A King Tries Everything

He tells you plainly who he is — son of David, king in Jerusalem — because he wants you to know this was not a poor man's complaint. He had the power to actually run the experiment, so he ran it.

Wisdom first, and he is honest enough to say it really is better than folly, the way light beats the dark. But the wise man dies, and the fool dies, and after a while no one remembers which was which. Then comes pleasure — every garden, every pool, every kind of music a heart could want. He comes back from that one with this:

"Yet when I reflected on everything I had accomplished and on all the effort I had expended to accomplish it, I concluded: 'All these achievements and endeavors are ultimately profitless — like chasing the wind! There is nothing gained from them on earth.'" — Ecclesiastes 2:11 (NET)

Then labor, then legacy — and here the worry turns personal. He hated leaving everything he built to a man he could not vet. "And who knows?" he asks, and no one answers him. A king with armies at his word, helpless in front of one question about his own son.

Notice something here, because it matters later. He never says he is nothing — he says what he built cannot do what he needed it to do. That is not the same wound, and it's worth holding onto the difference.

A Limit He Cannot Argue Past

In the middle of the book sits the truest line he ever wrote. It is not an answer. It is a confession.

"God has made everything fit beautifully in its appropriate time, but He has also placed ignorance about eternity in the human heart so that people cannot discover what God has ordained, from the beginning to the end of their lives." — Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NET)

Eternity, set down inside a human chest, like a guest who will not stop knocking. And in the same breath, the door he needs is hidden from him. He is not confused about what he wants. He cannot get there from where he stands.

I want to be careful here, because I got this wrong before. Some of this gap is just what it means to be small in front of a God who is not — you were never going to trace His whole plan with your own mind, sin or no sin. But the restlessness, the reaching for more than what's already in his hand — that part is not just the cost of being made. A bishop named Augustine read this same book sixteen hundred years before I did, and he said the whole point of it was to make us long for a life with no vanity at all in it, only the truth, found in the One who made the sun. He said the vanity itself belongs to us, not to anything God made. Martin Luther read it the same way, centuries later. The ache of not-knowing is just what it is to be finite. The restless grasping is what sin does to a finite heart. They are not the same thing. I want you to be able to tell them apart, because it matters for what you do with your own wanting.

He looks at the world and finds the same thing everywhere — courts where wickedness sits in the judge's seat, and people hurting with no one to wipe their faces. And once, only once, but he says it, and I love him a little for saying it instead of pretending he was sure, he wonders out loud whether his own breath is any different from an animal's when it stops.

"Who really knows if the human spirit ascends upward, and the animal's spirit descends into the earth?" — Ecclesiastes 3:21 (NET)

He does not know, and he tells you he does not know — then he leaves it standing there, unanswered, for the rest of the book to carry.