Ecclesiastes 9:4 Commentary and Bible Study

Death is the ultimate tragedy, the final disaster, for the unbeliever. It makes his life an absurdity, and for those who will not listen to the word of God it is utterly without explanation. How can human experience rise so high as to reach conscious life, deep meaningful relationships, wonderful insight into the natural world and the behaviour of human beings, the joy of interacting with a world outside of us, only to lose it all? How can men and women have such deep feelingful appreciation of music and poetry and art, and the refined emotions that they trigger, only to have all these things taken away again and to find ourselves returned to the dust out of which we were made? How did we come to such glory and dignity and yet be unable to hold on to life? What is the meaning of our lives when death so completely reduces them to nothing? There is no meaning at all; our lives might as well never have taken place. It is pitiful to see the contortions that men and women go through in their attempts to reconcile themselves to death, and to pretend that they can be content to die. They tell themselves that death is not the last enemy; it is not the king of terrors, but only part of the normal cycle of events. Who is deceived by this lie? According to Scripture, not many, for it is the common experience of those without Christ to be subject to bondage through fear of death all their lifetime. Even without the judgment that Scripture says must follow, death is the most miserable of endings to a human life that brings an end to all hope. No wonder so many human thinkers have been obsessed with its strangeness. The finality of death overpowers them, and they are swept away without trace. To raise the dead is utterly beyond the power of man, and immortality is a dream which he has wistfully longed for without any prospect of ever attaining.All that Solomon says here is from the perspective of man under the sun. If there is no future life – as seems to be the case judging by what we can see with our eyes alone, for no one has ever come back from the dead and give a report – then, the unbeliever reasons, we have no empirical grounds for believing in an afterlife. If so, then this life is indeed priceless and should be held on to at all cost. While there is life, there is hope, says the unbeliever, for he knows nothing of the hope which is based on the promises of God. Therefore, ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion’. What we have done in our lives, does not count for anything once we are dead. Better to be an ignoble creature with life, than the king of the jungle and dead. We take nothing that we have acquired in this life into the world to come, but must leave all behind. It is no consolation to the unbeliever that he was admired and praised by men, when he is no longer alive to hear that praise. On their evaluation, the only thing that counts is life and hanging on to that life with both hands. This is a reasonable conclusion for unbelief to come to, but what does man learn from it?