Commentary - Ecclesiastes 6:3-6

Bird's-eye view

The Preacher, Solomon, is continuing his relentless assault on the delusions of fallen man. In this section, he pushes his logic to an extreme, but necessary, conclusion. The world believes that a successful life is measured by its length and its acquisitions, by the number of children and the number of years. But Solomon, speaking by the Spirit, tells us that these are not the things that make a life. God frequently gives men an abundance of external blessings, but withholds the one thing necessary to make them blessings at all, which is the ability to enjoy them. This is a severe mercy, a sore affliction from the Lord, designed to show us that life under the sun, on its own terms, is a dead end. This passage paints a bleak picture, comparing the life of a man who has everything but satisfaction to a stillborn child, and concludes that the stillborn is better off. This is not nihilism; it is the necessary ground-clearing before the Gospel can be seen as the glorious gift that it is.

The core issue here is the difference between having things and enjoying them. The ability to enjoy is a gift, a grace from the sovereign God. Without that gift, a long life is just a long vexation. A hundred children are a hundred heartaches. Solomon is forcing us to ask the right question. We should not be asking, "How can I get more?" but rather, "How can I enjoy what I have?" And the answer to that is not found under the sun. The answer is found in the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, and which is ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ, who came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly.

Outline

Commentary

3If a man becomes the father of one hundred children and lives many years, however many the days of his years may be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things, and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, “Better the miscarriage than he,

The Preacher begins with a thought experiment, and he pushes the variables to the absolute limit. In the economy of the Old Testament, what were the two greatest signs of worldly blessing? A quiver full of sons and a long life. So Solomon says, let us grant a man not just a quiver full, but a hundred children. Let us grant him not just a long life, but "many years," as many as you can imagine. This is the man who has it all, the man who is on the cover of "Israel Success" magazine. He has legacy, he has security, he has longevity. This is the man everyone envies.

But then comes the pivot, the great "but." "But his soul is not satisfied with good things." This is the worm in the apple, the fly in the ointment. He has the good things, but he cannot taste them. He possesses them, but he does not enjoy them. And we must be clear: this ability to enjoy, this satisfaction, is not something a man can work up on his own. It is a gift that must be given. As we have seen earlier in this book, God gives some men wealth and honor, but does not give them the power to eat of it (Eccl. 6:2). This is a sovereign prerogative. It is like having a thousand cans of peaches in your cellar, but no can opener. The man is miserable, not in spite of his blessings, but precisely because of them. The mountain of good things he cannot enjoy serves only as a monument to his own spiritual impotence.

And the final nail in the coffin of this man's meaningless life is that he "does not even have a proper burial." This is the ultimate insult. After a long life, after fathering a hundred children, his end is dishonor. A burial was a profound statement of worth, of belonging, of hope for the future. To be left unburied was to be forgotten, to be cast out like refuse. It signifies that for all his apparent success, his life amounted to nothing. He left no honorable mark. His one hundred children apparently thought so little of him that they did not even bother to put him in the ground properly. His life was a vapor that has now dissipated, leaving behind a bad smell.

Given all this, the Preacher delivers his shocking verdict: "Better the miscarriage than he." The stillborn child is in a better state than this man. This is not to devalue life, but rather to show the utter horror of a life lived without God-given joy. The misery of a long, unsatisfied life is a far greater evil than the tragedy of a life that never drew breath.

4for that one comes in vanity and goes into darkness; and that one’s name is covered in darkness.

Now Solomon explains his reasoning. Why is the stillborn child better off? He says that the miscarriage "comes in vanity." The word is hebel, smoke, vapor, a puff of wind. The stillborn's existence is fleeting, a brief and sorrowful event. It "goes into darkness," and its "name is covered in darkness." There is no remembrance. No one names a street after the stillborn. It is a private grief that is soon covered over by the continuing march of life.

And this is a great tragedy. But the Preacher's point is that the man who lived many years and had a hundred children, yet had no satisfaction, ends in the very same place. His life, for all its apparent substance, was also hebel. It was just a much longer, slower, more drawn-out puff of smoke. He too goes into darkness, and his lack of a burial means his name is also covered in darkness. The end is the same. The only difference is that the man with everything had to endure eighty or ninety years of vexation and striving to get to the same point of oblivion the stillborn reached immediately.

5Indeed, that one never sees the sun and never knows anything; that one has more rest than he.

The comparison continues. The stillborn "never sees the sun." Life "under the sun" is the Preacher's phrase for this world of toil, repetition, and vanity. The stillborn is spared all of this. He "never knows anything" of the rat race, the striving, the envy, the disappointment. And because of this, the Preacher concludes, "that one has more rest than he."

The man with a hundred children knew no rest. His soul was never satisfied. He was in a constant state of agitated acquisition, always seeking the next thing that he hoped would finally fill the void, but which never did. His life was one of turmoil. The stillborn, by contrast, has a kind of negative peace, a rest from all this striving. It is the rest of non-participation. Again, this is not the ultimate good, not the "peace that passes understanding" that believers have in Christ. But it is better than a long life of torment. A quiet non-existence is preferable to a noisy, miserable one.

6Even if the other man lives one thousand years twice and does not see good things, do not all go to the same place?”

Here Solomon brings it all home. He doubles down on the hyperbole. Forget a long life, what about a ridiculously long life? Two thousand years. Let a man live twice as long as Methuselah. But if in all that time he "does not see good things", which is to say, if God does not grant him the gift of enjoyment, the grace of satisfaction, what is the point? The sheer quantity of years is meaningless.

Because, as he asks rhetorically, "do not all go to the same place?" That place is Sheol, the grave, the dust. Death is the great equalizer. The man who lives two thousand years in misery and the baby who lives for two minutes in the womb both end up as dust. Without God, death renders every life, long or short, successful or failed, utterly futile. It all comes to nothing.

This is the black velvet background against which the diamond of the Gospel shines. The Preacher has systematically stripped away every false hope that man clings to under the sun: wisdom, pleasure, wealth, legacy, longevity. It is all smoke. And when we are left with nothing, we are finally ready to receive everything. For into this world of darkness and death, Jesus Christ came. He is the one who gives the gift of satisfaction. He is the one who gives us the "can opener" for all of God's good gifts. Because He went to "the same place," the grave, and broke its power, our lives are no longer defined by their end in the dust. In Him, our labor is not in vain. In Him, we can eat our bread with joy and drink our wine with a merry heart, because God has already accepted our works in the beloved Son. He is the one who gives rest to the restless, and He is the one who gives a name that will never be covered in darkness.

Application

The central application for us is to check our own spiritual taste buds. It is possible for a Christian to be blessed with a good job, a wonderful family, a sound church, and yet have a soul that is not satisfied. We can fall into the trap of thinking that the blessings themselves are the point. They are not. The point is the Giver, and the gift of enjoying those blessings in Him.

If you find yourself in a place of dissatisfaction, the answer is not to rearrange the externals. The answer is to repent of the ingratitude that is blinding you to the goodness of God. The answer is to confess your sin of trying to find ultimate satisfaction in the created thing rather than the Creator. Ask God, as a sheer gift of His grace, to open your eyes to "see good."

And we must remember that the only way we can truly enjoy this life is to hold it loosely. This world, with all its joys and sorrows, is passing away. Our hope is not in a long life here, but in eternal life with Christ. When we are secure in that hope, we are finally free to enjoy the fleeting vanities of this life as what they are: gifts from a loving Father, to be received with thanksgiving, but never to be made the foundation of our joy.