Ecclesiastes Lesson 20

Three More “HVP Wisdom” Proverbs – 7:8-14

The book of Ecclesiastes is designed to depress; it’s designed to put a person in despair deliberately because it’s designed to discredit any false hope that a person might have if those hopes are not placed solidly in the Word of God. So if it’s depressing to you, just remember, this should be a Scripture appreciation course because you should appreciate the Word of God far greater after you have seen the despair and the darkness that is the only alternative to the plan of salvation given in God’s Word. I have gone through this book slowly deliberately because I find that a lot of people in fundamentalist circles do not even yet appreciate the fact that it is the issue of light and darkness, the issue of truth and error, the issue of absolute truth or not. This is the thing at stake and it’s not a toy, Christianity is not a thing to give you false psychological comfort if it’s not truth; an appeal to truth and if it’s not really true then we have no right to be hopeful or have comfort.

We’re in the middle of a heptad; in verses 1-14 of chapter 7 is what we call a heptad. A heptad is a collection of seven sayings; the number seven in God’s Word is the number of completion and again and again throughout the literature of the Word of God seven denotes completion. It was in seven days that you have God making the world and resting. You have in the book of Revelation the seven spirits before God; seven always denotes completion. And in seven, therefore, we have the writers and authors of literature of the Old Testament, when they want to make a complete statement they will often times make it in a series of seven. Sometimes it will come out in a proverb, six things are an abomination to the Lord, yea, seven; and that’s a way of attracting your attention that this is a complete statement that the man is trying to make and he doesn’t feel a statement is complete until he’s made seven points. I don’t know what they would have done in the homiletics classes in Israel; in homiletics they always tell you an introduction, illustration, three points, and a conclusion but it doesn’t add up to seven. So I guess they haven’t studied the heptads of the Old Testament.

But each one of these things in chapter 7 starts off in the Hebrew with the word tov, tov means better, or good, or pleasurable. That’s a sign when you’re translating this from the original that you’re encountering a new thing. In verse 1 we have “A good name is better than precious ointment,” and in the Hebrew it says, “Better is a good name than precious ointment,” so that denotes the first proverb. The second proverb, verse 2, “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of fasting.” Verse 3, “Sorrow is better than laughter.” In verse 4 it continues the proverb of verse 3 and you encounter the next tov in verse 5, “It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools.” Verse 6 continues the proverb of verse 5, so does 7, and then verse 8, “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof,” verses 9-10 continue with that proverb. Verse 11, “Wisdom is good,” or better, “with an inheritance.” Then verse 12, “For wisdom is a defense, etc. Then verse 13-14 are one proverb in reverse because in verse 14 it says, “In the day of better-ness,” or prosperity, it is tovah.

So we have these seven proverbs and they are arranged with a deliberate intent in mind. Solomon is here telling you that if it is really true that you can’t know God in a personal real way through a verbal revelation, then this is the best that you have to go on. Remember Solomon has reacted to several things in his life with negative volition. He’s gone on negative signals toward the Word of God with the result that he has suffered a divine judgment, as we explained last time, of decreased perception. If you do not use muscles they atrophy, you get out of shape. In case you do any regular exercise you’ll see this; you lay off exercise for three or four days and you come back to it and you can tell the difference, you can tell the way you breathe, you can tell the way your muscles feel after you exercise, etc. So when you don’t use these things they atrophy. Well, it’s the same thing in the Word of God, is that you have a spiritual perception as a believer. If you do not use that it atrophies and God gives you a spirit of slumber; maybe that’s the trouble. But the spirit of slumber is given according to Isaiah 29 to those who go on negative volition toward God’s Word.

So this is what has happened to Solomon. His perception is decreased down to the point where now he is almost incapable of understanding spiritual truth and so he has only one thing left to do and that is to erect a philosophy of life on just human viewpoint and what he has left. Now Solomon is going to be exposed, and it comes out in these proverbs that we’re considering now, and in the end of this section particularly, to a very strong agony, I call it the agony of unbelief. We have said there are two ways of thinking; one is the divine viewpoint, the other is human viewpoint. Now you either thinking one framework or you don’t, either you think in terms of the divine viewpoint framework in which God is at the center, you have Bible doctrine or information about Him and the universe and yourself around Him that you get from the Word of God, and around this you have the various activities of life, such as science, history, philosophy, art, music, relationship with believers, loved ones, friends and society, possessions, sex, you have your job, your health and a few things like this.

So you have all of these details of life but what holds them all together into one unified framework is Bible doctrine, the Word of God. And when you think you’re thinking in terms of this, or you have what I say is a human viewpoint muddle in which self is at the center because you now take your own self as the ultimate authority instead of God, and then you begin to say well now I have pieces over here, here’s my possessions, here’s my health, here’s my job, here’s philosophy, over here is history and you have all of these pieces. Some of these pieces you don’t like because they bother you. For example, there may be certain things about your health that you don’t like to think about; maybe God worked in your life and you don’t like that so you forget about the blessings of health that you may have and so you blot that out. So the person who is operating with a human viewpoint muddle has disconnected pieces in his life, intellectually, and he has ways of blanking out that area of his life that is disagreeable to him.

Now there is one way or the other way of thinking; you as a believer, and as far as I’m concerned as a believer, have one objective in the Christian life and that is to develop a divine viewpoint framework. That is your objective and any activity of life that does not lead to an edification of this framework, a building up of this framework is a waste of time. Every activity that you are in should be oriented to the erection of a divine viewpoint framework. You must have this in order to be a mature believer, in order to witness for Jesus Christ effectively, in order to carry on the spiritual conflicts with the powers of darkness, a divine viewpoint framework is necessary.

Now to a person that doesn’t have this but has these pieces he suffers an agony, a peculiar kind of agony that you will notice if you pay close attention to the way you think oftentimes when it’s not Scriptural, and the way unbelievers think. And this agony can be diagramed this way: here you have your human viewpoint muddle; now you are pulled… remember in the Medieval times they had ways of torturing people. They had something called a rack, and they just laid you out on this thing and started tying your feet down at one end and your hands at the other and they began to pull. And if you didn’t like what they were doing or you wouldn’t cooperate they pulled a little harder, and when your vertebrae began to pull apart and went snap, snap, snap down your backbone and a few other things with this rack and the pressure, usually people began to talk. This is how they tortured people into talking.

Well, in a very similar way, or in a mile away perhaps, but just as serious, we have a rack that stretches out human viewpoint in two directions. The first way we have logic, starting with where the unbeliever is, in darkness he tries to think his way out of a trap and he becomes pulled toward chaos, toward despair, and this is where he’s led to by the force of logic in his life. For example, I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie 2001, but if you haven’t I recommend you see it because it is evolution taken to the logical conclusion, and in the next to the last scene of that film, after it’s all over you find man old, decrepit, alone with no personal relationship because he’s all alone, he’s a solitary person, he can’t have any personal relationships, so he sits in the room, and if I recall there’s no sound except one sound, and you have him eating at a table; then you have the bathroom shown and the bed shown, and the man is simply reduced to eating, going to the bathroom and going to bed, just the mechanics of life, and the only thing that’s significant that happens in the last scene of that film is he drops a glass on the floor and he looks at it for about five minutes because there’s something significant that he did; that’s all that’s left. In other words, he’s left in despair and chaos. This is unbelief taken to the logical conclusion.

But on the other hand we have experience forcing him in the other direction. We have the person who may believe with all his heart there’s no such thing as moral standards; no such thing as all these things. But on the other hand when he has to live his life he finds himself forced into acting out, at least, some system of morality. He has some standard in which to live his life. So we say this, if a person is stretched in two ways, if he thinks he’s led to despair, but if he tries to fit and life a normal life then he finds himself reformed, he finds himself with morality but he doesn’t find any reason for it. So we have these two forces going the opposite ways.

For example, you can go to the students that were shot at Kent State University in Ohio and people would say this is bad; this is murder, etc. But it’s interesting that people that are claiming this have no basis for blaming the National Guard because if evolution really is true, and man isn’t worth anything, then who cares whether four or four hundred get shot, it doesn’t really matter at all. But yet if you were a student and you were there, you’d care a lot, because here’s experience moving you in one direction and logic pulling you in the other direction. So you have this problem then. And Solomon has it and why I bring this out is that in the proverbial literature of the Bible, if there’s a tension, experience always wins over the logical conclusion. In Solomon’s day it was experiencing these proverbs, he says that I am going to live life in a real world realistically as much as I can. And he lets the logical questions kind of drop by the wayside. For example, Solomon’s never answered the question, how do you know God exists here? Never! So Solomon lets experience win out, and you might say then that the proverbs of chapter 7 as well as the proverbs that he quotes in the rest of this book are basically rules of living in a real world when you really don’t know what’s going on. It’s how to live in reality but you really don’t know what’s there. How to get along, you might say this is the ultimate in social adjustment.

We’ve gone through several of these proverbs and we’ve said that he has a peculiar way of dealing with these things. In verse 1 we said the proverb that he quotes is, “A good name is better than precious ointment,” and then he stops, and he adds something, “and the day of death, than the day of one’s birth.” In other words he crushes it; it’d be like saying yeah, you’re a good person, good for nothing. In other words you make the statement but it’s what you tack on to the end that ruins it. We do this kind of humorously but Solomon is doing it seriously. He’s quoting and citing the proverb, then he tacks something onto the end that destroys the whole thing.

Now we come to the fifth proverb in verse 8; here’s his fifth proverb. “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.” And what he’s saying is that it’s better to wait until the thing is all over because then you get the big picture what’s going on, and going along with that, instead of being anxious, instead of getting impatient about things and flying off the handle, just wait until it’s all over. That’s the best way of living in the world, even though you don’t know the purpose behind it. The best way is just not to get upset, just let it go and see what happens.

Then in verse 9 he extends this thing, “Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry; for anger rests in the bosom of fools.” “Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry,” again he says don’t worry about getting vexed with your surroundings; he says it’s silly for you to bother about the world because it’s not worth that much anyway so just relax; “better not to be hasty in thy spirit to be angry, for anger rests” means it’s at home, and an idiot or a fool is one who doesn’t know how to live and he says the world’s bad but you might as well just put up with it and let it go by.

In verse 10 he says something very interesting. This is all amplifying verse 8, he tends to break away from the procedure in the previous proverbs where here he takes the proverb of verse 8 and then he explains it and extends it out into his own framework. In verse 10 he says, “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these?” Now that’s a question; you hear this today, people often say I yearn for the good old days. And that’s what Solomon is saying; he says that’s silly, absolutely silly to yearn for the good old days because he says basically there’s nothing new.

Let’s go back to chapter 1 and we can see his framework; this is why he can say what he says in this proverb because to Solomon the good old days weren’t good anyway. There’s new, there’s nothing really changing; this is why the book is introduced with this droning, horrible, depressing series of verses, when it says in verse 4, “One generation passes away, and another generation comes, but the earth just sits there forever. [5] The sun has risen, and the sun has gone down, and is hastening to its place only to rise again.. [6] The wind goes toward the south, and turns about to the north; it whirls about continually, going all the while, and the wind returns again according to its circuits. [7] All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full… [8] All things are weary,” literally, “full of labor, man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. [9] The thing that has been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done, there is no new thing under the sun” history isn’t going anywhere, and the good old days weren’t any better than they are today, there’s been no evolution and no devolution, it’s been all the same.

So he says it’s silly to say, as you go into some experience of life, you might as well just wait till it’s all over, getting upset, nothing is going to happen, it’s not going to improve, it’s not going to deteriorate, basically it’s going on the same way, there’s no change. You can see the boredom and the despair this man has. And that’s why he says at the end of chapter 7, verse 10, “You have not inquired wisely concerning this.” He says you should just submit to it, don’t have any false hope of improvement of salvation, it’s all over, it’s water over the dam, you can’t bother with it, just forget it. That’s Solomon’s consolation for the irritations of life.

There’s only one problem, in my experience I have found few people that could do that. I have found very few people that can go through an experience of life and just sit passively by and forget it. There are certain psychological mechanisms that come into play of repression, etc. where you can do this but even that doesn’t solve the problem, and I find very few people that can do what Solomon is saying, just forget it, just sit by, don’t become anxious, just be patient and let it go. Very few people, I would say, would follow that.

The next proverb, the fifth proverb in verses 8-10, he has stated in summary that in the end you’ll learn not to worry, you will learn just to submit to experience, become passive, adopt almost a fatalistic attitude toward life, what’s coming is coming, you can’t do anything about it, there’s no change, there’s no hope, there’s nothing. Now if you think about it for a minute, you’ll realize that that’s true if Christianity isn’t true. If you were to throw the Bible out and put it in the garbage can, forget all about it, you would have no hope whatever that things are going to get better. Probably you might say things are getting worse, but you wouldn’t have any hope, you wouldn’t have any real basis of hope. You’ve got to appreciate what you hold in your lap; you must appreciate the Word of God, it and it alone can give you hope. Education cannot give you hope, material possessions cannot give you hope, studying all your life is not going to give you hope, only the Word of God can give you this.

Now the sixth proverb, verses 11-12, Solomon takes another tact, and he starts in with a proverb and then he kills it, because he says “Wisdom is better with an inheritance,” now what does he mean by “wisdom is better with an inheritance?” He’s simply saying that wisdom, and wisdom is skill in living, he says all of that, if you’re not a Christian, all of that is immaterial in the end, he says what really counts is if you have it plus a few coins in your pocket, that’s what counts. In other words, wisdom by itself, you can have all the wisdom you want to, but if you don’t have money and material possessions to enjoy yourself it’s a waste of time. Wisdom is not independent in and of itself; “wisdom is better with an inheritance, and by it there is profit to them that see the sun.” “Them that see the sun” is an idiom for those who are living “under the sun.” It goes back to the concept that we’ve had again in this Scripture, that the phrase “under the sun” refers to human viewpoint, they are living outside of the divine viewpoint framework and all they have left is the naturalistic base.

For example, you might say it this way, those who live under the ceiling, in other words, there’s nothing above the ceiling, no God up there, nothing, nothing above the ceiling that’s worth counting on, so those that live this way, those that constantly see the sun, they don’t see anything else, they just are rooted and focused on human viewpoint, for those people the best thing is a little wisdom plus quite a few possessions.

Verse 12, “For wisdom is a shadow” literally, you have to get the Oriental picture, “Wisdom is a shadow, and money is a shadow,” now why does say… it’s translated “defense” and the word has come to mean defense except you want to see the picture. Those that see the sun, here’s the sun and this person is underneath the intense heat of the ancient east, and so he says I need a shadow to shield me from the sun. And so as an illustration he says I need a shadow and money is that shadow and wisdom together is a shadow and it shields me from the heat of the sun. And by the analogy he’s saying that those who live in a human viewpoint framework live in despair; it’s just liking getting exposed to the heat of the sun and after awhile it burns you to a crisp. So he says that those people that live inside a human viewpoint framework eventually are destroyed. The only thing that keeps them going on, keeps them alive, is if they can have an umbrella over their heads to shield them from that despair and the two things he recommends is wisdom and money, but not wisdom alone, wisdom and money together.

Why? The rest of if it is explained in the end of verse 12, “it shouldn’t be “but,” it should be “and” here, “and the excellency of knowledge is that wisdom gives life to them that have it.” But it might be better rendered, “and with the excellency of wisdom that wisdom gives life to them that have it.” Now what he’s saying here is the word “give,” “wisdom gives life,” remember in the Hebrew in which the Old Testament was originally written you could have various nuances to the verb; you could have, say for example, a nuance of capability, such and such is able to give; you could have a nuance of certainty, such and such is certain to give. And here we have the nuance of capability, he says it’s good to know if I have money, that now I have the means by which wisdom can give life. That’s the point, he’s saying. With wisdom and money together as a shadow, then I have the excellency of the knowledge that wisdom can give life to them that have it, that is that have wisdom.

So he says wisdom is rendered ineffective unless you have material means of carrying this out, you’ve got to have material possessions. Yet we know from chapter 2 that Solomon had all the possessions in the world and yet he could not adequately solve is problems. But he’s saying even if you want to start, a poor person materially, he’s saying, can’t solve his problems, you have to have some material possessions. So here he’s making wisdom, basically, subservient to material possessions. He’s simply saying that it in itself is not sufficient. And we know one exception in history that refutes this completely. The Lord Jesus Christ owned nothing except the clothes on his back; He wore different robes that were that same color, we know this from the typology of the tabernacle, when he was on trial they put a purple robe on him, they put a red robe on him fulfilling basically all the colors of the tabernacle; of course they didn’t realize what they were doing at the time. But the Lord Jesus Christ had perfect wisdom and yet no material possessions. And I would ask you, was the Lord Jesus Christ satisfied with His life or not? This is not a pitch to be poor, this is simply a pitch that there’s a priority and the wisdom that Solomon has needs material props to make it go; it needs human viewpoint sources, it needs human good to let it go; divine viewpoint never. This is why I often stress here at church that when we have grace giving we don’t need human gimmicks; under no respect will we ever need human gimmicks.

God’s Word can go forth with no possession. God is so fantastic that He can work in history, for example, one of the great times that we’ve seen in history was when Hudson Taylor was conducting his missionary work in Inland China and he came to a crisis in the ministry in which he needed a certain sum of money for something, and he wrote back to England, I forgot the exact circumstances but I guess they didn’t have the money to send him, so here we had almost a disaster out in the mission field, they needed these funds but they didn’t have enough or something. But there was some money sent from England over to China and in those days it took quite a while for it to go, and it turned out that in the international balance of trade by the time the money had left England and got to China the balance of trade had shifted so that the money increased in value exactly to the amount that Hudson Taylor needed. And here you have generation, here you have generation of wealth, generation of material by sheer trusting the Lord, God’s sovereignty in history—God’s sovereign in history overcoming all barriers.

So here we have a man who would come to this conclusion, verses 11-12 that you know, this wisdom bit is fine but you’ve got to have material possessions. You’ve heard this saying, people saying God helps those who help themselves. That is a lie; any person who says that does not know the grace of God. God helps those who are helpless; God does not help those who can help themselves. People who help themselves, God doesn’t have to help them. You see this again and again, you have incidents in the Scripture, for example, where the angel comes to Peter and the angel does what Peter can’t do, he opens the gate, puts the guards to sleep, but the angel says Peter, put your clothes on. God never does things that we can do ourselves; He helps the helpless, He helps you when you get to the end of human viewpoint, the end of human resources, then He moves in with grace. So therefore this concept that Solomon has in verses 11-12 would be logical if we didn’t have a gracious God to supply our every need. He’s saying you’re helpless unless you generation your own possessions.

Now the seventh proverb and the last in this heptad begins in verses 13-14, “Consider the work of God; for who can make that straight, which He has made crooked? [14] In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: God has also set the one over against the other, to the end that man should find nothing after him.” “Consider the work of God,” now what he’s saying to you here is if you look out on the real world you’re going to see good and evil. And he says that no matter where you go in life you’re going to see good and evil; you’re going to see it in your personal life, you’re going to see it in your friends, you’re going to see it in your loved ones, you’re going to see it in society, you’re always going to see good and evil.

So he says when you consider the work of God, “for who can make that straight that He has made crooked.” Now he’s not talking about geometry, he is talking about justice, havath in the Hebrew, havath is the word that means to bend, or twist that which is straight, and it usually in the Bible refers to a moral standard; it’s not a physical twisting, it is bending of a moral standard. When we go to God’s character we find His character has certain attributes; He has sovereignty, He has righteousness, He has justice, He is love, He is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, immutability and eternality. He has all these attributes. One of these absolutes is absolute righteousness. God’s own character is the base for all standards, so he’s saying that now God has made this crooked. Now He never resolves the problem, how God, perfect God can make crooked world but he’s saying what has happened is that this absolute righteousness doesn’t exist, God has made the universe on –R or a crooked standard, and he’s saying you can look out in your personal life wherever you go, you consider the work of God, that’s the world around you, “who can make straight what He has made crooked,” can you straighten out the evil in the world. And the challenge that Solomon tells you is that you can’t even straighten it out in your personal life, leave alone straightening out society. There’s no possible way of doing this.

And so his conclusion is, in verse 14, “In the day of prosperity” or joy, when things aren’t going well, “be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider,” he’s saying be passive to this thing, he’s saying that you can’t fight evil because good and evil, good plus evil is the essence of reality, it’s the essence of your life and you are stupid to worry about getting rid of the evil and keeping that which is good. You can’t do it, and it’s interesting, but no radical revolutionary of history has ever come up with a reason for a hope that he can do away with evil.

We’ve had the French Revolution, the radicals, similar to the radicals of our day who would tear down everything because they want to bring in a better society, but they have never yet explained how can man get rid of evil, and you know the results of the French Revolution; they brought in worse evil than ever happened, they brought in so that even the men set off the revolution eventually wound up losing their heads, literally. So what happens, you had an abortion of the revolutionary purpose because they found after the revolution evil was still there; you can never get away from it and this would be a logical conclusion on a non-Christian basis is that you never can get rid of evil, absolutely not, and no radical, no matter how many promises he makes to you can solve the problem. The only way the French Revolution ever got under control was when a young artillery officer by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte lined up his artillery brigade in the Paris streets and the mob started coming, he had his artillery and he put it at zero elevation, cranked it down to zero elevation and he shot into the crowd, killing several hundred people if not up in the thousands. And he never had any trouble with them after that. But that’s the way he did it; but still, Napoleon didn’t get rid of the evil, he stopped the [can’t understand word] but he never got rid of evil. You see, you can’t get rid of it.

There’s only one way you can get rid of evil and that’s because each one of us has a sin nature, an old sin nature and this old sin nature is on the inside and as long as the old sin nature is in control you can’t get rid of evil; how are you going to get rid of it? Filling of the Holy Spirit. That’s the only possible way you can get rid of evil in your personal life and the only way you can get rid of evil in society is have a maximum number of people filled with the Holy Spirit and on Bible doctrine. And you can’t get rid of total evil until the forces behind it, the spiritual forces are eliminated at the Second Advent of Christ. So please remember the next time you hear some politician, or some radical talking about he’s going to get rid of the evils in society and he’s going to get rid of all this and all that, you ask yourself, wait a minute, how is he going to get rid of evil. Solomon is saying, this verse 13, holds good, this would be valid to criticize any movement of our time, “Consider the work of God; for who can make that straight, which He has made crooked?” That would be a response to any radical movement of our time, how are you going to make straight that which is crooked? How are you? Challenge, how are you going to do away with evil, show me.

So Solomon concludes at the end of verse 14 that the reason why good and evil coexist in society is that “God has set the one” that’s the good, “over and against the other,” that’s the evil, “to the end man should find nothing after him.” Now turn back to Ecclesiastes 3:11 you’ll find much the same statement. “He has made,” there’s God, “God has made everything beautiful,” the word “beautiful” is well-fitting, “in its time; also He has set eternity in their heart,” man’s heart, yet “so that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end.” In other words, God has so set it up that you can’t find out ultimate purposes; it’s impossible Solomon says, there’s one exception to the rule, but on Solomon’s base as a carnal Christian or as an unbeliever there’s no way to get down to the root of everything, the solid truth. And this is what it’s saying back here 7:14, God has set life with the ebb and flow of good and evil so you’re never going to get it straight, impossible to get a clue as to what’s going on. You have no purpose for your life, you have no meaning for your life, you have nothing.

Some of you don’t believe this, I know this because some of you when you are around a person who is a non-Christian who knows nothing of Bible doctrine, who knows nothing of a personal relationship with Christ say wait a minute, they’re happy, they have a nice time, I don’t believe the Word of God, I don’t believe this. That’s because they really do not have joy, it’s a false, pseudo joy, and if you think for a moment that a person outside of Jesus Christ has absolute joy and peace in the sense you have in Christ, you’re wrong. And it should be a challenge to your faith and the Word of God to test this. Some of you need to do testing, you need to put the Word of God to the test; you need to take it and apply it in areas of your life. If you have doubts about the Word of God clear them up, test them, pick somebody out that you think is having a good time outside of Christ and try to get to know them and see if they really are. That’s the way of testing the Word of God, if it doesn’t test out, there’s something wrong with the Word, but if you really believe the Word of God is the Bible then you’re willing to put it to the test everywhere in your life. Where there’s a doubt in your mind, test; test the Word of God and see if it’s true.

We come to the end of the heptad at the end of verse 14; now from verses 15 on through verse 25 Solomon is going to explain why he did what he did in the heptad. Verses 1-14 is the series of proverbial statements, now verses 15-25 is an explanation of why he did what he did. We’ll get into that next time because I want to get into the New Testament to correct this heptad, but I want to go to verse 23 for a moment. Verses 23-25, this is his summary, and he’s telling you what he just did, how he arrived at these proverbs. He says, “All this have I tested by wisdom;” in other words, Solomon ran his own experiment and said starting from where I am, what can I come up with, and he says I’ve done this by wisdom, it’s the skill that he had, but notice the word “understanding” isn’t there. See, he didn’t have any divine viewpoint understanding but he had a lot of human viewpoint, a lot of intellectual skill. So he took all this skill and ran an experiment, “I said, I will be wise, but” conclusion, verse 23 “it was far from me.” In other words, he never wound up with any kind of a satisfactory solution to life.

Verse 24 he says, “That which is far off, and exceedingly deep who can find it?” Now the word “far off” usually in the Old Testament means geographical separation; “deep” is a word which means just intellectual depth, we might say it’s deep things intelligence wise. So you have these two things; now we know what Solomon did in his lifetime, we know from the Word of God that Solomon sent expeditions all over the world. For example, archeologists, I was told by a professor in seminary, have found places in China, and people always say what about the heathen who have never heard, isn’t it interesting, you start studying archeology you find remnants all over the place, in China they found ancient temples structured similar to Solomon’s. Now where did they get that from. We know if you look at the trade routes up into China at that time in history, they came down and traded with Africa; we know this because they got materials that could only be gotten from Africa. To get from China to Africa where do you have to go through? You have to go through Israel and so it’s obvious that God placed this nation of his at the center of the trade routes of the ancient world, people passing through the land would pick up this kind of thing.

So we find then that wherever this has gone, wherever people have gone in the ancient history, the only thing that really counts is what is found in the Word of God. All these other civilizations struggled with these problems and never could come up with something. But Solomon reversed it; what Solomon did was say I don’t have the answer so I’m going to go out to all the Gentiles and see if I can find an answer. So he went down to Africa, we know he had expeditions down to Africa because of things that were left down there; we know for example of Solomon’s mining activities; we know of Solomon’s naval activities in the Gulf of Aqaba, Solomon had a fantastic fleet; he had a fleet that rivaled the Egyptian fleet. Solomon had a fleet in the Mediterranean; Solomon had people going up to Tyre, up to Lebanon, etc. He was a man who sent expeditions all over the ancient world, and in verse 24 when he said “that which is far off” he is saying that I have sent out and investigated every culture I know and I still can’t find answers.

“…and exceedingly deep,” he says I’ve sat around and thought and thought and thought and though and I came to the conclusion that you can’t get down to what’s really there. In verse 25, “I applied my heart to know and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly,” and “foolishness and madness” is all that resulted. “Foolishness and madness,” vanity, nothing, just a lot of hot air is what it amounts to.

Now do you really believe, and this is a challenge to apply this before we go back into Deuteronomy, do you really believe that if the Bible isn’t true that this is what you’ve got. Now if you don’t, if you harbor a doubt in your mind that there is nothing of true substance apart from the Word of God, you do not have a mature divine viewpoint framework; that’s the objective of this book. If you entertain for a moment the fact that you on a non-Christian base can have something solid on which to build your life you are entertaining a delusion. Now that’s the objective of this book. Before you tune out the book, just remember that you have to consider the challenge Solomon is throwing at your feet; without the Word of God you have zero, absolute zero.

Turn back to Deuteronomy 30, we’ll see a direct antithesis of what he said here; he said that which is deep I can’t find out; that which is afar off I can’t reach. In Deuteronomy 30 we have Moses saying exactly the opposite; exactly the opposite! Why? Because Moses starts at a different point. Deut. 30:11-14, “For this commandment which I command thee this day,” now that’s the Law, verbal revelation from God, “it is not hidden from thee,” the word “hidden” would correspond to the word “depth” over in Ecclesiastes. In other words, it is incomprehensible, you can’t reach it. Literally in the Hebrew it says it’s too high for me or too deep. See the words “high” and “deep” just simply means it just won’t fit in my mind, I just can’t grasp it. So the first word in verse 11 is that it is incomprehensible, “neither is it far off,” exactly the phrase that Solomon has used.

Now in verses 12-13 Moses is going to develop those two phrases. Verse 12 deals with the phrase “incomprehensible,” or “hidden from thee.” And verse 12 amplifies it, “It is not in heaven, that you should say, Who should go up to heaven,” being in heaven in the Old Testament that it’s inside the counsels of God, hidden from your mind, that you can’t get it. The only place that you can get it is if your mind could stretch, stretch, stretch and stretch and penetrate into the infinite of God. That’s the only way you could get it, and Moses is saying listen people, I have given you the words of God, I have given you the promises of God and don’t say you can’t understand it; “it’s not in heaven,” verse 12, “that you should say, Who shall so up and bring it down,” you already know it Moses says, it’s right there in front of you, you know it, you see it, you hear it.

Verse 13 amplifies the phrase “far off;” “Neither is it beyond the sea,” refers to the Mediterranean, the ocean from the Hebrew standpoint, and they were saying it’s not off in some other culture somewhere, contrary to what the Mormons like to tell us. It is right here in Israel, and he says I have given this to you, you don’t have to go across the sea to find it out, it is right here. “Who shall go over the sea to bring it to us,” you don’t have to; you don’t have to send expeditions out and yet we have Solomon doing exactly opposite to what Moses told him. Solomon had all the answers right here, but Solomon went on negative volition toward the Word of God, he divorced his mind from this and was left in despair.

Now you may not think that this ever happens; that’s because many of you have never counseled the people I counsel with. I have counseled with college students who have trusted the Lord Jesus Christ somewhere in their youth, have never really gotten a firm foundation on their faith, and they go to college, one student told me when I came to college I made one decision, I put the Bible on the shelf and I swore I would never read it for four years to see if Christianity was true, so he went through four years majoring in philosophy and then one day after graduation he came to my office and said you know, I’m all fouled up and I’d like to be straightened out. And I said fine, do you want me to take five minutes or ten minutes… after four years I am in a five or ten minute counseling situation that’s supposed to straighten him out. What happened? Because either the person who led him to the Lord didn’t make it clear, either his pastor or parents didn’t make it clear, that the Word of God can stand all intellectual challenges.

It you want to test the Word of God don’t put it upon a shelf and say I’m going to test it. You test the Word of God by reading, studying and applying it. And my challenge to you is I dare any one of you to put the Word of God to a test in any area of life, in any academic area, and I say to you that it will validate itself. You can test it in any area of life; if you can’t you might as well throw it out. Don’t be afraid of testing the Word of God. And it’s the challenge the Word of God says to you, you can test it in any area, hard difficult situation, if you have a personal problem and you say I can’t solve my personal problem, of course you can’t but the Word of God gives you the framework to solve it, the Word of God says God’s grace is sufficient for every and any difficulty of life, and when you say you can’t solve your problems you are denying the Word of God. You are saying the grace of God is not sufficient for my problem, I’ve got a problem so big that the plan of God can’t care for it; I’ve got a problem so big that Romans 8:28 can’t apply, “all things work together for good,” Philippians 4, “My God shall supply all your needs,” that verse obviously is wrong for you so what you ought to do is write your name in there, “exception so and so.” My God shall supply all your need except mine, and then sign your name.

That’s what people are saying when they have a personal problem that can’t be solved; they are denying the efficacy of the Word, they are denying its sufficiency and in effect are saying exactly what the apostate is saying. Do you realize that? When you come to the point of saying the Word of God is not sufficient for a personal problem in effect you’re saying exactly what they’re saying in the classroom; the Word of God is not sufficient on which to build a philosophy of life; the Word of God is not sufficient to build a primal history of the earth, including the biological realms of the planet/animal kingdom. The Word of God is not sufficient to give us a base for writing music, for working with art, etc. The Word of God is not sufficient for this, the Word of God is not sufficient for that. Well you do the same thing when you say God’s resources in the Word of God are not sufficient for your problem. I see no difference between that and the apostate liberal.

I see absolutely no difference for in effect it’s the same error, the error that the Word of God is far off, the real solution is way beyond you, you don’t have it available to you.

Now let’s go back to Deuteronomy 6 and see how we can make the Word of God real in our life so we don’t get in the mess that Solomon got himself into. There’s a fantastic system of education expounded in the Word of God, particularly in the Old Testament. I think that the nation Israel had one of the most fantastic systems of education that you could ever imagine; they had schools for the technical arts, true, but the main education on how to live was done in the home. And two things were accomplished this way; first the teacher was always present with the child because it was in the home. Second it built the home structure so that they had a solid base for society; you can’t build a society like we’re trying to in the United States when 30-40% of the people are divorced; how long can this go on without shredding the whole guts and the backbone of our society.

In Deuteronomy 6 we have one of these little passages that tells us a lot about how they taught the Word of God to their children. Deut. 6:4, this is the famous slogan of Israel, “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone” literally, “is one! [5] And thou shall love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all your might.” That was the commandment, the first and great commandment, now watch. After the commandment is given what does Moses say? He says I know I’ve given you this commandment, now let me tell you how you can accomplish this in your life. So immediately beginning in verse 6 he tells you how this commandment can become real in your life. “And these words, which I command you this day, let them be in your heart, [7] And thou shall teach them diligently unto thy children, and you will talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.”

Now there’s a little switch in the phrase in the Hebrew that makes a lot of difference on how this word comes across to you. The word “teach,” there are many words for teach in the Hebrew, there’s lamed, which means emphasis on the fact that you finally got it, it means to teach and teach and teach and teach and teach until you get it. There are other words, yatser, which means to beat the living tar out of someone until they learn, and that’s what God uses for the forty years in the wilderness, He says I yatser-ed you for forty years and you people still didn’t learn; that’s teaching by boot camp training. But then there’s another verb for teach and that’s the verb here in verse 7, this means to sharpen something, it was originally used to sharpen arrows and what it’s saying here is you teach by making the thing stick into it. So what it’s saying is that in verse 7, what Moses is saying is that you want to take these commandments that I’ve given you, sharpen them so they stick into the child. Now it doesn’t literally mean you’re sticking things into him, but the picture is that you sharpen the Word of God… what do you mean “sharpen the Word of God?” We mean make it clear, make it absolutely clear. This is why in our teacher training these are some of the techniques, this is justification for teacher training so you get different techniques by which to communicate the Word and communicate it clearly. You need to understand various areas of development of a child so you can gear the technique to the different age brackets, you just don’t give a 50 minute college lecture to a three year old.

So in verse 7, you shall teach, make sharp, “diligently unto thy children,” be careful about this, keep at it, “and you will talk,” not about them, the way that’s translated in the King James it looks like all you do is tell Bible stories all day. But that’s not what it’s saying, it says you will talk, and the preposition after talk, “you will talk in them” is what it means in Hebrew. Now what does that phrase mean, “you will talk in them.” This is used in many places in the Old Testament, “talk” plus this preposition “in,” for example, when you’re in a trial, and the person is to conduct the trial and he gets on the witness stand and they say you will now swear in the name of Yahweh. What does that mean? It means that you talk within the framework that the Old Testament is given to you. So when we come here to verse 7 the methodology of teaching in the nation Israel was to talk, not about the Word necessarily, but whatever the subject was that you were talking about you talked in terms of the Word. Now what does that mean? That goes back to this divine viewpoint framework; God at the center, Bible doctrine on the outside, you have these details of life, science, history, philosophy, art, music, fellowship with believers, loved ones, friends, society, you have your job, sex, possessions and health. All these details of life.

Now what verse 7 is saying is that, let’s take one of these things; suppose a man comes home and he’s tired and he’s talking about his job. That’s the subject of the conversation, his job. But, is the job, and the conversation about the job, set inside the framework of the Word of God. For example, take the concept of job, we know certain doctrines about employer/employee relationship, they’re given to us in Ephesians, Colossians and Philemon. So the man who knows these knows the Biblical principles of employment. So when he begins to discuss his job he will try to discuss it and look at from the divine viewpoint framework; it won’t always work, of course it won’t, but this is growth, you make a mistake so you fly off the handle, but next time you’re careful to check your mental attitude and make sure that when you discuss this area of life, the job, it’s done inside the Biblical framework.

Take the area of sex, fundamentalists are long known never to talk about the topic of sex, we’ve got one whole book of the Bible written on sex, the Song of Songs; we’ve got instructions on sex in the book of Deuteronomy, 1 Corinthians, in some of the Gospels, we’ve got instructions all through the Word of God, it’s a subject, it’s a topic, so you take that topic, you don’t hide it, you talk about it but you set it within a Biblical framework. Now that’s the point. The Bible has a fantastic system of sex education and it so outdoes anything that anybody else could possibly come up that it’s absolutely ridiculous to think that they’re going to teach somebody sex education in schools. Ridiculous, when the Word of God gives you a fantastic framework to teach sex education in and yet even the fundamentalists don’t use it. There is data in there by the tons to use to construct a system of sex education from the Word of God.

Take health, a person’s attitude toward their health, are they a hypochondriac, oh I feel terrible, oh I feel horrible, etc. if you find someone like that say why don’t you say look, if things are that horrible why don’t you just check out and wait for the resurrection body. We have people that are suffering fantastically, but you don’t hear them fussing, sure they’re in pain, and they let you know about every once in a while but they don’t walk around, oh it’s so horrible, and they give you a 30 minute lecture on how their cancer is doing or how their diabetes is. On the other hand, you find someone that says oh my toenail got twisted last night and they give you an hour and a half lecture on how bad their toenail is. This is what a hypochondriac is, always looking around for attention from somebody, get on your shoulder and tell you all their problems. If they know the divine viewpoint framework, just treat it and talk in terms of the Word.

And that’s what this admonition in verse 7 has done, and this is why, had the Jews followed this in verse 7 they would have produced one of the most fantastic civilizations that man has ever known. They did all right but in the sense of fulfilling their destiny in history it would have been fantastic. So when it says “you will talking terms of the Word when you sit in your house,” that’s the activities inside the home, “when you walk by the way,” this is when the father would take his son out into the field and they’d work, when they worked and when they dealt with issues on the job they talked in terms of the Word of God, always this divine viewpoint framework.

Now do you see why it is impossible to live effectively for Jesus Christ if you don’t have a divine viewpoint framework? You see, you can’t pass it on to the next generation. If the parents don’t have a divine viewpoint framework how are they going to adopt the method of verse 7? Because the method of verse 7 presumes that the parents have a divine viewpoint framework, that they can use so that when they talk the influence is almost subliminal on their children; the children grow up and they learn the framework without probably ever having been taught it explicitly because they’ve picked up by the attitudes the parents have had in various areas.

For example, practical application, take the area of relationship to society and we have people out here that are complete clods, we have people in our society that are tearing our society apart, and every once in a while the TV will show one of these characters, so what do you do? You say well that guy is a clod and he’s a bad guy and he ought to be knocked off and all the rest of it. Well suppose you say that; your child picks this up and says oh, it’s good and Biblical to hate people. Now do you see what you’ve done, you’ve already sown a seed in his mind. Now what should the Biblical point of view be? Adopt the principle of the Word of God, grace and truth. What does that mean? It means toward people you have grace, toward the ideas you have the antagonism. So check yourself and say this man entertains ideas that are anti-Biblical, he thinks in anti-Biblical terms and his ideas are absolutely wrong, but as a person, as a member of the human race, he is one for which Jesus Christ has died, and therefore we should pray for him. Now you can be gracious to a communist, to a fascist, you can be gracious to anyone on the basis of the Word of God; that’s what is so fantastic about it, yet you don’t have to agree with them at all. Now there’s the difference, and this is what I’m talking about, these subtle differences. And yet they count… they count in the end. If a person has a teacher in the school system, so is the teacher bad or the ideas the teacher has bad. What’s the difference? Well, there’s a fantastic difference, the teacher is an individual made in the image of God for whom Jesus Christ has died; but the teacher is filled with human viewpoint so by focusing on the ideas you do two things, you eliminate the problem of hate; on the other hand you focus the child’s attention on the issue and where the issue really is. The issue isn’t the person’s personality, the issue is what he believes, and so constantly you’re focusing his attention on ideas, on doctrines, doctrines, doctrines and that’s where the attention should be focused. This is what they did in verse 7.

Let’s conclude by turning to Psalm 1, you’ll see another way they taught the Word of God. In Psalm 1:2 we have one of the classical statements about a mature believer’s attitude in the Word; “But his delight, the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful, [2] His delight” his overwhelming desire “is in the law of the LORD, and in His law does he meditate day and night.” You see the preoccupation with the Word of God? Almost total preoccupation with the Word of God. Now that is the norm in the Old Testament, it’s there in the New Testament except the New Testament doesn’t emphasize a lot of these techniques like the Old Testament does. You can find them, you can find them in Ephesians chapter 1 and 3, and in Hebrews 5 if you want some references. But these techniques, the constant meditation of absorption of the divine viewpoint framework is the way in which the people became mature and it was the way in which they were to produce a fantastic younger generation. Remember that God did not perform miracles in every generation in the Old Testament, you find this concern again and again. For example, Passover, incidentally this is why we have communion, God doesn’t make miracles in every generation, what He does, He clusters the miracles in one generation and then after these clusters, for example you have one cluster in Exodus, you have another cluster in Ezekiel, after these clusters you have a strange set of admonitions. For example, in Exodus 8-14 you have the Exodus, and then in Exodus 14-15, immediately you have Moses going about to conserve these miracles.

What do I mean conserve miracles? I mean that what Moses is going to do is he’s setting up procedures to preserve the memory of those miracles. So he says now people, when your sons come to you and they ask you daddy, what’s the meaning of this thing, why do we do this in our home, why do we take this Passover lamb and go through all this. And Moses says then fathers, you will tell your son that we do it because of this, this, this and this. And you will use that as a method of educating the young Christian. So Moses was intent on the fact that God would not verify Himself in every generation, He would verify Himself in one generation and the verification miracles would be remembered historically by acting out and by other means so that the young people in the next generation, who themselves would not personally witness the miracles, could be reminded of them and the miracles would have their desired effect in that generation. This is why we have communion; this is why we study the Word of God, so that you can learn about God’s miracles without having to see them.

This is why I fear the tongues movement in our day is a violation of this teaching movement for it is a desire on the part of many people to witness signs and authentications of the validity of the gospel when God has totally given these in history already. It is to reopen a question that has already been closed; it is to ask God, God, the resurrection was not a sign that was big enough to verify the truth of the gospel; the verification miracles of the book of Acts are not enough to verify Christianity, God, we don’t need that, the historical records of these things aren’t enough to verify the truth, what we need is signs in our own generation. That is blasphemy, that has no Biblical base, it never was the norm in Israel; Israel depended on study and meditation of the Word of God. And I suspect that there’s a hidden motivation behind a lot of people that get involved in these things and I’m frank to say that I think what the motivation is, is sheer laziness. It takes work to sit down and study the Word of God; it takes thought to think through in terms of the divine viewpoint framework and people are naturally lazy. So a lazy person, how does he want verification; he wants God to strike him with lightening so he doesn’t have to think, he doesn’t have to sit down and study, he doesn’t have to do what the Psalmist is doing in Psalm 1, meditate day and night. Why? He can have his own miracles, snap his fingers and God will make a miracle, and that I fear is a lot of the motivation behind this business of tongues and signs following and all the rest of the nonsense we have today. It is a denial of Biblical education.

Next week we’ll finish Solomon’s explanation of chapter 7 and move into chapter 8. With our heads bowed.