Ecclesiastes 5:10-6:12 | The Power to Enjoy in an Unenjoyable World
As we’re seeing, the book of Ecclesiastes doesn’t hold back. Instead of dancing around the issues of greatest importance, the Preacher goes right after them. He highlights the bad parts to show us how great our need is, and he highlights the good parts to show us how great our life can be. Both reveal God’s grace. We have a great need, and God has great grace. Both/and, not either/or. We find meaning in our life right in the middle of that tension. Jesus is not silent about what’s really going on in our lives at the level of our emotions and thoughts and actions. He knows us, and Ecclesiastes is proof. Ecclesiastes is Jesus saying to us that in all this crazy difficult world, there is a purpose to it. Life does have meaning. It is going somewhere. We just need to know where to look to find it.
We spend too much of our days looking in the wrong direction. God is calling us back. Like the parent constantly herding the kids down the hallway out the door, God turns us moment by moment in the right direction. But we can ignore his prodding. We can make a turn into the wrong doorway, looking for a snack when he’s promised to take us out to dinner. He doesn’t want us to do that. That’s why we have the book of Ecclesiastes. Jesus gets right in the middle of our everyday life and infuses his wisdom, asking the hard questions maybe we’re too afraid to ask. He doesn’t want us to waste our life.
And you don’t want to waste your life. That’s why you’re listening to this today. You want the wisdom of Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit. You don’t want to keep turning into the wrong doorways. You want to let him lead you down the right path to the right place. Still, sometimes his leading feels a bit murky. Where are we going? Why is everything so disappointing? Where is the enjoyment I thought I’d have? When can I finally just get a little rest and peace of mind? With Jesus leading us, we’ll go through the valleys of the shadow of death, but how else are we going to get to the green pastures and still waters?
Ecclesiastes is Jesus saying to us that while in some ways the answers to our questions leave us with more questions than answers, he is on the field with us, he’s calling the plays, he’s pointing out the right path, and he’s exposing longings in our hearts. He does that not so we’re awake enough to be disappointed further, but so we’re aware enough to look beyond this world and trust him for what’s coming far out ahead. He exposes so he can provide. He’s the wind blowing against our cold, vulnerable bodies, and he’s the shelter calling us inside his safe abode. Wisdom is knowing how to get home.
So today, from 5:10-6:12, we’re going to see three lessons of wisdom from Jesus through the Preacher of Ecclesiastes.
Don’t ask of this life more than it can give (5:10-17)
The power to enjoy is a gift from God (5:18-6:6)
This world is no place to rest (6:7-6:12)
Don’t ask of this life more than it can give (5:10-17)
10 He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. 11 When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? 12 Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.
13 There is a grievous evil that I have seen under the sun: riches were kept by their owner to his hurt, 14 and those riches were lost in a bad venture. And he is father of a son, but he has nothing in his hand. 15 As he came from his mother’s womb he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand. 16 This also is a grievous evil: just as he came, so shall he go, and what gain is there to him who toils for the wind? 17 Moreover, all his days he eats in darkness in much vexation and sickness and anger.
This world offers a lot, doesn’t it? There are so many amazing things. For example, I’m not a big gamer, but I saw this week Sony held a big press conference to reveal the new PlayStation 5. You don’t have to be a gamer to look and that and think it’s incredible. And that’s just the surface. Did you see Elon Musk send that rocket to space? You can buy your way into that soon.
This world offers a lot of really amazing things. But how far does that amazingness take us? How far toward satisfaction can we go? Many of us are still trying to answer that question. We’re still working hard, shooting for promotions, for the next big deal, and so forth. And that’s not all wrong. We ought to work hard. The Bible tells us to. We should make money and provide for our families. But there is a difference between earning money and loving money, and this world makes that really hard to do.
The Preacher, like Jesus, shows us we cannot love both God and money. The life we most want is in danger of being lost by our misplaced pursuits. It’s really so easy for us to start asking money to do what only God can do. We ask money to make us secure, to give us comfort, to preserve us in bad times. But money can’t do all that we ask of it. And, more broadly, the things of this world, under the sun, cannot do all we ask of it. Too often, we ask of life more than it can give. For example, a promotion is out ahead. We know it could be ours. We daydream of the impact an extra bit of income will have on our life. The renovation of the outdated house. The hot new car. The dream vacation. We just know it will satisfy us. Who isn’t looking for a little extra? Okay, yes, we sense that it’s not going to solve all our problems, but it’s going to solve some of them! And in this life, isn’t even a little better worth shooting for?
Verse 10 warns us. “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money.” You say, “Well, I don’t love money.” Okay. What about stuff money gets? Look again. “Nor he who loves wealth (goods and possessions) with his income (hope of further income); this also is vanity.” What’s the Preacher saying? Simply this: you can’t satisfy covetousness. Wealth is not the answer, no matter how many problems it solves. It always creates new ones. You can’t ask of this life more than it can give. It can’t give you ultimate satisfaction.
In case we don’t believe him, the Preacher continues. Verse 11: “When goods increase, they increase who eat them.” Who’s “they”? Kids. Taxes. Hangers-on. Increasing wealth attracts increasing collectors. The Notorious B.I.G. was a prophet: “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.” Promotion anticipated is better than promotion achieved. When we reach that new status, we find more problems, not less. The best we can hope for is to at least see it as it goes into our hands and into another’s. The simple laborer sleeps really well, but not the rich.
We don’t think of it this way, but the Preacher says money is dangerous. Jesus told us the same thing. Like Jesus, the Preacher is a storyteller. He uses parables to drive home his point. “Okay, reader, so you aren’t the rich man. But imagine you were…” In verses 13-17, he makes another of his famous “observations under the sun.” What does he see? Verse 13: “Riches were kept by their owner to his hurt.” It’s a story of riches kept and lost, hurting the owner physically, emotionally, and relationally. There is a cost to this, he says. And it’s not just time we spend toiling. It spreads.
Verses 14-17 explain further. Verse 14 says the riches were lost in a bad venture. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe it wasn’t. We can lose through wisdom just as we can through folly. Wisdom only points to the best way of things, but it doesn’t prevent disaster. Even worse, he has a son, but this bad venture cost him all he had. His son receives no inheritance. Though he worked hard, he came into the world naked, and he will depart naked. He “shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand.” All he has left is all he is—nothing that he has. Nothing to hand to his son. His whole life’s work—gone.
Verse 16 says toiling for money’s sake is toiling for the wind. It’s a miserable life. Verse 17 says he eats in darkness, in misery; in much vexation, full of cares and frustrations; and sickness, physical strain; and anger, thwarted plans, and so forth. In the end, toiling for money alone is tragic on every level. It doesn’t deliver on the promises it makes. He was asking too much from it. By making money his life, he was asking of life more than it can give. Money and possessions and wealth cannot give security and comfort and peace of mind because it does not possess it and cannot buy it.
The Preacher’s point is not that we ought not to earn money. His point isn’t even that we ought not to try and earn more. If God gives us a lot, there’s a reason for it. He means for us to use it for his glory in advancing his kingdom. The point is that it’s all too easy to make the pursuit of money into your life. It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a subtle shift here and there. But doing so is simply asking too much of it. It’s not hard to make money an Emporer, but that Emporer has no clothes. Only one Emporer has what we need, and his name is Jesus. Everything we’re looking to money to provide is actually found in Jesus Christ. Only Jesus comforts, satisfies, provides, and gives the life that we’re really looking for everywhere else—abundant, joyful, never-ending. Money is a great tool but it’s not lord. Don’t ask it to be.
So lesson one, obvious but difficult: don’t ask of this life more than it can give.
Lesson two, non-obvious but available:
The power to enjoy is a gift from God (5:18-6:6)
18 Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. 19 Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God. 20 For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.
6 There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: 2 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 grievous evil. 3 If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life’s good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. 4 For it comes in vanity and goes in darkness, and in darkness its name is covered. 5 Moreover, it has not seen the sun or known anything, yet it finds rest rather than he. 6 Even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good—do not all go to the one place?
Here’s something non-obvious but available: the enjoyment we want in life isn’t lying out beyond our grasp, but given graciously by the hand of God if we’ll take it. But we don’t always see that, do we? We scratch and claw our way for another dollar, asking this life to give more than it can. But what if the life we really want isn’t expensive at all? What if it’s as free as the grace of God? Well, good news. It is! It’s as free as the grace of God because it is the grace of God. The life we most want is the life that is most freely given, coming from God’s own hand. All the satisfaction we’re looking for everywhere else is found in simple openness to God moment by moment. Isn’t that so cool? God’s not making this too hard for us. He’s saying to us right now, “This world looks amazing. That’s because I created it. But because of sin, it’s dangerous. Don’t ask of it more than it can give. Instead, receive what I can give.”
In verse 18, the Preacher makes a turn to help us see this truth. The word “Behold” means he’s redirecting our attention away from the toil under the sun to the grace under God. He’s seen something else, something “good and fitting,” literally “a good thing which is beautiful.” And it’s surprising because, on the surface, it doesn’t look all that impressive. What is it? Look again at verse 18. “To eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil…”
The opposite end of life’s continuum is not a life void of toil. He’s not giving us the false dichotomy of toil vs. no toil. The difference is between a life of non-enjoyment vs. a life filled with enjoyment in the toil. If 5:10-17 shows us the covetous and unhappy life, 5:18-20 show us the content and happy life. What makes the difference? Verse 19 is the key. “Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and the power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God.”
If I asked you, “What is the gift of God in your toil?” how would you answer? Would you stop at enjoyment? But that’s the Preacher’s answer. Do you see what the Preacher is saying? When we ask of life more than it can give, we rip the enjoyment of anything out of our life. What good is a great steak when there’s another better somewhere? What good is a dream vacation when it’s over? But what if every day you held the same enjoyment as a day at the beach? Wealth is separate from the power to enjoy. They do not go hand in hand. God may give you wealth, but has he given you enjoyment? He can.
I can’t help but think of my four-year-old son, Andy. Many of you know him. He’s the personification of joy. We were at the McDaniel’s the other night and their new puppy, Happy, was running around the yard with Andy. It was as if his personality was running alongside him. He walks into a room with a smile. There’s this great verse in Malachi about those who love the Lord go out leaping like calves from the stall. That’s Andy. He leaps through life. I came into the room one day, and his treasure-box was broken. Part of the side had come off. I asked him what happened, anticipating his sadness. He said, “Oh, it broke. But that’s okay. Now it has a window!” When life gives that boy lemons…
Verse 20 says that kind of person “will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.” The toil and vexation remain, but the grace of God gives the power to enjoy the good in life. To press the point further, not everyone has this gift of enjoyment. As he opens chapter 6, he says, “There is an evil that I have seen under the sun.” Again, this is observable. You’ve probably seen it too. Verse 2: “A man to whom God gives wealth, possession, 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.” It’s possible to have it all and fame on top of it and still have a miserable life.
This is far more significant than we realize. Enjoyment is a gift from God. That power comes from him! But it’s not alloted to all. Some of us need to ask him for it.
Did you watch The Last Dance, the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls? During the 1997-1998 season, the Bulls allowed a camera crew special access to their season.
One night, the camera crew knocks on Michael Jordan’s hotel door. He lets them in. He talks about the questions swirling about his post-season retirement. Will he really do it? Why would he? He’s at the top of his game. He says, “This isn’t one of those lifestyles that you envy, where you’re confined to this room. I’m ready for getting out of this life. You know when you get to that point. I’m there. With no reservations at all.”
The life many of us could only imagine living is a living hell for the person actually living it. How can that be? Because the power to enjoy it comes from God and nowhere else. And here’s the secret to the universe: the power to enjoy your life right now also comes from God. You may not have much, or least all you wish you had, but you can have joy!
Remember the story of Mary and Martha? Mary sat at the feet of Jesus while Martha anxiously worked. Martha grows impatient with Mary, but Jesus says Mary is the one doing the right thing. Jesus says, “You are anxious and troubled about many things” (Luke 10:41). In other words, Jesus says that our anxious toiling is not his heart for us. We can ruin our own enjoyment by forgetting one amazing reality: God is with us. We’re so focused on bearing the world’s burdens that we forget the One who overcame it all is with us.
We don’t have to over-think this. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes is incredibly real about the hardness of life. But he’s also incredibly real about how much enjoyment fills life. God is offering us right now our regular life infused with his divine joy. That gift of his power comes from his hand to all in Christ. Who are we to reject that gift?
In verses 3-6, the Preacher tells the story of a man who did reject it. He fathers a hundred children and lives many years—literally, thousands of years. But his soul isn’t satisfied. Furthermore, when he dies, there is no burial. He’s despised and unmourned. His end is so bad that a stillborn baby is better off. The Preacher isn’t making light of stillborn babies. He knows the heartache of that. God cares about those deep wounds. He means the baby at least avoids the toil and enters rest. He’s saying a life void of the joy of God is a life not worth living, and some of us are living that. I’ve lived it too often.
Ecclesiastes is that odd book that says to us both, “Yes, this life stinks,” and, “Yes, this life rocks.” We cry, and we laugh. As Ray Ortlund says, “The tears are inevitable, but the joys we might neglect.” Let’s not neglect the joys. They’re a gift from God. Right now, in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God is asking all of us just to chill out, to enjoy his amazingness, this life’s amazingness. Yes, the world is falling apart, but your morning coffee still tastes good. The sun still shines. The wind on a summer day still feels amazing. The gospel is still good news. There is so much to enjoy. So enjoy it! When the side of your treasure box falls off, God’s giving you a window to better see him through it. Don’t neglect that.
So lesson number two, non-obvious but available: the power to enjoy.
Finally, the third lesson, uncomfortable but necessary:
This world is no place to rest (6:7-12)
7 All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied. 8 For what advantage has the wise man over the fool? And what does the poor man have who knows how to conduct himself before the living? 9 Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite: this also is vanity and a striving after wind.
10 Whatever has come to be has already been named, and it is known what man is, and that he is not able to dispute with one stronger than he. 11 The more words, the more vanity, and what is the advantage to man? 12 For who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow? For who can tell man what will be after him under the sun?
Though there is real joy to be found, the Preacher knows this world is no place to rest. That’s an uncomfortable but necessary truth. In the previous passage, he talked about the Christian and the gift of joy from God. Here, he considers the purely secular man and his quest for answers. He’s never satisfied because he’s looking only to things under the sun. Verse 7 points that out in the simplest of ways. “All the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied.”
Where is that satisfaction he seeks? The Preacher leads us on further. He asks in verse 8, “What advantage the wise man has over the fool?” It doesn’t seem like much in the end. They both end up dead. Both forgotten. The wise avoid a lot of bad through their wisdom, but they can’t outwit death. The fool suffers more than he ought in life, but in the end, even he finds rest from the toil.
So the Preacher says, “Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite.” In other words, be content with what we do have rather than wandering inwardly for what we do not. That’s the best we can do, right? Just shut down our desires. Ignore the longings.
But even the most secular person protests. Surely this can’t be it! Surely there’s meaning to it all! We see so much moral fervor in our day. People protest online and in the streets. So many call for change in our broken society. But what’s the point if nothing ever really can change? Who’s to say it’s broken anyway? If this whole world is just one big, fat accident, then it doesn’t really matter what happens to it or what happens to us.
Even we feel this at times, don’t we? So we take our protest to God. But verses 10 and 11 warn us that won’t go well. God made it this way, and we’re not able to dispute with one stronger than us. “The more words, the more vanity, and what is the advantage to man?” We’re like Job, arguing with God who sees everything from our tiny island of limited vision. We cannot change the basic character of life—this toil and difficultly and is-ness of it all.
Verse 12 summarizes the question for us, “For who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow? For who can tell man what will be after him under the sun?” Here the Preacher takes us to the end of the secular imagination. Who can know what is right and wrong? No one. We’re just here, and that’s the way things are. Just get on with life.
But what if we can’t just get on with life? What if we sense that there must be something more than this life here under the sun? We sense deep inside that there is something more, don’t we? We long for another world. And that, friends, is because we’re made for one. The secular man throws up his hands and decides to just rest while he can. But the Preacher says this world is no place to rest because the rest we seek is found only in God, and only in eternity with him. As Saint Augustine said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
Conclusion
We spend so much of life asking difficult questions. Our life is a mess at times. As we look at our life and say, “Man, I have problems,” God looks at us in the face of Jesus Christ and says, “Yes, but I am your joyous remedy.” When we come to the end of ourselves and to the very end of what we can make of this world, we find not a vast, empty nothingness but an infinite, loving God.
The Preacher gives the gift of seeing life through secular eyes so that we can see what life is truly like apart from the grace of God. But in the gospel, Jesus provides the answer to our big questions. Is there a right way to live? Yes, and Jesus lived it. Is there more than what I can see with my eyes? Yes, and Jesus showed it. Is there life after this? Yes, and Jesus proved it by his death and resurrection.
We can finally stop asking this world to give us the satisfaction that only God can provide. We can enjoy him, as he gives us the power to, and we can look to eternal life with him, knowing this world isn’t our final resting place.
“Who can tell man what will be after him under the sun?” Jesus can. Come to him for the answer.
Let’s pray.
