Ecclesiastes 3:20

_ALL GO UNTO ONE PLACE; ALL ARE OF THE DUST, AND ALL TURN TO DUST AGAIN._ No JFB commentary on this verse....

16-22 Without the fear of the Lord, man is but vanity; set that aside, and judges will not use their power well. And there is another Judge that stands before the door. With God there is a time for the redressing of grievances, though as yet we see it not. Solomon seems to express his wish that men might perceive, that by choosing this world as their portion, they brought themselves to a level with the beasts, without being free, as they are, from present vexations and a future account. Both return to the dust from whence they were taken. What little reason have we to be proud of our bodies, or bodily accomplishments! But as none can fully comprehend, so few consider properly, the difference between the rational soul of man, and the spirit or life of the beast. The spirit of man goes upward, to be judged, and is then fixed in an unchangeable state of happiness or misery. It is as certai...

Verse 20. _ALL GO UNTO ONE PLACE_] "Man was born To die, nor aught exceeds in this respect The vilest brute. Both transient, frail, and vain, Draw the same breath; alike grow old, decay, And then expire: both to one grave descend; There blended lie, to native dust return'd."-C....

That great anomaly in the moral government of this world, the seemingly unequal distribution of rewards and punishments, will be rectified by God, who has future times and events under His control Ecclesiastes 3:16. As for people, they are placed by God, who is their teacher, in a humble condition, even on a level with inferior animals, by death, that great instance of their subjection to vanity Ecclesiastes 3:18, which reduces to its original form all that was made of the dust of the ground Ecclesiastes 3:20. And though the destinies of man and beast are different, yet in our present lack of knowledge as to God’s future dealing with our spirits...

EXPOSITION ECCLESIASTES 3:1 Section 4. In confirmation of the truth that man's happiness depends upon the will of God, Koheleth proceeds to show how _Providence arranges even the minutest concerns; that man can alter nothing, must make the best of things as they are, bear with anomalies, bounding his desires by this present life._ ECCLESIASTES 3:1 The providence of God disposes and arranges every detail of man's life. This proposition is stated first generally, and then worked out in particular by means of antithetical sentences. In Hebrew manuscripts and most printed texts Ecclesiastes 3:2 are arranged in two parallel col

ALL GO UNTO ONE PLACE,.... The earth w from whence they came; ALL ARE OF THE DUST, AND ALL TURN TO DUST AGAIN; Adam's body was made of the dust of the earth, and so all his posterity, all of them; in which they agree with beasts, who are made of the dust also; and, when they die, return to it; see Genesis 2:7. w "Magna parens terra est", Ovid. Metamorph. l. 1. Fab. 7....

2. FURTHER RESULTS OF THE SEARCH CHAPTER 3 _ 1. The times of man under the sun (Ecclesiastes 3:1)_ 2. When then is the good? (Ecclesiastes 3:12) 3. Concerning judgment and the future (Ecclesiastes 3:16) Ecclesiastes 3:1. There is a time for everything. Twenty-eight “times” are mentioned, beginning with the time of birth and ending with the time for peace. Everything has a fixed time: Life-death; seeding-harvesting; killing-healing; breaking-down building-up; weeping-laughing; mourning-dancing, etc. These are the times of the entire race; that is what human life

MAN NO BETTER THAN THE BEASTS. Ecclesiastes 3:16. Both in the administration of the law and the observances of religion, wickedness is prevalent; righteousness is here equivalent to piety. Ecclesiastes 3:17 is the insertion of the orthodox glossator; Qoheleth does not regard God as vindicating the godly. Ecclesiastes 3:18 links on to Ecclesiastes 3:16; the corruption already alluded to is God's way of showing that man, despite his vaunt of intelligence, is really on a level with the beasts. They share the same breath, and when it leaves them, the same end, death. Note...

ONE PLACE: i.e. _Sheol,_ or the grave. OF THE DUST. See Genesis 1:24; Genesis 2:7; Genesis 2:19; Genesis 3:19. TURN TO DUST AGAIN. See Genesis 3:19; Psalms 22:15; Psalms 104:29; Psalms 146:4.Job 10:9;...

_All go unto one place_ The "place" thus spoken of is not the _Sheol_of the Hebrews or the _Hades_of the Greeks, which implied, however vaguely, some notion of a shadowy disembodied existence, for the souls of men as distinct from those of brutes, but simply the earth as at once the mother, the nourisher, and the sepulchre of every form of life. So Lucretius, as a disciple of Epicurus, speaks (_De Rer. Nat_. v. 259) of earth as being "Omniparens eadem rerum commune sepulcrum." "The mother and the sepulchre of all." _all are of the dust_ There is an obviously deliberate reference to the narrative of the Creation in Genesis 2:7. To those who did not see below the surface, it seemed to affirm, as it did to the Sadducee, the denial of a life to come. "Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return" was the sentence passed, they might say, as on the brute creation, s