The Pain of Pleasure

Well, we return to our time here in Ecclesiastes as this morning we begin chapter 2. And as we begin chapter 2, we have not left behind the larger context of chapter 1, especially that programmatic question in verse 3, what prophet has a man from all of his labor in which he toils under the sun?

We're gonna see in our passage even this morning the return of that theme of that programmatic question. Not only the word toil, not only the phrase under the sun, but specifically the word profit or gain.

What gain is there? What profit is there from all the labor that a man may toil under the sun? So this morning we're looking at chapter 2 verses 1 through 11. And as I said last week, we're in a section that runs from chapter 1 verse 12 to chapter 2 verse 26.

So this is all together and we'll see more and more of repetition and structure as we advance over the next two weeks, although we'll be broken up by the church retreat. Let me say, as I also said last week, I think it was during interaction time, if you're feeling somewhat confused or distraught or perhaps even depressed, you're at the right place and be patient with that.

That's actually part of the point. And you see the raw gritty reality of what Koholet is putting out. And unless we resonate with the things that he's saying, unless we reflect in the way that he's reflecting, we won't be able to see the insight, the wisdom, the gain that there really is in the wisdom and in the good things that God gives to his own.

And so we have to be faithful, even as we're being trained to trace our sorrows. And that's certainly what the next several weeks will bring about in chapter 2. Last week, we looked at the pursuit of wisdom.

Koholet said, I set my heart, I set myself. It's a synecdoche, a part for the whole. I set myself. My whole endeavor was to gain wisdom, to have insight. And we called that message the folly of wisdom, the foolishness of wisdom.

This morning, we'll see that Koholet sets his heart after pleasure, sets himself after pleasure. And the message this morning is titled The Pain of Pleasure. Ecclesiastes chapter 2, beginning in verse 1.

I said in my heart, come now, I will test you with mirth. Therefore, enjoy pleasure. But surely this also was vanity. I said of laughter, madness and of mirth. What does it accomplish? I searched in my heart how to gratify my flesh with wine.

While guiding my heart with wisdom and how to lay hold on folly till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their lives. I made my works great. I built myself houses, planted myself vineyards.

I made myself gardens and orchards. I planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made myself water pools from which to water the growing trees of the grove. I acquired male and female servants and had servants born in my house.

Yes, I had greater possessions of herds and flocks than all who were in Jerusalem before me. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the special treasures of kings and of the provinces. I acquired male and female singers, the delights of the sons of men and musical instruments of all kinds.

So I became great and excelled more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also, my wisdom remained with me. Wherever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure for my heart rejoiced in all of my labor.

And this was my reward from all of my labor. Then I looked on all the work that my hands had done and on the labor in which I had toiled. And indeed, all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun.

Well, we introduced a section in verse 12 of chapter one with these words. I, the preacher, I, Kohelet, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. This is who is speaking. And as we said, this is somewhat autobiographical.

This is Kohelet's testimony. I mentioned this. A testimony is something that causes us to compare. As we share our testimony, we're inviting the hearer to consider what their life is like, what their experience is like in comparison.

We're going to make comparative questions along the way. Let's look at verse one. I said in my heart, come now, I will test you with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure. So the first thing that we notice is he's again identifying himself distinctly from his heart.

I said in my heart, or you could literally say I said to myself, I am addressing my heart myself. I said to my heart, come now, I'm going to test you with mirth. The same way he put his brain, his wisdom, his insight on the examination table.

Now he's doing that with his heart again. I'm going to test you. I'm going to run some exams across you. I'm going to test you with mirth. Let's try it this way. If wisdom was bankrupt, if knowledge didn't actually satisfy, then let's throw ourselves into the reckless abandon of pleasure.

I won't withhold anything. Any good thing that I set my eye upon, I will give myself wholly over to it. And he already tells us here, it's a foregone conclusion. As soon as he says that this is the test he's going to run, he gives us the the answer, the outcome.

This also is vanity.

It's past tense.

I will test you with mirth. This also was vanity. So he's telling us the conclusion even before he describes the test. Solomon, of course, knew, again, whether he's author or literary device, Solomon knew firsthand what it was to be tested.

That's the verb that was used when the Queen of Sheba came to test his wisdom, to test this divine gift that had been bestowed upon this mighty and wealthy king. We read in 1 Kings 10, when the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to test him with hard questions.

And now he's testing what's the meaning of life? What's the satisfaction of anything that's done under the sun? What does it all amount to? Can my heart ever be satisfied? I'm going to test it with mirth.

I'm going to throw every pleasure in its direction. And what was the outcome of that vanity? Verses two and three, I said of laughter, madness and of mirth, what does it accomplish? So he's already spelling out what this test is going to look like.

He realizes of laughter itself, of the simplicity of joy or of merriment, it really doesn't bring anything about. What does merriment accomplish? What does laughter actually give? He realizes it's madness.

It's absurd to think that somehow this could answer or satisfy man is a foregone error. He said, I searched in my heart how to gratify my flesh with wine. He goes, as it were, to the place of merriment.

He goes to the ancient saloon. He takes his place at the stool. He gives himself over to the pleasure, to pleasures of laughter and of merriment. He gratifies his flesh with wine. He says, I didn't lose control.

I still guided my heart with wisdom and I thought how to lay hold of folly. That's the folly of merriment, the folly of mirth. Till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their lives.

I think a better translation would be for the few days of their lives. It seems to be making this rhetorical comparison. And the phrase there in Hebrew is a diminutive. And the idea is just for a brief span, just for a few days.

Again, thinking of James. What is your life? It's a vapor, something brief, something fleeting. What good is there for the sons of men to do in the short little expanse that they have, in their little bit of time under the sun?

He throws himself to pleasure. He says, as one commentator points out, I became more of a wine connoisseur than a back alley drunk, right? He didn't lose control. He didn't go on a bender. He says, I guided my heart with wisdom, but I did gratify my flesh with wine.

I gave myself over to the finest things, the finest luxuries. I took the kind of alterations that might gladden my heart. As scripture says, wine makes a heart merry. Wine can gladden life. He didn't take it to the extent where we're warned against, where wine becomes a mocker and a brawler that leads us astray.

He says, I guided my heart with wisdom. I just gave my flesh over to every indulgence. This, too, was the test, and the outcome was vanity. Think of a collector of a wine cellar. In my mind, and I know that has a great value, and you can probably trade, and you have all sorts of equity built into that, but in my mind, what good is a wine cellar if you never open up the bottles and taste them?

It's like visiting the older generation's homes, and they have all their furniture and plastic, and you realize they lived their whole life, and they never experienced the fabric of their sofa. What's the point of that?

Who are you protecting it for? Wasn't it meant to be used and become threadbare and worn over time? At least you got to enjoy it. What were you saving it for? Why not uncork it? And Solomon says, oh, I uncorked it.

I went through every bottle. I didn't hold back anything. I was looking to see what is good. Now, here's a little preview of where we're going, not only in the next few chunks of chapter two, but especially in chapter three.

We're going to start to see seeds that are bearing fruit when we bring Ecclesiastes into dialogue with Genesis, especially Genesis 1 and 2. You see that already in this phrase. He says in our translation, till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their lives.

So notice that I might see, that I might behold what was good for the sons of men. That would be the sons of Adam, the sons of Adam, to see what is good. Adam is man in Hebrew. Man is Adam. And so see what is good.

Doesn't that sound eerily like Genesis 1 and 2? To behold, to see and declare something as good. That's what Solomon's trying to do. There's going to be a lot more bridges to Genesis 1 and 2 as we work our way toward chapter two and three.

To see what is good draws us back into this creational setting where God gave good things that man could behold and could experience them as good and use them in the ways that God intended. Solomon, in some ways, Colalette is trying to get back into this.

I want to see it to be good. I want to experience it in its fullness. I won't hold back any fiber of my being from it. I'll make merry with the best of it. In Genesis, we see God saw it was good and Adam and Eve were able to replicate God's pleasure and the good things he had given.

That was how they experienced his glory and worshipped him in gratitude. Robert Rayburn, this is excellent. He says, it is not too much to say that Ecclesiastes is something of a commentary on the meaning of the fall reported in Genesis 3.

That's exactly right, especially when we get to Ecclesiastes 3. There we read that because of his sin, man had been separated from the life sustaining presence of God. The earth now made subject to the curse and that man's work, which was once a wonderfully satisfying part of his life, had now become toil.

Looming over his life is the shadow of death. And all of these themes reappear and are emphasized by Ecclesiastes. If that's not evident just in seeing what is good, look at where we're going in verses.

Four and following.

I may. You're going to have this language of making, of building, of planting. That's the verbs that we see in Genesis 1 and 2. God making, building, planting.

I made my works great.

I built myself houses, planted myself vineyards. I made myself gardens and orchards, planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made myself water pools from which the water watered the trees of the grove.

And I acquired male and female servants and had servants born in my house. I had greater possessions of herds and flocks and all who were before me in Jerusalem. And I had great amounts of silver and gold and the treasures of kings of the provinces.

And I had male and female singers, the delights of the sons of men, musical instruments of all kinds. I became great and excelled more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. And my wisdom still remained with me.

There was a 90s commercial. I'm dating myself here. We used to say it in middle school all the time, but the commercial went like this. It would usually have some guy on the gallows and he's about to face the penalty for whatever his crime was.

And the executioner says, what do you want on your tombstone? And the man in the gallows would say, pepperoni. And then it would go into tombstone pizza. What do you want on your tombstone? The idea was you pick your toppings.

Well, in some ways, that's the question here. What do you want on your epitaph? What do you want on your tombstone? That's quite literally, as Leo Perdue's excellent article that I was reading in a festschrift, he mentions how we have several examples of autobiographical statements of what was built, of what was established, of the legacy that was laid down, of the amounts of wealth and stature that were accomplished in all sorts of tomb epitaphs.

What do you want on your tombstone? You want verses four through seven. That is an epitaph to beat all epitaphs. I made my works great. Look what I built. Look what I made. Look what I had. Look at what I accomplished.

That's what you want on your tombstone. We have not only this testimony, not only this epitaph, not only this great boast, but we have it in this creational language. Again, I mentioned I made, I built, I planted.

These are verbs that are common to Genesis one and two. We also have little clues, like in verse five, the term that we have translated garden. It's actually a loan word, a very rare loan word that gets translated from the Hebrew, pardes, through some other lexicographical oddities into paradisos in Greek, paradise.

And so we have this garden paradise. He's recreating Eden with all of the fruit trees, well-watered plants, all that fruition, all of that glory. We think of Solomon. He spent seven years building the temple.

But 13 years building his palace. Tells you something of his priorities being askew, doesn't it? Almost twice as long to build his palace. Can you imagine what his palace would have been like in all of its splendor if it had taken 13 years to build?

With endless amounts of cedar, of gold and silver coming in. The silver was more than the stones in Jerusalem, we read.

He had the glory.

He was recreating his little Eden on the earth. And what's his conclusion when he threw himself into that kind of pleasure and accomplishment? It's all vanity. It's all vanity. First Kings 10 tells us about his throne of ivory overlaid with gold, ships coming from ports all over the Mediterranean with precious things, precious stones, precious objects.

That's what's being reported in these verses. He says, I acquired all things, works of great art, works of wonder, musical instruments of all kinds. It's most likely, this is the most contested part of this passage, most likely a misunderstanding or a mistranslation.

More modern translations will have the word concubine or harem. That seems to be right. The problem is, it's the only place we find this construction in the Old Testament. And so we have to go to lexicons and understand how is some of this language used elsewhere.

And it seems to be the most secure examples are you have this superlative construction that's probably referencing either the most beautiful woman or the most beautiful women among women. And if we think of Solomon being the figure at hand, we remember he had a harem of 700 wives and 300 concubines dwelling in this palace of absolute luxury.

Truly, he had it all. The whole world sought this man for audience to seek the wisdom that God had put on his heart. He said this whole time, wisdom was still with me. No king had ever had an earthly advantage quite like this.

He says as much, doesn't he? I became great and excelled more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. But you know what else is repeated throughout this testimony, throughout this tombstone epitaph?

The word myself is repeated eight times. Here is where we depart from Genesis 1 and 2. All that building, all that planting, all those things being established. He says, I did it for myself. I established for myself.

I built for myself. I planted for myself. I did this all for myself. I set my heart for the merriment of it all. I sought the pleasure and the gain of it all. And in the end, there was nothing to be gained.

Dwayne Garrett, in his commentary, calls this the gospel of selfishness. I did it my way. This was Frankie Sinatra in Solomon's Rose. I did it my way. He says, verse 10, whatever my eyes desired, I didn't keep from them.

You can imagine over 13 years, anytime you walked down the corridor, I want this now. I don't like that now. I want something else now. I'd like it to look like this now. The hanging gardens being an ancient wonder of the world.

You can imagine all the wealth streaming in from provinces afar. He says, whatever I wanted, I got. Whatever I sought my mind to, I built. I didn't keep my eyes from any pleasure. I didn't withhold my heart from any good thing.

And he says, you know what? At the time, my heart was really satisfied. He says, my heart rejoiced in all of my labor. This was my reward for all of my labor. But now he's looking back as he's examined all of these things, as he's put it all to the test.

The king in all of his splendor has found all of his splendor to rust and decay away. I remember coming across this short called Fly Like a King. And it was a picture of a discombobulated and rusted out jet.

I forget that it was a Learjet, I think, from the mid -60s. And it was the last jet Elvis Presley bought. And I don't know if he ever even flew on it, because I think he died a few years later. But it was in this abandoned airport in New Mexico for about 35 years untouched.

It was all just corroding and parts were falling off and rusting away. And this article was trying to sell it, you know, does anyone want to make an offer on this? And as you toured through the cabin, it had gold-plated accessories and lining and red velvet.

And it was a plane built for the king, the king being Presley. I thought, what an example, Fly Like a King. And here's this jet rusting away. And you think of how Presley died. What a sad ending for a king.

Well, that's Colette here.

I'm looking at it like I look at that jet. It's all corroding and rusting away. What good was any of it? All those great projects seem to have a payoff, but that payoff didn't last very long, did it? Let me ask you, what are your great projects right now?

What have you set your heart toward to build? What are you expecting out of that? We always need to be working. And God gives us good things to enjoy. And we ought to cast our bread in many waters. Again, this is not a call to passivity or simply folding our hands.

If anything, Ecclesiastes is going to press and challenge that kind of outcome. But we do need to have a completely renewed experience of expectation. What are the projects that you're working on right now?

What are you setting your mind, your heart, your vision, your goal toward that you think is actually going to satisfy or accomplish some meaning in your life? You too, just like that rusted Learjet, just like the projects in Solomon's Review, will find it to be hopelessly absurd.

Why did I do that? A great film that you'll be hearing a lot throughout this series, based on a short novel, a novella by Dennis Johnson called Train Dreams. It's a really fascinating biopic, as it were, of a man who grew up in the mid -19th century.

And as he becomes old, he watches all the shifts in society and tries to make sense whether he's changed or the world around him has changed. And one of the great moments that happens toward the beginning of the film is as an elderly man, he's sitting in, I believe, a train car, looking out the window on this modern concrete suspension bridge, looking over the wooden railway that he had poured so many years of his life into and realizing that was no longer going to be used again.

It would slowly just begin to fall apart. And all of that labor, all of that blood and sweat, all of the hope and the loss that the years of labor represented was just going to waste away. No one would even have any regard for that.

It would just be a rubbish heap. And he was already beginning to see that as an old man, as he was transiting along the way. That's what I think when I think of Kohelet here. He's a passenger in a different direction, surveying all that he had built and saying, what was it all for?

We're going to see this again as we approach the close of chapter two. Where is this all going to go? To someone who didn't build it. Whether he'll be wise or a fool, who knows?

But we'll all die alike.

So what was the point of that all? A great poem by Frederick George Scott called Solomon. It's written in 1886. He put it this way. A double line of columns white as snow and vaulted with mosaics rich in flowers make square this cypress grove where fountain showers from golden basins cool the grass below while from that archway strains of music flow and laughings of fair girls beguile the hours but brooding like one held by evil powers the great king heeds not, pacing sad and slow.

His heart hath drained earth pleasures to the least, hath quivered with life's finest ecstasies. Yet now some power reveals as in a glass the soul's unrest and death's dark mysteries and down the courts the scared slaves watch him pass reiterating omnia vanitas.

All is vanity.

Verse 11.

I looked on all the works that my hands had done, on all the labor in which I had toiled. Indeed, all was vanity. Grasping for the wind, there was no profit under the sun. Here we return to the main question, the programmatic question of chapter 1, verse 3.

What profit has a man from all of his labor in which he toils under the sun? The answer begins here, 2 -11. There was no profit under the sun. I tried. I did more than anyone could. I was the greatest of anyone who had come before me.

I did it all.

Was there any gain?

No.

He's observed all the pleasure that he gave his life over to. He's assessed all the toil and put it on the scale over the balance of that luxury. Was the toil worth the luxury? That's the question. Was the labor worth the outcome?

He says, was there any profit, any gain, any residual pleasure? He says, no. It's not profit. It's not gain, not under the sun. And so again, he's wanting us to learn how the heart responds to these kind of pulls, these kind of desires, these kinds of projects as hopes that somehow pleasure or satisfaction or meaning may come from it.

Zach Eastwine, a tremendous little book published by PNR called Recovering Eden. And in this chapter and in chapter 3 especially, he is fantastic. And he puts it this way. Here, the Bible raises a question through Ecclesiastes 2 that every human being asks.

Is there a thing in the world that can truly satisfy the heart of a human being? Is there anything under the sun that can fully satisfy the heart of a human being? What kind of world are we living in today?

A world that's convinced there's all sorts of things under the sun that can satisfy the heart of a human being.

We do it every week. We live for the weekend.

And we just wash, rinse and repeat. Come Sunday evening. Live for the weekend every week. Live for pleasure. There is that momentary thrill and pleasure. What Koholet realizes is there's no gain. There's nothing lasting.

Nothing that ultimately delivers what it promises.

Throughout this, of course,.

He's going to see even by the end of chapter 2 that there is some good. There is some gain. At the end of it, wisdom is better than folly. To recognize in our limited bounds the good things that God has given is a key to the wisdom that Koholet has discovered.

What he realizes is a partaking of pleasure does not give meaning to existence. Not under the sun. Partaking in pleasure does not give meaning to existence. Not under the sun. But pleasure, first of all, has no staying power under the sun.

And that's not just what death stomps out. That's just true. Think of any pleasure, any goal that you've accomplished. Is it still paying dividends to you?

Probably not.

In fact, the things you once loved probably now are odious to you. The things that once you gloried in now are tiresome to you. There's no staying power with pleasure. As soon the fun fades, the limelight loses its luster.

There's just no going back. You can't recreate, though as parents we always try to recreate through nostalgia, that experience of joy. I try to make every Christmas morning like my Christmas mornings.

I don't know if that's working for them. It's not working for me. I can't get back into what that was like. Though I may try in vain. I can't actually capture what was good about that, what was memorable about that.

I'm turning 40 in a few days. I remember I used to talk about my birthday all year when I was little. I'd be counting down months. I'd be like, you've got 10 months to go. Stop talking about it. How long now?

Every day.

How long now? Now it's like, ah, birthday. I just want to get through that day. Let's ignore that day. A birthday doesn't have any significance. There's almost no joy in a birthday. They start to roll by.

There's no lasting power, no staying power. To pursue pleasure as if it could offer that is already to misunderstand life as it really is under the sun. This pleasure, just like we saw when Eve was tempted, she beheld with her eyes and saw that it was pleasing, saw that it was good.

It seemed to offer something to her that she wanted. It did not deliver to her the thing that she wanted. So it is with all forms of pleasure. All pleasure offers us something, but no pleasure under the sun delivers what it promises.

And so, on the one hand, a pleasure offers to open our eyes. And the day you eat of it, your eyes will be open. Pleasure offers to open our eyes, but in reality, it blinds us. It never actually delivers what it promises.

When we set our sight toward pleasure, when we give our heart over to that kind of indulgence, we feel that we're on the cusp of actually finding fulfillment, satisfaction. This will be the thing that makes it all worthwhile.

This will be the thing that completes me, that makes me. Here's a safe place for me to fix my identity, to hang my hat on. Here's what I want on my tombstone. It's this desire for pleasure that James says wages war in our members.

It becomes a cutthroat thing, a very bloody and messy thing, a very violent thing. You see that right after Genesis 3, the spread of sin and all of the dysfunction and strife that results from this. Disordered loves, disordered experiences of pleasure, disproportionate desires for good things, to the point where they even replace the giver of good.

Sensual pleasure in this way, pleasure completely disillusions us. It's folly that we keep chasing the pleasure even though we know it's a diminishing return. Let me just keep pushing. Let me just keep using.

Let me just keep trying. Maybe there's some drop, some vestige that will actually deliver. And Koholet said, I went to the dregs. I did it all. He was tantalized by everything his eye or his flesh was pulled by.

It never fully arrived. You have in Greek mythology the figure of Tantalus. It's interesting. That's where our English word tantalize comes from. To be tantalized is to have a strong desire for something that can't be obtained.

And Tantalus, he was a figure throughout Greek mythology, but in Homer's Odyssey, which is very buzzworthy right now in light of a film coming out, Odysseus finds him in his journey to Hades. And he was punished by the gods, different reasons why according to different sources.

But the punishment of the gods was he was to stand in a pool of water but whenever, the water would be right up to his lips, but whenever he went to take a drink as he was so desperate for drink, he was so thirsty, the water would instantly recede.

He could never actually sate his thirst. And there was fruit hanging over him. He was so desperately hungry that almost was touching his mouth. But as soon as he lunged after it, the winds would blow or the branches would move.

So he could never sate his thirst, never satisfy his hunger, though it was almost on his teeth. That's the experience of Koholet. I put my eye to it, it was at my teeth. I couldn't taste it. I couldn't drink it.

It never actually sated me. It never actually satisfied me. This is what we can call the pain of pleasure, isn't it? The pain of pleasure. Because there's an irony with pleasure that the more you seek it, the less you enjoy it.

The most obvious example for this would be drug addiction. That experience of pleasure being so profound that it re-orients all of your priorities in life. And there's almost no line that's too low that you'd be willing to go, even though the return is so diminished that you actually hate it.

You're in bondage to it. That's just the extreme example of how pleasure under a fallen sun works for us all. The more we give ourselves over to it, the less we can find of it.

It really is a pleasure.

It really is a chasing after the wind. We put more effort, more energy, more time and more commitment into the pleasure. We find less and less coming back at greater and greater cost. Pleasure in this way destroys souls.

Because pleasure is not rightly oriented toward its source. When pleasure becomes our God, when pleasure becomes an idol in our lives, it takes everything from us. The one thing it doesn't give us is pleasure.

That's the pain of pleasure.

It's absurd.

And Kohilet is saying,.

It was all in vain. It was all in vain.

It doesn't mean buildings don't need to be built or gardens aren't something to be enjoyed. God created vegetation and he gave the human mind the ingenuity to plan agriculture and architecture. All these things have their place, even as God commanded his temple to be built in a certain way, but to give yourself wholly over to build and to plant for yourself, for the meaning, for the fulfillment.

That is vanity.

That's chasing after the wind.

Under the sun, Kohilet realizes, man can only find the pain of pleasure.

There's no gain.

There's nothing secure. There's nothing lasting to pleasure under the sun. Jesus would put it this way. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what would a man give in exchange for his soul?

Notice that word again. What will it profit? Jesus has the same conclusion, doesn't he? There's nothing that could be built or planted or established or gained in this world that would actually be a profit worthy in comparison to your soul.

And since your soul.

Is something that corresponds or transcends any of the material gains of this life,. Jesus says, there's nothing in this life under the sun that's worth more than your soul,.

Your being,.

The core of who you are unto God. Part of you that endures without wasting away, as the body must waste away until it's further clothed and reunited once again to the soul. But there's something about the soul, the indiminishable essence of humanity that is worth more than the world entire.

Jesus says, compared to that, there's no profit. There's no profit, not under the sun. Solomon didn't gain the whole world. But even if he could have, Jesus says, it wouldn't have been a profit to him even then.

And I don't think, Kohelet, I don't think Solomon needed to gain the whole world to realize that conclusion. I had enough of the world under my thumb, he says, to realize even the whole world wouldn't be a profit to me.

Not only do I find its pleasures fleeting as I haunt the corridors of my marbled glory, but I realize that behind me, breathing down my neck, is mortality. If I can't give myself to pleasure, then pleasure will be taken from me nonetheless.

So we see there's these, these dimensions to this word profit that are taken up later by Jesus. The vanity of seeking profit under the sun. What will it profit a man if he gains? And we have this word play.

What does it gain a man if he gains the whole world? What does it profit a man if he profits the whole world? And Jesus says, in comparison to the soul, nothing. Because man's going to die. Even if you could contain it all, it's just for a fleeting moment.

What's your life? It's a vapor. So we think of all of the glory that Solomon encountered, and he's come to the conclusion that Jesus puts forth. There really is no profit. There really is no gain. Even if I could gain it all, I can't take it with me.

But I don't need to take it with me to realize how fleeting and empty it's become. The things that I thought would satisfy my heart when I gave my heart over to pleasure have not been there to deliver the goods.

I'm just as bankrupt and empty. I might as well not have done it at all. And we all know this to be true in some sense. We all know this is the right answer, the Sunday school answer. We might even say this glibly to others that we come across in life, but we don't live consistently with that.