Ecclesiastes Lesson 27

Caution! HVP Unstable – 9:13-10:1

 

In this book we have come through many sections; we are on the last large section of the book which extends from 9:13 through 11:6.  This is the second great section in the book that describes Solomon’s human viewpoint advice.  Solomon was a man who was a believer out of fellowship.  If we were to diagram Solomon’s life the way our lives look in the church age, Solomon would have accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior, he was in fellowship with Him for eternity, this is the legal sphere that never changes, once you’re in that top circle you never get out of it, but there was a bottom circle of fellowship.  He was either in this circle or out of it at any given time; either filled with the spirit or run by his sin nature.  Solomon was run by the old sin nature at this time; he was in the energy of the flesh, and even though Solomon was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived, a man of more versatility than Leonardo DaVinci, a man who would compare in one person with Leonardo DaVinci, Marcus Aurelius, Fredrick the Great and some of the great men of history who have also been intellectuals of history.  This was Solomon.

 

This book, however, is his personal investigation of carnality, and the entire book is an exposition of the blackness of carnality and by way of application the blackness of all unbelief.  Solomon does in this book what few Christians have the guts to do, and that is to think it through all the way; when you decide to choose some other thing than the will of God for your life, thinking that you can get by and cut corners, you ought to give serious attention to Solomon because Solomon has gone all the way logically.  And in this book he deals with the great problems which in our time have culminated in such movements as existentialism, such movements as linguistic analysis, such movements as are found in the contemporary despair of modern philosophy.  All of these Solomon anticipated in 1000 BC.  He anticipated it because he was the wisest man who has ever lived.  He in his one lifetime condensed some 13 centuries of human thought, and although he does not describe in detail all of what 20th century man has found, he at least hat the outline.  We’d do well in our generation to pay careful attention to this book, even though it’s dreary, even though at times it’s full of despair, even though it’s black, this is what Solomon deliberately wants you to see: it’s black outside of the bottom circle, it’s not nice out there and you’re fooling yourself through some system of self-hypnosis if you think it’s nice. 

 

In this section, 9:13-10:1, we have an introduction to a section of proverbs.  Solomon is going to set up some proverbs beginning at verse 2 of chapter 10.  These proverbs go one after another and they are short pithy statements of truth that he has observed in life.  Remember Solomon is operating in a human viewpoint system, which means that he is looking at life from a naturalistic point of view, from physical birth to physical death, spiritual factors excluded, no after life, nothing in here except this life, purely naturalistic basis “under the sun.”  Viewed from this point of view what does life look like?  Solomon, in verses 13 through 10:1 is describing a cautionary note.  In other words, before he sets his proverbs up in 10:2 he’s going to caution us about something, about human viewpoint wisdom itself, and he is a very realistic individual and here in verses 13 and on he is warning you that on the basis of human viewpoint, which means that you empirically perceive the world through your senses, you logically perceive it, minus the Word of God, minus revelation, in that kind of situation you never can arrive at absolute truth.   Today we are going to see something, probably in a way that is far more clear than we have ever seen it before in this book, what it means by absolute truth.

As a believer if you have received Jesus Christ, whether you knew it or not when you received the Lord, you were saying there was such a thing as absolute truth and that you staked your life on it at the point of belief in Jesus Christ.  You believed that the gospel narratives depict absolute truth; you believed that when they say that Jesus Christ was God incarnate, that when Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins, that that is a truth that can’t be changed in time and space.  That is a truth that’s as true on the planet Mars as it is true on the planet Earth. And it is as true in the first century of this era as it is in the 20th century, as it will be if the Lord tarries, in the 30th century.  Absolute truth will never be changed by additional data.  History can’t add to absolute truth; it can enrich it but it can’t change it, and that’s what we mean by absolute truth.  And this is actually tremendous for our generation because the average person on the street does not believe in absolute truth; everything’s relative, it’s all how you see it, oh, that’s your opinion, and if you like to believe that, well that’s your opinion.  It’s your opinion of this and your opinion of that; that’s nonsense. 

 

In verse 13 he starts out, “This wisdom I have seen also under the sun, and it seemed great unto me.”  Now this wisdom he is talking about here is human viewpoint wisdom, it is the flesh wisdom, it is wisdom that was cranked out of Solomon’s natural nature; it was wisdom that had a flaw in it, a very fatal flaw it seemed to Solomon, and this is the thing that he’s going to caution you against.  Before he gives you his advice, beginning at 10:2 he is going to caution you about certain limitations on his advice.  And the limitation is that because it’s human viewpoint it can never be certain.  In other words, certainty is out: minus certainty!  The advice that he gives you he says might be true for a while, but don’t bet your whole life on it because an additional factor, he says in 10:1, dying flies are going to ruin precious ointment.  And a little bug, or a little factor that comes into your life can ruin and blow the whole theory.

 

Now we have certain applications of this, if you lived through the tornado you know that in this situation we had an excellent illustration of this problem.  Man, arriving at the problem by human viewpoint, looking at life through the limitations of human knowledge says that there are certain known ways for a tornado to form; never have these laws been violated in known observation, except May 11, 1970.  Usually what you have in a tornado situation, by every other observation that we know has gone on, in this part of the country you have to have dry air from the west and you have to have moist air from the south, and you have what they call a [can’t understand word] which sets up here along the panhandle, and that has to be there in order to have these conditions.  Furthermore, in addition to this condition you have to have a jet stream to act as they dynamic force to evacuate the air [can’t understand words] and move it, etc.  So you have to have these conditions; always before we’d had these conditions.  Always before we’d had these conditions, but you didn’t have the conditions, there was no jet stream there, and therefore, according to all the theories the Lubbock tornado should not have happened.  But it happened anyway, it didn’t now the theories so it went on blowing.  So we have a situation where human wisdom was point out to have its limitations.  The limitation was that some additional event in history, namely May, 1070 there was an event that blew the theory. 

 

Now that is the limitation of human knowledge and if you are trying to live your life on the basis of your opinion, and if you’re trying to build your life on the basis of what men say, you are subject to the same startling and sometimes scary conclusion, as the tornado theory got in Lubbock; there’s going to come an event sometime in your life that you can’t account for, there’s going to something happen that’s going to blow your whole theory right out of the window.  And if your life is not structured on the Word of God, and the firm foundation, your philosophy of life is going to wind up in the same place as practical theories of tornados wound up in May; exactly the same place.

 

To see this a little better, let’s take the illustration of parents and children.  We’ll take three examples of parents teaching children, and in each one of these three illustrations you see this problem of absolute truth that Solomon is going to look at, for what Solomon wants to do is take a parent’s perspective of life, the parent has a larger perspective on life than the child does, so the parent has this large perspective; the kid has a small perspective.  Now, you as a parent have to tell your child certain truths about life; a child may or may not be ready to accept some of these. For example, you deal with the problem of authority.  If you operate on a human viewpoint system you’ll tell your kid, listen kid, you don’t blame me because I’m your parent, period!  If you don’t like it, lump it.  Love the house or leave the house.  That’s operating on human viewpoint. 

 

But if you are operating in such a situation from the divine viewpoint what you want to do is teach the child authority in such a way that his later experience isn’t going to knock out what you taught him.  In other words, he’ll never have some experience in his life that he’ll have to unlearn what you taught him, so the best way to teach him is to teach him in such a way that future experiences, he won’t have to readjust what you told him.  He won’t have to unlearn what you’ve taught him.  So therefore what you do is if you’re a Christian you will ground your authority on the Word of God and say that the ultimate authority is not the parents; the ultimate authority is God Himself. Therefore, when the parents tell you do to something we are operating in the divine institution, the third divine institution of a family, and we are operating on the basis of what God tells us, so therefore our authority is delegated to us by God.  It is not inherent in us; it’s not that we’re so smart, it’s that God has instructed us that this is the way it’s going to be period. 

 

And if you can ground your authority on God’s authority, then later on there will not be, theoretically there can never be one situation in that child’s life that will violate the idea that God is the supreme authority.  You are under God, all right, you’re fallible, sometimes you do make mistakes, so if the kid sees you make a mistake you don’t shatter the authority because the authority is in an infallible God, not fallible parents.  So you say well, we made a mistake, all right, we made a mistake, we are doing the best we can to follow the authority that God has vested in us as parents.  This way what have you done?  From your perspective, looking at all of life, you have taught that kid something in his little limited world that will be true as his world expands, as he has more and more experiences, he will never reach something that will blow this because you looked at it from the big picture, and then you gave it to him in these little pictures, and when this little picture gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger as he grows, he will never encounter some situation that will demand him to throw out what you taught him.

 

That’s the best way to teach; teach truths that don’t have to be unlearned later.  That is absolute truth, that is truth that will be true all through life and he won’t have to keep shifting and changing. And if you deal with some of the people I have to deal with in counseling, it’s very interesting to see their home life and their background.  Somewhere along the background in many of these people with tremendous personal problems I have noticed they have had drilled into them by their parents, by the school system or something, some truth that they’ve pinned their life on and then they’ve gone on through life and all of a sudden one day, bam, they hit something that blew the theory and it shook them; it shook them so bad that now they have psychological problems because they weren’t prepared for what lay beyond.

 

And Solomon is saying without God we have no parents, without God he says, living “under the sun” I’m like this little child and we’re like a lot of little children and we just share our little worlds together and we haven’t got the overall picture so that we can learn something that’s going to be true today, tomorrow, the next day, the next year, etc. for all eternity.  We haven’t got the perspective, Solomon says, looking at life from the human viewpoint. 

 

Another way in which this is done, a recent way the school system has tried to do this is through the introduction of new math.  Some of you don’t like new math but actually new math is an improvement; new math is an improvement because when we learn the old ideas of arithmetic, etc. we learned all these little sweet rules, but we didn’t learn overall structure, the logical structure behind mathematics.  Now new mathematics does this, so here’s a kid in 7th grade, when he gets to be a sophomore in college he doesn’t have to unlearn all these mathematical rules; he’s got the structure.  It’s the same concept. 

 

We  have the same thing in the area of sex; we have parents teaching children certain things, not so much now but in the past generation, that sex is a no-no and that’s all they say, it’s a no-no.  Great, that works until they get married, then what happens?  That’s not the way to teach sex; you have to teach sex from the Biblical point of view, and grounded on the character of the male and the female and the divine institution of marriage as the Word of God teaches you and Genesis 2, Genesis 3, Ephesians 5, 1 Corinthians 7, Deuteronomy 24 and many other passages of the Word of God.  Now from these passages you can tell a child, teach them some of the things about sex that will never have to be unlearned later on.  It’s far better to do it this way than to teach them some odd hot principle that’s out here and if it’s all screwed up, later on you have to unlearn the thing.  You can teach that there are limitations, but you teach it in conjunctions with marriage; there are limitations for the purpose of marriage so that when a person is married they don’t have to reverse gears and everything else and wind up with 3-4 years of married life adjustments.  But we find this again and again, ministers find this again and again in marital counseling this has happened, where kids have been taught in a certain way, no, no, no, no, no, no, or haven’t been taught at all, then they get married and what happens; it blows the whole theory again.

 

So these are illustrations by what I mean by absolute truth, looking at life from the overall perspective.  Then we may not learn all there is to know but what we do learn we never have to unlearn.  Application to you personally: when you study the Word of God you don’t know all of the plan of God, I don’t know all of the plan of God, and you could study the Bible from now until the rapture and you still wouldn’t know all the plan of God, but if you truly know any piece of the Word of God, you know something that will never, never, never have to be unlearned in eternity.  What you learn today from the Word of God, if you really learn it and know it and appropriate it, no matter how long you spend in eternity in the presence of the Lord you will never have to unlearn it; it’s truth that never has to be unlearned.

 

Let’s look now at Solomon.  In 9:13 he’s crying about this problem, and the problem is that his human viewpoint wisdom can be spoiled by additional events and circumstances in life.  “This wisdom have I seen also under the sun, and it seemed great unto me.”  Now “great” here means burdensome, it is a tremendous pressure for this man, a relativist, someone who cannot ground his life on absolute certain truth has no place to hang his hat, to put it in a contemporary way. He walks in the room and there’s no hook, there’s no place to hang his hat.  If he hangs it over here he turns away and it’s a changed position; it’s a terrible pressure to be under.  And you’d just have to spend about five minutes thinking where you would be if nothing was certain; if tomorrow morning when you woke up you weren’t even sure the sun was going to rise. And if you’re not a Christian and if you don’t have any base in the Word of God you have no certainty the sun is going to rise tomorrow.  You just take that by blind faith, and you turn around and say Christians take everything by blind faith.  No, Christians don’t take things by blind faith, unbelievers take things by blind faith, like the sun is going to come up tomorrow.  You haven’t got a shred of a reason for saying the sun is going to come up tomorrow. Christians do because we know that the God is there who has created the universe according to law, and therefore I know the sun is going to come up tomorrow, prophecy tells me, I’ve got a reason; the average unbeliever does not.

 

So verse 14; in verses 14-15 Solomon gives an illustration in history of what he’s trying to get across.  He’s going to illustrate a truth and the truth is that wisdom, no matter how great it is, is clouded over, squashed by the events of history, and he gives you two illustrations.  This first one, verses 14-15 is a case of wisdom that worked on one occasion but has since dropped out of man’s memory.  [14] There was a little city,” and many scholars have debated what the city was, and I think it’s irrelevant, the point is it’s an illustration that Solomon has made. “There was a little city, and a few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it. [15] Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he, by his wisdom, delivered the city; net no man remembered that same poor man.”  The point here is that in the chaos of history Solomon says the great things of life get swamped out; it’s like rowing across a lake when the wind’s blowing and the boat just gets swamped by the waves.  He says you can have perfect wisdom even, in the human viewpoint, as best as the human viewpoint can get it, and you have this man who evolves a strategy for the defense of a city in times of a warfare in verse 15, the strategy works; now it may not work again, but even if it did work again he says, you never can remember it.  He says the history swamps it out, this man is destined to oblivion.

 

If you want to see the same train of thought turn back to Ecclesiastes 2:16, this is something that recurs again and again in Solomon.  “For there was no remembrance of the wise man more than of the fool forever, seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. How dies the wise man? Like the fool.”  In other words, you naturally, viewed without God, without any idea of eternity adjusting the scales, without any spiritual dimension, life is chaotic.  He says the point here is that the good things of life get submerged, they get swamped out, and here’s a man who is wise from the human viewpoint, it doesn’t pay off.

 

Ecclesiastes 4:13 is the same thought, 4:13 is another one of his famous illustrations, in the area of politics, “Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and stupid king, who will no longer be admonished, [14] For out of prison he” the child “ has come to reign, and though he was born poor within his kingdom, [15] I consider all the living who walk under the sun, with the second one that shall stand up in his stead.  Solomon points out that here you have the political situation of an old king, you have a young man who’s dynamic, he comes out of prison, and the Hebrew word for “prison” here is debtors prison, the lowest position in society this man comes out of, sort of reminiscent of Joseph.  So this man comes out of debtors prison and he comes to be the ruler and he says people flock all around, verse 15, “I considered all the living who walk under the sun, with that second one,” the crowd, he’s a mob politician that has for a moment in history great popularity.  And then in verse 16, “There is no end of all the people, all that have been before them; they also who come after them shall not rejoice in him,” he says it doesn’t make any difference, he’s just a splash in the pan, that’s all, he’s just a man who has a great mob but for only one moment in history, and there were thousands and millions of people that lived before and there are thousands and millions of people that live after that have no knowledge of him, what does it matter. That’s his point.  Things get swamped out in history.

 

Ecclesiastes 9:5 you have the same thought; one thing you can’t say about this book, it may be discouraging, it may be depressing, but this book can’t be said to be a myth or a fantasy, these are real observations, and this is just Solomon shooting straight.  This is exactly the way life is.  “The living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.”  He says once you die you get swamped out in the flow of history, nobody knows you’re there any more, so you have a gravestone some place, big deal. You just get swamped out and your memory is gone.  Looked at from the natural point of view there’s nothing left.

 

So when we come back to chapter 9, this is what he means when he says that man’s wisdom is remembered no more, “no man remembered that same poor man.”  Verse 16, he goes on and he begins to quote a proverb.  Verse 16 is an illustration of this trouble that we have interpreting this book because he’ll throw a proverb in.  Solomon is very clever in his writing, he takes a proverb that’s right and then he smashes it with one of his observations, and this is what he does here.

 

Verse 16, “Then said I,” now he quotes a proverb that’s right, “Wisdom is better than strength;” now that is a proverb that Solomon is quoting, “Wisdom is better than strength, nevertheless,” now here’s where he tacks on one of his little observations, like we said again and again, you’re good—(dash) for nothing.  It’s what you add that smashes what you already said at the beginning of the sentence.  Solomon says yeah, I know the proverb that says “Wisdom is better than strength,” he’s speaking of this illustration, this man, surely a person would come along and say look at this man, this poor man, he delivered a city because of his superior strategy, tremendous, and he says yeah, I know the proverb, it says “Wisdom is better than strength,” but he says, “the poor man’s wisdom is despised,” and “despised” here is the Hebrew participle and it means it’s continually despised all over the place, continually despised, “and his words are not heard.” 

 

Now you people living in this time in America, this illustration shouldn’t be too far removed from you. We have had poor wise men that have warned this nation again and again and again, and even from the human viewpoint they are right; their strategy, I think of men like MacArthur who told us don’t get involved in a land war in Asia because it’ll just be a war of attrition, it’ll dry you up, Asia is so vast with a population there that America could never fight a non-nuclear war on land in Asia, don’t do it.  So MacArthur is like this man whose wisdom is despised and his words are not heard.   These men, men like MacArthur, these poor men, just like in verse 16, their words are despised, the words aren’t heard any more and the result is disaster.

 

Verse 17, here’s another proverb, “The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that rules among fools.”  This is another one of his good proverbs that he’s quoting, he says yes, I know that proverb, “The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that rules among fools,” the chide ruler in other words, chief idiot.  Verse 18, “Wisdom is better than weapons of war,” see it all flows out of that original illustration, he says yeah, I know that, “but one sinner destroys much good.  And what he says is you can have the perfect strategy, you can have perfect wisdom and have it blown by one little event.

 

Now 10:1 and we’ll explain this first proverb that actually concludes this last section.  “Dead flies,” or “Dying flies cause the ointment of the perfumer to stink and ferment” literally, there are two verbs in here, one means to smell, to cause to smell, to stink in other words, and the other is to ferment.  And the word “dead flies” are not dead flies but dying flies and the picture here is that in the ancient near east these men would have these shops where they’d mix oil, they’d use it for perfume, the ladies would go down there, ladies haven’t changed, and ladies would go down here and they buy these perfumes, and they’ mix these perfumes up in these big vats.  Now this was expensive oil, and he said you’d go by the shop and there’d be oil in the vats.  Well what would happen to the oil?  Same thing happens to swimming pools, the flies come down, bugs come down, they get caught, a bug gets into the surface, oil gets on his wings, there he is, he’s trapped and he can’t get out of it.  Well some lady walks by and she sees flies sitting around in her perfume, is she going to buy it?  No, and that’s what he says, he says the thing stinks, obviously, due to bacteria that got in there along with the flies, etc. and we’ve got fermentation going on, he says it’s spoiled.  And in the ancient world ointment was precious, that’s the point.  This ointment he’s talking about is expensive and it’s ruined by dead flies, no expense, cheap, a penny for a million of them, and yet those can ruin it. 

 

If you want to remember an incident from the Gospels to recall the expense of ointment, think of the alabaster incident with Jesus Christ.  When the woman came up to Him, who incidentally recognized the doctrine of the resurrection and she went and she smashed this precious ointment over His head; those of you who don’t understand the customs think it’s sort of crazy to have some man sitting there and some lady comes up and taps him on the head with perfume and it dribbles all down.  The point there was that she was signifying that Jesus Christ is going to die, and she was burying Him, she was caring for His death, for His body that would one day die, and so when the disciples were all sitting around, they junked her, they said look woman, how stupid can you be.  Of course, she was the one that was smart, the men were the ones that were idiots because they didn’t recognize the death and resurrection of Christ; the woman recognized it, which is a travesty on the male leadership but in the Gospel narratives, it’s interesting that the people who caught on to Bible doctrine first were the women.  And secondarily the men, the men never did catch on till Pentecost.  But there were several women in the Gospel narratives who kept up taking in doctrine and they took in doctrine, they always listened, so they learned a lot, and this woman evidently learned all about the resurrection, etc. so she recognized it and she was applying doctrine to the experience, and these men said hey, what are you doing here, taking this expensive ointment and blowing it on this guy, why don’t you go out and sell it, at least you could distribute it to the poor.  By the way, do you know whose advice that was?  Judas Iscariot.

 

And do you know a modern author who thinks Judas Iscariot was right and Jesus was wrong?  Fletcher, author of “Situation Ethics,” says that Judas Iscariot in that situation demonstrated more love than Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ turned around and in effect said to the people the poor you always have with you, if you’re going to blow your money blow it on me now, because I’m not going to be around for a while.  Now that’s essentially what Jesus Christ said, and you see, Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be or He was one of the greatest lunatics that ever lived.  He actually turned and in effect said to these people, if you waste your money on Me because you’re not going to have Me all the time.  Now what man would rightfully say something like that unless He was who He claimed to be.  So Fletcher said he’s shocked at the text, he says we have no reason to conclude that Jesus ever said anything like that, because Fletcher can’t analyze things from the divine viewpoint, situation ethics, there you go.  A beautiful illustration of how to apply situation ethics.

 

So we have the situation here in verse 1 of precious ointment, these dying flies spoil the thing, and then Solomon concludes, “a little folly,” now your King James translation should be corrected here, “a little folly is weightier than wisdom and honor.”  What’s his point?  He’s saying in the end what prevailed, the dead flies or the ointment?  The dead flies.  In the end he says what prevails in history, human viewpoint wisdom or some fool that comes along and blows it?  Some fool may prevail.

 

Now what’s the escape from the dilemma?  What is the escape from Solomon’s point?  If you act out your life as a non-Christian you are right here, because no matter how much you know, no matter how carefully you plan your life, some event will come up, auto accident, sickness, business reversal, and the way our country is going we can all expect business reversal; one of the hardest areas of fulltime Christian service is a Christian businessman today.  You Christian businessman don’t you ever take a back seat because some missionary makes you feel guilty “because you’re not out on the mission field you’re not in fulltime Christian service.”  If you are a businessman that is your fulltime Christian service before the Lord and you have the right to pray in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ for help and guidance in your business.  That is your privilege as a believer priest; don’t feel apologetic about your business.  That is your ministry unto the Lord.  Jesus Christ hired you according to Ephesians 5-6 and Jesus Christ can fire you and Jesus Christ can promote you, you don’t work for men, you work for Jesus Christ on that job.  Here we have a situation where men can build up their business and in a minute it can be destroyed, by a storm, by disaster, by a wrong business deal, anything.  So how stupid to build your life on all these things. 

 

Let’s turn over to Matthew 7 and we’ll have the New Testament corrective. We never want to leave where Solomon leaves us so we always like to turn to the New Testament and find out a correct doctrine.  Matt. 7:24, this is the so-called Sermon on the Mount that everybody lives by and no one reads.  “Therefore, whosoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him unto a wise man, who built his house upon a rock. [25] And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell not; for it was founded upon a rock. [26] And every one that hears these sayings of Mine, and does them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, who built his house upon the sand. [27] And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.” 

 

Now I suggest to you that of all the words in verses 24-27 the one that is least noticed, and probably the most important, is the last phrase, “great was the fall of it.”  Why is it that it was great, the fall of it. What Jesus means here, it was a shock; it was a shock to the man who had invested his life in sand, because the man sincerely did it. Well, so and so is sincere; well you can be sincerely wrong and that’s the whole point here.  This man was sincere when he built his house on sand, he wasn’t ostensibly rebelling against God, he was absolutely sincere that this was the right thing to do, and “great was the fall of it,” great because it was a shock to him.  He woke up one day and he was out riding the surf.  Why? Because his house just collapsed.


Now there are two reasons for you as a believer to watch this. We have before us two events in history, and great is going to be the fall of some Christians.  One is our own history, our country faces disaster, and I’m not just some prophet crying in the wilderness, you don’t have to be a prophet to know, but you’d better be preparing for disaster because at the rate this country is going our school systems and college campuses could be closed.  We face a situation in this country if the Korean War erupts again of a second front in Asia.  Then we could have the Middle East situation open up, that’s about ready to blow up.  So in our personal history as a nation and in your personal history we face disaster; if we don’t get it through war we’re going to get it through economics.  We have all sorts of economic disasters ahead of us if the Lord is not continuously gracious to us. We have disaster after disaster and people rock along, living the Christian life, don’t pay any attention to the Word of God, don’t know how to be filled with the Holy Spirit, never understand the gospel so they can tell someone else about Jesus Christ, they never can live the Christian life themselves because they don’t have stability, what are they going to when something like this hits.  They can’t even live the Christian life now.  What’s going to happen when the ceiling falls in, where are you going to be.  The only Bible doctrine that you have is going to be Bible doctrine that you took in that’s memorized that nobody can take away from you because you may not be able to go down and hear some preacher some place.  That’s the kind of situation we could well get in your generation. 

 

Ask yourself, if this happened tomorrow, if this happened next year in this country, am I as a believer in Jesus Christ ready?  Are you going to cry and moan and groan and fall apart, etc. are you that kind of a believer or are you going to be ready for it when it comes.  If you haven’t taken in Bible doctrine you are not going to be ready; that’s the up and the down of it right there.  Either you take in Bible doctrine and get ready now or forget it; right now you’ve got the opportunity, you’ve got peace and stability, right now you’ve got time to sit down and take these things in and if you’re confused on points you have Bible class where you can go and get information on the gospel, where you can go and get straightened out on passages that you don’t understand, techniques that are hard to apply for you.  You ought to be straight on these things; we’ve got a tape library with hundreds of hours of instructions; we’ve got books in the library and yet I can count on my hand the number of people that have used the facility. 

 

Why? Because people don’t care, and you will be like the believer who build his house on sand, we’ll have economic disaster in this country and you’ll sit around and wonder what happened, oh God, why are you such a meany, why did you let this happen to me.  He let it happen to you just like He let it happen to the Jews in 586 BC.  God always lets it happen to believers who are out of line; God always lets it happen because if He can’t teach you through normal processes the doctrine of predestination, the doctrine of predestination says you are going to be equipped to live in the presence of the Lord forever. What does this mean?  This means that God is going to get you in shape.  It’s like you go to boot camp and the drill sergeant walks up to you and says fatso, and he pats you on the tummy and he says you’re going to be in shape in six weeks; and you know you are going to be in shape in six weeks, you are predestined to be in shape and it’s going to be the easy way or it’s going to be the tough way, but you will be in shape. 

 

Now that’s exactly how God operates, He wants believers who are going to be in shape for eternity and you either learn the easy way or He clobbers you around until you learn the hard way, but you will learn. And that’s the doctrine of predestination, that is one phase of eternal security that people never understand, they always like to say oh, once saved always saved, that’s true; that’s absolutely true and I would be the last to compromise that doctrine of eternal security, but a corollary is that once saved we are going to be trained for eternity whether you like it or not, and God will put you through the mill of disaster after disaster; you may have been lucky, God may have been gracious to you so far, God may have spared you from trials because (1) you may be learning, and another thing, you may not be but God is saying well I’ll give him/her another chance, I’ll let him go rocking along and see if I can get him to learn something, and if not, bang, all of a sudden, something is going to happen. That’s not an accident, there are no accidents in the Christian life. 

 

All things, now watch it, Rom. 8:28, some of you quote it out of context, Romans 8:28 goes along with the doctrine of predestination, “All things work together for good,” now it does not say all things are good, it says “All things work together for good,” and in the context Romans 8:28 says your overall Christian life is [can’t understand word/s] so therefore trials, and you get hit, hit, hit again, “all things work together for good,” that’s what it means, the trials and errors of life that God has forced you to go through are working for good.  He’s set up a special training program just for you, the Christian life and you can learn the easy way or learn the hard way, but you will learn. That’s the area of predestination/eternal security.

 

The second thing that we face as believers, we may escape the historical judgment on our society, we may escape disaster, we may escape these possible situations that develop, we may escape personal illness or catastrophe in the family, but there are other things that we won’t escape and one of them is in 2 Cor. 5, Paul’s doctrine of death, the end of phase 2, entrance into eternity, phase 3.  Verse 8, “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and present with the Lord. [9] Wherefore, we labor that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of Him. [10] For we must all appear before the judgment of Christ, that everyone may receive the things done in his body, according to that he has done, whether it be good or bad.” 

Now this means there’s a believer’s judgment ahead for every person and at that believer’s judgment it doesn’t affect your salvation status but it does affect your position in eternity, in the sense that there will be rewards and your works are going to be divided into two categories.  Here are all your works, everything you’ve ever done is going to be divided up at this judgment; between the good and the bad.  What is the bad?  The bad are things that may be good, the bad are things that may be done in the energy of the flesh, works of the flesh, and they can involve giving money to charity, praying, Bible study, witnessing, and all the rest of it but if that’s done in the energy of the flesh, bad.  Why? Because God’s modus operandi in the plan of salvation is to glorify Himself and He can’t glorify Himself if He’s depending on your works.  Therefore, the plan of salvation, since it’s designed to glorify God, is designed that the Christian life be supernatural, the filling of the Holy Spirit.  And when the Holy Spirit controls the life and produces the work, those are what is going to be called “good” at this judgment seat.

Now you can think through your life and say, do I spend 5% of the time filled with the spent, 15%, or what. That’s going to be your ratio at the judgment seat of Christ and He’ll weed out all the works of the flesh that you thought were so great, etc. self-righteousness, legalism, etc.  Now if you operate in the usual Christian way and you have been exposed to a lot of fundamental fellowship, you’ve probably been involved in a legalistic rut where everybody minds everybody else’s business.  Legalism is one these bad works and it’s energy of the flesh.  So we have works of the flesh, and those are the things that are going to be eliminated.  You’d better take a look at your life; I have to take a look at my life all the time and I know lots of things in my life that are going to be eliminated at the judgment seat of Christ.  People that know me know a lot more; this is the advantage of friends.  You know what Martin Luther said, if the Pope had been married he’d never have thought of the doctrine of papal infallibility; that’s very true.  But you can spot areas in other believers and if you’re married to a believer you know they have a sin nature.  But you don’t lord it over people, Christ is going to take care of that at the judgment seat. 

 

Those are two things you as a believer faces; one, the storm that may come in our generation, and are you going to have the wisdom, Solomon says where a little fly can come in and ruin it, some little disaster can come in and blow your whole philosophy of life and ruin you so you’ll be a psychotic for the rest of your life.  Is that what you want?  Or are you going to wait until the judgment seat of Christ before you straighten out.  So we have these two things that are certain in our life and we have two choices today, are we going to submit to the Word of God as God has explained in His Word how to be filled with the Spirit, how to believe in Jesus Christ, all these techniques of living the Christian life or just rock along; that’s our choice.  With our heads bowed.