singers,” etc.

And then down in verse 15, “Beside that he had of the merchantmen, and of the traffic of spice merchants, and of all the kings of Arabia, and of the governors of the country.” And these people brought in things from all over the world, fantastic things. Verse 21 he brings in lumber from Lebanon, and he brings in all sorts of things so that when the Queen of Sheba comes to him, whoever this Queen of Sheba is, and if Velikovsky is right, he’s rejected by 95% of the world’s scholars today, but if Velikovsky is right, the Queen of Sheba is none other than the woman who reigned on the throne of Egypt, Queen Hatshepsut. This woman, known as Queen of Sheba because she was queen both of Ethiopia and Egypt, if Velikovsky is right in this identification, when she went there she brought back from a place called “God’s land,” you can see this in archeology [can’t understand word], 31 anti trees she called them, we don’t know what those trees were but she brought back with her 31 trees that she had never seen before and she said never was seen the likes since the world was of these trees. She was fantastically over-awed with what she saw in Solomon’s court. Here are these trees that were just absolutely astounding, and to be astounding to a monarch of that day and that era they must have really been astounding because they had access to anything. And yet Solomon had in his possession things that were the envy of the greatest kings and queens of the ancient world.

What else did he have? In Ecclesiastes 2 we find that not only did he plant these trees but because the rainfall was a little bad, verse 6, “I made pools of water, to water therewith the wood that brings forth trees.” These are the pools that you can see if you go to Israel today. On the road between Jerusalem and Hebron there are a set of these pools. These pools have been absolutely intact from the time Solomon built them. To give you an idea of the dimension of one pool it is 582 feet long, 207 feet wide, and get this, 50 feet deep. And they didn’t have steam shovels, that was all hand dug. This is just one of the pools and Solomon has a couple more along the row, to store water. See Jerusalem needed water and so Solomon realized two things, he realized he wasn’t like Thebes, in Egypt Thebes had a river front. It wasn’t like Babylon; the city of Babylon had the Euphrates River running by. Jerusalem had no great river running by and so therefore Solomon said look, I need some water here, not only for defense purposes, for drinking, the city is never going to go anywhere until it has water so therefore I want you engineers to get busy and I want you to design me an irrigation system. So they designed him a tremendous irrigation system consisting of these pools. The water would come from various areas, piped into these pools and stored, and then they had conduits built, going along this road back down to the city of Jerusalem, this thing 400 feet higher than the altitude of the city of Jerusalem. So Solomon had a fantastic things, this was not only to water his gardens but also to water the entire city of Jerusalem and to this day it’s still there.

Just to show you how tremendous Solomon’s engineering feat was these pools were in use until the Romans. So when the Romans came in, 100 BC or thereafter, actually about 70 BC, all the way from 1000 BC or almost ten centuries this system was in use. Now think of some of your homes, are they going to be around in ten centuries? But that’s the way Solomon and the engineers built things. Ten centuries this conduit stood in action. The Romans changed it, added to it, Pontius Pilate being one of the men. Then in 1902 the Turks took over the area and the Turks built it up even more, they put a four inch pipe to run the water down from these pools into the city of Jerusalem and today Israel has done the same thing, of course greatly expanding the system to provide for Jerusalem. But those pools are still used in the city of Jerusalem’s water supply system. That gives you an idea, this was no amateur at work here, this was a man that pulled out all the stops and went all the way.

Verse 7, “I got servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of herds and flocks [great and small cattle] above all that were in Jerusalem before me.” The “great and small cattle,” just two Hebrew words are one for a herd and the other for a flock. Now what can we understand from the historic text about these things? The first thing in verse 7, “the servants and the maidens, and servants born in my house” all referred to Gentiles. Under the Jews could buy slaves from the Gentiles; they could not enslave each other except on an economic system in which you would work off your debt. But even then Hebrew slaves had to be released. So evidently he imported a tremendous number of slaves, both men and women into his entourage in Jerusalem. “…also I had great possessions” and here’s what’s equivalent today to a great stock and bond holding because flocks in that day were an investment. A flock was basically a businessman’s investment. So it would correspond today to a man who had a fantastic amount of real estate holding, stocks and bonds, etc. and had a great program of systematic investment. Solomon had all these things.

Now just to show you how much he had, turn to 1 Kings 8, it’s almost unbelievable the amount of things that Solomon had. Solomon offered a sacrifice, now this is part of his flock; don’t think this is his whole flock. This is the time when Solomon set up and built his temple. He built a temple for the Lord, one of the greatest… probably one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, Solomon’s temple. We don’t even know what it looks like today; hopefully as archeologists begin to dig in the Mount Zion area now that Israel has possession of it, if they can get to digging we’ll find out exactly what the Solomonic temple plan looked like. But Solomon’s temple was fantastic. It’d be interesting to see some of the stones in that temple for sentimental reasons; those stones saw the glory of God because God’s glory, the Shekinah glory that glowed in the Old Testament signifying the presence of God was literally in this stone building. So these stones are very important and Solomon’s temple was a fantasatic thing. After he made this temple he decided to have a dedication service but he didn’t ask people to walk down the aisle; instead he had animals walk down the aisle and when they got down to the front they cut their heads off; that would be an interesting dedication service wouldn’t it?

In verse 63, “And Solomon offered for the sacrifice of peace offerings, which he offered to the LORD, two and twenty thousand oxen,” so that’s just part of his flock, he had 22,000 oxen, “and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep,” that was just a little offering he offered the Lord, not just part of his holdings. He decided he’d take five or ten percent of his holdings and give them to God. Now you can see, this was done over a 14 day period because in verse 65 you read, “And at that time Solomon held a feast, and all Israel with him, a great congregation, from the entering in of Hamath to the river of Egypt, before the LORD our God, for seven days and seven more days, even fourteen days.” Now if you figure this out mathematically and they offered these sheep and these oxen 24 hours a day it comes out to the rate, the oxen 65 and hour, and the sheep were offered at the rate of 387 an hour. And that’s offering them 24 hours a day around the clock. So you get an idea of the tremendous slaughter and the tremendous sacrifice that went on there. It also tells you something else; it tells you about the size of the temple necessary to handle this kind of an offering. Can you imagine this thing going on, oxen being killed at the rate of one a minute, and that’s the way it was happening, and the sheep being killed at the rate of five a minute, five or six a minute, fantastic rate. And this went on four fourteen days. And he didn’t even notice, his inventory, stock inventory wasn’t even down a bit, just the same as it always was. So it gives you an idea of the wealth of this man.

I’m giving you these facts and figures because I want you to see this man isn’t playing Mickey Mouse, he’s really got his possessions. And if you think you can mimic Solomon’s [can’t understand word] you’ve got another thought coming because if you saved from now until the rapture you couldn’t come anywhere close to Solomon. If you saved your dime a week or something you still would never come close to Solomon. Never could, absolutely impossible.

Back to Ecclesiastes now, you begin to see the magnitude of this man, fantastic. In verse 8 he tells us some more things he did, again all the time trying to fill up this soul. You see in his soul he has personal affections, and in his soul his personal affections, his bodily affections, these are the emotions of beauty, etc. and he likes beautiful things. You see this again and again, Solomon had a very high ascetic standard and he liked beautiful things; he liked to have beautiful houses, beautiful buildings, he liked to have beautiful religious ceremonies, he just liked to have everything. And in verse 8, “I gathered also silver and gold,” he liked to have money and he had himself a tremendous treasury. And notice it wasn’t promissory notes; he collected gold and silver, metal, for his treasury. And he didn’t buy the jazz that the United States is buying, that you can walk on paper money. He had “silver and gold,” actual valuable material, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces.”

Now that word “peculiar treasure” has a gold mine of application for us as believers for the word “peculiar treasure” is used of you. If you are a believer did you know that you’re peculiar, a peculiar treasure. In Exodus 19:5 this word is used of Israel, God said I want you people to be a kingdom of priests unto Me and you are my peculiar people, meaning that you are My special possession, I have a lot of possessions God says, I own the world, but you’re My special possession. In 1 Peter 2:9 the Apostle Peter applies that to you. So if you’re a believer, what this is, if you draw a circle around yourself, here you are as a believer and you are God’s special possession it says in 1 Peter 2:9. It means that although He owns many things He has a particular interest in you. We’ve seen details of that in the doctrine of predestination and election. But you can see that God values you very much. You may have the attitude a lot of Christians have, God doesn’t care for me, why did God let this happen to me and all the rest of it. And yet God loves you, God has a plan for your life, God has done everything He can to provide you with assets and yet if you are like the average Christian you practically spit in the face because you don’t take time to find out what His assets are, you don’t study the Word of God to find out what He has given to you or how to use what He has given to you and then you turn around and blame God for not blessing you. Well the reason is your own fault; you don’t take advantage of what He’s given to you. So don’t blame God. But you are His peculiar treasure and His peculiar possession.

Now in verse 8 he’s referring here to the original meaning of the word and this meant collections. The greatest kings of the ancient world gained, of course, coins or stamps but they collected all sorts of other things. Some of them collected pottery, we had some kings that collected boats; Solomon liked to boat so he collected a bunch down in the Port of what is now the Gulf of Aqaba and he had a whole port down there, he liked boats. And he liked his yachts, and maybe when it was a hot day in Jerusalem he got in his chariot and drove down and had himself a nice ball out in the Gulf of Aqaba some place, nice cool water out there. Maybe he went fishing or something. But he was a man of beauty, a man of possessions, etc.

Now comes the interesting part; it says in your King James “I got me,” the word here in the Hebrew is he made, it means he trained these people, “he trained men singers and women singers,” now that’s interesting because we find in 1 Kings 10:5, 12 that he had a concert when he sat down to eat. He didn’t have piped in music. This man went all out; a lot of people have stereo, etc. and Solomon didn’t have any stereo but he had something better, he had an a cappella choir right there ready to go. And he’d sit down for his appetizer and say I want you to sing me about three pieces before the first course and between the first and second course give me a concert on something and we’ll go on through the meal that way. And that’s how Solomon ate, he had his own live a cappella choir. And he trained these people to sing.

1 Kings 10:5 tells a little bit about it, these are some of the people that waited on him. “The food of his table,” this is when the Queen of Sheba comes in and she just can’t believe her eyes, “the food of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his cupbearers, and his ascent by which he went up into the house of the LORD, and there was no more spirit in her.” This queen, one of the enigmas of ancient history who the Queen of Sheba was, but she was a fantastic queen and if Velikovsky the only other person that we know in history that comes close to her is Queen Hatshepsut, although the chronology is off; Velikovsky would correct the chronology.

Queen Hatshepsut was an unusual woman; she took over a kingdom that was divided; she introduced humanitarian principles, went around built many buildings and then she had an idiot son, Thutmose III, and King Tut walked around, he hated his mother for some reason, he couldn’t stand her and just as soon as his mother dropped dead he took his soldiers and went around to everything that his mother built and took plaster and plastered it all over and put Thutmose III over it. So Queen Hatshepsut had disappeared from history until some archeologists were digging around and one of their shovels hit this plaster and it fell off and it turned that Tut the III hadn’t made it, his mother had made it, Hatshepsut. And he hated his mother and every treaty that his mother went into he went out and conquered them just to spite his mother. What happened in that family we don’t know but this kid rose up with a tremendously intense hatred for his mother. He did everything he could in his career to destroy everything his mother ever did for him. But this lady was a fantastic woman, one of the greatest women in the ancient world and she saw this and she just gave up, she couldn’t even compete with it.

While you’re in 1 Kings, turn to 4:32 and you’ll see Solomon’s musical ability. This gives you a little accounting of his compositions. “And he spoke three thousand proverbs, and his songs were a thousand and five.” So this man sat down and composed his own songs, and then he trained a choir to sing his own songs. This is the kind of a man he was; he didn’t buy his music from somebody else, he’d write his own music, or have some of the Levite choir masters write the music and he’d write the lyrics and that was it. And then he’d hire you, you, you, I want you to sing. And he probably had his own talent scouts out all around Israel, they’d have try outs for the talent show held in temple tonight. So Solomon would go through the line and find out who could sing on tune, and I want you to sing in my choir, I want you to sing in my choir, I want you to sing in my choir. And so he built up this tremendous choir and then he said now I want you to sin my music, I’m going to write the music, you sing it, and that was the way he operated.

Back to Ecclesiastes, we’re flipping back and forth but I want you to see the historical background for this book. So we have the wine, we have the song, and now we get to the women. It says “I got men singers and women singers,” and now it says in your King James very innocuous translation because they don’t to really tell you what the text says, “and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts.” Now isn’t that thrilling. That is not what the original says. The original word there is a word which is used for concubines. I’m not going to tell you what the word means; the Hebrews had a very non-Christian way of describing women. They’d take a person, part of a man or woman’s anatomy and let that stand for the whole person and you can fill in what probably was used.

So in verse 8 that’s how they described these people, and this word is used for young ladies, kind of the playgirl type, and that was what Solomon had. He had his beautiful house, he had a beautiful temple, he had beautiful music, now he wanted some beautiful women. And this is what it means by “the delights of the sons of men.” Now the problem is to define what the word “delight” means; people have debated, what does that word “delight” mean, can you really prove what it means. All you have to do is go to the next book, written by Solomon, and you’ll see it. So turn to Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon 7:6 and here’s the word used again. This is a story of love and this is one of the passages in the Bible that go into the relationship of sex and love. In verse 6 he praises her love and “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!” You need not study the context to figure out what he’s talking about. So the word “delights” means sexual pleasures. And this in verse 8 refers to sexual pleasures of the sons of men.

So this is his harem, and Solomon was famous for one of the greatest harems that ever existed. Turn to 1 Kings 11, I think you’re getting the impression that 1 Kings is a historical book about Solomon. The book of Kings gives you all the historical information you need to understand some of these other books. In 1 Kings 11:1-3 it tells you how he was attracted to beautiful women and collected them. He probably had his portion of redheads, brunettes and blondes, girls with nice black hair, etc. and he had them all together; he had girls of dark complexion, girls of white complexion, etc. He just imported them, loved them, and in verse 1 it begins to describe this. “But King Solomon loved many foreign women together with the daughter of Pharaoh; women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites.” He collected them from all over; he’d get tired of one and went to the next one, love ‘em and leave ‘em. Verse 2, “Of the nations concerning which the LORD said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to them, neither shall they come in unto you; for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods. Solomon clung to these in love.”

Verse 3 is the catalogue of his girls, “And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart.” Well I guess they would; if you have seven hundred women in the house and three hundred extras you can imagine, it would be a little distracting to be around them. Now this is what went on in Solomon’s household, seven hundred. Now you figure it out. Just for the heck of it I took one thousand and then I figured out, if Solomon was in the presence of these girls from six o’clock in the morning until ten p.m. in the evening, and that leaves eight hours for sleeping, if he spends every waking hour of every day, seven days a week for a year, that gives each girl 5.8 hours a year to be with him. So you can see he obviously didn’t have too much time to get overly infatuated with any one. But that’s how he handled the operation. So whatever you deal with with Solomon you find that this man had everything going for him; in fact that was his problem, he had too much.

Back to verse 8 and we’ll get into the more mundane material. After “the delights of the sons of men,” his many beautiful women, verse 9, “So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom remained with me,” which is to refer you back to verse 3. What he wants to get you to understand is that he didn’t lose his mind in all this process; it was according to plan. This was a planned system of trying to satisfy his soul. He was a believer whose soul was structured for fellowship with God and yet whose soul was cut off from fellowship with God because of his carnality. The human spirit was not communicating to him, not giving him life and so therefore his soul became a vacuum, he sucked in human viewpoint, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, and he said I want to fill that vacuum, I want satisfaction in life, I want happiness in life, and yet he could never do it because by carnality he had blocked out the only source that he could possible have as a believer and that’s to be in fellowship with His Lord. And yet he was trying to fill up his soul with everything and verse 9 warns you that he still deliberately did this. He deliberately did this because he was trying to find out—is there happiness apart from fellowship with God.

Then verse 10, to emphasize what he did, “And whatsoever mine eyes desired, I kept not from them. I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labor;” And I want to spend a moment on this clause, “for my heart rejoiced in all my labor” or you’ll miss the point. Verse 10 is an explanation of his psychological state while this was going on and it tells you why he kept on with it. He says “whatever my eyes desired I kept not from them;” see, it goes back to this, personal affections and bodily affections, he’d look out at that house, maybe he’d get a postcard from some king over there on Crete that’d say hey look Solomon, look what I just built. And Solomon would say hum, that looks pretty good, I think I’ll have one just like that; engineers, build me one, and so he’d build himself one. And then maybe he’d pick up a magazine and see some pretty girls and I want that girl so he’d send his talent scouts out and they’d kidnap her from some place and bring her so he had her. So no matter what he wanted he had.

And in verse 10 it tells you his subjective state while all this was going on, till “my heart rejoiced” and the word “rejoiced in the Hebrew is a participle and it means his heart continually rejoiced while it was going on. But watch what happens, there’s a let down and a hangover later. While it was going on his heart was rejoicing. It was just a mad rush; he’d get this building and he’d build that and then he’d say I want something else, I want a garden over there, so they’d build a garden. Oh, that’s a thrilling thing, now let’s see what else, I want a pool over there. So the engineers would get over here and they’d build him a pool, then he’d take a few laps in the pool and say now I want some girls to go bathing with me, he’d say I want five, so all right, five, you got ‘em. And then he’d say I want a feast tonight, I’m going to the temple and we’re going to have a big blast and we want a big party so bring out the choir and so they did. And this went on and on and on.

And he says all the time this was going on I was happy all right, this kept me happy, yes it did. But watch what happens. Then he adds the last phrase, “and this was the portion of all my labor.”

And that point, although it sounds a little innocuous, the point there is that that’s all he got out of it. In other words, as he went along in this pleasure his rejoicing continued that long and the moment he stopped his rejoicing stopped. The moment he got away from his beautiful girls, his beautiful home, his beautiful pool, his beautiful garden, the moment all these things were out, bang, his rejoicing stopped. So you see what happens; he became a slave to things because he said things are going to make me happy and as long as I have things I’m happy. What’s going to happen when you take the things away?

That’s what’s wrong with a lot of you Christians. You’ve got your happiness so tied up with things. Some day this country may go down and you are going to have the experience that the Eastern Europeans had during the early days of the 40s and you’re going to have enemy troops walking through the streets and they’re going to be plundering, looting, burning homes, assaulting women, killing the men and they’re going to be molesting the children and what are you going to do then, you who have your happiness tied to things. All your things are going to go right down the tube and then where is your happiness going to go? You’re going to sit around like the crybabies in 721 BC when the northern kingdom of Israel fell; 586 BC the southern kingdom fell and you can read the book of Lamentations and read all the crybabies that sat on their front steps and yelled and screamed as Nebuchadnezzar walked in and slaughtered. Nebuchadnezzar walked in with his soldiers and said look, I want to ship everybody across the Saudi Arabia peninsula; they got to go across desert, I don’t want any old people, I don’t want any children. So they went in and they killed anybody under 12 and anybody, say, over 50. And they did it right in front of the parents so the parents could see it. And they’d kill your father and your mother right in front of your eyes and then they’d put you in a chain gang and march you off. Psalm 119 describes the cases of what happened when that was going on. So the book of Lamentations and Psalm 119 give you the background. And that’s what could happen here. I’m not saying it’s going to happen but it could happen and where would you be as a believer, you who always had your parties and your good times, etc. Are good times going to sustain you in that kind of a crisis? No. Because you had a wonderful garden and loved to plant hollyhocks and you going to say oh, my hollyhocks were so wonderful and I’m going to hypnotize myself and just remember those lovely hollyhocks I had in my backyard, they give me such sustenance in this crisis situation. This is not going to sustain you; it’s never going to sustain you.

That’s what Solomon is pointing out; the rejoicing lasts only so long as you have your things and when your things go you go. So verse 11 is a summary, and then he woke up. Solomon was a thinking individual and he turned around, the word “turn” means to take another look and he said wait a minute, I’ve tried this experiment, let’s look at it. “Then I turned and I saw [looked on all] the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had belabored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and preoccupation with wind [vexation of spirit], and there was no profit under the sun,” it doesn’t make any profit. By “profit” he means what lasts after it’s all over, what’s left Monday morning, that’s what he’s talking about profit. You can rejoice and rejoice, sure it’s easy to rejoice in a party but what do you do when the party is over. What do you do with a hangover the next morning? That’s his point, no profit here, absolute vanity. And this is the trouble with Christians that are always seeking their happiness in some other thing than doing the will of God. We have Christians in this town that go to 8 different clubs a week thinking they can find happiness and when it comes to knowing the Word of God they can’t find John 3:16 and then they’re wondering why they can’t live the victorious Christian life. It’s obvious; they don’t have enough of the Word to last two minutes in the Christian life. Could you sustain yourself for one week on one meal a week? What makes you think you can sustain yourself as a believer on one feeding of the Word of God a week. You’ve got to study the Word during the week. We have classes, you can take notes and analyze them and have questions later on, I don’t mind questions. That’s why we do this, so you have something to engage the mentality of your soul instead of walking around on the basis of your emotions and then wondering why you don’t have any happiness, peace and prosperity. It’s obvious.

What’s the New Testament solution; it’s found in Matthew 6. We go to Solomon and then we come back to the New Testament to find out the divine viewpoint. All this is human viewpoint, human viewpoint, but now we come to the New Testament and find the divine viewpoint, Jesus Christ personally answered this question. You might entitle it how to be happy although I’m a Christian. Matthew 6:19, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal,” Verse 21, “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Now it’s a simple principle, He’s not knocking possessions. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and sell everything you own; that’s not the point. The point is to have it in perspective and what Jesus says is you are laying up… if you’re looking at your life like this, here’s your life and here’s the time you die, maybe you have life insurance, funeral arrangements, etc. everything is taken care of, but you’re looking all the while to total satisfaction, or ultimate satisfaction, you’ve got your eyes over here and so you’re running your life and you’re going to get everything you can get because you think that’s going to give you happiness. If you’ve that attitude Jesus says you’re so out of it and you’re so spiritually decrepit you ought to be ashamed of yourself. He says this is where, verse 20, “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” and how you do this is performing the will of God, it may be with your possessions, and it may be without your possessions but you want the will of God, regardless of whether you have them or you don’t have them, that’s the point Jesus is say, and obviously possessions and needs and God supplies these.

But the question is your attitude, your mental attitude toward possessions. “lay not up for yourselves these things,” He says it’s kind of stupid anyway because verse 19 tells you why, you’re going to lay these things up and they’re going to fall apart, they crumble, they turn to dust and besides in verse 21 you aren’t going to be worried about. That’s one of the great things about the Christian; a psychological byproduct of true Christianity is that it gives you wonderful peace because nobody can take away what God has given you. And you don’t have to worry about the bank failing or the stock market failing, losing your shirt in some real estate deal or something else, you don’t have to worry about that because what God has given you no man can ever take away, ever! It’s absolutely secure. This is what makes the Christian life so relaxing, you don’t have to worry, worry, worry, worry the next minute where someone is going to take it, break through or steal.

Verse 24, Jesus says this is not only going to cause problems with you and your mental attitude, it’s going to cause problems in your volition. “No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon,” the god of money. That’s his point; he’s not saying money is wrong; don’t get the impression money is wrong or riches are wrong; it’s how you use them that counts. The slogan of this whole section of Scripture is summed up in verse 33, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you.” Do you know what He’s talking about “things” here? He’s going back to the human soul and He’s saying look, here’s your volition, here’s your personal affections, here’s your mentality, here’s your bodily affections and here’s your human spirit. And the reason you want all these things if you’re a Christian and you think this way is because really you’ve got a big fat vacuum over here because somewhere you’ve totaled out spiritual life in your personal life and you have a vacuum in your soul and you want, want, want, want, want, want because you want to fill this thing up with something and the frustrating thing is the more you try to fill it up the less it becomes filled up and the more frustrated you get.

And so what Jesus is saying, listen, if you seek God’s will, that’s positive volition, you throw your volition into positive, you declare, God, I’ve lived my life up to this point and I dropped the ball and I fouled up and I’ve done all these things, now I’ve got the guts to go on record as declaring before you that I want Your will and I don’t care where it leads, I want it. When you go on positive signals that removes this and so the Holy Spirit begins to work in your life and you are filled with the Spirit as we diagram very frequently with this diagram. So now the indwelling Holy Spirit in the human spirit moves out, you begin to experience eternal life in your volition because now your volition is strengthened, you have personal affections that are under control; you are now occupied with Jesus Christ. It doesn’t negate your emotions, it doesn’t mean you don’t have them any more, it just means they are under control, it’s a priority system. And your mentality, it means you’re living in the Word. You can take your mind as a Christian and if you’re living in the Word what does this mean? It means you take the doctrine and the Biblical intellectual concepts and wherever you are you apply these things.

You see, evangelism properly speaking in the Word of God has two dimensions; one horizontal dimension, you win people to Jesus Christ and what the southern Bible belt has done but the southern Bible belt has forgotten one thing, evangelism has another dimension and that means after the person has trusted the Lord the job is to soak him full of the Word of God so that you begin to produce a Christian culture. And you begin to feel Christianity making its impact in philosophy, history, science, art, literature; this is evangelism and this is one of the unrecognized and neglected areas of evangelism; it’s filling converts up with the Word of God so that in the next generation the evangelism is easier because they are beginning to influence culture. That’s why we have Christians today who are intellectually intimidated, because the generation before us, in the 20s and 30s evangelized but they never built their converts to go in and conquer society and culture and so what’s happened? Culturally in our country we’ve got a vacuum and into that vacuum has come communism, has come radicals, etc. Why? Because Christians failed to evangelize properly and follow up properly and teach the Word properly. And the result is that we’re going to reap it and if we survive the next decade as a national entity we can thank God’s grace for it. Absolutely His grace all the way after what we have done; we have utterly failed as Christians in this country to follow this concept of total evangelism.

So if we’re filled with the Spirit then our mentality is living in the Word, bodily affections are now under control. This is what filling of the Spirit means; this is what it means to walk, not “being drunk with wine, but being filled with the Spirit.”

One further passage in the New Testament, Philippians 4:6, Paul’s personal testimony in this area. You can check your own thinking out by just looking at this verse. As you read down this verse ask yourself, does this reflect my mentality and the way I usually think, and the way I react or should react to my problems? Verse 6, “Be careful for nothing,” now that doesn’t mean be sloppy, it means “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. [7] And the peace of God which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” When was the last time you took some of your problems and had them out before the Lord in a little prayer time? Now when you can answer that question you have some clue as to where you stand in this thing as a believer.

Then you go on down and he says in verse 10 how he rejoiced in the Lord, but then he says in verse 11, I want to get something clear to you Philippians, he says, “Not that I speak in respect of want, for I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” Now he’s not saying the state he’s in he’s happy with it. That’s not what Paul is saying. What he is saying is that he’s not going to get shook by circumstances in his life, and he means that life can dump him some hard blows and those blows are not going to be pleasant to take; there’s going to be suffering, there’s going to be heartache, but Paul says, I have stability and I can take those things and I can roll with the punch because I always take my problems to the Lord, and it’s not, by the way, something else that people distort, it’s not that Paul kind of grits his teeth and says I’m going to fight it; that’s not the impact of the New Testament. Paul wasn’t that kind of a man that fought it off on his own strength. He was a relaxed man spiritually and he said Lord, what is the meaning you have for me in this situation. I know that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.” I know that this situation will ultimately work for good, now show me what I must do. It was a humility, it wasn’t gritting his teeth and bearing it, that’s not relying on God’s grace, that’s just getting your flesh all up in high gear. What Paul did was always humbly, knowing that his only solution was God’s gracious one and the promises of the Word, knowing this, he always sought this solution for his problems.

Do you see what a difference it makes; the sheer psychological byproduct between Paul and Solomon. Solomon was drinking wine; Paul was filled with the Spirit. What’s the difference? Solomon inebriated himself partially to destroy the pain in his life, to try to fill up a vacuum and the result was his soul sucked up. Here’s Solomon’s soul and here’s Paul’s soul; Solomon had volition, Paul had volition; Solomon had personal affections, Paul had personal affections; Solomon had mentality, Paul had mentality; Solomon had bodily affections and Paul had bodily affections, don’t you think Paul didn’t have emotions. He had emotions like anyone else but watch what happens. Solomon was negative; Paul was positive. Solomon went on negative signals and tried to suck in things to fill the vacuum and nothing filled it because all he got was human viewpoint through his mentality, all he got was pleasure and wine through his affection pattern. Now what did Paul do? He was in the same position, he was a human being, he had needs, but what did he say? Positive volition toward God first and so through the indwelling human spirit the Holy Spirit gave him the love, the joy, the peace and the longsuffering of Galatians 5:22 and so all Paul’s happiness came from his human spirit, not from circumstances. That’s the difference. Solomon is a slave to his things, slave to people, slave to circumstances. Paul could sing in a Roman prison, say it doesn’t bother me at all because in the inside I have perfect freedom, Jesus Christ indwells me and I have fellowship with Him and that gives me perfect peace, no problem with circumstances. That’s the difference, being drunk with wine or being filled with the Spirit. With our heads bowed.