Eccles 1:14    I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

                

Solomon had been very wise and his wisdom and enabled him to become very rich. With all those riches he had been able to do whatever he wanted. The proverbial, “Been there, done it and got the tee-shirt” really applied in his case. Unfortunately, Solomon's life deteriorated as he took on more and more foreign wives and started giving way to their wishes for him to worship their gods. The tragedy was that by old age, when he probably wrote Ecclesiastes, he had become very jaded in the way he viewed life.

 

When he said he had seen all the things done ‘under the sun', that last phrase meant everything on the earth. Heaven no longer figured in his perspective. All he was left with was materialism, contemplating the world purely from a physical, earthly viewpoint. Whenever we take God out of the equation all we are left with is the physical world, but the trouble is that we have been designed with a spirit and that requires that we have spiritual input from heaven. Solomon no longer had that and that left him feeling very jaded, and that is reflected in his writing.

His final conclusion, therefore, was that everything was meaningless. There is NO meaning in pure material with nothing else. Atoms don't have meaning and purpose; they just are. From his perspective now, everything he did was like chasing the wind – pointless, hopeless. It led him nowhere. There was no meaning to his endless activities. It just went on and on, going nowhere!

The truth is we need God, we need a spiritual world. Make sure you have a strong spiritual perspective, not a purely material perspective, or even a religious perspective because that is just another way of godless thinking, using religious ritual or dogma to operate in mechanistic ways (if I do this, then that must happen) just like the materialist does who wants self control of life. A godly perspective sees God in His Creation and recognises our need for a genuine relationship with the Living God.