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Bible Biographies
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“I made my works great, I built myself houses, and planted
myself vineyards. I made myself gardens and orchards. ... I also
gathered for myself silver and gold and the special treasure of kings.
... So I became great, and excelled more than all who were before
me in Jerusalem. ... Then I looked on all the works that my hands
had done, and on the labor in which I had toiled; and indeed all was
vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun.
[92]
... I hated life. ... I hated all my labor in which I had toiled under
the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 2:4-11, 17, 18
.
By his own bitter experience Solomon learned the emptiness of
a life that seeks its highest good in earthly things. He built altars to
heathen gods, only to learn how vain is their promise of rest to the
soul. In his later years, wearied and thirsting from earth’s broken
cisterns, Solomon returned to drink at the fountain of life. By the
Spirit of inspiration he recorded the history of his wasted years,
with their lessons of warning. And thus, although the seed of his
sowing was reaped by his people in harvests of evil, the lifework
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!
The Testing of Job
For those who love God, those who are “the called according
to His purpose” (
Romans 8:28
), Bible biography teaches an even
higher lesson of the ministry of sorrow. “You are My witnesses, says
the Lord, that I am God” (
Isaiah 43:12
)—witnesses that He is good,
and that goodness is supreme.
Unselfishness, the principle of God’s kingdom, is the principle
that Satan hates. He denies its very existence. From the beginning
of the great controversy he has endeavored to prove God’s principles
of action to be selfish, and he deals in the same way with all who
serve God. It is the work of Christ and of all who bear His name to
disprove Satan’s claim.
It was to give an illustration of unselfishness in His own life that
Jesus came in the form of humanity. All who accept this principle