Ecclesiastes Chapter Nine, Vain Effort

Ecclesiastes 9:9 Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life which He has given you under the sun, all your days of vanity; for that is your portion in life, and the labor which you perform under the sun. [10] Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.

The proffered optimism of verses 7 and 8 give way to a brutal reality check in verses 9 and 10. That is why I believe the preacher was exercising satire regarding the prior passage. Combined, the reader is told to enjoy food and drink, make merry, practice pious external religion, and enjoy your marriage, for that is one’s portion from their labor.

But twice in verse 9 we are told in no uncertain terms that it is pointless. We are to “live joyfully” in our marriage “all the days of your vain life…all your days of vanity.” Now the preacher isn’t saying that food, drink, merriment and marriage are all entirely and only useless endeavors. What he is getting at and what genuinely disturbs him is that people give them primacy in their lives, and by putting something fleeting and material into the circle of importance that would intimate its permanence, we have overplayed our hand. Nothing on earth is permanent. We die, marriage ends, food rots, merriment waxes cold. Life lived for the pursuit of what being under the sun offers is vain, futile, pointless, hopeless, injurious even.

So the shining hope of the previous passage dims rapidly, giving way to a sobering pessimism, or fatalism as the preacher reminds his readership that joy found on earth is fleeting and fraught with trouble. What trouble? Well, for one, it is ephemeral. Food and drink sustain the body in the short term, but cannot prevent death. External religious form reflects an earthly mentality because it accords value to external, material action over internal transformation. Christ our Lord informed the woman at the well that God’s worshipers would eventually stop going to this place or that to worship and would shed external, ceremonial formality, worshipping in spirit and truth, John 4:21-24. Were believers left behind sacraments? Yes, but they did not signify formal religious acceptance, or infer grace or salvation by increments. Rather, water baptism and the Lord’s Supper were expressions of our association with Jesus of Nazareth, identifying us to the world as belonging to Him.

Verse 10 advises the readership to put our all into whatever it is we find ourselves doing under the sun. Why? The cold truth is that such work ends with absolute permanence when death finds us, in whatever state we are found. The ESV translates the word, “device,” in this verse as “thought.” The Hebrew word involved is, “cheshbown,” and means, “contrivance, or by implication intelligence.” A simple definition of contrivance is the use of skill to bring something about. So the preacher is adamant that not only work (or labor) will end, our thoughts involving how to accomplish labor will end, our knowledge of what we have accumulated throughout the years will end, and the wisdom in how to properly apply that knowledge to a given situation will end. We as a human being will end; the cessation of physical, temporal existence. In light of this, it is really no wonder why the preacher expressed flippancy concerning the acts and institutions of daily life. Viewing them from the ultimate outcome of human experience (i.e. the grave) he could only find fault and futility.

As he states earlier, one’s love, hate, and envy all perish with us, Ecclesiastes 9:6. Knowing this, he clearly views the grave as an implacable enemy beyond human reckoning or understanding. Even from our youngest years it creeps into our mindset, germinates in our thoughts and can contaminate ideologies. The fear of death is one of mankind’s oldest fears, and is equally one of mankind’s most primal. It is the stark representation of “fear of the unknown.” When only life under the sun exists, then the horrid thought of it ending with a wooden box is mortifying. Sensitive thinkers throughout the ages have wondered what the point was, if this was man’s end. Sadly, some of them precipitated the process by following through on their convictions. 

But if life is nothing more than accumulating events, experience and things until we die and cease existing, can someone be blamed for succumbing to such feelings? Life under the sun makes no apologies to us, and offers no comfort. In fact, the preacher describes the discrimination, oppression and disparity of life so frequently that it seems he would almost accuse it of deliberately being cruel and unfair. But life offers no guidelines on how we are to live. It does have obvious boundaries to the game board, but the best we can surmise from the presentation of life in a panoramic glance is that we are to live to the best of our abilities and assets. Of course that idea, were it taken at face value, is 100% subjective, and likely a strong reason why life under the sun is so cruel and unfair. Men make it so, because we lack a metanarrative to make purpose out of nothing, so a billion, billion, petty gods inject their own limited meaning for purpose in. Sometimes it is kept in check, sometimes ideologies run rampant and overtake countries and cultures. But all such thinking under the sun, whether profound or petty, comes to an end with death and vindicates the preacher’s counsel when he relates, “wickedness will not deliver those who are given to it,” Ecclesiastes 8:8.