Having mused on a "time for this, a time for that" we are back to "what's the point?". He starts by looking at work, and I am sure many of us can identify with this. He talks about the burden God has laid upon us, and after the fall part of the judgement was that our work would be hard. It is a pretty safe guess that almost of all of us will have found the burdens at work will have increased over the last ten years.
Verse 11 expresses some of the frustration of being human. God has put eternity in our hearts. We know there is a deeper purpose than what we see in front of our noses, we sense that there has to be more to life than being born, living for a few years then dying. Yet we cannot work out what it is! The Teacher's immediate answer to this is just to get on with life now and enjoy it as best we can. To enjoy our work is indeed a gift of God, and when we do enjoy our work we should be grateful to God for that.
Yet there is still the matter of eternity. God is an eternal God and His works endure forever. Moreover, we will be called to give an account. At present we see much wickedness, but this makes it all the more certain that God will bring a time of judgement. In fact, he is continuing in his "a time for ...". We cannot understand why God allows certain things to happen, but we can be sure that in the end there will be justice.
He then seems to go into despair again, wondering if we are any better than animals. It is the human spirit that makes us different from animals. Physically we are made of much the same stuff as animals, yet we know that there is a radical difference.
So he concludes this section by suggesting that we just get on with life because nothing else is possible.
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