Ecclesiastes 5

Solomon begins here to confront directly the folly of attachment to this realm of existence. Only a fool takes this world’s concerns too seriously.
If you think of God as a Western king, you’ll never understand the Bible. He portrays Himself as an Eastern sheikh; there is no law or logic outside His Person. He defines reality and is by no means constrained by it. People who dream of solving the world’s problems are fools; they are morally blind and cannot grasp reality. It’s not a sin to want the best God offers under His Laws, but it’s downright evil to assume your human logic can perceive a better world and make it happen. Even if all you care about is your own comfort, you cannot possibly build your life on your dreams. Such talk is empty and leads only to sorrow, unless it reflects directly what God has promised.
We’ve all had to endure dreamy big talkers. If only they could get this or that advantage, they would change reality itself. As King of Israel, Solomon had his fill of such idiocy, people asking for this or that authority and how wonderful it would be if they could just get what they needed so they could act on their grand dreams. God must have it even worse. What must it be like to have people traipsing into the Temple and making all sorts of silly bargains with God? It would be a whole lot wiser to go to the Temple and listen to what God has to say. Try your best to understand what God said is and must be, and confine yourself to that reality. What will you tell Him when you promise to do this or that, and He decides to grant your request, but you are unable to carry out your grand promises?
You want grand piles of material wealth? That translates to grand taxes. You think your local lord is greedy? Someone higher taxes him, and someone higher yet taxes them both. They all get a piece of the pie, so the best produce of your garden plot ends up on the king’s table. That’s the reality of this world. The only way to avoid taxation is to have nothing productive to tax. (Tithing and taxation only applied to those who produced things, primarily agricultural products.) And what the tax collector leaves behind, your relatives will consume. You get to own it just long enough to look upon it with pride before it’s confiscated by someone else. Stop investing so much emotional energy in what you can pretend you’ll have tomorrow, because you cannot predict what God will do. Just enjoy what you have today, because people who are owned by their property never rest.
But if you liquidate your wealth into silver and gold, what good is that? Sure, you get to keep it all, but you can’t eat it and it won’t grow anything by itself. You’ll just spend it until it’s all gone. So you invest it and try to make more, right? That’s the life! That is, it’s a good life until some business deal goes sour and you lose your investment. If you own no real property, you have nothing to bequeath to your children. Isn’t that great way to build loving memories? Getting wrapped up in the cares of this life is like eating in darkness, it’s worse than ordinary blindness because your very own soul is the cause of darkness, filled with constant disappointment.
The notion that you can really accomplish anything of lasting importance in this world is stupid. Yesterday is gone and you don’t have tomorrow with any kind of certainty. Don’t focus on tomorrow, but on eternity. Take what comes; play the role in which you find yourself right now. Trust what God says in His Laws about providing the needs of those who are faithful to Him. If He gives you lots of stuff, He also gives you the skill to handle it for His glory. If He gives you almost nothing, be glad you have no cares to burden your days. Focus your concerns on what He puts in front of you and you won’t have room for worry.
This is not, “Eat, drink and be merry.” This is, “Find joy in obeying the Lord.” The Hebrew legacy of revelation was a gift from God, not an impediment to human greatness.