Ecclesiastes Chapter Eleven, The Days Of Darkness

Ecclesiastes 11:7 Truly the light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun; [8] But if a man lives many years and rejoices in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. All that is coming is vanity.

What begins now is a litany of morbidity as the preacher goes on to lambast childhood, adulthood, and old age. The passage begins here, however, with a very somber warning. The light that is sweet and pleasant to the eyes happens to be the light of life, the light we enjoy while we are among the living.

The key phrase that tells us this is, “to behold the sun.” Looking back to Ecclesiastes 7:11 we read a similar passage, when the preacher writes, “Wisdom is good with an inheritance, and profitable to those who see the sun (i.e. are alive still).” Verse 7 appears at first blush to be a concession that living can be most enjoyable. But the reader must take this with a grain of salt, since the preacher also went on record, saying, “for a living dog is better than a dead lion,” Ecclesiastes 9:4. The preacher’s perspective about life under the sun, and the value of human life and human purpose is low, to say the least.

It isn’t that the preacher does not consider human life valuable; it’s that nothing about life under the sun suggests a permanence that would lend value to anything that is accomplished. Mankind passes across the world stage briefly, is filled with madness, and passes into darkness, leaving a legacy for others to corrupt and exploit, and then be utterly and finally forgotten. Rinse and repeat, Ecclesiastes 1:4.

Verse 8 delves into the preacher’s typical tone when addressing life under the sun. He offers a hypothetical situation, in which a man lives many years, and enjoys them to boot. He poses a similar query earlier in his letter when he asks, “even if he lives a thousand years twice–but has not seen goodness. Do not all go to one place?” Ecclesiastes 6:6. In that passage the preacher contrasted an unborn baby with a man who lived longer than Methuselah by a long stretch but never experienced genuine good. The unborn baby never entered the world, and thus never experienced its hardships, and therefore was better off for it.

Now the preacher says that should a man live so long and find joy in all of his days, there is still a sobering, contemplative thing to consider. I would daresay it is THE thing to consider. Life ends. These are the days of darkness that the preacher refers to: death and the grave. “For there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going,” Ecclesiastes 9:10. In light of this revelation, it is a gentle euphemism to call the dark days of the grave, “many.” They are, in a certain respect, infinite. Hebrews informs us that it is appointed for man to die only once, and then we enter into judgment, Hebrews 9:27. For the unsaved, when they die, their bodies and souls remain in a state of death, and when they are brought forth to the Great White Throne judgment, they are cast into the Lake of Fire, the Second Death. Hell is not the Second Death; Hell is a holding cell, like a local jail that keeps a prisoner until they are properly sentenced for their crime; then they are transferred to a maximum security prison, the Lake of Fire. Except even the local jail (Hell) will be cast into the Lake of Fire in the end, Revelation 20:14

The preacher’s final comment on this initial portion of his diatribe is that all that is coming is vanity. This is fitting, since he already proclaimed that everything is vanity, Ecclesiastes 1:2. Vanity is the reflection of a wasted life; a life lived for self, whose only lasting legacy is a grave stone and a wooden box as a remaining comment that we ever existed. And after our close kin follow suit and the generation we were part of is swallowed by time, our name will have no emotional attachment; it is writing on stone. Once there was a person. This person is dead now. Move along, next generation, and continue this cycle of cynical hopelessness. It is vain to believe that individually we can inject meaning into life. We artificially substitute meaning on an individual level, but this is nothing better than a placebo effect. If meaning doesn’t reach the universal, or inform some metanarrative for humanity as a race, it is a dangerous, delusional dream. It is, as the preacher states, vanity.