Ecclesiastes Lesson 10

To the Dead and Unborn – 4:1-3

We have moved into the second report of Solomon. This book is a series of reports on Solomon’s experience being out of fellowship. Although we’ve all had the experience of being out of fellowship, many of us may not know what that experience is. When we receive the Lord Jesus Christ, God the Holy Spirit puts us in union with Jesus Christ. This is a technical word “en Christo” in the New Testament, or “in Christ. That is your legal position and this is what that phrase means again and again in the New Testament. It is one’s legal position in Christ as of the moment of salvation. No one can change that, no human authority can cause that position and no human authority can destroy that position. That is your position by grace if you have appropriated Jesus Christ and His work on the cross, if you have personally believed on Him.

If that is true of you, then you are in that top circle. It means you never can get out, that you never can commit a sin big enough to get you out and it means that forever you are stabilized in this position. You are not in this position if you have not trusted in Christ for your salvation. But this is your position, it’s absolutely unchanging; from the moment that you accepted Christ, for all eternity it will never change. However, down below this I have drawn a circle and this depicts your experience; this shows the will of God for you at any given moment. When you accept Christ the will of God may be very small, as you mature in Christ the will of God expands so that the bottom circle gets larger and larger. So as you grow in Christ you have a greater and greater responsibility and you have more ways in which you can get out of fellowship. This bottom circle represents the will of God which is an either/or. Either you are in the will of God or you’re out of it, Galatians 5:16 says we walk either in the flesh, by the flesh or by the Spirit, it’s either one way or the other, either outside of the circle or inside the circle at any given instant.

Now the Word of God always leads us with adequate grace and by grace God has provided a means for getting in the bottom circle; this means is 1 John 1:9. By acknowledging your responsibility for personal acts of sin, God the Holy Spirit immediately restores you, cleanses your conscience, and this is what it means “the blood of Jesus cleanses you from all sin” in 1 John 1:7, it means as far as your conscience is concerned. You were cleansed from all sin as of the moment you accepted Christ but experiential cleansing means that your conscience is cleansed. This occurs if you are in this bottom circle; outside of the bottom circle you will be miserable; it’s a time when Christians are living under their own energy of the flesh, living in ignorance, living by defection, going through religious practices without any meaning, etc. This is living outside the bottom circle. You could be a great moral and ethical person living out here but if you are living outside of fellowship there’s no joy, no animation, no personal fulfillment in this.

Now Solomon’s problem is that he’s outside of this bottom circle and he has been outside of this bottom circle from chapter 1 on. Chapter 3 deals with a special report of how it feels to be outside of the bottom circle as mankind as a whole. He had report #1; report #1 of the book of Ecclesiastes was chapter 2; chapter 1 gave you the preliminaries, chapter 2 gave you the sphere of the individual life, and the fact that individually and personally there’s no fulfillment for you outside of the bottom circle. You can try to fill up that vacuum with social activities, you can fill up that vacuum with your job, with something else, but you’re never going to fill the vacuum up and a lot of Christians are going to be miserable, miserable, miserable people until they learn they are not ever going to fill that vacuum and attain contentment outside of the bottom circle. Do you know why? Because if you are a child of God, God has deliberately designed your life to make you miserable until you get back in the bottom circle; you’re fighting omniscience and omnipotence so you might as well give up, you’re never, never going to be happy outside of that bottom circle. Solomon is trying, and this book is a complete examination of how I tried it; I tried to be happy outside of the will of God for me personally.

In chapter 2 we dealt with the many ways in which he tried; he tried construction programs, he tried building programs, he tried the wine, women and song routine, he tried money, he tried investments, he tried everything conceivable to attain happiness outside of the will of God for him. He was a believer all the time, Solomon personally had accepted Christ, known in the Old Testament dispensation, years and years ago under his father David. He was a believer but he was the most miserable of all believers. He had more wealth than any man in the ancient world. He had more culture than any man in the ancient world. He was more versatile than such modern men as Leonardo DaVinci; he was an amazing personage of history. Probably we can attribute all of western philosophy to Solomon for he actually gives us the roots of it in this book. Solomon was a genius in every category; some men are geniuses in one category. Some men are an absolute genius in their field but a clod in every other area of life. Solomon was not this kind of person; Solomon was a man who could be a genius in all areas of life. He was a genius in his personal relations, he was a genius in his social relations, he was a genius in his building construction programs, he was a genius engineer. He hired the greatest corps of engineers, probably, that has ever put together anything aside of the Egyptian pyramids for Solomon’s pools and the water system of the city of Jerusalem still stands today and is still used by the modern city of Jerusalem. This man was an all around genius. So if you think you’ve got something new and you’ve got out of fellowship with the Lord and you’re wandering out here and you think you’ve got a new gimmick, beware; Solomon has already covered all the ground for you, every little inch.

So in this book he gives you in chapter 2 a complete rundown on his personal life. And at the end of verse 11 he says that this didn’t cut it; this didn’t satisfy anything, as a result of this thing I’m most miserable, I’m more miserable now than before because at least before I could hope there was at least one pleasure I could find in life that would fulfill; now I’ve come down t the end of my life and I’ve tried every pleasure and found that not one of them fulfills and now I am more miserable than I was before.

Then he tried in verses 12-17 the self-development routine; he said if I can’t get pleasure certainly there is at least some benefit from self-discipline, from building one’s life, from having a community image, of being a good man around town, of being the man that’s for this and that and so on. Yet he said when you get right down to it there’s no benefit there; no benefit whatever. And in verses 18-23 of chapter 2 he said well, if I’ve tried pleasure and I’ve tried self-development let’s try family heritage, and the great name of Solomon will stand forever. Now the great name of Solomon stood forever but not because of Solomon, it stood because of God’s grace toward Solomon. Because Rehoboam, his son, at 41 when he attained the throne had kept his little teenage crowd with him, and mentally they remained teenagers. Therefore he was on the throne about a year and the whole kingdom was blown. Rehoboam ruined the kingdom in 930 BC. Therefore we find Solomon’s name perpetuated and his family greatness perpetuated but only because of the grace of God, not because he tried it.

In verses 24-26 his first great conclusion, a conclusion that we are to see repeats again and again throughout this book; “There is nothing better for a man,” no pleasure, “than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor.” The point of Solomon here is that you have to settle for a relative fulfillment. Again, going back to the illustration of a bar graph, every man tries to have perfect fulfillment. Pascal said there’s a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man that God Himself can only fill through Jesus Christ. Now that’s what every man tries to fulfill but Solomon reports back to you at the end of chapter 2, I can’t be fulfilled. Of course you would say yes, but have you tried Christ, have you tried the plan of God, and Solomon would say no and I don’t intend to because I’m out of fellowship and I want to stay out of fellowship. So he says outside of fellowship how do I fill that vacuum; well, there’s only one way and this is relative fulfillment. Relative fulfillment, that’s what Solomon tried, that’s what he says in verse 24, I’m going to get what I can now and see how I get fulfillment out of that, just moment by moment, doing this, flitting from one thing to the next thing, trying to excel in everything and actually excelling in nothing, but this is how I’m going to attain fulfillment.

Then in chapters 3-4 we come to report # 2. Report #2 goes for a larger view; report #1 had the individual life before him; report #2 deals with man’s situation in the universe. And beginning in chapter 3 we find that Solomon has increased the scope of his point out to include the whole nature of the universe and man himself. In 3:1-15 we found that he came to this conclusion: the universe has a purpose, and this purpose, although Solomon believes it’s there he can’t find it. And this is what frustrates him; again and again he says I know there’s a purpose here, there’s got to be a purpose somewhere. Many of you have said this, there’s got to be a purpose in your life, somewhere there’s a purpose, somewhere there’s something that makes sense in this muddle.

And Solomon senses it and he says yes there is, there is a purpose here somewhere but then he spoils it all in verse 11 when he says, “He has made everything beautiful,” the word “beautiful” means well-arranged. “He has made everything well-arranged in His time,” that refers to verses 2-8, there’s a time for everything; everything kind of fits together, there is a plan there, “And God has set the world,” the King James says, and the word is “eternity,” holam, eternity, “God has set eternity in their,” mankind’s “heart.” So this means that God has built into you a crying for Him. And that’s part of your nature, you are programmed to [can’t understand word] to have this built-in desire. You were made for God, and this is what it means, “He has set eternity in your heart,” there’s something in you that cries out for a base, cries out for something to build your life on, something solid and no human experience and not emotions moment by moment but you want some unchanging truth that if it’s true in 1970 it’s going to be true in 2070. A truth that never changes and is never modified, that’s what you want and that’s what you want to root your life on. Every man has this desire and although you may suppress it, it’s not true that you do not have it. You obviously do.

But then he says, the rest of 2:11, all this is fine, there’s a plan for everything, I have this desire in my heart, and “yet” he says, “so that,” the word “so that” should be “yet no man can find out the work that God has made,” that’s past tense, “from the beginning to the end.” In other words, man by his own searching, apart from the Word of God, can’t find this plan; it’s absolutely impossible for man to find the plan. God has a plan for everything. We call that plan the master plan; the master plan has two parts to it, it has the angelic conflict, that’s His part of the master plan that deals with angels and it has the plan of salvation, and the plan of salvation deals with men. These are the two parts to the master plan and it’s the interplay of these two parts that results in what we call history. You can’t understand history without understanding the master plan, leave alone your own life. But Solomon says I know the plan is there but I can’t find it. So verse 11 leads him into further despair.

And last time we came to 3:16-4:3, and in this section Solomon, like the previous one, is finding something true but he can’t get hold of it. The first one he found true was the purpose for the universe that he can’t find. Now in verses 16-4:3 he finds there’s a need for justice in the world but he can’t experience it. In other words, there are certain things, there are moral absolutes, there must be he thinks, and yet he doesn’t know where they are, they never show themselves. His intuition tells him they must be there but he never sees them, and this is why he says in verse 16 his observation. The outline of this passage, verse 16 is his observation, this is what sets off this section, this is what he sees and looks out upon, “Moreover, I saw under the sun the place of judgment,” that’s government, “wickedness was there; and the place of righteousness,” parallel to the place of judgment, “iniquity was there,” except the word “wickedness is repeated twice for emphasis, emphasis on wickedness.

So, he looked in the place of judgment and wickedness was there; the place of righteousness, wickedness was there. Wickedness, wickedness, wickedness, no justice, no justice, no justice! He looked all around his society, he looked in the societies of other nations for Solomon was a historian, he knew ancient history up to his day and he knew also from his foreign envoys about other lands; lands of the Mesopotamian valley, he knew of the lands in the Nile valley, Egypt and Ethiopia, he knew of these ancient civilizations and yet he said even there the same rule holds, even in my own country, Solomon was aware, like Marcus Aurelius was when he wrote his reflections, he was aware of corruption in his own kingdom.

Now in verse 17 we have his first reflection. Verse 17 is his first reflection and then verses 18-21 is his second reflection. These are not conclusions, they’re just reflections. In verse 17 his response is: “I said in my heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked; for there is a time for every purpose and for every work—there.” The word “there” that you have should not be there, it should be at the end of the sentence because this is a sarcastic reference to verse 16. “There” refers back to what? The place of judgment, the place of righteousness, and he looks back and he says well, my intuition tells me that there’s a time and a place for everything and so obviously somewhere, some time, God must be going to execute justice at the place of government, divine institutions #4, and yet he says it’s obviously not going on now, so He might do it someday, it’s not here today, so I’ll forget about it and he moves on to verses 18-21.

In verses 18-21 he comes to a remarkable reflection on the nature of man. Verse 18, “I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men,” and you have to supply the words “this exists,” “this estate exists that God might manifest them” or make them clear for what they are, “that God might manifest them and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.” In other words, God is allowing the injustice in the world to go on, he says, it’s part of His design, to bring out what is really there. Now what is really there, he says, is that man’s nature is that of an animal. Very logical, incidentally, if you don’t have Genesis 1. But he’s saying that mans’ nature is just that of an animal and what God has done is set up history so that you won’t be deluded. You think you’re great, well just go on in history a while and God is going to show you, you make such goofy mistakes, you do such cloddy things that nobody but an ignoramus would do these things, that is an animal or a beast. And this is his reflection in verse 17-18.

Now in verses 19-20 as he begins to further meditate on this thing he comes to a very interesting and pointed application for our day. He says “that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts.” The things that happen to men happens to beasts, that is death, his primary thinking, “so one dies, so dies the other; yea, they have all one breath, so that a man has no pre-eminence above a beast;” and it means there’s no difference between man and animal, that this is starting “under the sun” now, this is not starting with faith, this is starting “under the sun.” Verse 20, “All go to one place,” and then he quotes Genesis 3:19, “all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.”

Verse 21, “Who knows the spirit of man that it is the one that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast that it is the one that goes downward to the earth.” The word “goes upward” in your King James is actually the Hebrew participle plus the article; the article sets of the Hebrew participle and so this should read: “who knows the spirit of man, that it is that one that goes upward, or the spirit of beasts that it is that one that goes downward.” In other words, whose to say that this thing is true. And of course, with this he denies the very fundamental thing of Proverbs and last time we went to Prov. 15:24 to see that this conflicts with that verse; it conflicts because Solomon is starting from human viewpoint, through and through, human viewpoint. There are only two ways you can think, divine viewpoint in accordance with the Word of God, or human viewpoint, in accordance with human reason, according to human concepts. So divine viewpoint or human viewpoint, and based on human viewpoint this is the logical end result of an observation like this in justice.

Now this is doubly important in our day because we have a paradox abroad today that goes like this: man evolved from the ape but man should not act like an ape. Now that’s a contradiction; if man really evolved from the ape in history then we should act like apes. You say I know some people that don’t have too much trouble that way. Well, they’re acting consistently. The student radical today is actually acting more consistent with the theory of evolution than the high intellectual snobs that say well I believe the theory of evolution, well-educated people all accept this thing. Well-educated people do not all accept it and that’s another lie prorogated today. But the point is, that you have no right to accept the theory of evolution and say that there are such things as morals; absolutely not at all, there’s only one ethic you get from the theory of evolution and that’s survival of the fittest, and this condones anything. If you want to rape and plunder that’s your business because this is the ethic you derive from evolution. If you’re stronger than somebody else, beat him up, it’s you’re right if you’re nothing more than an evolved ape you have absolute right to go beat up anybody that you can take on, just be sure you’re stronger than they are, that’s all. It’s not wrong, not if evolution is right.

People want to hang on to the fruits of Christianity and yet at the same time cut the cuts out of Christianity and you can’t do it. You have to accept the pagan results of pagan thinking. Ideas always have consequences and evolution has a consequence and you’re dishonest if you don’t face that consequence. Now it’s either one or the other but you can’t mix the two; you cannot accept the Genesis narrative and act like an ape and you cannot accept the theory of evolution and act like a man made in the image of God. Those are two contradictory points and you’ve got to do one or the other. You can’t buy this line you hear mouthed all around, oh it’s not what you believe, it’s how you act. Bologna; everything grounds on what you believe. You act in accordance to what you believe; as a man thinks in his soul, the Scripture says in Proverbs, “as a man thinks in his soul, so is he.” He acts, always, according to how he thinks inside. Now that’s just fundamental.

You act like you think; if you think that you can lose your salvation you’ll be one of these religious people that are always going around trying to do this, do that, and get involved in every activity because you’re afraid if you don’t get involved in every activity then you’re going to lose your salvation. Of course this is salvation by works and not salvation by grace and it’s not Christianity. Christianity says that Jesus Christ put you into union with Himself and keeps you there. And it’s all grace, and if you’re thinking Biblically then you know there are certain promises available to you from the Word of God. So you read verse 21 and you know the spirit of man is the one that goes upward; what does it mean that your human spirit goes upward? It means that it seeks out God moment by moment, it means that you have promises, it means that you soul has certain activities and functions in it, it has volition and emotion, which I split up between personal affections and bodily affections, and mentality, and these things go on day by day. You don’t decide you’re going to use your mind and turn it off; your mind sometimes goes on whether you like it or not; sometimes you can’t get to sleep because your mind continually goes on. So your mentality functions are going on all the time. All the time you’re making decisions. And it’s either wrong decisions or right decisions but you’re always making them.

Now under the filling of the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit from our human spirit comes over and influences all of these things. So we have positive volition, personal affections meaning that they are under control, we are emotionally occupied with Christ, it doesn’t mean we don’t have emotions toward other people but it means that He is the one in the #1 position, to whom we respond. And it also means in the mentality that you now have an relaxed mental attitude, that you are living in the Word. What do we mean by “living in the Word?” It means that daily you are thinking in terms of the Word, you don’t walk into a classroom and buy everything that’s thrown to you because you say just a minute, does this fit into the Word of God or not. Does what this man fit in my categories in the Word or not. Living in the word means you take all categories of the Word of God and apply them all over the place. You’re in a history course, all right, you know the doctrine of dispensations, you know the categories of divine history, you know that civilization existed before the flood and after the flood, you know some eschatology, what’s going to happen, you know about the socio-economic and religious ecumenism of the Tribulation, you know about the millennial kingdom and the golden age will not come in until Christ returns. So you have all these categories and you begin to analyze history in light of these things. And it develops the course and makes it really living for you as a Christian student. If you are in other areas of life you have suitable categories for that. The Word of God gives you these categories and this is what we mean by living in the Word. Bodily affections are under control and your body is empowered for service.

So here’s the filling of the Spirit and what it does for you. Now under Solomon’s situation we find him frustrated; frustrated because in his human spirit it’s all flesh, and so these things are changed. You have production out of this thing, human good and personal sins, and that’s all he’s producing, ever—human good, personal sins. Personal sins are those overt activities that everyone condemns; human good are things that no one condemns, giving money, prayer, coming to Bible study, doing all these things is human good if isn’t done with the proper motivation. That’s why you can see all religion is basically a system of human good. Human good to do this, human good to do that, but it’s all unmotivated human good. So this, then, is the working and walking in the energy of the flesh.

Now back to Solomon, he comes in verse 22 to his conclusion. This is the first of his two conclusions; “I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works,” this is an exact repeat of his conclusion in 2:24-26.

Today we come to verses 1-3 which is his second conclusion from his observation. Here is his conclusion as he goes back to his original problem. “So I returned,” returned where? Returns to verse 26 which was his original observation looking at the injustice of the world. And he says, “I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun,” notice the phrase “under the sun,” again and again this phrase comes up, “under the sun.” Now if you’re a Christian you do not live “under the sun,” you live under the S-o-n, not the “sun,” you live under the Son in the sense that you now live under divine viewpoint, His Words, but “under the sun” as Solomon lives is sheer human naturalistic experience, with no higher category than mere human reason, and no higher input from the Word of God, nothing, just natural experience.

So in that situation Solomon looks out, “and, behold, the tears of such as were oppressed, [and they had no comforter,]” or just simply the tears of the oppressed, the next phrase is mistranslated and should be “power coming from the hand of the oppressors,” in other words he sees two things here; he sees the tears and the sorrow and the heartache of those who are oppressed, those who always get the dirty end of the deal, and some of you have been on the dirty end of the deal and we’ll show you how to respond to that situation from the Word of God. But it means that people are being oppressed and it’s sheer delusion to think they’re not, “tears and power from the hand of the oppressors,” those are the two things he sees. On the one hand he sees the weak, the intimidated, the suffering, and on the other hand he sees those that are causing the suffering, and he says the whole thing, by characterizing “no comforter!” No comforter, no comforter, see he’s repeated, like in verse 16 with wickedness, wickedness; here’s that same thing coming out again, “I saw the tears of the oppressed, and no one to comfort them; I looked at the power of their oppressors, and there was no comforter.” No one!

Now verse 2, “Wherefore,” here’s his conclusion now, “I praised the dead who are already dead more than the living who are yet alive.” In other words he’s saying it is better in this sense to be dead than to be alive. Now a lot of people would react and say no, no, I think you could find some good in life. Yeah, but you’re never going to find God’s plan for your life in this life and that’s what Solomon wants. And he is shrewd enough to see what some people don’t see; this business of entertaining yourself from day to day is just a sheer delusion. The reason why you think that you’re getting a lot out of life and the reason that you think it’s better to be alive than dead is because you’ve hypnotized yourself into thinking so. But as you look at your life and the facts of the case, and the reality of the case, there’s no reason. And Solomon says that on a non-Christian basis, and rooted in carnality and unbelief, the only logical conclusion is to say it’s better to be dead than alive.

Verse 3 goes even further, “Yea, better is he than both they, who has not yet been, who has not yet seen the evil work that is done under the sun.” He says it’s better that you weren’t even born, that’s the best thing. Now here comes another people that people don’t like to accept in our day. I gave you one conclusion and that’s this problem of evolution. Evolution must logically lead to the moral ethic of survival of the fittest. That is the logical conclusion of evolution. The second conclusion in verses 2-3 that pertains to our time is: there is no reason to perpetuate human life if you do not accept the Bible. Now you think about that for about five weeks, there is no reason to keep humanity alive if the Bible is wrong, and if I were in charge of Strategic Air Command or if I were in charge of something which would release nuclear missiles, why shouldn’t I just press the button and end it all? Think of all the suffering I’d avoid; look at all the suffering in verse 16, look at the tears and the power in 4:1. Why should you bother to keep this thing going? There’s no reason to keep it going and so logically if you don’t receive the Bible basically as the Word of God, logically there is no reason for the preservation of the human race.

So this is how you think, basically. If the Word of God is not true, and everything is chaos and there’s just injustice and there’s no moral principle, everything is helter-skelter, it’s just dog eat dog world, if that’s really the world, if that’s really what’s going to go on, then why not press the button. What is immoral about pressing the button and ruining the human race. Now I find it very ironic that even in your most radical groups today who want to destroy everything, destroy the campus, destroy the establishment, destroy this, destroy that, why haven’t they thought of destroying the human race? Take it one step further, if you’re going to destroy it, why destroy the buildings, why not destroy everybody, all the people. And yet here’s one of the modern flaws of logic in the modern radical position. They can’t account for the fact that they want to save humanity. On their base they shouldn’t; on their base there’s not a shred of a reason for wanting to perpetuate the misery of the human race; not a shred of a reason. The only reason why they want to perpetuate the race is they’ve taken a by faith position that somehow they can change it; by faith position, and it’s grounded on less fact than Christianity. So don’t be embarrassed by the radical; if you want to show him his by faith position, he laughs at you because you believe in Christ by faith, listen, you’ve got far, far more historical facts going for you than the most radical of radicals because he can’t even tell you one good reason for keeping humanity alive. Not one.

That’s Solomon’s point in verse 3, “yea, it is better than both they, who has not been born,” it is better just to end the whole thing. That is the logical conclusion and you ought to sense that. Now some of you really don’t feel that this is true so I’m going to read you some quotes by some people that exist in our times. These quotes were made in March of 1969 at a conference held in New York City by some of the leading intellectuals that control the music and the arts and the literature of our day, and these men said some remarkable statements; these are the men that are writing for the TV, these are the men that are writing the books that are the bestsellers; these are the men that control our culture and they recognize it if you don’t, that there’s no logical peace, happiness or meaning to the non-Christian position.

One man said, Norman Mailer: somewhere something incredible happened in history, the wrong guys won. Arthur Koestler: it is easy in these days, this century, to defend the idea that something ails man; man has some built-in error or deficiency, a screw loose in the human mind. He suffers from an endemic form of paranoia. A painter said this at the conference: life itself is a tragic thing, we watch ourselves from the cradle performing into decay. Isn’t that a tremendous statement, we watch ourselves from the cradle performing into decay. Man now realize he is an accident, a completely futile thing that he has to play out the game without reason. Jim Morrison, one of the rock singers, said: I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that has no meaning; it seems to me to be the road to freedom.

Now that’s what they’re thinking; they’ve grasped the thing if dead-head Christians haven’t. Christians have got to wake up t the Word of God; you can’t play with the Word of God. You either go down the line with divine viewpoint into a live lived in communion with Jesus Christ moment by moment that gives you meaning, intellectually as well as all other ways, or you go that way; you have no middle ground and it’s the hardest thing in our time for people to see that. There is no middle ground; either you should do what these people are doing or be Biblical Christians, one or the other, there’s no middle ground. You can’t hold on to the moral ethic, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” bologna, where do you get that from. You get that from the Bible, and therefore what right do you have to take one verse out of the Bible and use it and not the rest of the verses out of the Bible and use them. But you come to the Bible, pick out a few verses that kind of strike your fancy and you live by those. Now that’s dishonest; either you have to take the Bible as a unit or you take none of it but you have no right to come to the Bible and lift a verse out of context, “love thy neighbor as thyself,” adopt that as some golden rule for happiness and go on living. That’s dishonest. Why should I love my neighbor as myself, I’m stronger than him, I should clobber him, that’s the law of evolution, survival of the fittest. Who’s my neighbor, another animal, and I’m an animal, so therefore I should treat him as an animal and he should treat me as an animal; that’s the logical conclusion. You only get this “love thy neighbor as thyself” if the Bible is literally true. Those are the either/or situations that are facing us.

Conclusion: turn to Matthew 5 and see how the New Testament resolves social oppression. The Lord Jesus Christ had to deal with this, and Jesus had a tremendous intellect. And so He had to come to the same problem of social oppression. And He wasn’t the first hippie either; all this jazz that Jesus was the first hippie because Holman Hunt happened to paint Jesus with long hair. It is dubious whether Jesus ever had long hair and it is dubious whether he ever wore a beard. We have no Biblical evidence that Jesus wore long hair; none whatever. In fact we find passages in 1 Cor. 11 where Paul tells the men you have to wear short hear and women are to wear long hair; long hair on a woman is a covering, and that’s 1 Cor. 11 and it’s highly interesting that if the Lord Jesus wore long hair he’s violating part of the Bible. So the Lord Jesus was not the first hippie.

The Lord Jesus Christ was a man who was not a revolutionary in the sense of the word today; the Lord Jesus Christ was a revolutionary in the sense of the American Revolution. Let’s get two different words in the sense of the word “revolutionary.” You’ve got use # 1 and use #2 and you should understand the difference between the usage of these two words. The first usage of the word revolution is the sense of the American Revolution and the sense that Jesus is a revolutionary. It means that you have had standards established in history that have been previously upset by tyranny; so you have your standards back here, you have tyranny develop and you revolt against the tyranny to get back to the standards. It is in a sense a counter-revolution; that is the American Revolution. The American Revolution was the American colonists demanding the legal rights of Englishmen. They weren’t overthrowing England per se, they were demanding the rights that the Englishmen had and they were reacting against the tyranny of the English kings that had developed in the early part of the 18^th century. That’s the American Revolution and that’s the first use of the word revolutionary. In that sense the Lord Jesus Christ shares that word in that you have the Old Testament standards of the Mosaic Law, Deuteronomy, the Lord Jesus is down here in New Testament times and He’s reacting against tyranny, and do you know what the tyranny he was reacting against? Not Rome, He was reacting against religious tyranny of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

The Sadducees would correspond to liberals today, they denied the doctrine of the resurrection and in its place they had raised a vast ecumenical religious organization; they were so powerful they controlled the courts; they were so powerful they could bribe the courts so Jesus Christ couldn’t get a fair trial. The reason why Christ didn’t get a fair trial was because of the religious ecumenical movement in His day, the Sadducees, they controlled the thing. They had one man in the middle of the Sadducees, the high priest, Caiaphas, Caiaphas and his family had a three million dollar a year business cheating people in religion. Do you know how they did it? They set up a deal out of the Old Testament, took Scripture out of context, and had this deal going in the temple. You come, say some two thousand miles to sacrifice at one of the Jewish feasts and obviously you can’t bring your own herd to sacrifice so you’d bring money; but then you got to Jerusalem and oh-oh, say you came from Spain and you had some Latin form of currency, and Roman currency was Gentile currency and Gentile currency couldn’t be used in the confines of the temple, so they had to have money-changers and the money-changers would take your money and they’d give you fifty cents for four dollars. And they’d cheat you left and right, and that’s what was happening and this is why Jesus Christ walked through thing, in one of the most graphic depictions in the Gospel, the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, He walk through it an threw out the money changers on two occasions. That is not anarchy, Jesus was not revolting against established law; He was revolting against established tyranny, and He was going back to certain principles. That is the first use of the word revolutionary.

That contrasts with the second use of the word revolutionary which would correspond to the French and Russian Revolutions. This is the second meaning of the word revolutionary as it is most commonly used today, and Jesus was not this kind of a revolutionary. In this kind of a revolutionary we have various religious systems in the past that are looked down and despised, usually an evolving system, and they are going to bring in some golden age undefined out in the front; actually it can be proved historically that communism and Nazism that these forms of organized tyranny got this concept of the golden age through the medieval proponents of premillennialism, Norman Cohn in his book, Pursuit of the Millennium shows this. So actually they picked up that from the Bible too but they won’t admit it today of course. And they’re going to tear apart because their idea is that this whole evolving thing can’t evolve into the golden age unless the establishment is destroyed. And don’t think they’re not going to try it; the establishment must be destroyed in order for this to come about. The thing that’s obstructing the golden age is the economic, social and political structure of this country. Now obviously there are things wrong but this revolution doesn’t seek to go back to some other standard, they seek to set up something entirely new; that is not the revolutionary Jesus was.

In Matthew 5, the Lord Jesus Christ in the old sense of the word revolution gives you the answer to social injustice. Verses 1-12 are the beatitudes and everybody says oh, isn’t this sweet and they never work and all the rest of it. These beatitudes were given to a generation that would be persecuted; this sermon preached here, starts in verse 25 of the previous chapter and you have to integrate Scripture with the context. Who was Jesus speaking with; 4:25, “And there followed Him great multitudes of people, from Galilee, from Decapolis, from Jerusalem, from Jordan and from beyond Jordan.” So that sets up the Sermon on the Mount. You have great followers, some of these followers are believers, some are unbelievers. And this sermon is integrated into the program that Jesus Christ was preaching at that point when He said the kingdom is imminent.

Now watch that message, it was not a spiritual kingdom Jesus was speaking of. We know this now, it was clear before from the Scriptures, but you get added confirmation from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran community. The kingdom for which these people looked to was a political kingdom that would be free from injustice. It was a golden age in the future; God has a plan to bring this about. The plan looks like this: He started out with all Gentiles, from Genesis on down to the time of Abraham. At Abraham’s time He divided the human race into Gentiles and Israel. Israel goes down, Israel is knocked out of the picture in 586 BC, returns 70 years later temporarily, brings Christ into the world, goes out again in 70 AD, will come again to bring the Second Advent of Christ in, and you have 1,000 years of perfect environment after Christ returns. So you have Israel geared into the program in Genesis 12. Israel will be the capital nation during the golden age; it will be a regenerate Israel filled with believers and not the rejecting Israel of today. The Gentiles that go into the millennium are going to be believing Gentiles and Jesus Christ is going to come and remove Satan.

Satan is removed from history plus all fallen angels; all fallen angels are removed from the scene at that point and that is why you can have the golden age. You can’t have a golden age in 1970, not because of the establishment, but because there are angelic forces operating in society that must be dealt with; the wickedness is based on an unseen source, and that unseen source, the Bible says, is due to the angels working. Satan and his fallen angels, when Satan is deposed and he goes to hell and the people in hell look at him and say oh, look at Satan, he is the one who was habitually deceiving the nations. So you have the golden age brought in by Jesus Christ at His Second Advent and it is brought in because Jesus Himself removes Satan and all fallen angels from the earth. That is the basis for the golden age and that is why you’re never going to have a golden age and that is why these people who wish to believe, in spite of their sincerity, that they are bringing about a golden age, are going to bring about a worse form of tyranny than has ever existed on earth, for when you destroy the establishment you destroy government and when you destroy government you have destroyed God’s divine institutions #4.

God has authorized that government, even though it’s bad, be here to maintain law and order in society. Now it’s true, governments can be legally replaced, etc. but you have to have a form of government. Now you destroy and remove that and you not only don’t bring about the golden age, because in order to bring about the golden age you’ve got to deal with these fallen angels and Satan, you not only don’t do that but you do something worse. You not only don’t get rid of the fallen angels but you make life easier for the fallen angels because now you’ve destroyed all form of law and order; now the fallen angels have complete free range; now you’ve really got a mess on your hands, so these people must be stopped if society is to survive. God is given as a means of law and order and protection, and the gospel of Jesus Christ can’t be preached if we don’t have law and order. Isn’t it ironic that during the time of the establishment of the church, back to 30-70 AD, in those forty years of crucial work in the church, isn’t it ironic that God had the most law abiding legal entity the world has ever seen, the Roman Empire. And isn’t it interesting that there were highways and communications and ordered systems of police that… event after event who saved the apostles from being killed? Police. When the apostles were about t be mobbed in the temple, what happened? There was a police office up in the tower and he sent his troops in and got the apostles out of the mob. The apostles weren’t leading mobs in their day, they were the ones that were being mobbed. And you had religiously motivated mobs, you had clergy leading mobs like they do today, clergy that are out of line, clergy that put their Bible away 40 years ago and haven’t opened it since. And these the people that are leading religious riots and these are the same people you read about in the book of Acts. Time after time after time where Paul and the apostles went they were threatened by religious clergy leading riots in anarchy and the people that got them out of the jam in every case were policeman; sometimes unjustly arrested but that was better fate than being in the hands of a mob.

In Matthew 5 the Lord Jesus Christ gives these beatitudes to a people that are going to go out under these conditions, a people that in his generation would not live in the golden age; the kingdom was still imminent in one sense, but these people had to live in this world. These beatitudes weren’t given to a future thing, they were given right now. Why do I know that they are not given to a future kingdom? Because of verse 4, “Blessed are they that mourn,” there’s no mourning in that future golden age, therefore this is not given as the ethics or the morals of a future kingdom. Verse 10, “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” is that going to happen in the millennium? No, you’re persecuted for righteousness’ sake before the millennium. So these are things that were given to persecuted believers and Jesus said “happy,” the word “blessed” means happy, it should be thrilling to you, it should be deeply joyous. Now it doesn’t mean you have to run around like a zombie, oh I’ve got the joy, joy, joy. That’s not blessing. The word “blessed” means there’s something deep and powerful and abiding that gives you inner peace, inner joy, animation. This is what the word “blessed” is and Jesus said every time the people that are engaged in these acts, that are acts that define spirituality, these acts show these people are blessed.

Verses 13-16 deal with the problem of living in the light of a future kingdom. In other words, we too live in a time Solomon accurately described, no justice, no justice, no justice, but we live, Jesus says, because in the future there will be a time of perfect justice which we will share. And therefore Jesus authorizes that we endure the persecution for the moment on the basis of His sure Word that there will be something in the future. Solomon rejected the Word of God, Solomon did not have this consolation, and therefore Solomon gave up. You, when you face the persecution can do one of three things; there’s three things that you can do. You can get discouraged and quit, and that’s what Solomon did, basically. The second thing you can do, you can try to revolt and be a rebel, tear everything apart until something comes that you like. Only one problem with that is that the history of ever kind of revolt like that always ends in disaster. Or, you can trust the Word.

Those are the three things, and you can apply that technique in your own personal life. Every time some little problem comes your way you have these three options to you if you are a believer. The first option you have is to quit and whine and cry and go see your psychiatrist, or cry on someone’s shoulder and if you haven’t got somebody’s shoulder come to the church, some religious organization and you’ll find somebody that you can cry on. That’s one way of handling your problems. The second way you can handle your problems is just gut it out and overthrow everybody, punch them in the nose, clobber them, run them over, get rid of them. Or three, you can trust the Word that “vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord.” You wait until I take care of the problem, wait, wait, wait, wait, on the Lord.

Verses 17-20, the Lord Jesus Christ gives you the basis in which to trust, “Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets,” Jesus was not a revolutionary in the modern sense of the Word. He didn’t come to overthrow the established order. I haven’t come to overthrow the Law or the Prophets, I have not come to destroy but to fulfill. In other words, I have come to bring the establishment to its ordained position in history. So [18] “Verily, I say unto you, until heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle,” now a jot is the smallest consonant in the Hebrew. The word “tittle” is part if a dotting, a vowel point system. “…not a vowel or the smallest consonant will be removed from the Law until all is fulfilled.” And that gives you assurance that though things look bleak in your time and individually you can apply this, things may look bad for you today, but Romans 8:28, all things are now working for good, and although things are bad today, over here in the future, in phase three of your life you’ll have your rewards and it’s a matter of trust, trust, trust, trust.

Verse 20, and this is the conclusion of the whole matter, “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, you shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven.” That’s a fantastic statement; the Pharisees were the most religious people of the day and yet the Lord Jesus Christ said that your righteousness has to exceed theirs if you want to get into this future kingdom. How does your righteousness exceed the Pharisees. These people prayed five times a day, went to the temple three times a day, and you say I have to exceed that? Yes, Jesus said. You know, there’s only one way to have perfect righteousness, for God actually in His essence, we have described it as +R, you have to have that in order to be saved. How are you going to get it? You can’t get it by personal activity; if you went on today in your life and reformed today what would do with the past sins? But the Lord Jesus Christ perfectly obeyed and through Him we have access to God. The Lord Jesus Christ lived a perfect life and it’s that righteousness that God will credit to your account; it doesn’t mean that He’s not going to make added demands on you, lead you moment by moment in an exciting life, but it means that judicially and legally you have this question cleared up. Your righteousness can exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees because you have the Lord Jesus Christ’s righteousness attributed to your account. It only comes by grace and grace only comes to your account by faith. With our heads bowed.