The Teachers continues looking at riches. Note that riches themselves are not wrong. There is a whole lot of bad teaching in the area of prosperity. On the one hand there is the so-called prosperity gospel which at best puts an undue emphasis on wealth and at worst is greed teaching. But then in opposition to this we can so easily teach wealth is bad, which is equal nonsense. Riches are not wrong in themselves, and can be a gift from God and a source of blessing.
Here the Teacher observes that sometimes God gives good things to people, but not the ability to enjoy them. There are many examples of people getting lots of money, but far from blessing them it ends up being a curse, just bringing trouble.
Verse 3 looks at the temporal nature of things. He muses that a stillborn child is better off than the living. The problem he is wrestling with is the apparent meaninglessness and pointlessness of life. However it starts, whatever happens in the middle, the end is always the same, death. This is the inevitable conclusion of a world without God, or a world without eternity. You see the human attempt to explain life is to look at the world as a closed system, this is all there is. We do this from a moral perspective - we decide what is right and wrong. We do it from a scientific perspective - everything is explained in purely material terms. But if we do this the logical conclusion is that life is ultimately pointless.
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