But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
Whoever loves money never has money enough;
whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.
This too is meaningless.
As goods increase, so do those who consume them.
And what benefit are they to the owner
except to feast his eyes on them?
The sleep of a laborer is sweet,
whether he eats little or much,
but the abundance of a rich man
permits him no sleep.
I have seen a grievous evil under the sun:
wealth hoarded to the harm of its owner,
wealth lost through some misfortune,
so that when he has a son
there is nothing left for him.
Naked a man comes from his mother's womb,
and as he comes, so he departs.
He takes nothing from his labor
that he can carry in his hand.
This too is a grievous evil:
As a man comes, so he departs,
and what does he gain,
since he toils for the wind?
All his days he eats in darkness,
with great frustration, affliction and anger.
***
Those who love happiness never have happiness enough. Those who seek fulfillment in friendship never have friendship enough. Those things that we most crave are the things that undo us.
The children we want sap us of life in their neediness and their simply being children. It is not their fault that what we obtain from them for both our happiness and theirs can literally suck life from us. Were we to blame them it would be unjust to them since they could not ask to require so much sacrifice from us simply to live. Christian parents who look to their children as their legacy may be heartbroken to discover their children don't even believe in Christ or embrace sexual immorality or define themselves by sexual immorality or betraying their highest political values. Children may grow up and seem to have no sense of gratitude for the sacrifices their parents made that the Christian parents expect should be understood. Yet if those children were the idols of the parent's heart how can these children grasp the significance of sacrifices made to them because their parents made them into gods? Ironically parents may find themselves having created, literally, the idols whose service crushes them.
The career we want has no life of its own and that it costs us time with our families is not its fault but our own. It is we who love the career to the point that no sacrifice is too great or small for it. The financial stability a career seems to promise makes it seem worth it, or the prestige of knowing you are a mover and shaker in your field, in the top ten or twenty or fifty in the nation for whatever it is you do. It is something you can publicly dismiss with a shake of the head and saying that it is the work itself that is the reward or that you're doing it for Jesus or to be a team player but in your heart of hearts that idol is still there.
For many Christians in the United States love of country is its own idol. Even though Christ said His kingdom was not of this world and the apostles predicted a time when Christ would come to judge the nations we can fool ourselves into thinking that because we live in a country founded by Christians who feared the Lord and wanted to create a just society that somehow Psalm 2 will never apply to OUR country. Jesus is coming to judge the nations but that doesn't mean America will be found wanting and idolatrous and worthy of destruction like any other nation?
Surely, AMERICA, which has done so much for world missions and fought so valiantly for freedom across the world will not be ripe for judgment from the Lord when He returns, will it? In our hearts we secretly imagine that whatever heaven will be like when it will descend to earth to be with humanity forever in the age to come that it will somehow be an improved version of America, an America without Democrats (or an America without Republicans), a land of liberty and love where all the dreams that fail in this life will succeed in the next. We may imagine that in a millenial reign our nation will get to judge the other nations and find them wanting, perhaps.
The things that would ostensibly bring us the most happiness are the things that bring us the most regret, anger, and shame when either they fail us or we fail them. Yet often we are unaware of those things we take refuge in, that we make idols of because we are teeming with the desire to rebuke other people for their own idols because we figure we have everything set.
We live in the same sort of times as the times of those who came before us. There are families where the legacy in finances is basically debt. The scriptures are full of tales of people who inherit the less than sparkling legacy of parents who erred in their walk with the Lord and the children inevitably err in their own ways, often precisely in the same way as their parents but with new twists. Rehoboam was eager to be even more stern than his father Solomon. Solomon carried on David's legacy of marriages that were political conveniences.
Koholeth withheld from himself nothing that he desired and in the end it was miserable to him, a vapor, a grasping for the wind. None of the things that he built and established for himself as his legacy survived him. Solomon collected proverbs and composed them but as we can see "collect" can indicate that he collected that which was not even really his. Not everyone agrees that Solomon actually wrote the song that bears his name but that it was archived in his library. Some interpretations of the Song of Songs have Solomon as the villain rather than the hero of the narrative, such as it is. The attribution of Ecclesiastes to Solomon is traditional and not even all conservative scholars agree that he wrote it. All that is to say that we cannot go to modern day Israel and point to any of the things and say with certainty that any of those riches and buildings Solomon built survived the assault of Babylon, the assault of Greece, the assault of Rome. That there was a second temple more or less attests that.
We are encouraged to build legacies in many ways. It's not wrong to want to have something to pass down from one generation to the next. Nevertheless a legacy can be the thing for which parents are willing to sacrifice who their children actually are so as to attain within their own lifetimes what they feel they deserve. A legacy can be the reason a person fires his friends to preserve his own vision for what should come about. A legacy can be the reason people don't come forth with the truth about the frailties and poor decisions of people they admire or about their own lives. Thanks to American civic religion and different forms of the prosperity gospel it presents us we can see a legacy as proof of prosperity and the prosperity of that legacy as a proof of our godliness. Who knows but that in many cases it may be?
But then again whoever loves legacy never has legacy enough and no sacrifices of friends or family or other things are considered too great or small for the sake of it. Especially since I have had to get back to job hunting in the last few months I have come to realize that there are many ways in which we sanctify our ambition or are told, point blank, we have to sell ourselves because no one else will. This is tough for me because for me the quality of work should speak for itself and that is delusional since no one knows what work I do unless I draw attention to it but then am I not bragging about my accomplishments. It ends up being a sort of false humility, doesn't it? An overspiritualized perspective from an overspiritualized man. Whoever loves being spiritual can't be spiritual enough, I guess, but I am not really very good at being spiritual in the end.