Ecclesiastes 3:16-22--The Mystery of Injustice and Death

Ecclesiastes 3:16-22
Christian Standard Bible

The Mystery of Injustice and Death
16 I also observed under the sun: there is wickedness at the place of judgment and there is wickedness at the place of righteousness. 17 I said to myself, “God will judge the righteous and the wicked, since there is a time for every activity and every work.” 18 I said to myself, “This happens so that God may test the children of Adam and they may see for themselves that they are like animals.” 19 For the fate of the children of Adam and the fate of animals is the same. As one dies, so dies the other; they all have the same breath. People have no advantage over animals since everything is futile. 20 All are going to the same place; all come from dust, and all return to dust. 21 Who knows if the spirits of the children of Adam go upward and the spirits of animals go downward to the earth? 22 I have seen that there is nothing better than for a person to enjoy his activities because that is his reward. For who can enable him to see what will happen after he dies?

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Solomon speaks again from an earthly perspective to say that it looks like the righteous aren't any better than the wicked, and he expects judgment to come on both groups of people if there truly is a time for everything, as the LORD's time of overlooking sin will end and there will be a time for judgment to come.  For the wicked, they would bear the judgment for their own sins, but for the righteous, another would bear the punishment for their sins.  Solomon is incorrect if he is assuming the "righteous" will pay the penalty for their own sins, but this is the way that the world thinks.

Solomon's justification for this is that man along will all the animals have been affected by the curse of sin, which is death.  They all received the life that God breathed into them (though I would argue that man was different as he received an eternal soul when God's Spirit was breathed into him).  Solomon says that there is no evidence that a scientist could study that would prove that animals don't have souls and only get buried in the ground and that men and women, though they die and are buried, have an afterlife in a place of blessing or a place of judgment.  That is not to say that Solomon doesn't believe in these things, but he's trying to restrict his arguments to those that he can make from an "under the sun" materialistic or humanistic perspective.  Though he mentions God here, he only does so to say that maybe God intends to let man know they are nothing special (that the Humanists are wrong).  He seems to favor the Naturalist position here that man is just another animal.  Again, we have to know that Solomon is arguing for a bad set of premises and coming to bad conclusions on purpose.  We're supposed to bristle up when we hear this and say, "Wait a minute!  I know the book of Genesis, and that's not true!"  We know the truth because God (who is not "under the sun") has revealed it to us, but what if He had not?  We might be about to infer his existence as Creator (see Romans 1), but would we really be able to infer everything about man being made in His image, that we were eternal beings, that there was sin that needed atonement, and that atonement needed to a blood sacrifice of the innocent for the guilty, and there was no innocent man that could take our place? I don't think we could reason much of this once our mind was corrupted by sin.  Solomon is taking the point of view of one of these people with a depraved and corrupted mind (maybe his son is still one of those people) and trying to argue on their level how they should know there are better answers than what their worldview has to offer.  I promise we will eventually get to a point where we come back to a biblical worldview where we consider God has Creator and the one who will judge the living and the dead, but we must hang on for many more chapters before we get there.