I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits:
The making of gardens and orchards and the planting in them of trees of every kind of fruit belonged to Solomon's great works in which he sought pleasure, satisfaction, and his highest good in earthly accomplishments and things. His turning to these pursuits was a turning away from the joy of communion with God to seek satisfaction in the pleasures of sense, after the pride of prosperity separated him from God. In that course he became great and increased more than all who had been before him in Jerusalem, keeping back nothing that his eyes desired and withholding his heart from no joy.
When he looked upon all the works that his hands had made, he found them vanity and vexation of spirit, with no profit under the sun, and by bitter experience he learned the emptiness of such a life, which brought him no lasting satisfaction or fulfillment. He came to hate life and to hate all his labor under the sun, and learned how vain is the promise of rest held out by heathen gods.
Wearied and thirsting from earth's broken cisterns, in his later years he turned back to drink at the fountain of life. Under inspiration he recorded the history of those wasted years as a lesson of warning for later generations. Although his people reaped harvests of evil from the seed he had sown, his life work was not wholly lost, for the discipline of suffering at last accomplished its work in him.
The making of gardens and orchards and the planting in them of trees of every kind of fruit belonged to Solomon's great works in which he sought pleasure, satisfaction, and his highest good in earthly accomplishments and things. His turning to these pursuits was a turning away from the joy of communion with God to seek satisfaction in the pleasures of sense, after the pride of prosperity separated him from God. In that course he became great and increased more than all who had been before him in Jerusalem, keeping back nothing that his eyes desired and withholding his heart from no joy.
When he looked upon all the works that his hands had made, he found them vanity and vexation of spirit, with no profit under the sun, and by bitter experience he learned the emptiness of such a life, which brought him no lasting satisfaction or fulfillment. He came to hate life and to hate all his labor under the sun, and learned how vain is the promise of rest held out by heathen gods.
Wearied and thirsting from earth's broken cisterns, in his later years he turned back to drink at the fountain of life. Under inspiration he recorded the history of those wasted years as a lesson of warning for later generations. Although his people reaped harvests of evil from the seed he had sown, his life work was not wholly lost, for the discipline of suffering at last accomplished its work in him.