Ecclesiastes 9:5 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Ecclesiastes 9:5

Comments

These words will not make sense if we try to interpret them from a Christian perspective. Solomon is of course choosing to see life from the point of view of the man without God. His purpose is to present the world which the unbeliever creates for himself when he denies that there is a God. All that he is left with is a brief, transient life and this must satisfy him entirely, because it is all he has. There is for him no afterlife, no hope beyond what can be known here; there is no future reward and no future punishment. All is now.If so, then to be conscious is better, even if the only thing we are conscious of is that we are soon going to be unconscious, that we are soon going to die. Viewed from this most basic level, human life has this one advantage over inanimate matter. We might understand Solomon to be saying, ‘Repent while you have the chance.’ This would be a good application of his words but it is not his primary meaning. He is simply pointing to the purposelessness of the life lived only for this world. He is deliberately leaving out of the picture anything said by God’s word and limiting his outlook to what carnal man can see. From his own perspective man under the sun must conclude that life is pointless and hopeless.

Application

How miserable and bereft are all human explanations of life, when God’s revelation is set aside. What can man understand about anything if he rejects what God has to say to him. The mysteries of life are too deep, too unfathomable, for him to penetrate them in his darkness. Why is he so stubborn in refusing to come to the one who can answer every mystery and shed light upon his path?

Questions

Commentators are anxious to defend Solomon as if he was attempting to make a comprehensive statement about the state of the dead and failed to recognise either the conscious pleasure of the righteous or the conscious torment of the lost. To help him in this difficulty, they argue that he limits his observation to the knowledge that the dead have of this world’s affairs – not very much. But we should not treat this statement as if it was a real insight into what the dead actually know. It is only looking at the dead from the point of view of one who believes there is no afterlife. He is considering death from the standpoint of those who do not know God, a standpoint that can have no certainty about what the future holds. The unbeliever, to all intents and purposes, does not have a revelation from God. He can therefore know nothing about the future except that the dead are excluded entirely from this world. For the sake of argument, Solomon is again putting himself in the position of the unbeliever.

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

Ecclesiastes 9:5 Commentary and Bible Study