The Unread Report Card: Text: Ecclesiastes 9:1-6
Introduction: The World As It Is
We live in an age of profound sentimentalism. Our Christianity is often a therapeutic exercise, designed to make us feel better about ourselves, to soothe our anxieties, and to assure us that God is a celestial grandfather whose primary job is to dispense blessings and affirm our life choices. We want a God who is manageable, predictable, and, above all, nice. Into this syrupy fog, the book of Ecclesiastes lands like a chunk of granite dropped from a great height.
The Preacher, Qoheleth, is a realist. He is not a cynic, and he is certainly not a nihilist. He is a man with his eyes wide open to the world as it actually is, this side of the fall, this side of Eden. He insists that we look at life "under the sun," which is to say, life as we experience it in its raw, often brutal, and perplexing reality. He wants us to stare into the abyss of what life would be if this life were all there is. He does this not to drive us to despair, but to drive us out of our flimsy shelters of self-deception and into the fortress of the fear of the Lord.
This passage is one of the hardest in a book full of hard sayings. It confronts our deep-seated belief that the universe ought to be fair on our terms. We want a system where the good guys get good things and the bad guys get bad things, and we want to see the ledger balanced before we go to bed at night. But the Preacher tells us that from our vantage point, the world simply does not work that way. There is a common fate. The righteous and the wicked, the clean and the unclean, all march toward the same black door. This is an offense to our modern sensibilities, but it is the necessary groundwork for the gospel. If you do not first understand the bleakness of the diagnosis, you will never appreciate the radical glory of the cure.
The Preacher is not telling us that there is no ultimate justice. He is telling us that we cannot read the tea leaves of our circumstances to determine God's pleasure or displeasure. The universe is not a divine report card that we can check for our grade. It is a stage upon which the absolute sovereignty of God is displayed, often in ways that are utterly inscrutable to us. And it is in grappling with this inscrutability that faith is forged.
The Text
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.
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.
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.
For whoever is joined with all the living, there is confidence; surely a live dog is better than a dead lion.
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.
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.
(Ecclesiastes 9:1-6 LSB)
In the Hand of an Unreadable God (v. 1)
The Preacher begins with a foundational statement of God's absolute sovereignty, immediately followed by a statement of our profound ignorance.
"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." (Ecclesiastes 9:1)
Everything, and everyone, is "in the hand of God." This is not the language of a distant, deistic clockmaker. This is the language of meticulous, sovereign control. The righteous, the wise, and all their works are not just observed by God; they are held, governed, and directed by Him. This should be a comfort, and it is, but it is a rugged, masculine comfort, not a soft, sentimental one. It is the comfort of knowing the one who holds you is infinitely powerful, not that He is infinitely predictable.
Because the very next thing we are told is that despite being in God's hand, we cannot discern His disposition toward us from our circumstances. "Man does not know whether it will be love or hatred." A righteous man's business might fail while a scoundrel's thrives. A godly woman might suffer from a long illness while her godless neighbor enjoys perfect health. From the outside, looking at the raw data of life under the sun, you cannot tell who is who. You cannot look at your life's circumstances and conclude, "Ah, God must love me today," or "God must hate me today." This is a direct assault on every form of the prosperity gospel and its ugly cousin, the poverty gospel. God is not training you like a dog, giving you a treat for good behavior and whacking you with a newspaper for bad. He is your Father, and His purposes are far deeper and more mysterious than that.
The book of Job is the feature-length film of this very verse. Job was a righteous man, yet he received what looked like hatred from the hand of God. His friends were theologians of the "report card" school, and they were dead wrong. They tried to reason backward from the suffering to the sin, and God rebuked them for it. Faith is not the ability to connect the dots of our circumstances into a picture that makes sense to us. Faith is the ability to trust the Artist when the canvas looks like a chaotic mess.
The Great Equalizer (v. 2-3a)
The Preacher then drives his point home by pointing to the one event that seems to mock all earthly distinctions: death.
"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... This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all." (Ecclesiastes 9:2-3a)
He piles up the categories to leave no room for escape. It doesn't matter if you are righteous or wicked, ceremonially clean or unclean, a faithful worshipper or a pagan. The grave waits for you all. The hearse does not ask for your spiritual resume before it comes for you. This common fate, he says, is an "evil." He means it is a grievous, vexing reality from our human perspective. It seems to render all our moral striving meaningless. Why bother being good if you end up in the same place as the scoundrel? Why be faithful when the faithless get the same six feet of dirt?
This is the horizontal perspective, and it is true as far as it goes. If you limit your view to what happens under the sun, this conclusion is inescapable. All human stories, from the noblest to the most vile, end with a period. This is the great problem that every worldview must answer. The materialist simply bites the bullet and says, "That's just how it is. We are all just cosmic accidents that blink out of existence." But this is a counsel of despair. The Preacher lays out the problem so starkly because he wants us to feel the weight of it. He wants us to see that if there is no God who judges, no resurrection, no life beyond the sun, then all our talk of justice and meaning is just whistling past the graveyard.
The Diagnosis of Madness (v. 3b)
After describing the external problem, the Preacher turns to the internal one. The world is vexing, and our hearts are mad.
"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." (Ecclesiastes 9:3b)
Here is the doctrine of total depravity in a nutshell. The fundamental problem is not just that the world is broken; the problem is that we are. Our hearts are not just slightly bent or misguided; they are "full of evil." And the manifestation of this evil is "madness." This is not primarily a clinical diagnosis but a spiritual one. What is the nature of this madness? It is the insanity of living as though God does not exist, or as if He does not matter. It is the madness of chasing the wind, of building our lives on things that will be forgotten the day after our funeral. It is the madness of shaking our fist at the heavens because the world doesn't conform to our standards of fairness, all while ignoring the plank in our own eye.
And this madness characterizes our entire lives, right up to the end. "Afterwards they go to the dead." The madness of a godless life is followed by the silence of a godless death. There is no escape within the system. You cannot pull yourself up by your own moral bootstraps because your heart is full of evil. You cannot reason your way out of the problem because your mind is full of madness. The human condition, viewed from under the sun, is utterly hopeless.
The Bleak Consolation of Being Alive (v. 4-6)
The Preacher then offers the only consolation possible from a purely materialistic, under-the-sun perspective. It is better to be alive than dead, but that is not saying much.
"For whoever is joined with all the living, there is confidence; surely a live dog is better than a dead lion. 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. 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." (Ecclesiastes 9:4-6)
If this life is all there is, then existence, no matter how lowly, is preferable to non-existence. A living dog, a scavenger, is better off than a dead lion, the king of beasts. Why? Because the living at least have consciousness. They have one piece of knowledge the dead do not: "the living know they will die." But that is the extent of their advantage. The dead, by contrast, "do not know anything." Sheol, in this context, is the place of silence, of forgetting, where all human projects, passions, and rivalries cease. Love, hate, zeal, it all evaporates. Your "portion," your share in all the activity under the sun, is gone forever.
This is a brutally honest description of death as seen by the natural man. This is the worldview of the atheist. There is no reward, no memory, no continuing consciousness. It is the great nullification. The Preacher is holding this up to us and asking, "Is this it? Is this the final word?" He paints the bleakest possible picture to show us the absolute necessity of a word from "above the sun." He is demolishing every false hope so that we might be ready for the only true hope.
The Gospel Above the Sun
So where does this leave us? It leaves us at the foot of the cross. This entire passage is a magnificent piece of pre-evangelism. It shows us the world without Christ, a world where all hands, righteous and wicked, are held in the hand of an inscrutable God, heading for a common, silent fate.
But in the gospel, everything is turned on its head. In Jesus Christ, the inscrutable God has made Himself known. The question of whether God's disposition is love or hatred is answered definitively at Calvary. "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). God took the one truly Righteous Man, His own Son, and put Him in the place of the wicked. Jesus experienced the fate that we deserved. He went to the dead. He was forgotten in the grave.
But that was not the final word. On the third day, He rose again, shattering the "one fate for all." He broke the power of Sheol and brought life and immortality to light. Because of His resurrection, the grave is no longer the great equalizer; it is merely a doorway. For the believer, death is not the end of our portion; it is the beginning of our inheritance.
The madness in our hearts is healed by the mind of Christ. The evil in our hearts is cleansed by the blood of Christ. And the vanity of life under the sun is transformed into a theater of God's glory. The Preacher is not telling us to despair. He is telling us to stop looking for ultimate answers in the wrong place. Stop trying to read your circumstances. Read the Word. Stop trusting your own righteousness. Trust in the righteousness of Christ. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, because it is the only thing that can make sense of a world where live dogs are better than dead lions. For in Christ, even the dead lions will live again.