Ecclesiastes 6:7

SOLOMON FINDS MORE VANITY AND STRIVING AFTER WIND

"All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled. For what advantage hath the wise man more than the fool? or what hath the poor man that knoweth how to walk before the living? Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this also is vanity, and a striving after wind."

When life on earth, as considered apart from the knowledge of God, as the author of Ecclesiastes was speaking of it in these lines, "Then life itself is a rat-race that makes no sense at all. This awful truth is just as real to the modern man on his industrial treadmill as it was to the primitive peasant scraping a bare living from the ground (which God has cursed for Adam's sake). He works to eat, for the strength to go on working, to go on eating; and, even if he enjoys his work and his food, the compulsion is still there."[3] His mouth, not his mind, is in control.

Even with all of man's vaunted discoveries, achievements, inventions, etc., there is an epic tragedy of human life on earth continually lived out in the lives of uncounted millions of people. Millions of children annually die without proper food from malnutrition and starvation. Disease and death are rampant in all lands. Oh yes, the average life-span has been increased a little; but it remains only a small fraction of what God intended, as evidenced in the lives of Adam and many of the patriarchs. What is wrong? Just one thing. Man's wickedness.

Apart from God, "homo sapiens" (the wise one, as he calls himself) would be more appropriately named if he had called himself `homo ignoramus.'! Apart from God, mankind has no more future than the ichthyosaurus or the dinosaur. More and more our wretched human family is claiming for itself the scriptural designation that must be applied to unbelievers, namely, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" (Psalms 14:1 and Psalms 53:1).

"Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire" (Ecclesiastes 6:9). Cook interpreted this to mean that, "A thing pleasant before the eyes is preferable to a future which exists only in the desire."[4] If this is correct, then we have here the equivalent of the current saying that, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," the very same thought of every sinner who consents to take what his lustful eyes may see instead of those things eternal which are invisible (2 Corinthians 4:18).