And I saw all labour, and all success of work, that it is man's jealousy of his neighbour. This also is vanity and pursuit of the wind.
The Preacher turns from the tears of the oppressed to something that looks far better: hard work, skill and achievement. Yet he finds a worm in it, because the drive behind the effort is one man measuring himself against his neighbour — so what is left to work for?
Success Breeds Envy
The verse sits inside a short survey of extremes. One writer reads verse 4 as the story of the man who has made it:
Verses 4-7. As he goes on with his observations, he mentions the successful man, the man who has made life worth living. But success breeds envy. It makes his life bitter. Instead of being loved, the successful man is hated. What else is it then but vanity and a striving after wind! But now the other extreme. It is the lazy man, the fool who eats his own flesh.
Older translations read the line the other way round: the successful man is envied by his neighbour. The ESV instead traces the work itself back to envy. Either way, envy stands between the two men.
Two Roads, Both Empty
The trap has two jaws. Work hard and people resent you. Refuse to work and you destroy yourself. One commentator gives the verdict:
That is man: success only stirs up envy in his neighbour, and bitter self-torment in the fool. Here, as before, only the quiet, thankful soul is wise.
What Feeds Envy
Envy feeds on a neighbour's success. The better a man does, the more he becomes a target. That is what makes this sin strange: good, not wrongdoing, sets it off.
James does not hesitate to say that envy is a root of every evil work (Jas. 3:16). It is worse than wrath or anger; no one can stand before envy (Prov. 27:4). It holds back growth in grace (1 Pet. 2:1,2). It is one of the works of the flesh (Gal. 5:21), and one our spirits fall into easily (Jas. 4:5). The prosperity and good deeds of others produce it (Eccles. 4:4), and so do arguments and disputes (1 Tim. 6:4).
Envy has a twin in hypocrisy, and the two work in opposite directions:
Hypocrisy springs from claiming to have the good we lack. In the same way, envy seeks to deny and defame the real good in others.
The Motive Behind The Effort
Read the other way, the verse exposes why people work at all. The goal is not the job; it is the gap between me and the man next door.
To have something that others do not have is a very deep-seated desire in the heart of fallen man. Only a few, however, can ever reach it. So the rest settle for pretending to have what makes them better than the people around them.
What the achievement is hardly matters. What matters is that it sets me apart from someone else:
Man glories in anything that will bring honour to himself — anything that sets him apart from his neighbour. It does not matter what it is (it may be that he is the tallest man). His pride will take hold of whatever gives him an advantage over others. … Wealth, knowledge, anything that marks a man out, he will glory in, and build a little world around himself with it.
No Cure Within This World
Ecclesiastes offers no method for fixing this. The Preacher looks only at things in this present life, and within those limits there is no repair:
Until Christ returns, there is no proper correction or remedy. The Preacher, who speaks here only of present things, could do no more than praise the dead who had already gone, or the unborn who had seen nothing.
The One Outlet
Yet the book does not leave us there. It points to one way out, and that way out is a Person:
Faith in Jesus, says the apostle, is the one and only way out of a state of condemnation. Living to Jesus, says the Book of Ecclesiastes, is the one and only way out of a state of vanity. And we may well rejoice at how simple such relief is from conditions so heavy and painful.
That changes what work is for, without excusing laziness:
The fact that mere man's work is vanity is no reason to be lazy in the Lord's work. Faith in the Living God and hard work go together, for in this there is no vanity: "in the Lord your labor is not in vain."
Summary
- Cause. Comparison drives much human achievement — the wish to hold what a neighbour does not hold.
- Cost. Envy feeds on another's prosperity and good deeds, not on their sins, and it works to deny and defame the good it sees.
- Trap. Both roads end in emptiness: others resent the successful man, and the idle man consumes himself.
- Limit. Ecclesiastes offers no remedy within this world; correction waits for Christ's return.
- Outlet. Living to Jesus is the way out of vanity, and work done for Him is the one labour that is not in vain.