Ecclesiastes 1:3 Commentary and Bible Study

The king’s first challenge is this: ‘What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?’ Do we find life fully satisfying without God? It is a searching beginning to the book. Solomon asks us to imagine that we are at the end of life’s journey, looking back across the years. What will we have to show for it all? What will life have achieved for us? What will all the struggle and heartache have gained? Will we have any of the really important things, such as peace of heart, strength of character, and power over sin? Will we have gained any depth of understanding about life? Will we have any standing with God, and any hope beyond the grave? At the end of life we may well be surrounded by material things, such as a home, furniture, car and so on. But what will life have done for us, viewed as living souls? All man’s labour is pointless, for nothing permanent comes from it, nothing that he can keep or truly regard as profitable. Nothing that man gains in this life can be taken with him when he leaves this world and even while he is here it fails to give him the pleasure which he expects. This is a miserable situation because nobody labours and toils without expectation of gain. The hardship of labour is compensated by the gain that follows, but if nothing comes from it then the labourer is wasting his effort. All motivation is undermined. Yet this is the condition of mankind, ever since the curse, for God said to Adam, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ (Genesis 3:19). This is the frustration man now faces in life: that he is compelled to labour to live and yet all that his labour gains is transitory and serves only to preserve his life for a time until that too is taken away. This law of human existence applies not only to the basic struggle for survival but also to any attempt to rise above the humdrum of life and to search out the higher pleasures of this world, any schemes of human endeavour and achievement, knowledge and learning, and the indulgence of the senses. All this also is subject to the same law of vanity, though on this point it is even harder to convince men and women because somehow, each one of us thinks he is an exception to the rule. Solomon adds a most important phrase, ‘under the sun’, used 29 times in the book. The phrase means more than just ‘man in this present world’. It describes the man who lives in a world with nothing above his head but the sun. He is in a world where there is no God and where he must solve all his own problems and find all his own answers.