Life Under the Sun

Life under the Sun | Ecclesiastes 4
Brian Hedges | September 13, 2026

Let me invite you to turn to Ecclesiastes 4.

Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and I wonder if that describes your life in any way this morning—quiet desperation. Do you ever feel like you’re just hanging on? Hanging on in marriage, hanging on in family, hanging on in your job, or hanging on in your faith; but quietly desperate, burdened, overwhelmed, overcome, fatigued with life.

“Lives of quiet desperation.” It could almost be a summary of Ecclesiastes 4, which we’re going to read together this morning in this ongoing series on Ecclesiastes.

It’s called “Breathing Lessons: Wisdom from Ecclesiastes for This Fleeting Life.” Over the last several weeks, we’ve seen that life is a breath, life is a vapor. We are confronted in this book with the brevity of life, with the certainty of death, with the fact that nothing in this world can really satisfy our restless hearts.

We saw last week that we live within time, and that time is short. Time brings change into our lives, and yet God in his sovereignty rules over time. He has made everything beautiful in its time, and our times are in his hands.

Today we come to Ecclesiastes 4, and the picture gets even more complicated as the author raises the stakes by giving us a series of observations about what he saw under the sun. Life under the sun—that’s what this message is about.

As we read this chapter, just 16 verses, I want you to notice the language he uses, where he says, “I saw,” and he describes what he saw under the sun. That’s the thread that kind of holds this chapter together. So Ecclesiastes 4, beginning in verse 1.

“Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

“Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is [mere breath] and a striving after wind.

“The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh.

“Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.

“Again, I saw [mere breath] under the sun: one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, ‘For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?’ This also is [mere breath] and an unhappy business.

“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

“Better was a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice. For he went from prison to the throne, though in his own kingdom he had been born poor. I saw all the living who move about under the sun, along with that youth who was to stand in the king’s place. There was no end of all the people, all of whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is [mere breath] and a striving after wind.”

This is God’s Word.

Ecclesiastes is perhaps the most modern, contemporary book in the Bible, and as we’re studying this book (and one reason I wanted to study this book together is because it connects so well to the lives we live in the world today), we read this author, Ecclesiastes or Qoheleth in Hebrew—the preacher, the philosopher, the sage—we read his words and we get the sense that here is someone who is describing life as it really is. He is looking at the world from the street level, and he is describing what he sees in this life under the sun.

Honestly, the picture can sometimes feel pretty bleak, as it does in much of this chapter. But we also notice, as we read through this book, that the chapter or the book as a whole is punctuated with little nuggets of wisdom. You might think of the book of Ecclesiastes as a survey of a vast and harsh desert under the burning heat of the sun, but every now and again you come across an oasis with a spring of fresh water to refresh you with wisdom.

That’s what we find in this chapter. I think we could understand the chapter under these three headings:

1. Empirical Observation
2. Proverbial Wisdom
3. Gospel Consolation

That last one actually takes us out of the chapter into the New Testament hope of the gospel. So that’s the roadmap this morning.

1. Empirical Observation: Life under the Sun

We begin with empirical observation, life under the sun. What did Qoheleth see? “I saw,” he says four times, “these things,” life under the sun. And he’s giving us his street-level view of the harshness of human life in this world. “Lives of quiet desperation.”

I want you to notice three things as we just look at some of the highlights from the chapter.

(1) First of all, he saw injustice and oppression. You see this in verse 1.

“Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them.”

The oppressors and the oppressed. The misuse of power. The issues of injustice in the world.

It recalls Ecclesiastes 3:16, which we just passed over briefly last week, where he said, “Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness.”

It’s as if he looks to the courts, where there should be justice, and what he found was injustice and wickedness and oppression. So now he brings it up again and he says, “I see all these oppressions that are done under the sun, the tears of the oppressed, and there’s no one to comfort them.”

If this isn’t contemporary, I don’t know what is. This is a description of what happens in a fallen world, the world in which we live now. And this is Ecclesiastes at its bleakest.

Derek Kidner says,

“The passage is as brief as it is painful. For if there is no way of ending these things, as indeed there is none in the present age, there is little to add to the bitter facts of verse 1 beyond the lament of verses 2-3.”

And the lament is pretty dark. He says,

“I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.”

From the street level view, Qoheleth says, “It would be better to just die, or better yet to have never been born than to see the oppression, to experience the oppression and the injustice that is done in this world.”

This is a reminder to us that the Bible speaks frankly and directly about the evil that is in the world. The Bible doesn’t gloss this over; instead, it looks at evil straight in the face and calls it out. It’s a reminder to us that the Scripture cares about these issues and calls us to care about these issues as well.

There are many passages in Scripture that call us to care about issues of justice and injustice. Think about the prophets, who speak for the oppressed and call for justice to roll down like rain. Think of Jesus, who fed the poor and described his followers in Matthew 25 in terms of their social action—how they fed the poor, they clothed the naked, they visited those who are sick and in prisons. And he said, “These are those who are blessed of my Father, who will inherit the kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world.” This is what Christians should be like. It reminds us that we can do something in this world about injustice, and we should.

But Ecclesiastes is not so much looking at what we can do, he’s looking at the fact that no matter what we do, the oppression seems to continue. We can’t bring an end to injustice in this world. For every starving child we feed, there will be another one born. For every drug lord that is taken down, two will pop up in its place. For every honest politician, there are ten or maybe a hundred who are corrupt and who will use their power to bankroll the rich and the powerful. There’s evil under the sun, a world that is marked with injustice and oppression. “Behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them!” Let that land on you this morning. This is the world we live in, and Ecclesiastes calls it for what it is. That’s a social problem.

(2) Then he looks at something that maybe is a little closer to home for many of us, and it’s the problem of work, disordered work. No rest in our toil. You see it in verses 4-6 as he describes the dog-eat-dog world of competition in the marketplace.

“Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor.” He’s getting down to the basic motivations, what drives people. He says it’s envy of his neighbor. It may carry the idea of that classic sin from the seven deadly sins, the sin of envy, where you want what someone else has, where you rejoice in someone else’s misfortune and you covet their possessions. Maybe it’s that. Or some scholars suggest it carries the idea of the underlying ambition that drives people in their work. In either case it’s disordered work, and he says, “This also is [mere breath] and a striving after wind. The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh…” It’s a description of the sluggard.

It’s the opposite problem. Here’s the person who’s not ambitious, but instead is the slothful, the sluggard who turns in on himself, to the point of self-destruction. “Better,” verse 6 says, “is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.” So it’s the problem of disordered work, the daily grind, the rat race, the person who is driven by this desire to accumulate.

Again, it’s a contemporary issue, isn’t it? How many of us wrestle with the problems of work? And we may wrestle with the problems of work in more than one way. It may be that we are constantly striving just to make ends meet, just to get by, and it’s the daily grind, and it wears us down.

If you happen to be in a profession that is more affluent, the problems become different. It’s maybe not so much the effort to get by as it is how it reflects on your sense of self, your sense of identity.

I read this quotation this week from Derek Thompson, who wrote this in The Atlantic, as quoted by Bobby Jamieson in his excellent book on Ecclesiastes. Derek Thompson said,

“The economist of the early twentieth century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity, but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.”

Workism. The workaholic, the person who finds identity in work.

You can experience this in a couple of different ways. You might experience it when you simply feel like your work doesn’t matter, and so you feel bad about yourself. You lose a sense of self because you don’t feel like your work matters. You don’t love your work, you don’t feel valued in your work.

Or it may be that you place so much identity in your work that that’s who you’ve become. It’s the role that you fill, it’s your profession, and your sense of well-being rises and falls with how well you’re doing at the job.

In either case, it’s disordered work. It’s workism. It’s the workaholic. And Ecclesiastes says this is a striving after wind. It’s a futile effort.

(3) Then there’s a third problem. This one, perhaps, hits even closer to home than the others. It’s the problem of isolation. Look at verse 7.

“Again, I saw [mere breath] under the sun: one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, ‘For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?’ This also is [mere breath] and an unhappy business.”

This is a person who’s striving, who’s toiling, who’s working, but has no one to share it with—isolation. He has no other. Then the following verses have this refrain, as it talks about the one who is alone, the one who is alone, the one who is alone. Isolation. The problem of isolation.

It’s been surmised that we live in one of the most isolating periods in human history, where the extended family network has largely broken down as people are spread out more geographically than they’ve ever been before. So we lose that fabric of our social networks.

Not only that, but the nuclear family has broken down. So often you have divided homes and families.

Then you could add to that all of the changes that time brings into our lives and how that brings an increasing sense of isolation. Have you ever experienced this? You move to a new city, or you start a new job, or you go to a new school, or you go to a new church, and you just don’t feel like you can get on the inside. You feel like you’re kind of on the outside. You’re not in the inner circle, in the inner ring.

Or maybe you experience a life change in your family. You become an empty nester; your children have moved out, and you discover that you have very little in common with your spouse outside of the kids. Maybe you start to feel lonely even in your marriage.

Or maybe you are divorced or widowed, and you know the deep ache of loneliness, the long, lonely nights. There used to be someone there; now there’s not. Loneliness, isolation.

These are the things that we experience in life under the sun. And again, it’s a somewhat dark, bleak picture that this book of Ecclesiastes gives us—life in its harshness, life that’s difficult, life that’s hard.

2. Proverbial Wisdom

When I was in high school, I had a friend, a very good friend, who was my best friend for a number of years. We still remain in touch and see one another every two or three years now.

His favorite book of the Bible was the book of Ecclesiastes. And he was kind of a cynical guy. He was kind of funny. And this was his favorite saying. He would go around saying this all the time—you know how teenagers talk—and this was what he did. He would go around and he’d say, “Life sucks, and then you die.” And of course it would get a chuckle. “Life sucks, and then you die.” Is that okay to say in church? This is my friend who said that!

Is that the message of Ecclesiastes? Life under the sun—it’s just hard, it’s just difficult, and then you die. A lot of people read this book and they think that’s all it is.

To be sure, Ecclesiastes gives us this picture of the harsh reality of the world. It’s a desert under a burning sun. But I want you to see that there is an oasis in this desert, and you actually have it in this chapter several times, where the author gives us proverbial wisdom, and he points to something better. That’s the key word; it’s the word “better.”

I want you to see three ways in which this chapter gives us wisdom. This is not the full solution to the problems of life under the sun, but they are measures that will help us live better in the world as it is.

(1) Here’s the first: contentment, not grasping. It’s in the discussion on work. Again, look at verses 5-6. Verse 4 talks about all the toil and skill and work that comes from a man’s envy of his neighbor. And then verses 5-6 give us three portraits of hands, three different kinds of hands, postures of hands.

First of all, verse 5, “The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh.” Again, it’s a picture of the slothful man, the sluggard so often described in Proverbs, who refuses to work, and that leads to destruction. Folded hands.

Then at the end of verse 6, you have a picture of two hands that are full of toil and striving after wind. These are the grasping hands, the hands that are trying to chase down whatever it is—status or wealth or accumulation or significance. But Qoheleth says this is a chasing after the wind, a striving after wind. Hands that are full of toil.

But in contrast to that, verse 6, “Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.”

A handful of quietness. Isn’t that a beautiful picture? It’s the picture of the contented person, the person who has found a sense of inner calm and quietness in his or her life and vocation and status in life; not constantly trying to improve one’s standard of living., not constantly trying to climb the ladder of competition, not constantly trying to accumulate more, but content. A handful of quietness.

It reminded me of Psalm 131, which is a beautiful, short psalm that gives us a picture of the person who has found contentment in the Lord. It’s a picture of the person who has calmed and quieted his soul like a weaned child sleeping on its mother’s shoulder.

When our daughter Susanna was just about eighteen months old, we went on one of our family trips down to Texas to see extended family. And as often happens on these trips, everybody got sick. And she was sick, she was throwing up through the night, and it was a pretty miserable night before we started our journey home.

That night we were trying to console her. We were trying to calm her down and quiet her, and we would say things to her like, “It’s going to be okay.” We’d pat her on the back. “It’s going to be okay.”

She was up off and on through the whole night. And it was interesting, by the very end of the night, she had started consoling herself. She was beginning to talk. And she would say, “It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.” You know, she’s just eighteen months old, two years old, something like that. “It’ll be all right.”

I thought that was a picture of Psalm 131. It’s the picture of the person who has learned the skill of quieting their heart in God. This is wisdom. This will help you live in this harsh world, if you can learn to cultivate contentment in the Lord.

Do you remember the apostle Paul in Philippians 4? He said, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.” And he’s writing it from prison! He says, “I’ve learned the secret. I can abound, I can be abased. I can have plenty, I can be in want. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” He’s found the secret of contentment because he’s learned to quiet his heart in the Lord.

Contentment; not grasping, but trusting in the Lord.

(2) There’s a second oasis. Here’s another well of wisdom for us, verses 9-12: companionship, not isolation.

“Two are better than one,” verse 9, “because they have a good reward for their toil.” And then he gives us three pictures of why two are better than one. Here’s the first picture, someone falling down. “For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up.”

Picture number two is someone sleeping at night, and remember this is in a world before electric heat. The nights would often be cold. So when two slept together, they would benefit from one another’s body heat and their warmth. Verse 11, again, “If two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone?”

Then picture number three, verse 12, is the picture of a fight. Here’s someone who gets in a fight, and they could be overcome if they’re by themselves. But if a friend comes along and it’s two against one, they get an advantage. Verse 12: “Though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.”

It’s showing us the value and the wisdom of companionship, a friendship of community. Two are better than one.

You and I were not made for isolation. When God created the man and the woman, he said before creating Eve, “It is not good that man should be alone.” We’re not made for isolation.

I want to just say that this is important for us in the church, and it’s important for us in this church, in our church, in Redeemer Church. If you make this church your home, you should never be someone who feels that you are left in isolation. It’s a place where you should find community and friendship. We all need it.

I just want to suggest some ways in which you can take steps into relationship. Just slow down for a minute, just think practically for a minute. It just begins with those casual friendships. Many of you maybe don’t even have these, and if you don’t, you start small with something very simple. You ask someone to go get coffee together, or you go to lunch with someone. Maybe you ask someone to play a game of pickup basketball with you, or pickleball, or whatever it is you love to do, and you just include others, and you start building those basic, casual friendships.

Then in the whole realm of Christian friendship…if we have nothing else in common with one another, we do have in common our love for Christ, our faith in Christ, our need for Christ. And there is a place for you in Christian community and fellowship. So take advantage of joining a class or joining a group, taking a step to get to know other people. It’s not just coming to church on Sunday morning, as important as that is, but it’s also being a part of a group or a team of people who are serving together, loving Christ together, learning together, growing together. Those are available for you. We mentioned them this morning; take advantage of that if you have not.

Then for many of us, maybe what we need is to just take a step deeper with the friends we already have. Maybe just with one friend, where you go deeper into closer, more intimate friendship, and you do that as you share your needs, as you open your heart, as you risk some vulnerability. Maybe you confess a sin. Maybe you share the areas where you find yourself tempted, or tested, or struggling. You ask for prayer.

“Two are better than one.” If you fall, how will you get up again if you don’t have someone to help you? If you’re in a battle, won’t you fight the battle better if there’s someone standing by your side? That’s the message here. This is wisdom for us, wisdom that will help us to live in this world under the sun. Companionship, not isolation.

(3) Then briefly, at the end of the chapter, you have counsel rather than folly. You see it in verses 13-16. I’ll just read verse 13, and I want you to just notice here the contrast. It says, “Better was a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice.”

There’s a contrast between the wise and the foolish; between the young and the aged, the old; and between someone who is poor and someone who has wealth and power and riches, the king. But the main thing that distinguishes them is this: the king, who’s old and foolish, no longer knew how to take advice. He was no longer receptive to counsel. This is a person who stops growing. They stop growing, they stop learning, and they close themselves off from the counsel and the feedback of others.

So once again, this is a point of wisdom for us in this world. I just want to ask you, are you a teachable, humble person, so that you know how to receive advice or counsel from others? Who can speak into your life? Who can speak into your life? Who can help you in living your life with more wisdom? Do you make all your decisions in isolation, or are you able to open your life to others and receive wisdom from others? It’s one of the things that will help us.

This is the proverbial wisdom that we find scattered through this chapter: companionship, contentment, and counsel.

3. Gospel Consolation

But I think if that’s all we had, we would still feel that something was lacking. There are still the tears of the oppressed, and Ecclesiastes says there was no one to comfort them. Where do we find that comfort? This is where we have to read beyond the limits of this book and look to the fullness of Scripture, where we find gospel consolation.

If Ecclesiastes as a whole shows us life under the sun, but scatters throughout the book little nuggets of wisdom and says, “There’s something better; here’s a better way to live,” the gospel tells us that the best is yet to come. The best is yet to come. And we find it through the words of another wise man, the wisest of all, the Lord Jesus Christ.

I just want to take you for these last couple of minutes to the upper room, where Jesus, the night before he would be crucified for our sins, spends an evening with his disciples in this upper room. I just want to point out three strands of gospel consolation, of gospel hope, that we find from Jesus in these chapters in the Gospel of John. So we’re going to be in the Gospel of John 14-16; one nugget from each chapter.

(1) First of all, we see the promise of the Comforter. In John 14:18 Jesus says, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you…. But the helper [or the comforter], the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

The paraclete, right? The one who comes alongside us to help us, to be our advocate, our counselor, our comforter. One who is like Jesus, who, in a sense, mediates the presence of Jesus to us today; the Spirit of God.

This is something that you and I have that is unique to our age in redemptive history, the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church. The Spirit was active in the Old Testament, but it’s the great new covenant gift of Christ that he gives the Spirit to the church, the Spirit who indwells the believer. Ecclesiastes says, “I saw the tears of the oppressed, and there was no comforter.”

Jesus says, “I’m sending you the comforter. Here’s the comforter: the Spirit will come, and he will teach you all things. He will lead you into truth. He will be your comforter.” Wherever you are in life, if you know Christ, if you know the presence of the Spirit, you know a comfort that takes you beyond life under the sun, a comfort that comes from the very presence of the Spirit of God in your heart and life.

(2) Secondly, John 15, the sacrifice of a friend. Jesus says in verses 12-13, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”

This is the measure of friendship and love in the Christian community, that we lay down our lives for one another. Of course, Jesus himself is the supreme example of this. Was there ever a friend like Jesus, the one who’s the friend of sinners and the one who laid down his life for us?

This directs us to the cross, the cross of Jesus Christ, where Jesus in his self-sacrificial love laid down his life for our sakes. This is the model for us. This is the benchmark. This is the standard for Christian love and community today. “Love one another as I have loved you.” Self-sacrificial love.

Jesus went to the very limits. “Having loved his own, he loved him to the end,” John 13 says. And that’s how you and I are called to love one another. This is the gospel, the sacrifice of a friend. If two are better than one, the best of all is Jesus, our friend, who gave himself for us and who loved us to the end.

(3) Then from John 16:33, the power to overcome the world. We’ve already heard these words this morning. Jesus said, “I have said these things to you that you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation.” Life under the sun—you’ll have tribulation. “But be of good cheer [take heart]; I have overcome the world.”

Injustice, oppression, tribulation, sorrow, death—they’re all overcome by Jesus, who overcame them all in his death and in his resurrection from the dead. It is the power of the resurrected Christ that gives us hope beyond this world, hope that the best is yet to come, when Jesus comes and makes all things new.

I want to end this morning with a passage familiar to many of you, from C.S. Lewis’s final Narnian tale, The Last Battle. This is classic. It has to be the best ending to any children’s novel ever written. It’s when the Pevensey children have been killed in a railway accident. You would think it’s a tragedy, but they meet with Aslan the lion, this Christ-figure in Aslan’s country, and he says to them, “The term is over, the holidays have begun. The dream has ended; this is the morning.”

And then Lewis says, “The things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us, this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after; but for them it was only the beginning of the real story. Now at last they were beginning chapter one of the great story which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

That’s our hope, friends. Our hope is that there is coming a new world, a new creation through the power of the risen Christ who promises to make all things new. There will come a time when life under the sun ceases to be what it is now. In fact, in the new world, Christ himself will be the sun, he will be the light. There will be a new heavens and a new earth. Every tear will be wiped away. There will be no more sadness, no more sorrow, no more sin, no more injustice, no more oppression, no more suffering, no more death! It’ll be done forever, and instead what we’ll have is an eternal day, an eternal experience of ever increasing joy in the presence of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. That’s our hope. Let’s live in that hope this week.

Let’s pray together.

Gracious, merciful God, we thank you this morning for the fullness of the teaching of your word, your word which speaks truthfully about our present experience in this life, with all the harshness of this life that we experience; your word which also gives us wisdom for how to live better—lives of contentment, lives in community with others, lives that are marked by wisdom—and supremely how your word points us forward to the greatest hope of all, the hope that we have in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is in that hope that we now come to the Lord’s table this morning. As we reflect in these next few moments on what Christ has done for us, may it fuel our hope for life in this world as we anticipate what Christ will do when he comes again.

We pray that you would draw near to us in this time of worship, that your Spirit would come in fullness, that you would take these truths and make them real to our hearts and to our experience this morning, and that we would walk out of this building today with deeper hope than we had when we came in. So draw near to us we pray, in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.