Ecclesiastes 5:11 Commentary and Bible Study

Does increase of goods and wealth bring ease and security? No, it only gives more trouble. Let possessions increase, and their owners soon find they are the servants of the things they own. There is no more inner satisfaction; rather, they diminish me. Wealth increases responsibility and worries. Wealth and possessions give rise to other obligations and problems which we did not have before. You say, ‘I would like some of those problems’; the trouble is we have such an unrealistic, rose-tinted view of the world, in which we vastly overestimate the power of riches to make us happy.Additional people gather around additional goods, so that the owner finds that what he thought was for him alone, actually has to be shared between many. How does this happen? It happens because as his prosperity increases, the size of his household also increases: the number of his employees, the number of dependants for whom he must take responsibility, those who do not work for nothing and who look to him for regular payment, as well as the increasing size of his own family. Life becomes more complex for there are perhaps more trading partners to negotiate with and form business arrangements with and to keep on the right side of, and more problems to sort out when things go wrong. This increasing number of dependants and increasing business is not taken into the reckoning when the man anticipates all the benefit he will have from increased goods. Increased wealth therefore brings increased worry and responsibility which was not expected. Somehow the man who would be rich, thought that wealth came without any additional complications. Would he really have wanted his riches if he knew that he had to have all this with it? As the size of his estate increases, so maintenance costs increase. How many stately homes have been handed over to the national trust because the owners could not afford the upkeep! Then there are also those who like moths around a lamp, who choose to associate with the rich just because they hope to get a slice of the cake and who have no real affection or loyalty to the person themselves. Increased wealth attracts increased friends to help us spend that wealth, and usually they are not the best kind of friends.What has he really gained from all his riches? Often only to see larger figures on his bank statement or to visit his estates and say to himself that all this belongs to him. But he can take nothing with him from this world and even while he is here, his enjoyment of his goods is limited to imagining the enjoyment of them. The knowledge that he has ‘heaped up treasure in the last days’ further steal from his contentment; he has enriched his earthly life, but his souls is starved for his ‘gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against [him] and will eat [his] flesh like fire’.