Ecclesiastes 1:4 Commentary and Bible Study

Solomon then switches to a fresh argument. Life without God is not only futile, but boringly predictable and mechanistic. He says that if we live a purely ‘physical’ life (destitute of spiritual life) we shall be conformed to physical cycles. Viewed spiritually, we shall be no different from plants or animals. Generations come and go, he reminds us, and the sad story of all who are spiritually dead will be – they lived; they died! What is interesting about that? What ultimate hope or value is there in that? Without a spiritual dimension, he says, life is like the sun, which (viewed from Earth) follows inevitable, repetitive cycles. It will obey the same course next week and the week afterwards. This will go on for years, and for as long as the sun endures.Life without God is a mere routine. You put a cabbage seed in the ground and it grows. Soon it shoots up, reaches full size, is plucked, put in a saucepan, boiled and eaten. It is the same with you, says this preacher. Life is all so vain and inevitable. What mark does a single human life make on the world, what difference does it make? Indeed, what mark does a whole generation make? One generation passes from the scene and is replaced entirely by another. For the most part there is little remembrance of those who went before. We know the names of those who were closest to us; historians know a few more, but the rest are forgotten. We cannot go and meet them for they are beyond our reach and where they are, we are afraid to follow. It is effectively as if the slate has been wiped clean and the earth repopulated. And this cycle goes on again and again. The next generation approaches life with all the same enthusiasm and eagerness as the previous generation, almost as if it did not see what happened to the last generation and what it knows must also happen to itself. But the earth goes on standing; the same earth hosts the next generation and so many of the same experiences are repeated. The next generation seems to act as if it believes itself immune from the processes that removed the last. Life is appallingly transient and therefore futile and the contrast between the impermanence of the generations and the seeming permanence of the earth only emphasises this. The earth appears to care nothing for those who have been removed; it owes them nothing. These facts must be set against man’s confidence that he is making progress and bringing about change for the better, improving the world all the time. Will this generation which thinks so highly of itself be any different to past generations?