Ecclesiastes 4:3 Commentary and Bible Study

If it is better to have passed through this vain world and to have been removed from it by death, it is better still never to have come into it in the first place. This extreme pessimistic conclusion says in effect that life is worthless. How can Solomon have reached such a conclusion? Isn’t life the greatest gift that anyone can receive? He speaks however not for himself but for those who have no belief in God and can see no higher purpose in life than what each day brings. It is life from the perspective of those who have worshipped and served this world and its pleasures in the belief that this is all there is. For these who have no hope beyond the grave and have never known God’s gift of eternal life, life is so full of vanity that it is better never to have been born. Although Christ says the same about Judas, the point there is very different. Our Lord declared that it was better that Judas had never been born than that he should have come into the world and committed such a betrayal of the incarnate Son of God. He said this because of the certain judgment that was to follow, but Solomon’s evaluation of life is not based on any recompense that men face after this life but solely on the basis of life itself. Even without the prospect of hell, life is intolerable because the world is filled with oppression and purposelessness.To see all the evil that is done under the sun is to view a scene that crushes the human spirit. People tend to start out on life with much optimism at what it has in store for them, but as time goes on optimism so often gives way to cynicism. It is a world of painful disappointment which does not deliver what it promises. This is closer to Job’s thought, ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. … Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck?’ (Job 3:3-12).