The Bible reads, There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common
among men, a man to whom God hath given riches, wealth, and honor, so that he wanteth nothing
for his soul of all that he desireth.
Yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof, but a stranger eateth it.
This is vanity, and it is an evil disease.
Now many of the things in this chapter are repetitions of things that Solomon has already
said in previous chapters, and we've already talked about them a lot, and I promise that
in this series I'm not just going to keep repeating and harping on these things over
and over again.
So verses like these I'm just going to kind of blow past them, but one thing that I do
want to emphasize in verse number one is that word common, when he says, There is an
evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common among men, and then he explains
a situation where a guy has all this riches and wealth and honor, but then God doesn't
give him the power to eat thereof.
Somebody else ends up enjoying it, and the thing I want to point out there is that this
is not the exception, this is the rule.
He says this is common, and what he's saying is that when people achieve greatness in the
world's eyes or become very rich and powerful and have everything that this world would
consider as success, the more common result of that is that it does not gratify, it does
not satisfy, there ends up being emptiness and vanity as a result, and he says this is
common among men.
It's not just me.
It's not just King Solomon who has all the money and the wealth and the power and feels
this way.
He said, Look, this is the way people feel.
This is happening all the time, which is why if you seek the things that this world offers
in the way of riches and power and fame, you are being foolish, because these things will
not satisfy you according to the word of God, and in the last chapter we saw, in chapter
five, he said, He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver.
It's never going to be enough, and the common situation is for people to be unhappy and
dissatisfied even when they have all these things.