Death and Injustice
Ecclesiastes 3:16 to 4:3
Death and injustice DIG: What does this passage teach concerning the destiny of humans? Animals? Who are the “oppressed” in 4:1? The “oppressors?” Why does the Teacher say that the dead are happier than the living? Why did Solomon fall back down into a deep depression?
REFLECT: Do you fear death? How do you respond to those who act as if there is no God or final judgment? How does the promise of eternal life in John 5:24 help you deal with injustice? Are you really sure that after you die you will go to heaven and live with God?
Rather than getting angry and sad about the oppression we see in the world,
we can trust God to make things right in the end.
In his book Why Everything Matters: The Gospel in Ecclesiastes, Philip Ryken writes that few contemporary writers are more highly regarded than Julian Barnes, the English essayist and novelist who wrote Flaubert’s Parrot, The Sense of an Ending, and other prize winning books. In 2013 Barnes published Levels of Life, a poignant memoir that the author wrote after the death of his beloved wife. This followed an earlier memoir, in which he admitted that he was afraid to die. This confession was something of an embarrassment because, as an agnostic, Barnes honestly didn’t think that death was anything to be afraid of. If there was no good reason to believe in God, he reasoned, and also no such thing as life after death, then there is (to use the title of his memoir) Nothing to be Frightened Of.
Yet, in the memoir, Barnes frankly admitted that he was afraid to die – desperately afraid. The New York Times Book Review correctly diagnosed the author’s condition as thanatophobia, or the fear of death. Barnes admitted that he thinks about death every day and that sometimes in the night he is “roared awake” and “pitched from sleep into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world.” Awake and utterly alone, he finds himself pounding his pillow with a fist and wailing, “Oh no, Oh No, OH NO!”
Julian’s dreams are even darker. Sometimes he is buried alive. Other times he is “chased, surrounded, and outnumbered.” He finds himself “held hostage, wrongly condemned to the firing squad, and informed that there is even less time than he thought he had. The usual stuff,” he calls it. And perhaps this is the usual stuff, because death is the sum of all our fears: of being alone, abandoned or condemned.271
When you wake up in the middle of the night, what are you afraid of?
Man’s inhumanity to man: Ecclesiastes faces up to all our fears by asking the most difficult questions that anyone could ask about the meaning of the universe, the existence of God and the life to come. So far the Solomon of Ecclesiastes has tested the limits of human knowledge, attempted to do his moral duty, indulged in many pleasures and immersed himself in his work . . . trying anything and everything to make sense of his world. Now, at the end of Chapter 3, the Teacher deals with the most difficult question of death. He had been thinking of all the injustice in the world and about his longing for ADONAI to make things right. But dwelling on the Judgment Day naturally caused him to wonder what will happen when we die.
Try to follow Solomon’s reasoning: Another thing I observed under the sun, cutting God out of the picture. There, in the same place as justice, was wickedness; there, in the same place as righteousness, was wickedness (3:16). As we have seen before, the phrase under the sun may be taken to describe the futility and pointlessness of life lived only for self and the moment, without gratitude to or regard for God and His ways. What we see under the sun in this instance is rampant injustice – what the Scottish poet Robert Burns famously called, “man’s inhumanity to man.”
Here, Solomon sounds like one of the biblical prophets, crying out for justice. This is one of the deepest longings of the human heart – an end to all the unfairness. The specific problem in this case is that even the courts were unjust. The very place where people most need to receive justice turned out to be the site of unfairness. Innocent people were being convicted for crimes they never committed. People were lying, cheating and stealing; sometimes even getting away with murder. It was all so unfair. When the Teacher saw what was happening he longed for someone to comfort the oppressed and dry their tears. Even worse, there was nothing, he reasoned, that could be done about it. His frustration was that injustice was going unpunished. When the halls of justice become corridors of corruption, where can righteousness be found? Since God is good, why do so many bad things happen?
A time for justice: Solomon had a good answer to the problem of injustice. He affirmed that God would judge both the righteous and the wicked, but that this judgment would come only in His time, because there is a right time for every intention and for every action (3:17). But that judgment will come only in His time. The time of this judgment is ambiguous; it’s in the future and in God’s time, but the verse neither states nor implies that it will be in the afterlife. Solomon undoubtedly believed, along with the wisdom writers of his day, that the judgment would take place on the earth (Job 27:13-23, Psalms 37:2, 6, 11, 13, 15, 17-40, 73:18-20, and Proverbs 22:22-23).272
Here we see the Teacher applying one of his own sermons to his own heart. He takes a spiritual principle that he taught earlier and applied it to the issue of injustice. Since there is a right time for every intention under heaven (3:1), then there must be a time for justice. Consequently, rather than merely getting angry and sad about the oppression we see in the world, we can trust God to make things right in the end.
This doesn’t mean that there is never a time for us to pursue justice. Depending on our place in society – our position of privilege, our place of influence, and our God-given authority – it is our duty to fight against oppression in the Church and around the world. Yet, even our best interests will not bring an end to oppression. There will still be violence against women and children, structures of corruption in business, government, and even law enforcement. But in all the situations that we do not have the power, the authority or the wisdom to resolve, Ha’Shem will see to it that justice is done. Nobody is getting away with anything.
Dust to dust: Even if we believe that justice is coming, we may still wonder why it is delayed. To be sure, God will make everything right in the end, but why doesn’t He judge people right now? Why does He wait until the Day of Judgment? Solomon had a reasonable answer to this question as well: Concerning people, I said to myself, “God is testing them, so that they will see that by themselves they are, in one sense, just like animals (3:18). Our present existence is a proving ground. It is a test, not simply in the sense of something we pass or fail, but also in the sense of something that reveals our true character, our true relationship with ADONAI. This test is not for His benefit, as if there was anything about us that He doesn’t already know, but for our benefit, so that we recognize our own mortality. Will we learn to see ourselves for who we really are? This is the searching question that waiting for justice poses for every one of us.
Ecclesiastes helps us to clarify our identity by telling us that we are, in one sense, just like animals. This is not a comment on our biology, but on our destiny. Here is how the Teacher explains it: After all, the same things that happen to people happen to animals, the very same thing – just as the one dies, so does the other. Yes, their breath is the same; so that humans are no better than animals; since nothing matters, anyway. They all go to the same place; they all come from dust, and they all return to dust (3:19-20). This is one of the Bible’s strongest statements of the inevitability of death, which is the greatest equalizer of all. Animals are living creatures. Like us, they have been given life and breath by their Creator. But this life will not last forever. The day will come when we breathe our last. With our parting breath, each of us will go to the same place, returning to dust. By using this language the Teacher is reminding us of God’s curse against Adam’s sin: dust we are, and to dust we shall return (Genesis 3:19).
Not everyone responds to death in the same way. Some people laugh it off, like the American comedian Woody Allen, who famously said, “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens!” But many people are afraid, like Julian Barnes. They have terrors in the night and despair of ever finding any lasting hope or true meaning in life. Solomon was at that desperate point here, saying: everything is pointless.
Life after death: For a moment it seemed as if the Final Judgment would solve the problem of injustice. But as it turns out, the solution was only temporary at best. As the Teacher reflected further on the delay of divine justice and started thinking about the implications of his mortality, he ended up right back where he started. Here we go again: Pointless! – says the Teacher – everything is pointless (1:1-2)! Still, Solomon knew of one thing that could make a difference in the face of death. Even if our bodies return to the dust, maybe our souls will live forever. This would give us some reassurance that the wicked will come to justice.
The trouble was that he wasn’t quite sure if he believed in life after death. Who knows if the spirit of a human being goes upward and the spirit of an animal goes downward into the earth (3:21)? The Teacher had heard the conventional wisdom that when animals die, they just die, but when people die their spirits go to either Paradise (heaven) or sh’ol (hell). But, he was starting to have his doubts. So, he asked the agnostic question: Who knows? Can we really be sure that after we die we will go to heaven and live with God? This is the most basic question that we can ask about our destiny. We know that one day the time will come for us to die. The question is: Will we live again? Solomon was struggling to know for sure. Who knows? he said. As he wrestled with this doubt the Teachers first impulse was to throw himself back into his work: So, I concluded that there is nothing better for a person to do than to enjoy life, that that is his allotted portion; for who can enable him to see what will happen after him (3:22)? He just wanted to stay productive.
But unless we have the assurance of eternal life (see the commentary on The Life of Christ, to see the link click Ms – The Eternal Security of the Believer), finding joy in our everyday work will never give us lasting satisfaction. And sure enough, Solomon spiraled back down into a black hole despair. I turned away and thought about all the acts of injustice being done under the sun. I saw the tears of the oppressed who cried out for help but they had no one to comfort them because of the irresistible power of their oppressors. They had no one to comfort them. Solomon considered the dead happier (because they were already dead) than the living, who must still live their lives; but happier than either of them, he thought, was the one who has not yet been born because he has not yet seen the evil things that are done under the sun because of injustice (4:1-3).
From dust to glory: By this point, it is clear that Ecclesiastes doesn’t have all the answers. This frustrates those who want a progression of thought from one section to another, and who claim that Solomon offers no satisfactory answers to any of the problems he poses. But at least the book asks the right questions. As well as anyone in history, the Teacher accurately identified the problems of human existence. One way to find the answer to life’s most difficult questions is by searching the Scriptures. In the final chapter of Ecclesiastes, the Teacher-king affirms that the dust returns to earth, as it was, and the spirit returns to God, who gave it (12:7)! Clearly, Solomon came to believe in life after death.
But the best answer of all is the one that ADONAI has given in Messiah. Anyone who wants to know what will happen after death should ask Yeshua, because He has been to the other side. When our Savior was brought to the place of justice, there was no justice for Him at all. There was no one to speak in His defense, no one to rescue Him from the deadly cross and no one to comfort Him as He was laid in the dust of death. But Yeshua did not stay dead. On the third day, He rose; His body and His spirit ascended from dust to glory. Now everyone who believes in Him can obtain a better resurrection (Hebrews 11:35). This is why we can be absolutely certain of eternal life. It is because Messiah brought eternal life out of a deadly grave. As the Bible says: He abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel (2 Timothy 2:10).
Have you claimed this promise by the death and resurrection of Yeshua Messiah, that when you go down to the dust of death, you will rise again to glory? If so, then you have resurrection comfort in all your sorrows. You can rejoice in whatever good work Messiah gives you to do as you wait for the Day of Judgment. You have faith and hope to persevere in the face of injustice and oppression. Yes, He is our blessed hope (Titus 2:13) after all our troubles and sorrows, He will raise us up to glory.273
Dear Heavenly Father, Praise You that You are Almighty – Sovereign over the world and Sovereign over death. Yeshua was victorious over death when he rose from the grave, defeating death and its hold on sinners. As the sacrificial Lamb of God He paid the penalty for our sins so we could have His righteousness (Second Corinthians 5:21) and enter heaven. Praise You, God, for Your love for mankind to send Your one-and-only Son to die. Praise You for Your power to be victorious over death! That same power that You used to raise Yeshua Messiah from the dead, You will use to raise Your children. Therefore we were buried together with Him through immersion into death – in order that just as Messiah was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become joined together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also will be joined together in His resurrection (Romans 6:4-5).
Praise You that those who love You can look forward to that moment when we are changed into incorruptible bodies. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed – in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last shofar. For the shofar will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we will be changed (First Corinthians 15:51c-52). Your children have no reason to fear death for death is swallowed up in victory. Because of Yeshua’s great sacrifice, we can ask: Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting (First Corinthians 15:54c-55)? We cannot thank You enough for Your painful conquering of death. We want to show our thanks and our love by following You in all we say and do and think! In Yeshua’s holy name and power of His resurrection. Amen
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