As I have posted recently, every sin and every personal or relational problem in our lives can be traced back to idolatry. That is, we are trusting in and loving something in the created order more than we trust in or love the Creator. But this is foolishness to the core. Nothing in this created order can promise, "I will never leave you or forsake you."
Hence, it is good and wise of our Heavenly Father to strip us of trusting in the creation rather than Him, the Creator. As Ecclesiastes teaches us, those who do not fear God will not be satisfied by anything (Ecc 6:1-6). There is no satisfaction to be found in wisdom (1:17), construction projects (2:4), gardens (2:5), irrigation (2:6), slaves (2:7), treasures, entertainers, concubines (2:8), toil (2:18-23), oppressions, death, skill (4:1-4), solitude (4:7-8), unmerited exaltation to kingship (4:13-16), or money (5:9-16)).
As Jim Hamilton writes in his God's Glory in Salvation Through Judgment (p. 320),Ecclesiastes reveals and reminds of the vanity of the pursuit of pleasure divorced from the knowledge of God.
In this regard, I came across this penetrating statement by C.S. Lewis on the vanity of trusting in "things" rather than God. Lewis writes:
It is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) ‘having to depend solely on God’ is what we all dread most. And of course that just shows how very much, how almost exclusively, we have been depending on things. But trouble goes so far back in our lives and is now so deeply ingrained, we will not turn to him as long as he leaves us anything else to turn to. I suppose all one can say is that it was bound to come. In the hour of death and the day of judgment, what else shall we have? Perhaps when those moments come, they will feel happiest who have been forced (however unwittingly) to begin practicing it here on earth. It is good of him to force us; but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time.
C. S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady (Grand Rapids, 1967), page 47
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