As I reflect on conflicts that I’ve been invited to mediate or conflicts that I was party to, I’ve come to realize that the majority of conflicts are based on unfulfilled desires. I’ll be the first to admit that most of the arguments I can think back on with my wife came down to my desire for her to see and do things my way. I don’t think I’m alone.
We can usually explain why our expectations seem reasonable, but somewhere along the way, wanting something good can easily become an attempt to conform others into our image and the image of our vision. And when they don’t conform, people become obstacles to the worlds we’re trying to build.
That is the danger of building your own Eden: arranging life around yourself until your satisfaction becomes the purpose everyone and everything else must serve.
Ecclesiastes 2 gives us a picture through which to examine that temptation.
1 I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.” But behold, this also was vanity. 2 I said of laughter, “It is mad,” and of pleasure, “What use is it?” 3 I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine (my heart still guiding me with wisdom) and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life. 4 I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. 5 I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. 6 I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. 7 I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house. I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. 8 I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the delight of the sons of man. 9 So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. 10 And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. 11 Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2:1–11)
Whether or not Ecclesiastes was authored by Solomon1 or someone impersonating Solomon, what we know of this author was that he was a man who greatly sought pleasure.
Our children’s stories of Solomon tend to focus his biography on his great wisdom (1 Kings 3), but Ecclesiastes reveals that even the greatest of wisdom can fail to satisfy:
“I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.” (Ecclesiastes 1:17)
Wisdom was surely useful, but it couldn’t give Solomon lasting mastery over life. And so he tests pleasure while still claiming that his wisdom remained with him, exploring what all this enjoyment and achievement can actually give.
As the text says, Solomon built houses, planted vineyards, made gardens and parks, and filled them with all kinds of fruit trees. He gathered silver and gold, singers, servants, and concubines. Whatever his eyes desired, he did not keep from them.
His life was the epitome of “treat-yo-self.” Just look at how many times in Ecclesiastes 2:1–11, we read the words “me,” “my/self,” and “I.” In the ESV there are four occurrences of “me,” seventeen of “my” or “myself,” and eighteen of “I.” That’s thirty-nine references to self in only eleven verses. It reminds me of what the comedian Brian Regan calls the ‘Me-Monster.‘2
To be sure, simply speaking in the first person doesn’t make someone selfish. But notice what he’s doing: He’s gathering houses, gardens, wealth, pleasure, and even human beings; an entire world accumulating around him as the Me-Monster becomes a Me-god, expecting life, and everyone in it, to revolve around him.
We regularly face the same temptation… to create our own private Edens, believing they will give us rest and pleasure, without recognizing what our demands can destroy.
The Temptation To Build Our Own Eden
The gardens of Genesis and Revelation give us no reason to think that God is opposed to our delight and pleasure; the Hebrew name of the Genesis garden Eden (עֵדֶן) literally translates to “delight” or “pleasure.” The problem has never been pleasure itself, but seeking pleasure without God.
For Solomon, he starts by trying comedy… but as Proverbs 14:13 says: “Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief.” Or as we’ve all heard people say, ‘if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.’ Maybe you’ve felt that recently. I know I have.
My friends know that the easiest way to make me laugh is through puns. If my wife hears me in another room booming with laughter, she typically assumes that a friend sent me a ludicrous meme, or I was scrolling through posted puns and dad jokes (that’s 90% of my algorithm). But I’ll admit, when I get to scrolling, more often than not it’s a distraction from heartache and grief. For a moment it brings joy. That moment is not worthless, but it is mad to expect for it to do everything we might ask of a joke. Like all of us, Solomon finds that when the joke ends, grief is still there.
And so next Solomon tries wine. Allow me to give my paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 2:3:
“Solomon went from sitcoms to sipping. From Seinfeld to Zinfandel, from Roseanne to Rosé, from Michael Scott to a Moscato.” (Yes, I came up with those puns, and I am proud of them.)
But the passage moves beyond an evening’s entertainment. There are houses, vineyards, gardens, parks, and pools from which to water the growing trees. Interestingly, the word translated “parks,” pardēs, is a Persian loanword related to the Greek word “paradise.” (As in… “today you will be with me in paradise” or what the greek translation of Genesis 2 called the “paradise of Eden”.3
In Genesis, God gave a paradise to Adam and Eve to work and keep. They had real responsibility, but the paradise wasn’t created by them, it was received by them.4 Our private Edens begin to take shape when we forget that distinction. We may talk about God and sincerely believing that what we want is good and God-glorifying, but when we begin to treat our desires as though they ought to govern everyone else, we fall into the danger of become the Me-God.
Realistically, Solomon could build on a scale most of us will never afford. But you don’t need royal gardens, servants, or a treasury full of gold to build a life around yourself. A home, a marriage, a ministry, or even a perfectly ordinary afternoon will do. The question is what happens when our enjoyment becomes everyone else’s assignment. Our private Edens may be smaller than Solomon’s, but the people living in them can still get hurt. And if we insist on maintaining them, the destruction has the potential to reach further than we imagine.
1. You will destroy others
A striking feature of Ecclesiastes 2 is the note that Solomon purchased and placed people in his private Eden to do his bidding. Verse 7 says he bought male and female slaves.
A note on slavery: just because something is mentioned in the Bible doesn’t mean that it’s celebrated. We find in Genesis 1:27 the remarkable doctrine of the imago dei, that God made all of humanity in his image, and thus humans are to be dignified above the rest of creation, not, as we see in Ecclesiastes 2, listed within a catalogue of possessions alongside houses, livestock, and precious metals.
Surely, our circumstances differ (I doubt any of my readers are slaveholders) but we ought to examine how easily we too can objectify people, treating them according to their usefulness to us. It’s something that happens when we begin to see ourselves as the main character in our lives and cast everyone else in supporting roles: Our spouse provides understanding. Our children provide pride. Our friends provide encouragement. The church provides a place where we feel useful, appreciated, and preferably agreed with.
Now to be sure, we should encourage one another. Our marriages and friendships should involve care, and our children need instruction. But something changes when we begin to measure people primarily by how well they perform the part we have assigned them.
We want our marriages to assure us that we are worth loving. We want our children to become living proof that we have done something right. Before long, the people in our private Eden have been assigned jobs they never applied for. And when they cannot give us what we’re asking, we become wrathful gods potentially delivering injustice.
I recognize this temptation far too often when I get frustrated with my children. There are times when correction is necessary. But I also need to ask whether I am concerned for their good or simply upset that they are making my morning more difficult.
Or consider driving down the highway when my fellow image-bearers will not bend to my will. It is remarkable how quickly I can develop a very low view of humanity behind someone going slightly below the speed limit.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns in Life Together:
“He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter…5
The warning concerns loving our imagined community more than the actual people who belong to it. Bonhoeffer goes on to explain that even sincere, sacrificial intentions do not prevent that destruction.
That ought to give us pause. We can work hard, give generously, and sincerely want something good while making the people around us miserable trying to accomplish it: A vision for a healthy church can become a demand that everyone share our preferences. A desire for a close family can become resentment whenever someone needs something we did not plan for. We can begin with a picture of people flourishing together, but punish the actual people for failing to resemble the picture.
If the project appears successful, we assume that the fruit proves God approved of the methods. But getting what we wanted doesn’t settle whether we loved people well along the way. The people in our lives belong to God and so our responsibility to love them doesn’t disappear when they interrupt our plans.
2. You will destroy your joy
The demand for paradise can rob us of the very pleasure we were trying to secure.
Don’t miss this: Solomon doesn’t discover the limits of earthly pleasure because he was denied it. He discovers the limits precisely because he successfully obtained pleasure. His heart found pleasure in his toil (he says so in verse 10). Pleasure is pleasurable, Ecclesiastes grants its effectiveness, but it denies its ultimacy: A good meal can satisfy you. A good joke can make you laugh. But neither can explain your desire for satisfaction, laughter, or why you exist. The meaning of life is simply too much to ask of a sandwich.
When we require earthly pleasures to fulfill us in these ways, enjoying them becomes strangely difficult. The meal was lovely, but someone else ordered something better. The evening with our family was good, but it didn’t look like the evening we had imagined. The work was worthwhile, but someone else received more recognition. We can’t enjoy what is there because we will always be occupied with what is missing from what we had imagined.
As with the puns I mentioned earlier, laughter doesn’t have to make my grief disappear in order to be good. A moment of relief is still something to receive with thanks. The same is true of our other pleasures, they can be temporary without being worthless.
Later in Ecclesiastes 2, Solomon says that eating, drinking, and finding enjoyment in our work come from the hand of God (vv. 24–25). Pleasure and delight is something we receive from him.6 But in our private Edens, we keep moving the conditions under which we will permit ourselves to be thankful: We’ll enjoy our home once the next project is finished. We’ll appreciate our children once this difficult stage is over. We’ll rest once everything is finally in place (there is always another condition). Meanwhile, the good things God has given us become evidence that we have not yet received enough.
3. You will destroy yourself
Our private Edens make a promise they can’t keep: that if we can arrange enough of life around ourselves, we can make ourselves secure.
But whatever depends upon our control must continually be maintained by our control. We have to keep people pleased with us, keep disappointment at a distance, and keep producing whatever makes us feel that our lives matter: If my identity depends on being admired, correction becomes a threat. If it depends on being needed, someone else’s independence becomes a problem. If it depends on being successful, admitting failure feels like losing myself. And then I have a choice. I can acknowledge what is happening, or find another way to protect the world I have built. (Another purchase. Another achievement. Another distraction. Another person’s approval.)
We often hear stories of people who have lost everything and hit “rock bottom.” Loss can force questions we have spent years avoiding. But enough success can do something similar:
About a year ago I was listening to an interview that the actor Will Smith gave about the difficulty he faced after the 2022 Oscars fiasco. With everything that was going on in his career and marriage at the time he said that he came to the conclusion that there was a corresponding place to “Rock Bottom”, a place he called “Cliff Top” where a person reaches the end of what the material world can provide, including money, possessions, sexual experience, fame, and achievement, and discovers that those things still do not satisfy. Meaning, if rock bottom is reaching your limit through loss or deprivation; “cliff top” is reaching your limit through abundance and attainment.
Will Smith made it to the top, he got to sit front row at the Oscars and even take home the prized-award for Best Actor. But in the end it was vanity. The moment he got home the glory had faded and he had to sit with himself.
Solomon likewise obtained the things we imagine would satisfy us. He had all of the money, influence, power, knowledge, and experiences that we desire, but satisfaction remained out of his grasp. Into which Jesus speaks:
“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:26).
You can gain the whole world, but what does it matter if you lose your soul?
Jesus speaks those words while calling his disciples to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him. There is a kind of self-preservation that destroys us because we insist on securing our lives apart from the One who gives us life.
Our private Edens offer us a world in which our will is done, but following Jesus means that our will must answer to His. That reaches further than learning to relax or lowering a few expectations. We need mercy for the ways we have used people, distrusted God, and demanded that His gifts take His place. We need a Savior.
Receiving what we cannot build
We don’t need to build a paradise impressive enough to persuade Christ to receive us. What we need is his mercy.
Salvation is God’s gift, received through faith, rather than an accomplishment we can present as grounds for boasting (Ephesians 2:8–10). The good works that follow are part of the life he gives us in Christ.
That leaves no room for treating the people around us as materials for our own salvation project. Our marriages cannot establish our worth before God. Our children cannot justify us. Our churches cannot redeem us. Christ has not assigned them those jobs.
When our Eden (pleasure/delight/paradise) rests in Christ rather than in what we can assemble around ourselves, we can begin to receive those people with gratitude. We can delight in our children without needing them to become little versions of us (one of you is probably enough anyway). We can listen to our spouses without treating every difference as a problem to overcome. We can work for the good of our churches without assuming that every preference we hold carries the authority of God. And where we have hurt people, there is room to admit it, ask forgiveness, and change. The defense of our private Eden no longer has to govern our relationships.
At the end of Scripture, John sees the holy city, Eden, the place of eternal delight and pleasure, coming down out of heaven from God (Revelation 21:1–4). The future delight we long for is something that only God brings about. Until then, we have people to love, work to do, gifts to enjoy, and sins to confess.
And none of it requires us to be God or build our own Eden.
- I personally believe it was written by King Solomon, in part because Ecclessiastes 1:12 says that he was a son of David who ruled over Israel, with combined references to Israel and Jerusalem (after Solomon the kingdom was split, so that one king ruled over Israel in the north, and another king ruled over Judah in the south). ↩︎
- Yeah… the routine is 16 years old, but it still lives rent-free in my head. ↩︎
- NET Bible, Ecclesiastes 2:5, translation notes. The Eden comparison is an interpretation, not an explicit statement of the king’s intention or a claim that pardēs is the Hebrew word used in Genesis 2. ↩︎
- Genesis 2:8-9; 15-17. ↩︎
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, translated by John W. Doberstein, chapter 1, “Community,” p. 27. ↩︎
- Ecclesiastes 2:17–26; especially verses 24–25. ↩︎
