It’s easy to imagine the moment King Solomon – while sitting amid his beautiful parks and gardens – suddenly realized all his riches and accomplishments would eventually crumble to rubble. His paradise. The First Temple. National wealth. Indeed, all the grandeur he accumulated was ultimately decimated by Babylonian conquest.

Solomon surmised that “all the deeds that are done under the sun … all is vanity and a chasing after wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). They were vanity because they had no lasting power.

Things haven’t changed. Today, we’re constantly redirected to material comforts and marketing campaigns, often bolstered by celebrities who want nothing more than to lasso our attention and pocketbooks, often at the expense of virtually everything else. Who needs love when Tinder offers a town square for hooking up? Who needs patience when students can just AI their way to a passing grade? Who needs self-control when calorie-dense meals are available at a drive-through window?

Yet our desire for and attainment of material wealth will end no differently than it did for Solomon.

Consider just one example. Fortune recently reported that Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said that those who don’t invest in AI glasses in the future are likely to find themselves at a “pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people and who you’re working with, or competing against.” Meta’s Ray-Bans price currently stands at $299.

Whether this is an overt bid to wrench money out of Americans’ pockets for an item that will be outmoded in a matter of months, or whether Zuckerberg really believes what he’s saying, it’s difficult to tell. But one thing is certain: Americans will go into debt to obtain these glasses. Our culture has placed a premium on things – especially those we cannot afford. Many of us know, that seeking contentment and happiness by material means is futile, yet we still hand over our credit cards for the latest product. This tension between what we know and what we do, I’d wager, reveals the juggernaut-like power of crass materialism.

Roughly a quarter of Americans who own a credit card don’t think they’ll ever pay off their balance. In other words, a significant number of Americans consistently purchase items they cannot afford. The natural conclusion is that millions of Americans would rather be beholden to lenders and spiritually bankrupt than be left out of what’s fashionable and relevant in the moment.

Solomon had every material possession he could’ve ever wanted, but it was wisdom, that hard-to-define spiritual quality, which opened his eyes to the depreciating value of material wealth.

Novelist David Foster Wallace, during his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, said:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

Millions of Americans worship things. Thus, they will always strive in vain. No material possession can ever meaningfully quench our thirst for meaning or purpose.

What we need is not more things, but a revival of a consciousness of God. We must acknowledge that He’s there, while also living a life that reflects such consciousness.

“Men have not merely forgotten God but they have lost all consciousness of His existence,” early 20th century scholar Adolf Ernst Knoch wrote. The path to contentment, to lasting happiness, and to a meaningful spiritual life leads us backward to what we’ve left behind, what we’ve forgotten, rather than forward to the advent of the latest gadget.

“The consciousness of God is my most precious possession,” Knoch went on to write. “It supports me in my trials and tempers my success.” This sentiment falls in line with Wallace’s clever observation, which is that a spiritual life – especially one led by God – outshines and outlives all else.

Thus, as we progress through the Christmas season, I invite you to consider, as Solomon did – sitting comfortably in the midst of the paradise of his kingdom – that the material world, with all its appeal and shimmer, has an expiration date.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Pixnio