Commentary - Ecclesiastes 9:1-6

Bird's-eye view

The Preacher, having surveyed the maddening injustices of life "under the sun," now brings his thoughts to a preliminary conclusion. This section is one of the most brutally honest assessments of the fallen world found anywhere in Scripture. At first glance, it appears to flirt with a bleak nihilism, but that is only if you read it with modern, secular eyes. What Solomon is actually doing is dismantling every false hope that men build for themselves apart from God. He begins by affirming the absolute sovereignty of God, the righteous, the wise, and all their works are in His hand. But this sovereignty is inscrutable from our vantage point. We cannot deduce God's love or hatred from our circumstances. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, and the grave receives both. This common fate, this shared biological destiny, is the great leveler. Solomon calls this reality an "evil," a frustration, a vanity. But this is not his final word. It is the necessary demolition work that must be done before the true foundation can be laid, which is to fear God and keep His commandments in the face of this apparent meaninglessness.

The central thrust here is to force the reader to abandon the project of finding ultimate meaning in the observable world. If you try to make sense of life based only on what you can see, you will conclude that it is a mad, unjust scramble that ends in the dirt. The righteous man dies, the wicked man dies. The zealous man perishes, and his zeal dies with him. From a purely horizontal perspective, death wins. This is the truth, but it is not the whole truth. Solomon is rubbing our noses in the vanity of a world divorced from revelation precisely so that we will be driven to seek our hope, our joy, and our meaning from the God who stands above the sun, and who has revealed Himself in His Word.

Outline

Context In Ecclesiastes

This passage is the culmination of the argument Solomon has been building since the beginning of the book. He has explored wisdom, pleasure, wealth, and toil, and found them all to be "vanity" when pursued as ultimate ends (Eccl 1-2). He has affirmed God's sovereign timing in all things, which makes human striving seem futile (Eccl 3). He has lamented the oppression and injustice that run rampant in the world, where the tears of the oppressed seem to go unanswered (Eccl 4). He has warned against empty religion (Eccl 5). In chapter 8, he wrestled with the fact that wicked men often prosper while righteous men suffer, a great "vanity" that happens on the earth (Eccl 8:14). Chapter 9:1-6 is the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning. If justice is not visibly and consistently meted out in this life, and if death is the universal end for everyone, then any attempt to build a coherent worldview based solely on empirical observation is doomed to fail. This section sets the stage for the Preacher's ultimate answer, which is not to solve the riddle, but to live faithfully and joyfully before the God who holds the solution in His hand.

Key Issues

The Great Leveler

One of the central themes of Ecclesiastes is that of a common fate. In our pride, we want to believe that our righteousness, our wisdom, or our piety ought to purchase for us a different outcome in this life. We think that if we are good, we should get good things, and if others are bad, they should get bad things, and we should be able to see it all unfold in real time. But the Preacher tells us this is not how the world works. A car wreck can kill a godly pastor just as easily as it can kill a blaspheming drunk. Cancer does not check your theological commitments before it metastasizes. The grave opens its mouth for the clean and the unclean alike.

This reality is what Solomon calls "an evil in all that is done under the sun." It is a frustration, a part of the curse. But for the believer, this leveling reality is not a cause for despair, but a catalyst for faith. It forces us to look beyond the horizon of this life for ultimate justice and reward. It strips away our self-righteousness, which wants to be vindicated here and now. It makes us long for the resurrection, when the distinctions that are so often blurred in this life will be made stark and clear for all eternity. Death is the great leveler in this age, but the final judgment will be the great separator in the age to come.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1 For I have given all this to my heart and explain it that righteous men, wise men, and their service are in the hand of God. Man does not know whether it will be love or hatred; anything may be before him.

The Preacher begins with a foundational statement of faith, a truth received by revelation, not by observation. The righteous, the wise, and all they do are in the hand of God. This is the bedrock of Reformed theology: absolute divine sovereignty. Nothing escapes His control; no one can be snatched from His hand (John 10:28). This is a profound comfort. However, Solomon immediately places this comfort alongside a hard reality. From our vantage point, looking at the circumstances of life, we cannot discern whether we are experiencing God's favor (love) or His displeasure (hatred). The righteous man loses his job, and the wicked man gets a promotion. The godly woman is barren, while the promiscuous woman has children with ease. You cannot read God's secret decrees by looking at your outward circumstances. Providence is a book written in a language we cannot decipher, and to try to do so is to invite madness.

2 It is the same for all. There is one fate for the righteous and for the wicked; for the good, for the clean and for the unclean; for the man who offers a sacrifice and for the one who does not sacrifice. As the good man is, so is the sinner; as the swearer is, so is the one who is afraid to swear.

Here is the great frustration. He lays out a series of parallel pairs, covering the moral, ceremonial, and devotional aspects of life. The righteous and the wicked, the ceremonially clean and unclean, the pious worshiper and the profane non-worshiper, they all end up in the same place. Death. He drives the point home with two final examples: the good man and the sinner, the man who swears oaths casually and the one who fears God and is careful with his speech. In the grand scheme of things "under the sun," it all comes to nothing. The final heartbeat is the same for all of them. This is not a denial of ultimate justice, but a stark admission that this justice is not fully and finally executed in this life. If your hope is for a neat and tidy moral accounting on this side of the grave, you are going to be sorely disappointed.

3 This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all. Furthermore, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts throughout their lives. Afterwards they go to the dead.

Solomon names this reality: it is an evil. It is a grievous frustration, a key component of the vanity of this fallen world. The fact that there is one earthly fate for all encourages the wicked and perplexes the righteous. And what is the result of this state of affairs? Because judgment is not executed speedily (Eccl 8:11), the hearts of men are fully set to do evil. They live their lives in a state of madness, chasing after the wind, assuming that since everyone dies, nothing ultimately matters. They live like practical atheists, and their lives are a frantic, insane dance that ends abruptly. And then? Afterwards they go to the dead. The music stops, the lights go out, and the party is over.

4 For whoever is joined with all the living, there is confidence; surely a live dog is better than a dead lion.

Having established the bleak reality of death, the Preacher now pivots to the one advantage we have on this side of it: life itself. As long as a person is alive, there is confidence, or hope. Hope for what? Hope for repentance, hope for joy, hope for another meal. The proverb he uses is striking. A dog in the ancient world was a despised, scavenging creature. A lion was the epitome of strength and majesty. But a living, breathing, mangy dog is better off than a dead, magnificent lion. Why? Because the dog still has life. The lion has nothing. This is a call to seize the day, not in a hedonistic sense, but in the sense of recognizing the gift of life while you still possess it. Whatever your station, however low, it is better than being in the grave.

5 For the living know they will die; but the dead do not know anything, nor have they any longer a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.

The advantage of the living is a conscious one. We know one thing for certain: we will die. This knowledge should shape how we live. The dead, by contrast, know nothing of what happens here on earth. From the perspective of this world, their story is over. They receive no further reward under the sun. Their work is done, their wages paid. And the ultimate insult, the memory of them is forgotten. Generations come and go, and even the greatest of men are eventually just names in a book, if that. This is a brutal demolition of the pagan hope for immortality through fame or legacy.

6 Indeed their love, their hate, and their zeal have already perished, and they will never again have a portion in all that is done under the sun.

Solomon personifies the strongest human emotions and passions: love, hate, and zeal. These things drive the entire human drama. They are the stuff of epics, the cause of wars and the foundation of families. But in death, they are extinguished. They have already perished. The moment a man dies, all his earthly ambitions, his rivalries, his affections, his causes, they cease to have any relevance to the ongoing story of the world. He will never again have a portion in anything done under the sun. This is the absolute finality of death from a horizontal, earthly perspective. The Preacher is shutting every door of false hope so that we will be forced to knock on the only one that opens into eternity.

Application

So what are we to do with such a bleak passage? First, we must embrace its realism. Christianity is not a sentimental religion that puts a happy gloss on a tragic world. It looks the curse square in the eye and calls it what it is: an evil. We should not be surprised when life is unfair, when the wicked prosper, or when godly people suffer. This is the normal state of affairs in a fallen world.

Second, this passage should demolish our pride and self-reliance. All our striving, our wisdom, our piety, cannot save us from the grave. We are not in control. All our works are in the hand of a sovereign God, and we must learn to trust His character, not our ability to interpret His providence. Our hope is not in a better life here, but in the life to come.

Third, and most importantly, we must read this passage through the lens of the gospel. There was one righteous man, Jesus Christ, who did not have the same fate as the wicked. Though He died and was laid in the grave, the grave could not hold Him. He broke the curse of death. Because of His resurrection, we know that death is not the final word for those who are in Him. For the unbeliever, this passage is a terrifying dead end. For the believer, it is a description of the world from which Christ has rescued us. We still experience the common frustrations of life under the sun, but we do so with a profound hope. Our love, our hate for sin, and our zeal for God's kingdom do not perish in the dust. They are seeds planted in this life that will bear fruit in the new heavens and the new earth. Therefore, because we know that our labor in the Lord is not in vain (1 Cor 15:58), we can obey the Preacher's subsequent command: go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart (Eccl 9:7).