In Ecclesiastes we see a man capacitated to test everything under the sun. He is high and wealthy, endowed with wisdom, and has all under the sun at his disposal and command. And he uses his resources and capabilities, does great work and that of all sorts to find out the good that would satisfy. Nothing that is great or expensive or magnificent is withheld from him. He walks the full and ample range of all human promises, and traffics in all the productions that spring up under the sun.
In the Canticles we see a man that is as it were nobody. He has no memorial on the earth at all. He has nothing and is nothing. He may be an object of the least possible amount in the reckoning of the world. In palaces, and vineyards, and servants, and singers, and instruments, and wisdom, in all this and the like he is poor indeed. It is the contrast that strikes us in these two little writings. The one was king in Jerusalem, the other nobody.
But dissatisfaction attends the one as he travels the wide and rich domain of his kingly earthly resources: deep and unspeakably precious delight and satisfaction is the portion of the other in company with the one unchanging object. The one little ewe lamb does for him what the flocks and the herds of the other never did, never could bring Him.
All that she whom we and in the Canticles possesses is her “Beloved.” But He satisfies her, and it matters not how poor in all besides she may be, it matters not either whence she has Him, so that she has Him. There are the lovely gardens and there are the lofty mountains, there are the shade of the apple tree and the bed, and the vineyard, and withal the king’s galleries. But it is evident throughout that it is Himself that makes her all in all This is the deep contrast. The king in Jerusalem has nothing in the midst of everything, the unnamed, unendowed soul in the Canticles has all in all!
Are the experiences of our souls in the same company with all this? The grief of the one is that everything has disappointed him; the grief of the other is this, that she cannot make as much of her one thing as it deserves, having tasted its capacity to satisfy her. What a difference!
The flocks and the herds, I may again remember, left the rich man unsatisfied, the one little ewe lamb as it lay in his bosom taught the poor man that he wanted nothing else!