Unsatisfied
“I hated life.... Yea, I hated all my labor which I had taken under the sun.”[[237]]
By his own bitter experience, Solomon learned the emptiness of a life that seeks in earthly things its highest good. He erected altars to heathen gods, only to learn how vain is their promise of rest to the soul.
The Late Return
In his later years, turning wearied and thirsting from earth’s broken cisterns, Solomon returned to drink at the fountain of life. The history of his wasted years, with their lessons of warning, he by the Spirit of inspiration recorded for after-generations. And thus, although the seed of his sowing was reaped by his people in harvests of evil, the life-work of Solomon was not wholly lost. For him at last the discipline of suffering accomplished its work.
But with such a dawning, how glorious might have been his life’s day, had Solomon in his youth learned the lesson that suffering had taught in other lives!
God’s Witnesses
For those who love God, those who are “the called according to his purpose,”[[238]] Bible biography has a yet higher lesson of the ministry of sorrow. “Ye are My witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am God,”[[239]]—witnesses that He is good, and that goodness is supreme. “We are made a theater unto the world, both[[240]] to angels and to men.”[[241]]
Accusation from Satan