Ecclesiastes Lesson 28

All That is Left – 10:2-8

 

[the first side of this tape is extremely hard to hear, thus accuracy may be impaired] Ecclesiastes 9:13 through 11:6, the last great section in this book dealing with human viewpoint advice.  Remember that there are two ways of looking at life, looking at life from the divine viewpoint or looking at life from the human viewpoint.  Looking at life from the divine viewpoint means that you look at it through the framework given in God’s Word.  It means that you as a believer have as your prime interest the development of the divine viewpoint framework in the mentality of your soul.  This means that God will figure at the center of your life; Bible doctrine, things that He has told you, around Him and around these areas you will have the various areas of life, science, philosophy, history, art, music, literature, fellowship with believers, loved ones, friends, society, your job, sex, possessions, and health, all the details of life.  These are all activities of life and you have to, as a Christian, beware of a compartmentalization heresy, keeping the Bible in one compartment and these various activities of life in water-tight compartments separate from the Bible.  That is not truth, that his a heresy. 

 

Now in Solomon’s life we have the situation develop where he, because of his negative volition toward God has shattered his divine viewpoint framework.  Remember that your divine viewpoint depends on your personal relationship with the Lord.  If you are negative toward Him, then the result is basically a fragmentation of your life.  And one of the most disastrous things that will happen to you is that you will have no knowledge that is absolute and enduring.  This is why in verses 13-10:1, last time, Solomon warned us that even though what he was about to gives us is wise in considering the relative knowledge that he has “under the sun,” it is a wise path but Solomon says beware because it isn’t absolutely true and it isn’t absolutely trustworthy. 

 

I tried to think of a way of getting across the concept that human knowledge is relative and not absolute, as only knowledge that you get in the Bible is, revelation rather, then perhaps we might look at it this way.  Suppose you made a graph and suppose that the bottom axis, the X axis of the graph is indicated as time; suppose you let this be time.  And suppose the Y axis in the graph is equal to distance or space.  Then we can show how human knowledge is limited.  For example, we look at time, the human being is capable of observing events down to a little less than a second in life; anything faster than that your eye cannot register intelligibly to your brain.   You can observe on up to the end of your life, so an average of 70 years.  But we can extend that through history, and say we can go all the up, direct human observation, to say 6000 years of recorded history. All right, so we have that, that delineates the measurement of direct human knowledge. 

 

Now suppose we go to space and say what’s the smallest thing you can see with your naked eye? Well, just say roughly it’s one millimeter, and what’s the largest thing you can see with good visibility, in other words, you can see the universe, thousands of light years, but let’s take an object that’s pleasant to handle; say you go up, some of the satellites, etc. suppose we say 2,000, an object of 2,000 miles diameter, close enough so that you can make out detail.  It’s kind arbitrary but at least it gives you an idea of the fact that human knowledge, direct knowledge, is limited by time and by space.  This is one of the things that forces you to say “as far as you can see,” or “as far as you know.”  The modern man is able to extend his knowledge through instruments so he can extend the boundary this way a little bit with a telescope; he can extend the boundary this way with a microscope; and he can extend this way, faster, with high speed photography for example.  But this way he can’t extend, except by conjecture.  Incidentally, this is one of the weaknesses with the theory of evolution and all cosmologies that are arrived at in area of conjecture, because you can’t penetrate that line by any instrument.   So we have these instruments that add to our knowledge.  But even those in the end are also limited. 

 

This is what we mean, that if you start out from here, here’s where you are, and you start observing, sooner or later you run out of the power to observe; sooner or later you hit the limit, and within those limits you cannot build or find any purpose for life.  Within those limits, observing time and space, you can’t come to a conclusion on which you can fully commit your life.  No piece of knowledge that you will ever investigate, from the tiny things of time on up to the glorious expanses of time, etc. will give you purpose by themselves.  You need something beyond that; what you need is, as it were, to go back up to infinity where you can get the whole picture, and then looking at the universe from infinity, you view all of the things in every second. 

 

[This tape very hard to hear/understand, thus there may be errors in what I hear/understand]

I gave some example of this on a smaller scale when last time we saw the problem of a child and his parents.  Let’s look at this as a child. The child is growing up in the home; the child is taught that parents are the authority.  All right, this serves him for a little while but when his knowledge expands, sooner or later he discovers something, that his parents are not infallible.  So what happens to his authority; this means all of a sudden sometimes the authority that he trusts can be wrong.  Sometimes the authority that he’s submitted to leads him in the wrong direction, and this can be a shattering experience if the child has been taught that the parents are absolute authority.  That’s wrong, the parents are not absolute authority, God is the absolute authority.  You must always be careful to teach a person who has limited areas of perception truths in such a way that he doesn’t have to unlearn them later, when his perception grows.  So when you teach a child that the parents are authoritative under God then no harm is done when the kid finally discovers that the parents are not infallible, and no harm is done when he discovers that occasionally they can misinterpret their authority under God.  You haven’t shattered overall by teaching him the wrong thing, making a relative absolute.

 

But when you go into the larger framework and you look at all of life, then you must come to some conclusion, but he can on the basis of his human knowledge.  This is all limited, every man, every person [can’t understand words] he’s bounded by those boundaries.  And you can’t break out of them.  And there’s no way inside the box that you can ever find a meaning or a purpose for your life.  Men have tried and tried and tried. 

 

Go back to Ecclesiastes 2:3, in this great experiment of chapter 2 Solomon had as his objective to find that meaning and purpose for his life.  For example, in verse 3, “I sought in my heart,” literally “to lead my flesh with wine, but my heart was in control,” in other words, he was using liquor in the sense of a pleasurable device but he never but he never let it get to his mind.  “And to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men,” in other words, he wanted to find a purpose for life.  The conclusion of his experiment, after the construction works of verses 4-5, after the wine, women and song of verses 6-8, finally his conclusion in verse 10 was that “Whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them.  I withheld not my heart from any job; for my heart rejoiced in all my labor; and that was my portion of all my labor.”  In other words, he’s saying, it was great while I was doing it, but the joy and the pleasure only lasted as long as I was doing it.  He said I could involve myself in my business and forget about an overall purpose in life, just think of my business, apart from everything else, and as long as I did that there was pleasure in it.  Now do you know why there was pleasure?  He didn’t have the income tax people after him, he was the income tax bureau and so he didn’t have to worry about keeping records for the IRS.  So his business was pleasurable, and he didn’t have people looking down their nose and saying you can’t sell this, you can only grow this and you can’t grow this.  Now he was the authority so it was pleasurable in his day.

 

Then he went on and he had the wine, women and song routine in verse 8, and I translated the last part of verse 8 as it should be translated from the Hebrew, as women, and I won’t go into the real word that’s used there, it might offend some of you.  So in verse 10 he finds that all of this winds up with the fact that it just gives you pleasure now but it doesn’t last, he hasn’t come in contact with any absolute, with any purpose.  And then his reaction in verse 11, “Then I looked on all the worked that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do, and, behold, all was vanity,” a horrible conclusion.

 

But see, that’s an experiment; you can try that experiment but you will never go to the boundary of Solomon.   Solomon had resources to go out beyond all the things that you could possibly try and this is his conclusion.  So if you really sought Solomon’s experiment you won’t even bother with it because you will accept his conclusion, verse 11.  Now you’ll always have people trying to disprove Solomon but I’ve never yet met one who was successful.

 

In 3:11 he says the same thing, that God has “set eternity in man’s heart,” the desire for a purpose and a meaning in his life, but the result is “that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end.”  You see, you can’t find it out, you’re sitting in the box, and there’s no way out of that box.  And then Solomon says in 3:21, “Who knows the spirit of man that it is the one that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast, that it is the one that goes downward to the earth?”  Who can tell that man is significantly different from the animals.  In the movie 2001, that movie began with an animal, and then it goes into a man, and then at the end of the film the computer wins through the man.  What is that film saying?  The film is simply saying that modern man is no different from a monkey or no different from a computer, it’s basically all the same.  It’s a tremendous film of despair.  And that movie comes to the same conclusion that Solomon has come to here in 3:21, you can’t tell on a non-Christian basis that man is significantly different from the animal or the computer.  Computers can think like a man; the animals can act like a man, so therefore what’s the difference Solomon says.

 

Then he says in Ecclesiastes 6:12 that you can’t find purpose in your life, again because of its limitations, “For who knows what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spends as a shadow? For who can tell man what shall be after him under the sun?”  In other words, who can go out beyond these boundaries, out around the edges of this box, all the way out to the edge, all the way to infinity, who can go out there and tell you what’s there and what [can’t understand words] you life. 

 

We have another illustration of this in our day; is there life on other planets.  That’s the big question; now if there isn’t, that makes us unique; if there is then we’re not unique.  So therefore on a non-Christian basis to this day you can’t tell whether you’re unique in the universe or not, you have to suspend judgment or hold a wrong judgment, or you can say that we’re unique as far as our knowledge goes.  That’s a statement of relative truth; it’s true relative to the knowledge that you have available.  Now that’s the nature of human language, that’s the nature of human knowledge, but when we come to God’s Word we find something different.  When we come to God’s Word God makes the claim that He is sovereign, He is righteous, He is just, He is love, and He is omniscient, that’s one of His attributes. We are finite creatures; God is omniscient, God has that view of eternity, and since there is an omniscient God, when He talks to us through words, “words,” plural, in the Bible, in the visions recorded in the Bible and through recording the visions themselves in history, the words of the Bible, when omniscience comes to us, and here we are as finite creatures, that omniscience can tell us things that will be true forever and ever and ever.

 

For example, you never need fear that even though you were to die today that when you went into the presence of the Lord the Lord would look any different than He is described in Revelation 1.  If you want to know what God looks like today, it’s in Revelation 1; that’s the way He’s going to look like when you see Him.  And you can rest assured that that is exactly the way He is going to look.  You can rest assured that there’s going to be no added terms of salvation in heaven.  You can rest assured that when the Bible says that once you have trusted in Jesus Christ you have absolutely crossed a black and white boundary, that you have moved across the barrier and there won’t be another one out here somewhere and it turns out this was just a mirage that you observed in history.  No, you can rest assured that for all eternity that boundary once crossed has always been crossed, and need never be crossed again.  There is no such thing as another barrier to cross again, you are in fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ forever and ever and ever.

 

That’s what we mean by absolute truth.  Since it is not changed by more gathering of more information, by further and further experience, by going on and living for age after age after age, it’ll never change, the absolute truth that God has revealed to you in the words of the Bible.  This is why the Bible is such an important book to study and this is what we get when we come to Solomon, why he [can’t understand words] the situation, why he warns us as he begins chapter 10 that these things are tentative.  What he is saying is that this is the best wisdom that you can get given the limitations.  Verses 2-3 summarize human viewpoint wisdom; verses 4-7 his human viewpoint advice on the problem of politics and revolution.

 

Verses 2-3, “A wise man’s heart is at his right hand, but a fool’s heart is at his left.  [3] Yea, also, when he that is a fool walks by the way, his wisdom fails him, and he says to everyone that he is a fool.”  Now let’s look at verses 2-3 a moment.  First in verse 2, “A wise man’s heart is at his right hand, but a fool’s at his left,” what does that mean?  These are proverbs, you have to interpret proverbs in the light of the holy Word of God.  Can you recall a section in the New Testament where the right hand and the left hand comes out very vividly what the Bible means?  Remember that verse of the Lord Jesus Christ, when at the Second Advent He gathers the sheep and the goats, and what does He do?  He puts the sheep on His right and the goats on His left.  Why does He divide it between right and left?  Because the right hand is always symbolic in Scripture of accepting and it’s symbolic of power.  It always carries the connotation of accomplishment.

 

For example, some of you men might be called Benjamin, you may know it but “jamim” means the right hand, “ben” means son, and so the word Benjamin, Benjamim, means the son of the right hand, or one who accomplishes things, or a skilled person.  I’m just telling you what the name means, not what you are; but the name means that you are an accomplisher.  And so that’s Benjamim.  We find the same thing in the English language.  What does the word “right” means, the word right means right or correct, it carries the same connotation, but the English word “left,” if you go back in the English language means weak; the old English word “left” means weak.  And so therefore it carries the connotation even in our own language.  Well in the Bible it has a more sinister connotation, that the left was failure, the left was a lack of power and failure.  So therefore when it says here, “the wise man’s heart is at his right hand” it has something to say, so far we’ve learned that the right hand means accomplishment, “the fool’s heart is at his left,” means something that is a failure. 

 

Now we have to come back and find out what does the word “heart” mean.  This is a good lesson for a lot of Christians today because we have people floating around saying oh, a head knowledge but not a heart knowledge, or something like this, a head knowledge doesn’t do anything, a heart knowledge does.  If you make that unfortunate terminology you’re an existentialist if you say this.  Head knowledge and heart knowledge, there’s no division, there’s no two words in the Bible, it’s impossible to have head knowledge and heart knowledge, there can’t be two kinds of knowledge, there’s only one kind of knowledge and there’s only one word in the original for it.  This head knowledge/ heart knowledge business that started in the 20th century is something in America but it has nothing to do with the Bible.  The Bible only knows one kind of knowledge; head knowledge and heart knowledge or no knowledge. 

 

And so it says “A wise man’s heart,” and the word “heart” here carries the connotation of understanding, and it means a man who is wise or a man who is skilled is able to accomplish.  In other words, what Solomon is saying, within this square, the limitations of human knowledge, you might as well pick up as many facts as you can to succeed within that circle, that’s what he’s saying, and if you do you’re a wise man, and your “heart is at your right hand,” your heart enables  you to succeed.  The fool’s heart with his misinformation and so on is at his left.  And in verse 2 Solomon is simply saying this, he says yes, I know what I’m about to tell you, all of this advice is tentative only, but he says at least it works in limited areas.  And he says you might as well be right in limited areas instead of going zero percent, at least you might as well be right in some areas.  And so he says within the limitations of human knowledge this is the best I can do for you.

 

Verse 3, “Yea, also, when he that is a fool is walking by the way,” the word “walking” here is the Hebrew participle, and the Hebrew participle is a motion picture tense, it means that Solomon wants you to see this man walking, literally, see the moving man walking down the street, that’s what this Hebrew participle means.  “Yea, also, when he that is a fool walks by the way,” look as he walks down the road he says, “his wisdom fails him, and he says to every one that he is a fool.”  Now Solomon doesn’t mean he says hey, I’m a fool, I’m a fool everybody.  He doesn’t mean that, what he means is the way he walks shows he’s a fool, the way he carries himself in public, the way he acts in various situations shows that he’s an idiot.  A person shows what he is by how he acts, and that’s what Solomon says.  And this is why in verses 2-3 he carefully prefaces all his advice by saying at least, even though human wisdom is limited, you might as well settle for it rather than settle for nothing.

 

Now we come t verse 4 on revolution and politics.  Now Solomon has a lot to say about revolution and politics.  Solomon was a political ruler in his day.  And his advice is quite pertinent for our time because today we hear a lot of talk about revolution, we may see revolution in our country. So we might ask ourselves, given the fact that we approach the problem from a non-Christian point of view, with limited human knowledge, which would be the best, revolution or no revo­lution.  Solomon’s counsel is essentially on the conservative side of the picture.  Let’s look at it. 

 

There are two ways in which you can react to any political situation.  You can react to the things and ills of our country by one of two ways, within the system or outside of the system; by “system” I mean the established setup of government.  You can work from within and you can work from without.  You can work to change the system or you can work starting a policy within the framework.  When I say “work within the system” I don’t mean insidiously, by working within the system I mean you work sincerely within the system, you don’t try to work at it like a termite to tear the thing apart.  That I would put in the second, you’re working really outside the system though you appear to be working from within the system.  But by working within the system I mean working as an American citizen within the system.  Now that’s the two choices.  You can say that I want the system as it is, I believe there are wrongs in it, but I can right it within the boundaries of the system, so I work in the system.  But if you don’t believe that, you believe there’s something fundamentally wrong with the system, then you want to change the system, and you may be peaceable about it or you may be warlike but you still want to change the system. So there are two ways to react, you can react by going with it or you can react by going against it.  Today we have various people who want to work against the system, and we have a lot of people that want to work with the system. 

 

And Solomon says within the boundaries of human viewpoint, which is the most wise?  There is an answer and you can’t see it between one or the other, and Solomon gives us the answer in this phrase in verse 4; let’s look at this. Verse 4, “If the spirit of the ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy place; for yielding pacifies great offenses.”  Now there are a few things to clean up in the translation, the King James misses a few points, the King James has some old English terms in it that should be understood, then we can see what Solomon says.

 

“If the spirit of the ruler rise up against thee,” that’s pretty clear, that means you’re in trouble with the establishment, it means that somewhere along the line you have a [can’t understand words] the system is about to roll over you, “the spirit of the ruler has risen up against you,” there’s a problem; that’s clear.  The next part is not so clear, “leave not thy place, for yielding pacifies great offenses.”  Generally the thought is accurate but we might paraphrase it by saying “leave not thy place,” the “place” here is your position in the system; that is the word that was used for a political office.  And so if you’re having trouble with the system, stay in the system, stay in your place.  Example: if you hold a political office, you happen to be a Senator in a state setting or a federal setting, and you have this seat in the Senate and something goes wrong, you don’t like the estab­lish­ment, he says the best thing to do is don’t quit, don’t work outside the system, work with it. 

 

And he says why, “for yielding,” now “yielding” here means relaxing with the connotation of put up with it for the moment.  That’s the connotation of yielding, it doesn’t mean that you capitulate all the way, it just means be patient and stay with it for a while, walk the extra mile.  And even though you may not like it, just go with it for a little while, “for yielding pacifies great offenses,” and literally this word “pacify” means sets to rest, and the word “great offenses” is a word that could be used in political intrigue for treason.  In other words he says, don’t get involved in treason, sedition and all these other things, just sit tight with the system for a little while.  That’s his advice.  Now this is based on human viewpoint and we’ll correct it with the divine viewpoint later, but I want you to first see the human viewpoint looking at it from the non-Christian point of view, what is the most real, the most wise path to follow.  And he says given the situation, the best thing to do is stay with the system. 

 

And verses 5-7 Solomon lists his own personal observations to show you that he’s not unaware of your frustrations.  Solomon says in verses 5-7, I know the things you’re going to say to me, he says look, I know you’re going to come back to me and say but Solomon, you don’t understand me, Solomon, you don’t live in the 20th century, you don’t know what our problems are.  And Solomon says I know the problem, I’ve seen the problem, stick by my advice. 

 

Verse 5, he says, “There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, as an error which proceeds from the ruler,” and the Hebrew “as” here is what we call a classification technique in the grammar, which means that he sees an example, the word “as” should be “an example.”  “I have seen under the sun an example of an error that proceeds from the ruler.”  He says I know that rulers are fallible, I know the rulers make mistakes he says.  And he says I’ll give you some of the mistakes that I myself have seen, verses 6-7.

 

Verse 6, “Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place.”  You have to understand by “rich” here the connotation in wisdom literature, a rich person is one who is accomplished in life, and if you are rich in life in that day it meant that you were wise.  Remember what I said when we started the series; wisdom meant skill, so therefore a person with a lot of land, a person with a great business was considered wise, not necessarily intellectually, but he had the ability to cope economically with the system.  So therefore he said “I have seen under the sun an error that proceeds from the ruler, [6] Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place.”  In other words, the wisdom is not rewarded in his time.”

 

Verse 7, “I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking like servants upon the earth.”  “Servants upon horses” this would be, and you saw this many times in the Solomonic era as you study history, you find that Solomon himself introduced and centralized the government from the earlier [can’t understand words], over to the monarchy and when Solomon did this he incorporated the most fantastic theocracy that the world has ever seen in that area of the country.  Even today the government is Israel isn’t comparable to Solomon’s government; it was fantastic the bureaucracy.  Servants ride horses, he meant that people who had no business, administrators, were administrators; he knows this, he saw it, in fact, he was responsible for it before the Lord.  And so we find this recorded again and again in the book of Kings, that his centralized power led to bureaucracy and bureaucracy in turn led to a breakdown and the breakdown was that you had people that were utterly incompetents in high places telling people that were truly competent how to run their business, just like today.  People who slave, people who are work their fingers to the bone building up their business, are told by some incompetent idiot in some government office how to run their business.  Maybe the [can’t understand word] in the government office has never really had to work for himself, he was the son of some father, or some rich person who sent him off to school and he went out and got his PhD and now he’s telling everybody how to run their business, he doesn’t know how to run business, he’s never had to earn a dime.  We have this; it’s not an exaggeration to say we have these people, we have them today and Solomon had them. 

[tape extremely difficult to hear] “…servants upon horses,” and on the other hand, “princes walking like servants upon the earth.”   Now if you turn back to chapter 8 you’ll get the implication of this bit of advice so you can see why he says what he says.  In this section, chapter 10, it just tells you [can’t understand words] but in chapter 8 he tells you why he says what he says.  In 8:1-9 Solomon told us how to react on the basis of human viewpoint to a political problem.  In verse 2, “I counsel thee to keep the king’s commandment, and that in regard to the oath of God. [3] Be not hasty to go out of his sight.  Stand not in an evil thing; for he does,” that’s the ruler,” whatsoever pleases him.”  In other words, the ruler has power.  [4] “Where the word of a king is, there is power; and who may say unto him, Why do you do what your do?  So from verses 2-4 what’s Solomon saying?  One using wise Solomon’s counsel as he does, is the reality of political power.  He says unless you want to be a victim under the steam roller, you check the stream roller; he says when you tamper with political systems you are tampering with power structures, and so the reality, particularly in the times of the orient in which Solomon lived, this is [can’t understand words] a terrific reality.  If you were contemplating changing the system you had to contemplate the fact that your head might also be changed with the system, right off.   So there’s a power to the system; this is one reason why Solomon counseled. 

 

You say wait a minute, I don’t see any moral principles here.  This is just sheer compromise with the [can’t understand word] and that’s exactly it; do you know why?  Because on the basis of human viewpoint there aren’t any moral principles.  I hope you see this as we go through chapter 8, some of you get frustrated and you say this is wrong, there’s something about this that is wrong, it’s very dreary or something.  There’s no spirit in here, and you’re absolutely right, but the answer is here too.

 

Verses 5-8, “Whoso keeps the com shall feel no evil thing;” in other words, it’s all [can’t understand word] onto the system and you won’t have any problems.  “…and a wise man’s heart discerns both time and judgment,” and the phrase “time and judgment” is a tip off to what Solomon has in mind.  If you skip down to the end of verse 9, you see the phrase, and this explains what Solomon is talking about.  “…there is a time wherein one man rules over another to his own hurt.”  You don’t have to be a great student of the book of Ecclesiastes to recall that famous part that you read in literature, there’s a time to die, there’s a time to live, there’s a time to hate, that’s from chapter 3.  What Solomon says is the great history itself is one great machine that goes on, grinding on he says, and you can’t tell what that machine is going to do in the future.  Since you can’t tell what the machine is going to do in the future, why waste your life trying to change something.  Why waste your life trying to change the system when you can’t be sure how the whole history is going to flow.

 

In verse 7, “For he knows now what shall be; for who can tell him when it shall be? [8] There is no man that has power over the spirit to retain the spirit;” these are all limitations of man.  I’ve read this, chapter 10 and chapter 8 and so many of you have got a cramped feeling, you feel cramped and boxed in here; you say do you mean to tell me if a political system is totally rotten then Solomon would go along with it?  And the answer is: yes he would.  And you say well that’s wrong, and immediately you say the word “wrong” Solomon has got you; he’s got you right there, you have no right to say it’s wrong.  Where do you get your right [can’t understand words], you have no place to get it from.  This is looking at life from human viewpoint, “under the sun,” limitations, within that sphere of human knowledge you can’t find moral principles. That’s the point, there’s no possible way under the sun you can find moral principles.  People get moral principles by their sheer invention or by their own will.  There are only two places from the human viewpoint you get them.  You get them from your own will, you decide, well I’ll do something because of what it does for me and that’s just complete [can’t understand word] type thinking. And then you can invent the principles, you can invent a system of [can’t understand word] but you have no evidence it’s really true.  So you have no right, even though you feel this cramped in feeling as you study it, you say there’s something wrong with this somewhere.  The wrongness about it is that it’s limited by the limitations of human understanding.

 

But Solomon is able to go with the cramping and you aren’t, and the reason why you can’t go with the cramped feeling and Solomon can is because Solomon is more honest.  You see, Solomon is willing to go all the way; Solomon is willing to say given the fact that I’m cut off from the Word of God, given the fact that I have no absolute moral standards from a God who reveals Himself verbally, given all that, I am willing to live [can’t understand words] with all the implications it has; you aren’t, because you’re willing to try to live in two worlds at the same time.  Some of you want to live with human viewpoint, some of you want to live with the limitations of human knowledge but you don’t like the cramped feeling that you get from here, so you reach out and you pull things from Christianity, you pull things that you like, like “love thy neighbor as thyself.”  There’s no reason for that if Christianity is not true, there’s no reason why you should pull that but you pull it because you like it, and then you get it over here and you say now I’ll live with it.  It’s completely irrational, you are borrowing standards that you have no reason to borrow and you’re marrying them with human viewpoint.

 

And Solomon says no, I’m not going to do that, I’m going to be honest; if I am truly limited by this box and I’m cut off from a [can’t understand words] then I’ll live like it, that’s the point.  Example today: we have Christians that love to say, why if evolution was proved true tomorrow it wouldn’t bother my faith a bit.  How many times have you heard that?  That’s wrong, for three reasons; the first reason is that revolution can’t be reconciled with the historic text of Genesis 1-3.  One or the other is right or both are wrong.  Two, evolution cannot be reconciled to the Word of God because if evolution is really true, then the character of God is [can’t understand word] because that means that God through the process of blood and competition and death and survival of the fittest He has brought [can’t understand words] into existence, then God turns around in the New Testament and says “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”  Don’t you feel the tension?  If God Himself turns around and makes a bloody mess and He develops this creation and then He turns around and says “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” you’ve got a moral contradiction in the character of God.  The third reason why you can’t trust evolution is because of the fact that if evolution is true it does away with the need for salvation, it does away with the historical fall, there’s no need for the cross of Christ if evolution is true, because if evolution is really true then man’s problem is simply his animal inheritance, the genetic makeup that he’s inherited from his past and the cross of Christ [can’t understand words] solve genetic makeup.  So therefore the cross of Christ is utterly a waste of time.  So therefore evolution cannot be reconciled with Christianity.

 

But we have this problem, Christians still love to say, well even if evolution is true, I’ll still live a moral life, but that’s wrong.  Consider for example [can’t understand words] here’s man, here’s an ape and here’s a dog.  There’s the evolutionary development; man with gradation down to ape, and gradations… obviously the dog is not in the line of man’s development but I just use this to [can’t understand words].   Nevertheless, the point still remains, let the dog represent the animals before this in the development sequence.  Why do you treat your dog differently than you treat yourself?  On the basis of evolution there is no reason, none under the sun for saying… the dog does not differ except in a few overt ways, he doesn’t really differ from you except in degree, so why do you see him differently.  As evolutionists see it there’s no real significant difference between a dog and you.   I really have no right to go out and say I’m wrong if I shoot a man; if I go out and shoot a man you say I murdered.  But you go out and you hunt animals, why isn’t that murder?  On the basis of evolution you’re absolutely inconsistent; on the basis of evolution if it’s murder for me to kill a man then it’s murder for you to go out and shoot animals.  This is not far fetched, this is not far fetched at all.  If you want a development of this I suggest you read Mortimer Adler’s book, The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes.   He develops this whole problem.

 

So today in our time we face much the same problem; what’s the solution to the problem?  The solution to the problem is the divine viewpoint, Revelation 19.  Let’s go back to the choice we have.  We’re involved in a system, you see a problem, you’ve got two choices; no change or change.  What do you do?  The Bible solution is there is going to be change; the Bible solution says change it, but the catch is that the Bible has two mechanics for changing it.  Both of them come from grace.  We’ll cite the two ways in which the Bible changes the social system.

 

The first one, Revelation 19:17-21, let’s read verse 13, this is a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ at the Second Advent, “And He was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood,” by the way, this is a picture of the gentle Jesus that you see in Sunday School pictures; now here is the way Jesus really looked in His holiness, “And He was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood; and His name is called The Word of God. [14] And the armies what were in heaven,” can you imagine that, warfare, “armies which were in heaven followed Him upon white horses, clothed in fine line, white and clean. [15] And out of his mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it He should smite the nations, and He shall rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. [16] And He has on His vesture and on His thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.”  This is a vision of the millennial return of the Lord Jesus Christ to set up His kingdom on earth.  This is not just a vision; this is a prophecy of a future event in which Jesus Christ sets up world government, and when this moment hits in history you will have resolved on a permanent basis the problem of political and social evil.  And it will be resolved on the grace principle in the sense that salvation to society comes by grace like salvation to the individual.  God Himself does it in world government at this point. 

 

Now you say well that’s a sweet little vision, nice for the Middle Ages but not too pertinent today.  May I remind you that you can prove that the communists, the Nazi’s and every basic major social movement of our time borrowed their vision from here; Norman Cohn in his book, Pursuit of the Millennium shows that the communists borrowed their vision of the future straight from the Bible.  It was a millennial interpretation, they had this idea, here you have history, it culminated in the return of Christ, 1000 years of perfect environment, the eternal state.  Now that was the vision of Isaiah, that was the visions of the Old Testament, and that vision disconnected and torn out of context is what has motivated communism. If you study the ideas of history you will not find the Gentile nations believing in a future golden age, it’s always the golden age in the past.  How come the communists all of a sudden got a golden age in the future?  Where did that come from?  It didn’t come from any historical antecedent other than the Bible, the Word of God. The Bible is the only source in all the world for a golden age in the future, and the communists and the Nazi’s borrowed their vision of this future golden age in the future.  Now the problem is, of course, is that the communists took it out of context.  Who is it that’s going to bring in the golden age?  God through Jesus Christ; the communists say the communist party or whoever you want to say says it’s them; they are the ones that are the ones that are called to substitute the role of Christ.  Now, do you know what one of the Greek words for substitute is?  Anti, and from this we get the word “antichrist.”  This is why communism is a movement of the antichrist.  Why?  Because they replace the role of Jesus Christ and hence they get the label, the antichrist, or the “in place of Christ.”  Nazism was an antichrist movement.  And every other political movement, even in our country that promises to bring in a millennium and to permanently solve social problems is an antichrist movement, because it is replacing Jesus Christ role in the Word of God by themselves. 

 

Then finally we have another solution, the more mediate, you say well that’s great, what do we do, sit around and wait for Jesus Christ to come to solve the problem.  No, there’s another way the Bible has of solving the problem and this is on a short term temporary basis.  And that has to do with the fact that over a short time in history, three to four generations, we can halt the flow of history and change it.  How can we change the flow of history?  Simple, by a Biblical revival.  Let me define the term: a revival means a return to a positive volition toward God’s will in the individual’s life.  Therefore it involves both believers on positive volition, meaning they are filled with the Holy Spirit, developing a divine viewpoint framework in the mentality of their souls and you have unbelievers who come to the gospel and who believe it. That is a revival Biblically and revivals in history have always stopped insidious political movements. 

 

Example:  While France was being shredded by the French Revolution which actually was a forerunner of every modern revolution today, in England a young clergyman by the name of John Wesley was preaching the Word of God in the coal mines, and when John Wesley got through thousands and thousands of people received Jesus Christ as their Savior and as result of that, many historians attribute the stability and the strength of the moral character of the nation that grew out of Wesley’s revival with keeping England from the same disaster France had, and France has never been the same since.  Why?  The mechanics of history operate on the principles of divine viewpoint.  If we had a revival in our country the communists would evaporate.  Communism has no power over Biblical revivals.  The only problem in this country today is that our clergy and our church establishments have been infiltrated by liberalism and apostasy to the point where it seems almost impossible that there can be a return to the preaching of the Word of God.  That is what prevents the solution to our problem.


I want to give you a quotation to back up my contention that the American Revolution was utterly unique in history.  This is the 4th of July and you ought to have a little historical education.  The American Revolution was not a revolution in the classical sense of the Word.  Had the American Revolution occurred today would be called a counter-revolution.  The American Revolution was not an overthrow of the system because the American Revolution goes back to the principle that England originally had set up for all Englishmen, and they were being distorted by George III etc. and the American patriots revolted backwards, not forward.  The American Revolution has nothing of the character of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution.  Listen to the words of one of the most famous speeches given in the day of the American Revolution.  This speech will show you why it was that the American Revolution functioned and resulted in a country we have.  It resulted because of these mechanics.  Before in the 1600-1700s you had revival in this country; you had the Puritan movement, you had other movements beside the Puritans.  The Puritans were people who knew the Word of God; they had kooks among them, of course, but the Puritans were one of the toughest people who ever lived and they cranked out such a fantastic culture that it is still influencing America today.  That’s how strong they were.  And they were people who studied the Word of God.  The Puritans were tough with the result that even though the Puritan culture directly collapsed around 1700, in the next century, from 1700-1800, the time of the 1776 revolution you had the momentum coming over from that previous century and that’s the secret to the American Revolution.  Why it did what it did and how it functioned was because they had the fruit of the 17th century Bible back here.  What were some of the fruits?  You’re going to hear in this paragraph I’m going to read one of them and that was the concept of law is king. 

 

We’re going to have in our library one of the six copies in the United States of Rex Lex and all of you who are interested in politics should read it.  It says: “Law is king,” and it was a tract written by Samuel Rutherford and he said the king is not king, law is king and that law is founded on the moral absolutes of the Word of God and there is no other king.  And of course, Samuel Rutherford wasn’t too popular in his day, because he was saying men are moved by laws, not by men.  Now that’s what’s happening today, all the major revolutionary movements in our time are revolutions back to an old principle; revolution to government by men, instead of government by law.

 

Here’s what Burke said in his speech conciliation with America:  “In no country, perhaps, in the world is law so general a study; the greater in number of deputies sent to the congress were lawyers, but all who read,” now listen to this and compare to our country today, “and most do read,” an accomplishment over our time, “most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that science,” the science of law.  “I have been told by an eminent book seller that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to American.  This study renders men acute, inquisitive,” now these are observations that Burke has made on the American character at the time of the Revolution.  Now you listen to this and then ask yourself honestly, could we ever have a revolution like that in any place on the globe today?  Answer: no!  Listen to the character of the American people described by Burke, an Englishman.  “This study” the study of law, “renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources.  In other countries the people are more simplistic, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance.  Here they anticipate the evil,” now do you see what Burke has said there, in other countries he said in that day he said people would wait until the government already got rotten and then they’d say this is rotten, it doesn’t work; but he says in American they can smell it coming because these people have such an acute sense of law that they don’t have to wait until the system becomes rotten because they can tell by the divine principle; this principle is wrong, and when that principle is applied it’s going to result in disaster, and these Americans saw it.

 

So listen to what he says: “Here they anticipate the evil and judge the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle.  They [can’t understand word] misgovernment at a distance and [can’t understand word] the approach of tyranny in every tainted breath.”  That’s not an exaggeration, that was the American character that led to the American Revolution. We don’t have that character anywhere near that character today.  We have a government by men; the voter today goes to the polls and votes on a popularity context.   We couldn’t possibly duplicate the American Revolution in our time and no country going could probably come anywhere close.  In the last 200 years our country has deteriorated because we have never gone back to the divine principle of changing government.  You change government by changing the hearts and the character of the people and that can only be done through spiritual revival.  With our heads bowed.