Scripture Daily

Context No. 531 of 4322 · Ecclesiastes

Context · Reflection

Ecclesiastes 9:1-6: in context

1For all this I laid to my heart, even to explore all this: that the righteous, and the wise, and their works, are in the hand of God; whether it is love or hatred, man doesn’t know it; all is before them. 2All things come alike to all. There is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good, to the clean, to the unclean, to him who sacrifices, and to him who doesn’t sacrifice. As is the good, so is the sinner; he who takes an oath, as he who fears an oath. 3This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one event to all. Yes also, the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. 4For to him who is joined with all the living there is hope; for a living dog is better than a dead lion. 5For the living know that they will die, but the dead don’t know anything, neither do they have any more a reward; for their memory is forgotten. 6Also their love, their hatred, and their envy has perished long ago; neither do they any longer have a portion forever in anything that is done under the sun.

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes is looking hard at something most of us prefer not to look at directly: the fact that everyone dies, and death does not sort people by how they lived. The same event, he says, comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, the good and the clean and the unclean, the one who offers sacrifice and the one who does not. From his vantage point under the sun, this looks like the deepest unfairness there is; a lifetime of righteousness and a lifetime of wickedness both end in the same grave. He offers us no easy comfort here. He states the leveling fact of death plainly and lets it sit, heavy and unresolved.

And yet out of that bleak honesty he draws a conclusion that is oddly bracing: a living dog is better than a dead lion. In his world the dog was a despised scavenger and the lion the noblest of beasts, and he says the lowliest living creature is better off than the most magnificent dead one, because the living still have something the dead have lost. The living know they will die, he says, and that knowledge, far from being only grim, is what makes life precious. While there is life, there is hope; while I am still among the living, the day is not over, and what I do with it still matters. Being alive at all is a gift not to be wasted.

That reframes the certainty of my own death, which I mostly avoid thinking about. Ecclesiastes will not let me pretend I am exempt; I will go the way of everyone, righteous or not. But it turns that sober fact toward life rather than despair: precisely because my time is limited and death is certain, the life I have right now is a gift of enormous value, and squandering it is the real tragedy. Does the certainty that I will die like everyone else make me waste the life I have, drifting and half-asleep, or does it press me to treasure and use the gift of being alive today while I still hold it?

Sources