Ecclesiastes Chapter Three, God Makes Life Beautiful

Ecclesiastes 3:9 What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? [10] I have seen the God given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. [11] He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

Verse 9, while being a rhetorical question, is also a reiteration of the preacher’s thoughts. This thread began to be woven through the narrative beginning with Ecclesiastes 1:3. Thematically, then, profit and labor are two subjects with which the preacher is deeply and personally concerned.

And why not? Mankind, since ancient times, has sought profit from what we accomplish. Accomplishment itself is profitable in a certain sense; it reveals that we can do something we formerly had not, and perhaps thought we could not. But undergirding this is the sincere and searching inquiry as to what benefit mankind receives from his labor. Few labored more than Solomon in his forty year reign as king. His accomplishments were monumental and brought to him great satisfaction. Until, it would seem, that dotage caused reflection and temporal or material transactions took on an ephemeral value. Worse, another would warp or mutate his sundry accomplishments into perhaps something unrecognizable.

A smaller and more recent demonstration might be the Walt Disney company. The man Walt Disney (1901-1966) was said to be many things, but appeared largely a man of traditional values. During Walt’s time and decades after, his company by and large honored the man by producing films that were constrained in what would be considered normative, traditional ideology. But little by little as success increased and ambitions with it, the company began championing values entirely at odds with what it once represented in the eyes of many parents and families. The safe values Disney once vouchsafed were missing, and in their place was a new ideology that seemed designed to rewrite the country’s cultural perspective beginning with childhood. Walt might, were he alive now, look upon his once great ambition realized and lament about the direction taken.

Verse 10 is a call back to the earlier section of his letter once more: “And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven; this burdensome task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised,” Ecclesiastes 1:13. Now the preacher ascribes occupation with labor. Mankind is occupied with all they engage in, and the preacher was no exception. Funnily, the preacher refers to this occupation in the singular. The Tanakh translates “Occupation” as “business.” On a more interesting note, the Septuagint renders the verse, “I have seen all the trouble, which God has given to the sons of men to be troubled with.” The preacher claims insight into this phenomenon, the occupation or trouble God endowed humanity with. This trouble began with our first parents in Eden, when God said to Adam, “Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life…in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground,” Genesis 3:17, 19.

God has set labor before us as a legitimate occupation. Yes, many (and occasionally all) find labor vexing, but that vexation can arise from a hundred sources apart from the nature of the work itself. But work is not evil. Labor is not, of itself, vexing. God designed mankind to work, and work they did even before the Fall brought sin into creation and blighted our race. Work, like all things sin touches, is warped now and mankind views it exploitatively. Either we exploit work to gain advantage, or work exploits us and we feel oppressed or disregarded. Yet the apostle warned, “If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat,” 2 Thessalonians 3:10. This command is a truncated excerpt from Genesis when God told Adam that by hard work, or the sweat of his brow, he would produce the bread he needed to survive.