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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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Ecclesiastes 6:5
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He further presses this shocking conclusion. It is better never to have been born, never to have seen the sun, than to have lived to experience a life of vanity, of empty hopes that come to nothing. Both end up with nothing, but the one who has seen life, has along the way suffered the delusion of thinking that he had something when he had nothing. It is the vanity of that false expectation that Solomon is focusing on.He is not making any theological comment on what happens to the child who dies before having come into the world or whether that child goes to heaven or hell. That question is not answered by this verse for the argument is from the perspective of what can be seen by those who are ‘under the sun’.The stillborn has more rest or quietness than the other because it is not disturbed by the prospect of illusory gains and caused to stretch out for something that will slip from its grasp. In saying this, Solomon is measuring life by the worldling’s own standards, but forcing him to face up to the reality of the situation instead of romanticising about life.
Application
If we want to know the truth about life, let us stop telling ourselves pretty stories about life’s successes, and start to measure things according to the way God sees them. He does not set any store by a life where men pull down their barns to build bigger, in order to house their bumper crops. But he requires that life at the most inconvenient moment, at a moment that contradicts their success story. ‘The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked’ (Isaiah 57:20-21).
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