Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll – King Solomon’s Pleasure Dome – Ecclesiastes 2:1-11
by David Robertson, theweeflea:
King Solomon’s Pleasure Dome had sex, drugs and money. Why didn’t it work?
Every now and then within the Church, the cry goes up, ‘we need to make the Bible more relevant’. But such a cry is only an indication of misunderstanding the Bible. We don’t need to make it relevant – it already is!
Indeed whenever the Church seeks to make the Bible relevant it always ends up playing catch up with the culture, following it rather than challenging and changing it. This week’s Ecclesiastes passage (2:1-11) looks for example at laughter, pleasure, architecture, gardening, money, rest, stress, wine, women and song. In other words, sex and drugs and rock and roll.
Solomon is trying to work out what is the point of life. Millennia before Freud he tries a bit of Freudian psychoanalysis, working on the assumption that man is just a pleasure seeking animal. So he conducts an experiment. He has the money, the power and the ability to enter the pleasure dome and to see if any of it satisfied him. He was persistent and serious in his pleasure seeking. And in so doing he provides us with a list of what we in the 21st Century also seek to satisfy our thirst.
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