Ecclesiastes 1:13 Commentary and Bible Study

Modern commentators go completely wrong here. He is not saying I set myself to understand the meaning of life. They want him to say this, to give a sophisticated apologetic. They don’t want him to write for ordinary people, but for the wise. True, he says, there is no explanation for life if you leave out God, but he means, I indulged myself in these things for personal satisfaction. I thought by knowing everything there is to know, I would be happy. I never thought I would be able to explain all things, but I wanted to take pride in my effort. I went in for all this to find happiness, but none of these things helped me.Solomon therefore began this search with the utmost diligence and enthusiasm, directing his highly acute mind and all his many powers to exploring the varied activities of human beings on earth in the hope that he could find satisfaction. This became his preoccupation in life and his one dominating idea that governed the whole direction of his life. This was no superficial search but a thoroughly intelligent search that by the nature of the case must involve personally experiencing the things which he wished to explore. He was not content to just observe from the outside, but he must enter in to each avenue of human endeavour and pleasure, and furthermore he must take it to new limits, utilising his extraordinary resources to enjoy it to the full, in case others who had gone before him had failed because of lack of money or time or diligence.This was no doubt a ‘hazardous inquiry’, as Bridges calls it, fraught with danger because it involved the testing of a thesis which has already been pronounced unlawful by God – that we can find satisfaction in this life without the Lord and that we can make an idol of this world, for the first commandment says, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ and the last says, ‘Thou shalt not covet.’Solomon started this inquiry already in possession of wisdom, for the inquiry was to be conducted ‘by wisdom’. This wisdom was given to him by God at the beginning of his reign to enable him to rule God’s great people, Israel, with justice and goodness. It is said of him in the early part of his reign that he loved the Lord and although this statement is qualified, it is done in a way that assumes the genuineness of that love, and it should be taken at face value. Solomon had a true love for God, but 1 Kings 11 tells that he ‘loved many strange [foreign] women … ‘Of the nations concerning which the LORD said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to them … his wives turned away his heart after other gods.’ This shocking fall in one who was so preeminent a servant of God and leader of the nation, came about through Solomon’s failure to respect the commandments of God and from a pursuit of pleasure that risked bringing the name of God into disrepute. His experimentation with this form of pleasure is referred to in Ecclesiastes in chapter 7, but it was part of a broader search for meaning and purpose divorced from the living God.In the second part of this verse he refers to the burdensome task that God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with, bowed down with. This is not his description of his own unique search for meaning in life. That search was not conducted by any but himself. Instead, what he describes is the result of his own search, his conclusion that life on earth without God condemns all mankind to a futile search for meaning which will always prove elusive. Solomon had in a sense stepped outside of the normal business of life in order to examine life from the perspective of wisdom; although he entered into various experiences, he retained his wisdom and his chief purpose was to examine these experiences, not to enjoy them for their own sake. Nevertheless, he was himself captured by the allurements of sin for a time.