Eccl. 8:10-14.17: "Then too, I saw the wicked buried—those who used to come and go from the holy place and receive praise in the city where they did this. This too is meaningless. When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, people's hearts are filled with schemes to do wrong. Although a wicked person who commits a hundred crimes may live a long time, I know that it will go better with those who fear God, who are reverent before him. Yet because the wicked do not fear God, it will not go well with them, and their days will not lengthen like a shadow. There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve. ... Then I saw all that God has done. No-one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. People toil to search it out, but no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it." (Today’s NIV)

Why are believers not always better off than nonbelievers?

Salomon recognizes that we as human beings can’t answer that question. It is true that the life of a person that honors God will develop more positively long-term. But from a short-term perspective this is not always true at all. To the contrary: often either the nonbeliever outlives the believer, or the believer has to suffer destinies that nonbelievers escape.

Evidently God allows for some space for the evil. He doesn’t judge evil immediately. Otherwise our world would be full of dead people. But why he intervenes in one case but not in another, we cannot understand. To do that, we would have to be able to see and evaluate every single consequence, especially the traces that God draws in people’s hearts. But that’s exactly what we can’t. At most we can notice later on how God has changed the life of a person.

However, when we look at things from an eternal perspective, when we have the assurance that God glorifies himself even when we can’t observe it, and that every suffering in this world is nothing compared to the opportunity to rejoice about this very glory of God all through eternity and even partake in it, then we will have the inner freedom to simply confess like Salomon did: „This I don’t understand.“