Wealth as Punishment?

         My attention was snagged today in my ritualistic reading of the book Ecclesiastes by a little gem of a passage that has always nagged at my consciousness, but never really broken through into full-fledged pontificating before this moment:
Ecclesiastes 2:26

"To the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge, and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God."

Now, I'm naturally very wary of Old Testament passages in which sinners/the enemies of God are promised earthly retribution in direct proportion to their evil influence. To me, these promises  ring hollow; evil does not directly correlate with misfortune, nor is faithfulness directly rewarded with prosperity. Case in point: there is a depressing and disturbing cadre of talking heads that has labeled the recent tragedy in Haiti as just and deserved punishment from on high for their past sins; a punishment in the very same vein as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the days of Abraham and Lot. It's all poppycock.
But I digress. This is not to be about the evils perpetrated by humanity in the name of "righteous vengeance," it is about one particular verse in Ecclesiastes and the manner in which it confirms my own intuitive understanding of the way the universe works (what is a blog, after all, if not a public forum for me to congratulate myself on my own ability to ferret out the concealed truths of the universe?)
"to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth." Not "to the sinner he gives earthquakes, fires, and destruction," nor "to the sinner he gives doubt and fears, insecurity and all manner of unrest;" no, to the sinner he gives riches. Fame. Power. All breeds and varieties of "success" as set forth in the Manifest Destiny. If you buy into the words of the Health & Wealth Gospel Goons, the Lord is saying that He will bless the sinner.
Ahh, but there's a catch, isn't there? and it's really quite a doozy. According to the message of the Teacher, Qoheleth, the author of Ecclesiastes, the Lord is not promising blessings, sondern (Ger. "but rather") futility. The fool's life's pursuit, all of his greed and selfishness and who knows what host of unsavory activities may gain him a life of leisure and opulence while on earth, but at the end of der Tag he has accomplished nothing, and all he has will be taken from him and doled out as the Lord sees fit. 
(crap. that pesky H&W crept back in, despite my conscious attempts to avoid it. Sometimes I find myself very peeved at the Old Testament writers.)


Tschuss!