Ecclesiastes Chapter Three, God Renders Judgment

Ecclesiastes 3:16 Moreover I saw under the sun: in the place of judgment, wickedness was there; and in the place of righteousness, iniquity was there. [17] I said in my heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time there for every purpose and for every work.

Escalating from verses 14 and 15, the preacher states that he observed an injustice under the sun. Instead of men in authority rendering judgment, there was wickedness, presumably due to the corruption of human judgment through covetousness. Sound judgment should walk hand in hand with righteousness, but rather than that, the preacher discovered iniquity, also meaning wickedness.

The readership learned that what God does is forever; what men do is simply cyclical: new people doing old things and believing ourselves to be forward thinking pioneers. It would be the embodiment of the old adage: “reinventing the wheel.” But the preacher relates that men’s works go from pointless to evil, from the viewpoint of being under the sun. It would be bad enough to recycle what has been done and thought by other men in previous times. But then sin invades men’s thoughts and actions and what is done and thought is only and always corrupt. “A wicked man accepts a bribe behind the back to pervert the ways of justice,” Proverbs 17:23. “And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the discerning and perverts the words of the righteous,” Exodus 23:8.

Instead of subjective improvement as anyone contemporaneous would like to believe, mankind is objectively declining morally and spiritually, 2 Timothy 3:13, see also 3:1, 4:3, etc. Sin has run amok in Adam’s race for no less than 6,000 years, and its cumulative impact has degraded our race on no small scale. It is embodied in this verse by the perversion of justice. God, the ultimate Judge, does what is right, Hebrews 12:23, Genesis 18:25. God is just and impartial as a good judge ought to be. He shows no favoritism, balances what is done against the Law, and renders judgment. The Lord Jesus Christ was accused of having this very trait, Luke 20:21. In matters of law this attribute is absolutely requisite. Peter testified before Cornelius that God shows no partiality, Acts 10:34. James refers to God, the Judge, as the Lawgiver, James 4:12. The giver of Law to man embedded in his conscience is the same God that covenanted with Israel and gave them the Sinaitic Law on the mountain. All righteousness emanates from God, therefore it stands to reason that judging rightly involves using reason and wisdom to think God’s own thoughts after Him to determine what the right course of action is. Even the Gentile nations that did not know God expressed this by nature, by judging what was right amongst one another, without having received the Sinaitic Law, Romans 2:14, 15.

“There” in verse 17 would circle back to what is “under the sun.” The preacher saw the wickedness of mankind and knew that the Judge of all the earth would call us into account for the deeds done in the flesh. Paul assures his Roman readership, “God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel,” Romans 2:16. He prefaces that verse by telling his readership that there will come a day when this will be so. The OT prophets referred to it often as the Day of the Lord. The dead, that is the spiritually dead, will be judged according to their works. And the righteous will likewise be judged according to theirs.

The righteous, or the saints that have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, will have their works tried by fire, and those done in the flesh will burn away, leaving no reward. Those that remain merit reward. Since salvation is not merited, but the free gift of God’s condescending grace because of our Lord Jesus Christ, eternal life is not in question here. It is the state or station we enter into eternity. Will we receive crowns or rewards for what we, the righteous, have done on earth in the name of Christ? The wicked likewise will, by their works, determine the severity of their judgment. One can see that either righteous or wicked, one’s eternal position is not in question because of what is done in the flesh; that has been settled at the cross forever. No, the righteous will earn or forfeit reward because of our works and the purposes that spawned them. Moreover, the wicked will suffer either with greater or lesser severity based on what they have done and the degree of understanding they possess, having done it. Christ is the divider that saves or condemns a man. What we choose to do in life only adds (or detracts) from our eternal state in terms of what we receive when life “under the sun” finally ends.