Frustrated by Injustice

I have been in rooms where I told the truth and the truth did not win. I'd guess you have too — a meeting, a marriage, an HR complaint, a courtroom literally or otherwise, where the facts were on your side and the outcome wasn't. It is one of the more disorienting experiences a person can have, because it doesn't just frustrate you. It makes you start to wonder whether justice is real at all, or just a story we tell each other to feel better about a world that doesn't actually run on it.

The speaker in Ecclesiastes gets there too, and it's the darkest turn in the book. "I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness" (3:16). In ancient Israel, the courtroom was supposed to be where wrong got made right — the widow got her hearing, the orphan got defended. What the speaker sees was the bench rigged, the innocent walking out condemned and the guilty walking out free. His first instinct is the right one: God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter (3:17). For one verse, the chapter brightens.

Then he pulls the rug out from under himself. What happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other... Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward? (3:19, 21). He cannot prove there's anything beyond the dust. So he lands where consistent honesty under the sun always lands him: there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot (3:22). Joy in your work is the best you can manage once you've given up on a verdict ever coming.

Here's where I think the speaker is simply wrong, and history is the evidence. The doctrine he could only gesture at in verse 17 — that God will judge — has been the engine of nearly every major reform movement Christians have ever launched. Take the most uncomfortable example. Slavery was practiced almost everywhere, by almost everyone, for almost all of human history. So where did the idea come from that it was wrong? It came from Christians reading their Bibles and concluding that a coming judgment meant the present injustice would not stand forever — which didn't make them passive. It made them fearless.

Martin Luther King wrote from a jail cell that he kept hearing from ministers that race was a "social issue with which the gospel has no real concern." He didn't buy it, because he believed exactly what Qoheleth could only ask about. The conviction that God would set it right didn't make King wait quietly for heaven. It made him march.

The narrator at the end of Ecclesiastes finally says out loud what the teacher couldn't quite reach: God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil (12:14). That should terrify you and me as much as it terrified the corrupt judges. We've all done things we hope never see the light. But the cross is the corrupt courtroom in reverse — the Innocent One condemned, on purpose, for us, so the guilty could walk free. The speaker asked who knows whether there's anything beyond death. One man knows. He walked out of the grave and showed us his hands.