Solomon, a king of Israel, enjoyed wealth and splendor with unparalleled wisdom that was given by God. However, He wrote that his life was filled with emptiness, saying "Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless" in the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 1 verse 2. And he specifically described theat those who seek physical pleasure would end up being in emptiness on the next chapter.
Solomon said that he decided to live happily that led to nothing, which was meaningless. He deeply considered how to make himself happy with drinking alcohol. People drink alcohol when good things happen, to increase their happy mood. On the contrary, they also drink when sad or painful things happen, to forget their sadness.
We should be delighted by what we deserve. But if we enjoy ourselves with alcohol being out of clear minds, we won’t be different from those who got hallucinated by drugs. Why do the drug takers continue looking for drugs? They want to escape from the reality which is uneasy and distressing, getting into hallucination through drugs and enjoy physical pleasures that are not real. Once they get addicted to drugs, they go looking for it whenever they run out of energy from the drug. When the drug gets effective on their body, they feel better for a instant moment. When the drug’s energy gets off, they feel extreme anxiety and get distressed.
Just like getting hallucinated by drugs, you feel good when you enjoy the bodily pleasure. However, the suffering that comes afterwards is worse than you think. The life that seeks the pleasure is followed by huge regret and emptiness. In the end, it leads your life to destruction. If you live with pleasure and worldly desire without turning back to God until end of your lives, you will fall into hell and suffer pain,uncomparable to the suffering you had on earth. Therefore, you should not seek for meaningless things such as alcohol or drugs which will surely destroy your lives.
Pastor Seok-Jeon Yoon
Extracted from Yonsei Newspaper #849
