easy as it is, chapter number six, beginning in verse number one. The Bible reads, "There
is an evil which I have seen unto 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's 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. You know, 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, you
know, 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, it said he that loveeth silver should 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.