Bible Commentaries
Ecclesiastes 5

Verses 1-12

Ecclesiastes

LESSONS FOR WORSHIP AND FOR WORK

Ecc_5:1 - Ecc_5:12 .

This passage is composed of two or perhaps three apparently disconnected sections. The faults in worship referred to in Ecc_5:1 - Ecc_5:7 have nothing to do with the legalised robbery of Ecc_5:8 , nor has the demonstration of the folly of covetousness in Ecc_5:10 - Ecc_5:12 any connection with either of the preceding subjects. But they are brought into unity, if they are taken as applications in different directions of the bitter truth which the writer sets himself to prove runs through all life. ‘All is vanity.’ That principle may even be exemplified in worship, and the obscure Ecc_5:7 which closes the section about the faults of worship seems to be equivalent to the more familiar close which rings the knell of so many of men’s pursuits in this book, ‘This also is vanity.’ It stands in the usual form in Ecc_5:10 .

We have in Ecc_5:1 - Ecc_5:7 a warning against the faults in worship which make even it to be ‘vanity,’ unreal and empty and fruitless. These are of three sorts, arranged, as it were, chronologically. The worshipper is first regarded as going to the house of God, then as presenting his prayers in it, and then as having left it and returned to his ordinary life. The writer has cautions to give concerning conduct before, during, and after public worship.

Note that, in all three parts of his warnings, his favourite word of condemnation appears as describing the vain worship to which he opposes the right manner. They who fall into the faults condemned are ‘fools.’ If that class includes all who mar their worship by such errors, the church which holds them had need to be of huge dimensions; for the faults held up in these ancient words flourish in full luxuriance to-day, and seem to haunt long-established Christianity quite as mischievously as they did long-established Judaism. If we could banish them from our religious assemblies, there would be fewer complaints of the poor results of so much apparently Christian prayer and preaching.

Fruitful and acceptable worship begins before it begins. So our passage commences with the demeanour of the worshipper on his way to the house of God. He is to keep his foot; that is, to go deliberately, thoughtfully, with realisation of what he is about to do. He is to ‘draw near to hear’ and to bethink himself, while drawing near, of what his purpose should be. Our forefathers Sunday began on Saturday night, and partly for that reason the hallowing influence of it ran over into Monday, at all events. What likelihood is there that much good will come of worship to people who talk politics or scandal right up to the church door? Is reading newspapers in the pews, which they tell us in England is not unknown in America, a good preparation for worshipping God? The heaviest rain runs off parched ground, unless it has been first softened by a gentle fall of moisture. Hearts that have no dew of previous meditation to make them receptive are not likely to drink in much of the showers of blessing which may be falling round them. The formal worshipper who goes to the house of God because it is the hour when he has always gone; the curious worshipper ? who draws near to hear indeed, but to hear a man, not God; and all the other sorts of mere outward worshippers who make so large a proportion of every Christian congregation-get the lesson they need, to begin with, in this precept.

Note, that right preparation for worship is better than worship itself, if it is that of ‘fools.’ Drawing near with the true purpose is better than being near with the wrong one. Note, too, the reason for the vanity of the ‘sacrifice of fools’ is that ‘they know not’; and why do they not know, but because they did not draw near with the purpose of hearing? Therefore, as the last clause of the verse says, rightly rendered, ‘they do evil.’ All hangs together. No matter how much we frequent the house of God, if we go with unprepared minds and hearts we shall remain ignorant, and because we are so, our sacrifices will be ‘evil.’ If the winnowing fan of this principle were applied to our decorous congregations, who dress their bodies for church much more carefully than they do their souls, what a cloud of chaff would fly off!

Then comes the direction for conduct in the act of worship. The same thoughtfulness which kept the foot in coming to, should keep the heart when in, the house of God. His exaltation and our lowliness should check hasty words, blurting out uppermost wishes, or in any way outrunning the sentiments and emotions of prepared hearts. Not that the lesson would check the fervid flow of real desire. There is a type of calm worship which keeps itself calm because it is cold. Propriety and sobriety are its watchwords-both admirable things, and both dear to tepid Christians. Other people besides the crowds on Pentecost think that men whose lips are fired by the Spirit of God are ‘drunken,’ if not with wine, at all events with unwholesome enthusiasm. But the outpourings of a soul filled, not only with the sense that God is in heaven and we on earth, but also with the assurance that He is near to it, and it to Him, are not rash and hasty, however fervid. What is condemned is words which travel faster than thoughts or feelings, or which proceed from hearts that have not been brought into patient submission, or from such as lack reverent realisation of God’s majesty; and such faults may attach to the most calm worship, and need not infect the most fervent. Those prayers are not hasty which keep step with the suppliant’s desires, when these take the time from God’s promises. That mouth is not rash which waits to speak until the ear has heard.

‘Let thy words be few.’ The heathen ‘think that they shall be heard for much speaking.’ It needs not to tell our wants in many words to One who knows them altogether, any more than a child needs many when speaking to a father or mother. But ‘few’ must be measured by the number of needs and desires. The shortest prayer, which is not animated by a consciousness of need and a throb of desire, is too long; the longest, which is vitalised by these, is short enough. What becomes of the enormous percentage of public and private prayers, which are mere repetitions, said because they are the right thing to say, because everybody always has said them, and not because the man praying really wants the things he asks for, or expects to get them any the more for asking?

Ecc_5:3 gives a reason for the exhortation, ‘A dream comes through a multitude of business’-when a man is much occupied with any matter, it is apt to haunt his sleeping as well as his waking thoughts. ‘A fool’s voice comes through a multitude of words.’ The dream is the consequence of the pressure of business, but the fool’s voice is the cause, not the consequence, of the gush of words. What, then, is the meaning? Probably that such a gush of words turns, as it were, the voice of the utterer, for the time being, into that of a fool. Voluble prayers, more abundant than devout sentiments or emotions, make the offerer as a ‘fool’ and his prayer unacceptable.

The third direction refers to conduct after worship. It lays down the general principle that vows should be paid, and that swiftly. A keen insight into human nature suggests the importance of prompt fulfilment of the vows; for in carrying out resolutions formed under the impulse of the sanctuary, even more than in other departments, delays are dangerous. Many a young heart touched by the truth has resolved to live a Christian life, and has gone out from the house of God and put off and put off till days have thickened into months and years, and the intention has remained unfulfilled for ever. Nothing hardens hearts, stiffens wills, and sears consciences so much as to be brought to the point of melting, and then to cool down into the old shape. All good resolutions and spiritual convictions may be included under the name of vows; and of all it is true that it is better not to have formed them, than to have formed and not performed them.

Ecc_5:6 - Ecc_5:7 are obscure. The former seems to refer to the case of a man who vows and then asks that he may be absolved from his vow by the priest or other ecclesiastical authority. His mouth-that is, his spoken promise-leads him into sin, if he does not fulfil it comp. Deut. xxiii, 21, 22. He asks release from his promise on the ground that it is a sin of weakness. The ‘angel’ is best understood as the priest messenger, as in Mal_2:7 . Such a wriggling out of a vow will bring God’s anger; for the ‘voice’ which promised what the hand will not perform, sins.

Ecc_5:7 is variously rendered. The Revised Version supplies at the beginning, ‘This comes to pass,’ and goes on ‘through the multitude of dreams and vanities and many words.’ But this scarcely bears upon the context, which requires here a reason against rash speech and vows. The meaning seems better given, either by the rearranged text which Delitzsch suggests, ‘In many dreams and many words there are also many vanities’ so, substantially, the Auth. Ver., or as Wright, following Hitzig, etc., has it, ‘In the multitude of dreams are also vanities, and [in] many words [as well].’ The simile of Ecc_5:3 is recurred to, and the whirling visions of unsubstantial dreams are likened to the rash words of voluble prayers in that both are vanity. Thus the writer reaches his favourite thought, and shows how vanity infects even devotion. The closing injunction to ‘fear God’ sets in sharp contrast with faulty outward worship the inner surrender and devotion, which will protect against such empty hypocrisy. If the heart is right, the lips will not be far wrong.

Ecc_5:8 - Ecc_5:9 have no direct connection with the preceding, and their connection with the following Ecc_5:10 - Ecc_5:12 is slight. Their meaning is dubious. According to the prevailing view now, the abuses of government in Ecc_5:8 are those of the period of the writer; and the last clauses do not, as might appear at first reading, console sufferers by the thought that God is above rapacious dignitaries, but bids the readers not be surprised if small officials plunder, since the same corruption goes upwards through all grades of functionaries. With such rotten condition of things is contrasted, in Ecc_5:9 , the happy state of a people living under a patriarchal government, where the king draws his revenues, not from oppression, but from agriculture. The Revised Version gives in its margin this rendering. The connection of these verses with the following may be that they teach the vanity of riches under such a state of society as they describe. What is the use of scraping wealth together when hungry officials are ‘watching’ to pounce on it? How much better to be contented with the modest prosperity of a quiet country life! If the translation of Ecc_5:9 in the Authorised Version and the Revised Version is retained, there is a striking contrast between the rapine of the city, where men live by preying on each other as they do still to a large extent, for ‘commerce’ is often nothing better, and the wholesome natural life of the country, where the kindly earth yields fruit, and one man’s gain is not another’s loss.

Thus the verses may be connected with the wise depreciation of money which follows. That low estimate is based on three grounds, which great trading nations like England and the United States need to have dinned into their ears. First, no man ever gets enough of worldly wealth. The appetite grows faster than the balance at the banker’ s. That is so because the desire that is turned to outward wealth really needs something else, and has mistaken its object. God, not money or money’s worth, is the satisfying possession. It is so because all appetites, fed on earthly things, increase by gratification, and demand ever larger draughts. The jaded palate needs stronger stimulants. The seasoned opium-eater has to increase his doses to produce the same effects. Second, the race after riches is a race after a phantom, because the more one has of them the more people there spring up to share them. The poor man does with one servant; the rich man has fifty; and his own portion of his wealth is a very small item. His own meal is but a small slice off the immense provisions for which he has the trouble of paying. It is so, thirdly, because in the chase he deranges his physical nature; and when he has got his wealth, it only keeps him awake at night thinking how he shall guard it and keep it safe.

That which costs so much to get, which has so little power to satisfy, which must always be less than the wish of the covetous man, which costs so much to keep, which stuffs pillows with thorns, is surely vanity. Honest work is rewarded by sweet sleep. The old legend told of unslumbering guards who kept the treasure of the golden fruit. The millionaire has to live in a barred house, and to be always on the lookout lest some combination of speculators should pull down his stocks, or some change in the current of population should make his city lots worthless. Black care rides behind the successful man of business. Better to have done a day’s work which has earned a night’s repose than to be the slave of one’s wealth, as all men are who make it their aim and their supreme good. Would that these lessons were printed deep on the hearts of young Englishmen and Americans!

Verse 15

Ecclesiastes

NAKED OR CLOTHED?

Ecc_5:15 . - Rev_14:13 .

It is to be observed that these two sharply contrasted texts do not refer to the same persons. The former is spoken of a rich worldling, the latter of ‘the dead who die in the Lord.’ The unrelieved gloom of the one is as a dark background against which the triumphant assurance of the other shines out the more brightly, and deepens the gloom which heightens it. The end of the man who has to go away from earth naked and empty-handed acquires new tragic force when set against the lot of those ‘whose works do follow them.’ Well-worn and commonplace as both sets of thought may be, they may perhaps be flashed up into new vividness by juxtaposition; and if in this sermon we have nothing new to say, old truth is not out of place till it has been wrought into and influenced our daily practice. We shall best gather the lessons of our text if we consider what we must leave, what we must take, and what we may take.

I. What we must leave.

The Preacher in the context presses home a formidable array of the limitations and insufficiencies of wealth. Possessed, it cannot satisfy, for the appetite grows with indulgence. Its increase barely keeps pace with the increase of its consumers. It contributes nothing to the advantage of its so-called owner except ‘the beholding of it with his eyes,’ and the need of watching it keeps them open when he would fain sleep. It is often kept to the owner’s hurt, it often disappears in unfortunate speculation, and the possessor’s heirs are paupers. But, even if all these possibilities are safely weathered, the man has to die and leave it all behind. ‘He shall take nothing of his labour which he can carry away in his hand’; that is to say, death separates from all with whom the life of the body brings us into connection. The things which are no parts of our true selves are ours in a very modified sense even whilst we seem to possess them, and the term of possession has a definite close. ‘Shrouds have no pockets,’ as the stern old proverb says. How many men have lived in the houses which we call ours, sat on our seats, walked over our lands, carried in their purses the money that is in ours! Is ‘the game worth the candle’ when we give our labour for so imperfect and brief a possession as at the fullest and the longest we enjoy of all earthly good? Surely a wise man will set little store by possessions of all which a cold, irresistible hand will come to strip him. Surely the life is wasted which spends its energy in robing itself in garments which will all be stripped from it when the naked self ‘returns to go as he came.’

But there are other things than these earthly possessions from which death separates us. It carries us far away from the sound of human voices and isolates us from living men. Honour and reputation cease to be audible. When a prominent man dies, what a clatter of conflicting judgments contends over his grave! and how utterly he is beyond them all! Praise or blame, blessing or banning are equally powerless to reach the unhearing ear or to agitate the unbeating heart. And when one of our small selves passes out of life, we hear no more the voice of censure or of praise, of love or of hate. Is it worth while to toil for the ‘hollow wraith of dying fame,’ or even for the clasp of loving hands which have to be loosened so surely and so soon?

Then again, there are other things which must be left behind as belonging only to the present order, and connected with bodily life. There will be no scope for material work, and much of all our knowledge will be antiquated when the light beyond shines in. As we shall have occasion to see presently, there is a permanent element in the most material work, and if in handling the transient we have been living for the eternal, such work will abide; but if we think of the spirit in which a sad majority do their daily tasks, whether of a more material or of a more intellectual sort, we must recognise that a very large proportion of all the business of life must come to an end here. There is nothing in it that will stand the voyage across the great deep, or that can survive in the order of things to which we go. What is a man to do in another world, supposing there is another world, where ledgers and mills are out of date? Or what has a scholar or scientist to do in a state of things where there is no place for dictionaries and grammars, for acute criticism, or for a careful scientific research?

Physical science, linguistic knowledge, political wisdom, will be antiquated. The poetry which glorifies afresh and interprets the present will have lost its meaning. Half the problems that torture us here will cease to have existence, and most of the other half will have been solved by simple change of position. ‘Whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away’; and it becomes us all to bethink ourselves whether there is anything in our lives that we can carry away when all that is ‘of the earth earthy’ has sunk into nothingness.

II. What we must take.

We must take ourselves . It is the same ‘he’ who goes ‘naked as he came’; it is the same ‘he’ who ‘came from his mother’s womb,’ and is ‘born again’ as it were into a new life, only ‘he’ has by his earthly life been developed and revealed. The plant has flowered and fruited. What was mere potentiality has become fact. There is now fixed character. The transient possessions, relationships, and occupations of the earthly life are gone, but the man that they have made is there. And in the character there are predominant habits which insist upon having their sway, and a memory of which, as we may believe, there is written indelibly all the past. Whatever death may strip from us, there is no reason to suppose that it touches the consciousness and personal identity, or the prevailing set and inclination of our characters. And if we do indeed pass into another life ‘not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness,’ but carrying a perfected memory and clothed in a garment woven of all our past actions, there needs no more to bring about a solemn and continuous act of judgment.

III. What we may take.

‘Their works do follow them.’ These are the words of the Spirit concerning ‘the dead who die in the Lord.’ We need not fear marring the great truth that ‘not by works of righteousness but by His mercy He saved us,’ if we firmly grasp the large assurance which this text blessedly contains. A Christian man’s works are perpetual in the measure in which they harmonise with the divine will, in the measure they have eternal consequences in himself whatever they may have on others. If we live opening our minds and hearts to the influx of the divine power ‘that worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure,’ then we may be humbly sure that these ‘works’ are eternal; and though they will never constitute the ground of our acceptance, they will never fail to secure ‘a great recompence of reward.’ To many a humble saint there will be a moment of wondering thankfulness when he sees these his ‘children whom God hath given him’ clustered round him, and has to say, ‘Lord, when saw I Thee naked, or in prison, and visited Thee?’ There will be many an apocalypse of grateful surprise in the revelations of the heavens. We remember Milton’s noble explanation of these great words which may well silence our feeble attempts to enforce them-

‘Thy works and alms and all thy good endeavour

So then, life here and yonder will for the Christian soul be one continuous whole, only that there, while ‘their works do follow them,’ ‘they rest from their labours.’