WWUTT 1704 All a Man’s Labor is For His Mouth (Ecclesiastes 6:1-12)

After all the work that you have done, after all the stuff that you have bought, and you still feel meaningless, where do you turn? Meaning and purpose can only be found by faith in Jesus when we understand the text.

This is When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible commentary to help encourage your time in the Word. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we feature New Testament Study, an Old Testament book on Thursday, and our Q &A on Friday.

Now here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.

Reading Ecclesiastes 6 and the Problem of Meaningless Labor

Thank you, Becky, and greetings, everyone. Open your Bible to Ecclesiastes chapter 6. Unless you're driving, keep your hands on the wheel, I'll read it to you. This is a shorter chapter, just 12 verses here, so I'll read through the whole thing out of the Legacy Standard Bible.

This is the Word of the Lord through the writing of the preacher in the book of Ecclesiastes. There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is prevalent among men, a man to whom God gives riches and wealth and honor, so that his soul lacks nothing of all that he desires.

Yet God does not empower him to eat from them, for a foreigner eats from them. This is vanity and a sickening evil. If a man becomes the father of 100 children and lives many years, however many the days of his years may be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things, and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, better the miscarriage than he.

For that one comes in vanity and goes into darkness, and that one's name is covered in darkness. Indeed, that one never sees the sun and never knows anything. That one has more rest than he. Even if the other man lives 1 ,000 years twice and does not see good things, do not all go to the same place.

All a man's labor is for his mouth, and yet the soul is not fulfilled. For what advantage does the wise man have over the fool? What advantage does the afflicted man have, knowing how to walk before the living?

What the eyes see is better than what the soul goes after. This, too, is vanity and striving after wind. Whatever exists has already been named, and it is known what man is, and he cannot dispute with him who is stronger than he is.

For there are many words which increase vanity. What, then, is the advantage to a man? For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few days of his vain life? He will make do with them like a shadow.

For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun? So, once again, we're talking here about the fact that we can labor, we can do work, and yet the work that we do does not, in and of itself, bring us any kind of satisfaction.

So, what good is it to even live at all, if in all the things that we do, all that we labor for under the sun cannot bring us any joy or happiness or fulfillment? We've read that a person feeds his mouth.

The work that a person does is to feed himself. All a man's labor is for his mouth, verse 7, yet the soul is not satisfied. So, you feed your body, but the person himself, the soul, the inner man, does not feel any joy or satisfaction in all it is that he has done or he has accomplished.

So, where does this fulfillment come from, and what good are the days of a man if he's not even able to find meaning and purpose in anything? There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is prevalent among men.

That is the way that we start here in this particular chapter. This is evil, and what we're reading about here in chapter 6 is a result of the fall. So, there would not be meaninglessness and purposelessness in what we do if it were not for the fact that all of creation has been subjected to futility.

God created man to work the garden and keep it to the glory of God. Everything that he was to do was to be an honor and a worship unto the Lord. Man, Adam, and Eve created in the image of God. They were given the garden to tend it and keep it, to subdue the earth, to multiply and fill it, was the creation command that they were given from the very beginning, right in Genesis chapter 1.

But then they sinned when they ate of the tree that God told them not to eat from. All of creation came under a curse. And from that point on, there would not be any inherent meaningfulness in anything that man would do.

In fact, part of what the curse entailed was that his work would not yield for him the thing that he was laboring for. That was in the curse in Genesis chapter 3. God said to the man that the ground will now produce thorns and thistles for you.

So, you're trying to bring forth food, but it's just going to produce weeds and consume the thing that you've been laboring for. And so, even the satisfaction of a job well done, even joy and purpose in what a man does, has been swallowed up by the curse.

There is not any inherent meaningfulness in all that man does. If all that's going to happen to him is he's going to die and go into the grave, then what's the point of working at all? So, because of the curse, all things being subjected to futility, which is the way Paul puts it in Romans chapter 8, then the preacher here says that all that he's observing here in this particular chapter is evil.

There is an evil which I have seen under the sun and it is prevalent among men. Because everything we're going to be looking at here is going to be a result of the fall. Verse 2, a man whom God gives riches and wealth and honor so that his soul lacks nothing of all that he desires.

So, really you're talking about giving a man paradise here, right? What did Adam get? Adam and Eve had paradise. They lived in paradise and even lived with God who walked in the garden in the cool of the day.

So, here a man is given all that his heart desires by God, yet God does not give to him. So, there's something that God withholds. God does not empower him to eat from them, but a foreigner eats from them.

This is vanity and a sickening evil. So, this man works and he labors, but he does not get to enjoy the fruit of his labor. Somebody else enjoys it. That's evil. It's unjust is what it is because even in the law of Moses it says that if an animal treads out the grain, then the animal should deserve to eat the grain that the farmer has used the animal to help harvest, right?

Paul uses that same law to Timothy when he says to Timothy that a worker is worthy of his wages. And he's talking about how a person, a man who labors in the preaching and teaching of God's word, he deserves to get paid for that work.

That's real work that he's doing there. So, the church should provide for him and for his family. And Paul takes the law that says an animal that treads out the grain should get some of the grain. He takes that law and applies it to the pastor.

That even a pastor gets to enjoy the fruit of his labor. So, it is just that when a man works for something, he gets to enjoy the benefit of that work. If the man does not receive what it is that he's labored for, somebody else gets it instead of him.

That's unjust. So, therefore, it's evil. It's a sickening evil. When the man who is labored for this doesn't get it, but somebody else gets it instead. Somebody else enjoys the fruit of his labor and not him.

Verse 3. If a man becomes the father of 100 children and lives many years, however many the days of his years may be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say better the miscarriage than he.

In other words, it would have been better for him to be stillborn. Better for him to have not been born and have to experience the pain and the struggle and the disappointments of this life. And then eventually just die and go into the grave.

He lived a whole life of disappointment, of injustice, of not getting any satisfaction from the work that he did. He just felt meaningless and purposeless his whole life. It would have been better if he had been stillborn and then go through all of these things and then end up in the same place anyway.

Dead. Now, notice here that in this verse it says,. If a man becomes the father of 100 children and lives many years, it would have been better for him to have died. It'd be easy to look at that and go, well, that seems kind of cruel.

Because now you're knocking out 100 people. Those people did not even have an opportunity to have life if you're wishing that that guy had been dead from the moment that he was born. But this is proverbial here.

This is not saying, well, it would have been better for his 100 children to have never been born either. The point here is, in this time and place, I would argue that the same is true for today. But let's just stick with the context here.

So 3 ,000 years ago when this was written, in the time and place in which it was written, a man's wealth was often measured by what he had and how many children he had. Because the children were going to be the extension of his legacy.

Everything that he possessed he would pass on to his children, they would pass on to their children, so on and so forth. So now the man and all that he has accomplished in his lifetime becomes something timeless.

If he has family, if he has sons especially, that he can pass these things down to. So he's got 100 kids. Man, these kids just continue on this legacy. Some of the patriarchs that we read about in the Old Testament, they had multiple wives.

Well, the point of having multiple wives and concubines is so that you could expand your territory. You could basically become a nation unto yourself. So when David had wives and concubines, when Abraham had Sarah and he had concubines, it was really after Sarah died that he had more concubines.

Jacob had two wives, Leah and Rachel, and then also had concubines. But the point of the concubines was a woman who did not have the same kind of stature as a wife, but she would help to progress the family line.

So the head of the household, the patriarch, would have more children through his multiple wives and through his concubines. The more children, the more wealthy, the more blessed he was considered. So that's really the proverbial sense of what's being said here in verse 3.

It doesn't matter if he lives many years and he has many children. It would have been better for him to have not really come into the world and experienced meaninglessness and suffering all his days long.

The Miscarried Child and the Vanity of Legacy

Verse 4, for that one comes in vanity and goes into darkness and that one's name is covered in darkness. That one is a reference to the miscarriage. So again, end of verse 3, I say, better the miscarriage than he.

And this is still in quotation marks, so this is still the same quote, still the same saying. Better the miscarriage than he, for that one comes in vanity and goes into darkness. And that one's name is covered in darkness.

Talking about the miscarriage, child doesn't even get named, right? Indeed, that one never sees the sun and never knows anything. That one has more rest than he. Even if the other man lives 1 ,000 years twice and does not see good things, do not all go to the same place.

This is just the extended argument for how it would have been better for that man to have never been born than if gone through life and not been able to experience any satisfaction in all that he labored for, to have been miserable and afflicted and then to have died and gone to that place anyway.

The child that has been miscarried is better off than the man who's experienced all of that and goes to the same place. Do not all go to the same place, end of verse 6. So now in 7, all a man's labor is for his mouth and yet the soul is not fulfilled.

All that he does is for his mouth. Why do we work? You work to make money. For what purpose? To buy food. You thought you were just trying to buy video games or trying to spruce up your kitchen or paint your walls or get a better house or get a nicer car or whatever your reasoning might be for working.

You might have thought that was the reason why I go to work, right? No, the reason why you go to work is to feed yourself. First and foremost, that's the reason why you are working. You need to be able to buy food.

Why does the head of the household work? The head of the household works to provide for his whole family so that his wife and kids can also receive food. All the labor that we do is for our mouths. There are other things in life that we may enjoy, that we may spend our money on, but first of all, we work so that we can eat.

The Apostle Paul, speaking to the church in Thessalonica, in 2 Thessalonians 3, he said, when we came to you preaching the gospel, we did not become a burden to any of you, but we worked on our own and provided for ourselves so that you wouldn't have to feed us.

So Paul and his missionary brethren, when they came to Thessalonica, they had jobs so that they could earn their own living and buy their own bread without taking anything from the Thessalonians. And Paul says, we did this to set for you an example so that even you would know that you must work.

And Paul goes on to say that the one who doesn't labor does not get to eat. Whoever does not work does not eat. Now, we're not talking there about persons who are incapable of working because they're infirmed or they're elderly or something like that.

We're talking about abled-bodied persons who are perfectly capable of working but don't work. Then they don't even get to eat. Because the purpose of our work is to earn our own bread. It's to earn our own keep.

That's why we're supposed to work. And again, you make money to do other things, to pay other bills, so on and so forth. But what's the first need that you have? First need that you have is to eat. So all a man's labor is for his mouth.

Even when it comes to the things, the possessions that you own, they're kind of satisfying a certain appetite, right? You have a desire for a home. You have a desire for that home to look a certain way.

You have a desire for a certain car. You have a desire for a certain amount of prestige or you want people to look at you a certain way. So you need to own these things so that people will think you're normal.

You'll fit in on your block or whatever it is it might happen to be. We all have appetites we're feeding with the money that we spend. I'm speaking generally there more than anything. But anyway, so all of our labor is for our mouths, yet the soul is not fulfilled.

So even when you have bought food and eaten it, even when you've paid your bills, even when you've gotten all that other kind of stuff that you think you need to be happy and normal, the soul is still not satisfied.

You see an ad for a truck. A nice, fancy new truck. And you go and you buy that truck. You don't have enough money for that truck. So you go to the bank and you get a loan for the truck. You pay as much of it as you can and then the loan covers the rest.

And you're driving in that truck and you think to yourself, I feel like a new man. Or maybe you wanted a certain sedan or SUV or crossover or minivan and you think to yourself, I feel like a new woman.

Whatever it happened to be. Your voice would be higher than that. No, you're not a new person. You're not a new man. You're not a new woman just because you bought a new thing. You're the same person that you were but with debt.

So you buy these things thinking that it satisfies you, thinking that it makes you happier but ultimately the soul is not fulfilled. For what advantage does the wise man have over the fool? What advantage does the afflicted man have knowing how to walk before the living?

The afflicted man. So that person who's learned from the school of hard knocks. You know what I mean? What the eyes see is better than what the soul goes after. This too is vanity and striving after wind.

Those things that you need to feed your body in order to live and to survive. That's better. What the eyes see is better than what the soul desires. The soul is desiring something that it cannot see. So therefore it cannot find.

This too is vanity and it's striving after wind. It's emptiness. It's nothing. You eat. You live. But your soul remains empty. Whatever exists has already been named. Verse 10 says, and it is known what man is.

And he cannot dispute with him who is stronger than he is. Every man has another man who is over him. For there are many words which increase vanity. What then is the advantage to a man? And this kind of goes back to a statement we read previously where the fool multiplies words.

So there are many words which increase vanity. You speak. You plead. You make your case. You're not any more fulfilled. What then is the advantage to a man? What advantage is there to speaking? What advantage is there to disputing?

What advantage is there to eating food? If your soul still feels empty and unsatisfied. Verse 12, for who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime? During the few days of his vain life, he will make do with them like a shadow.

For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun? And that's the way we end chapter 6. What's the answer to that question? What is the advantage to a man? Who knows what good a man is for? Who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?

What's the answer to all those questions? The answer is Jesus. What are we worth? How do we find our worth? How do we find meaningfulness and purpose in this life? Look at Christ. Our meaning and purpose is to serve the living and the true God.

Problem is, because of sin, because of the fall, which I talked about at the beginning, we can't please God. There is no one who does good, not even one person. No one even seeks for God, as it says in Romans chapter 3, which is quoting from the Psalms.

So no one can do good before God. And it's impossible to please God without faith. Hebrews 11, 6, without faith it is impossible to please Him. For he who draws near to Him must believe that He exists and that He is a rewarder of those who earnestly seek Him.

We find blessing, we find reward, we find meaning and purpose only in Christ. And we cannot do anything good pleasing unto the Lord without faith in Jesus. It is by our faith in Jesus that our sins are forgiven and we are clothed in His righteousness.

So that now we become adopted sons and daughters of God and are capable of behaving, of working, of living in such a way that is pleasing and honoring unto the Lord. Romans 12, 1, in view of God's mercies, present your bodies as living sacrifices unto the Lord, holy and acceptable before God.

This is your spiritual act of worship. It begins with faith in Jesus Christ. He is the one who is the advantage to a man. He is the one who knows what is good for a man in his lifetime. He is the one who tells a man what will be after him after all of his days under the sun.

What's after this? Heaven in glory forever with God for those who believe in Jesus Christ. Heavenly Father, thank you for this good word. We're left with a question but we know the answer because we have the rest of the book.

We can look into the New Testament and see it is Christ whom you gave to die for our sins, to rise again from the grave, to undo the works of the devil as it says in 1 John. That work of Satan that brought everything to futility and all of creation being cursed.

That plunged us into hopelessness, sin, meaninglessness, and purposelessness. But it is in Christ Jesus that we are given hope and we have fellowship with God by faith in him. So help us to walk these days in a way that is pleasing unto the Lord and this be our spiritual act of worship to you today.

It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.

Closing Benediction and Ministry Information

This has been When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabriel Hughes. For all of our podcasts, episodes, videos, books, and more, visit our website at www .utt .com. If you'd like to submit a question to this broadcast, or just send us a comment, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

And let your friends know about our ministry. Join us again tomorrow as we grow together in the study of God's word when we understand the text.