Ecclesiastes Lesson 30

HVP Advice on Politics and Business – 10:15-11:6

The book of Ecclesiastes is a book of human viewpoint and by now you should be well attuned to human viewpoint and its weakness; you should understand that human viewpoint will necessarily lead you in a certain direction; man is what he thinks. And how you think determines how you live. You can’t get away from this, this is the way God built you and this is the way you have to live and there’s no getting around it; how a person decides in his heart is how he lives. And you have at any given moment two choices open to you; divine viewpoint versus human viewpoint. Divine viewpoint is based on revelation from the Word of God plus experience, plus logic. Human viewpoint has only experience and logic, and it’s incomplete without revelation, it doesn’t have [can’t understand word] or an omniscience and it will always leave you in a state of uncertainty with very little answers.

So therefore we have these two results. In one, the divine viewpoint, you have access to information human viewpoint does not have access to. With human viewpoint you have uncertainty; with human viewpoint you have pessimism; with human viewpoint you have misery; with human viewpoint you can never be happy in life; with human viewpoint you can hypnotize yourself and think you are happy but in the real sense of the word you are always miserable. There’s not a possible way under the sun that you can be happy with human viewpoint; it’s absolutely impossible. And the reason why you see so many Christians running around and operating on two out of six cylinders is because they are heavily infiltrated with human viewpoint.

This is an area in which fundamentalism in our day has never taken notice. We have avoided looking for where the enemy is and therefore the enemy has struck us again and again and again, and yet still, the average Christian does not know where he’s getting hit from. There’s no possible way you can deal with the problem until you have a bearing on where it’s coming from. This is the problem with fundamentalism is our day; we have no bearing, we are getting hit, clobbered, shell, shell, shell after shell coming in, and we haven’t got any closer idea where it’s coming from than they had sixty years ago. And the reason is a failure to understand divine viewpoint and human viewpoint and a failure to understand that you as a believer at all times are surrounded by culture. By “culture” I mean traditions of your family, traditions of your nation, traditions of your state, traditions produced through the media, we have all this thing, RV, radio, etc. These are all ways in which you are being exposed 24 hours a day to human viewpoint. And why it is necessary if you are to live the Christian life the way God designed it that you must take in divine viewpoint to counteract this infiltration that’s occurring. This is why we have weak Christians. The average Christian does not spend enough time in the Word of God.

In the last year and a half that I’ve been at Lubbock Bible Church I’ve had people tell me don’t feed these people so much, you’ll get them overfed, don’t concentrate so much on knowledge, it’s heart knowledge, not head knowledge that you need. Now there’s no such thing as head knowledge and heart knowledge in the Word of God, the word “heart” means mind, there’s no difference in the Biblical vocabulary between heart and head, no possible way you can separate the two. Therefore there is one kind of knowledge and it is the knowledge of divine viewpoint. You can’t get enough of the Word of God; it would be absolutely impossible for you to get too much of the Word of God, so next time you hear someone cautioning you saying now brother, you just have to relax a little bit and get balance, you’ve got too much head knowledge and not enough heart knowledge. Now of course, this is malarkey; it’s impossible to get enough head knowledge; you can’t get enough head knowledge if you spent 26 hours a day studying the Word of God, it would be absolutely impossible.

The Word of God has been given for us to absorb. Now the Word of God is necessary to absorb; you can’t live or take one step in the Christian life without knowing doctrine. This is why, if you turn to the New Testament you will find heavy doctrinal discussions in these epistles, terrifically heavy discussions, big words like predestination, election, etc. and guess what? They were not given to college graduates. What we have in our day is a campaign to exalt human viewpoint among Christians. The campaign takes many forms; deeper life speakers who go around to these various conventions who are advocating feeling, who are advocating “heart” knowledge over head knowledge, creating an artificial distinction that cannot be found any place I the Word of God. We have people doing the same thing in Christian schools; Christian schools are turning out all sorts of products but people who are not capable because they don’t have the original languages to study the Word and to pass it on to other people. We have people that deride the great Puritans; we have an anti-Puritan campaign on. We have people who despise the great men of the faith like Martin Luther and John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, etc. All these men, they say, weren’t familiar with the deep things, etc. It’s a campaign to malign and criticize those men who were the great men of the faith who really moved out because they had divine viewpoint.

So you are surrounded and embedded in a culture that is slanted totally against you absorbing Bible doctrine. Therefore to counter balance the culture you have to be over-weighted on the other side. You have to decide that there’s nothing going to come between you and Bible doctrine; that this is going to be the number one thing in your life as a Christian and you’re going to concentrate on taking Bible doctrine in over the years so that you can develop in the mentality of your soul what we call divine viewpoint framework—God in the center, around God and revealing Him, His glory, is His Word. This is why in the Old Testament when they had the temple, Solomon made temple, remember in 1 Kings he said, God, let Your glory abide in this temple; then the next [can’t understand words] he’s talking about let your Name abide in the temple, because in the Old Testament there was no difference from Bible doctrine or the Word of God and the glory of God. See, glory is a manifestation of God; when God reveals Himself He glorifies Himself, He makes Himself known. And so Bible doctrine is the way in which God makes Himself known. Since God makes Himself known through Bible doctrine, this means that the Bible doctrine or the Word of God is the glorification of God.

And then around here, in an area which many Christians have overlooked again and again and again and again in our time is the fact that you have science, history, philosophy, art, music, literature, the things of culture, which many fundamentalists have written off, well Satan’s taken them over and we have to retreat. I’ll tell you something, if Christians don’t get involved in these areas we will be talking to ourselves in 50 years. If we don’t have some young Christians that are going to break out of this thought habit that they’ve gotten from the older fundamentalist then we’ll just sit around and study our Bibles and pray without applying the Word in science, history, philosophy, art, music, literature; if we don’t have our young people move out into these fields and conquer them ideologically for Christ, you can just forget about evangelizing the next generation. Conquering these areas, all of these areas, and letting Bible doctrine flow out into them is an investment that one generation of Christians makes for the next generation. You may not realize dividends on the investment now in time; it’s a long range investment.

And this is why fundamentalists have been traditionally short-sighted, they’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars on sending missionaries all over to the hotten-tots and everywhere else, not even training those missionaries properly, thrusting them out and depriving the areas where this must occur, such as the Christian Research Institute for the various schools, the graduate areas where these studies must be done, and they have completely overlooked these, “well that’s not a mission field.” Oh yes it is; it is the basis for the mission field in the next generation. If in the next generation there is not an improvement in what we face in our generation evangelism will not occur. Evangelism cannot occur when the unbeliever has his mind totally controlled by satanic ideas. Christians have to realize that every area of life is a battleground where either Satan or Christ prevails; it’s one or the other, but both cannot. And yet as we look out in science, history, philosophy, art, music, literature, who is it that is prevailing today? It is Satan; Satan is prevailing in the area of music; Satan prevails in the lyrics of songs; Satan prevails in the musical structure of songs; Satan prevails in the art forms of the time, this modern art business is a bunch of junk. Modern art is simply a portrayal of the confusion of modern man and it is a natural outflow of this.

If you appreciate things of science, such as evolution, you are looking at a satanic produce. If you appreciate some of the historians who write textbooks for high schools today in which the early patriots of our country, George Washington and others, are maligned and criticized and laughed at, if you read history books where the Constitution of the United States is derided and communism is exalted, where the World Council of Churches is exalted, you are looking at a product of satanic culture. So all around, wherever you go, you are surrounded with a satanic culture. We sang a hymn by Martin Luther, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, and if you study the words carefully to that hymn, you will see that Martin Luther captured this vision of moving out, starting a front, a military front out of all these areas, conquering them, and bringing the Word of God to bear upon them.

You see, the non-Christian around us can tolerate us as long as we leave them alone. But the moment you begin to move out and begin to challenge, for example you begin to see the school system for breach of civil rights when they teach evolution in the name of science, when this happens you will find yourself becoming attacked. And this is precisely what we need, we need a conflict, we need a confrontation where we go out and make the issue, and bring these issues of the Word of God up on the standards in our society. When this happens, and the Word of God is lived out intellectually as well as all other areas, is lived out in these areas, then the non-Christian is going to say, well, those people take the Word of God seriously. They really mean what they say when they say this is the Word of God. They really mean it, and you have a testimony produced. But if Christians are weak-kneed, spineless people who are always retreating and apologizing and tripping over themselves because they might offend somebody, etc. these people will never receive the respect of the unbeliever, and they put on a very poor testimony. So we need an advance and all these other areas, the personal areas, the social areas are included in this.

Now what Solomon has done in his day is what a lot of Christians have done and that is that Solomon has begun a retreat. It all starts with carnality. Carnality begins when we get out of the bottom circle. At the moment of salvation Jesus Christ puts us into union with Himself or rather the Holy Spirit does; that’s called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is not an experience, never was an experience, never can be an experience. The baptism of the Holy Spirit by 1 Cor. 12:13 is something that occurs at the moment of salvation and you may or may not have an experience but the experience is a result of it, not the cause of it. The baptism of the Holy Spirit occurs at the point of salvation in which you are identified, the word “baptize” means to identify as anyone who knows the Greek will tell you. Baptism means to identify and you are identified from the point of salvation with Jesus Christ.

Now we have a bottom circle; the bottom circle is the area of our experience. At any given time you walk in this bottom circle, which we will define as the will of God for you. You are in the will of God or out of the will of God. Some people have confused on this point as to how you can be in the will of God and out of the will of God. Certainly, they say, that you can’t be totally in the will of God, can’t you be partly out of the will of God? And certainly this can’t be an absolute, it can’t be black and white, there has to be degrees of conformity to the will of God. Now because there’s some confusion I want to take a few minutes to explain this so you can understand Solomon’s carnality.

There are two phases to spirituality; there is an absolute phase and there is a relative phase and you must distinguish between those two areas of spirituality. The absolute phase is at any given point in time, now watch it, absolute spirituality, at any given point in time you are in the will of God for you at that moment or out of the will of God for that moment. So there’s your absolute; at any given instant of time, you narrow it down to an instant of time, you are either in the will of God for that moment or out of the will of God; you’re either doing, thinking or acting what God wants you to do or you are not; this is either /or. This is why in the New Testament you have such commands as Gal. 5:16-17, that the lust of the flesh is against the lust of the spirit and the two are the contrary, one to the other.

In other words, there is no middle ground at this point. At any given instant of time you are thinking divine viewpoint or you’re thinking human viewpoint. At any given instant of time you’re acting out divine viewpoint, living in the Word as we say from the Old Testament, or you’re living in the culture, the apostate culture that surrounds you. At any given time this is true for you. Now, relative, at this point you look at the whole life and you say if I look at my life from the time that I become a Christian, the time of my new birth to the time of my death there is a growth. And this growth curve may look like this, may have some ups and downs, but that’s the relative dimension of the Christian life. Two dimensions, don’t confuse the two. There is an absolute dimension: at any given instant of time you are in the will of God for you at that moment or you are at some stage of growth.

We might illustrate this by health and age. Let age be relative; let health be an absolute. Now, you take a young baby; on the relative scale that baby is young; now can that baby be healthy or sick? So you have an absolute, either the baby, when he’s a baby, is healthy or he’s sick; it’s simple. All right, you can take an adolescent; the adolescent is up the scale on the area of growth, and he can be sick or he can be well, either/or. And you can take an adult; an adult can be sick or well. But how does a baby, an adolescent, and the adult differ? They differ by the relative degree of age. And so we have these two dimensions in the Christian life that you must understand to understand Solomon’s problem. Solomon had a tremendous growth rate early in his life. Solomon began to grow like a weed, experientially, but there’s no guarantee in the Christian life that the growth turn is always up. And when believers begin to engage in carnality this growth rate drops off. Those of you who have had some calculus can immediately think of a mathematical analog to this; you can think of the curve, the linear curve as your relative growth and the differential of the curve as spirituality, the absolute is the slope, whether it goes up or down.

So at any given moment in carnality your curve begins to drop; it begins to drop because now you are carnal, and with Solomon he entered a period of tremendously intense carnality and Solomon lost a lot of his insights that he had and this explains why the book of Ecclesiastes has this human viewpoint by the carload, tons of it in these passages, because Solomon actually retrograded in the Christian life. Solomon retrograded because of his persistent carnality. Solomon was outside of that bottom circle, the area of your experience. Solomon was out in the toulies somewhere with carnality, carnality, carnality, and he never got back in the bottom circle, with the result that he deteriorated spiritually and with the result that this book is his cause; now this is his justification.

Beginning in Ecclesiastes 10:15 we pick up where we left last time and we will come to the conclusion to this section of this book today. This is his report, his second report, human viewpoint proverbs. We began this in chapter 7 and we will draw it to a conclusion in the middle of chapter 11. Verse 15, “The labor of the foolish,” now remember, all of these are proverbs which assume something. Watch out, they assume something; they assume that you want to be a carnal Christian. They assume that you want to live outside the bottom circle. They assume that perhaps you are an unbeliever and that you could care two hoops for the Word of God, etc. So it’s always good to look at Ecclesiastes and see if you want to live carnality here’s how to do it wisely.

10:15, “The labor of the foolish wearies every one of them because he knows not how to go to the city.” Now this is a simple proverb, a one-verse proverb, and it simply stated would mean that human viewpoint which says the wisest thing to do in labor is to do a job efficiently, and it looks quite obvious, he says that the more idiotic you are the more energy you waste in your job and if you’re going to do your job you do it as efficiently as possible and if you’re having trouble with it the chances are you are not wise in this area, wisdom, again meaning skill. That last phrase in verse 15, “because he knows not how to go to the city,” you wonder what does that have to do with the job?

This is a proverb and the only thing I can think of in our culture that would correspond to verse 15 is the phrase we often use, “he’s so dumb he doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain.” This is the proverb here, this guy is so dumb he doesn’t even know how to get to a city. And of course in the ancient world this was saying quite a thing because you had these great cities throughout the land of Palestine and they didn’t have side roads, all they had were main highways to these cities. Of course they weren’t highways but they had great commerce between them. And that was set in a grid, but out here they didn’t have any roads. If a farmer wanted to get out to his field he had to cut across somebody else’s field, etc. And maybe you had little horse paths, etc. but you didn’t have any sort of farm to market roads, you just had these main roads. So where’s the easiest place to go. Where there’s a road; where’s the road going? To the city. So Solomon says this person is so dumb that he can’t even get to the city. In other word, it takes a little effort to find a field out here in the middle of the rocks, each field in Israel had markers on them by the Law of Moses, and you had to walk out into that field until you found your marker, or your family marker, and that marked off your land. And sometimes, you can imagine, the weeds and stuff grew up around the landmarks, etc. and it would take a little looking. But it didn’t take any looking to find a road. And he’s saying these people are so dumb they can’t even get to the city. And he says this is what this fool is, he says this fool wastes his time on the job, he can’t get his job done, he stays three times as long as everybody else does doing it, and wastes about twice as much energy, and the reason is because he’s an idiot; he’s so dumb he can’t find his way to a city.

In verse 16-17 we have a two verse proverb and this has to do with national life. This two verse proverb says this: in national life the wisest thing to do from the human viewpoint is have disciplined leaders. If you’re going to have a non-Christian society then at least have a disciplined non-Christian society. Now when we begin to study verses 16-17 you will see that we live in a terrible day; we live in a day when the unbeliever’s aren’t even smart. We live in a day when you can’t even have intelligent human viewpoint. It’s one thing to have human viewpoint but Solomon says we’re not even having intelligent human viewpoint, leave alone getting to the divine viewpoint. And so in verse 16-17 he gives a contrast.

First, verse 16, then verse 17. Verse 16, “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning! [17] Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness!” Now eating in the morning in verse 16 is a traditional sign of an alcoholic. A person who starts out in the morning having a nip or something after supper is one thing, but when they start hitting the bottle at 9:00 o’clock in the morning and they just can’t make it to breakfast without taking the cork out and going to it, when it gets down to that point the person has become an alcoholic. And this is the traditional sign of an undisciplined person, a person who can’t get along, a person who has to be jacked up through dope, drugs, alcohol or something, and he says when your leaders get to the point where they become so dependent on artificial jack-ups to exist, you are in trouble, O land. “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.” And the word “child” here is the Hebrew word for crybaby; it means the whiny people, the people who are always afraid, the people who are always belly-aching about something.

It’s interesting in this country, for years people on one side of the political spectrum have had their wide mouth put out all over the media and you let one person hit on the other side and now they want to silence him. Words didn’t bother them when they came from the left, why should they bother them when they come from the right; it shouldn’t make any difference. It’s strange to watch how this works. So here we have the king as a child, we have leaders in this country who are children, crybabies, always whining, always worried about what Russia or China is going to do, always worried about what somebody else is going to do, never, incidentally, worried about the American GI who’s giving his life, that doesn’t count. Always worried about what the European businessman thinks, not worried about the American businessman who’s paying the taxes. The American business man can go to the drags but you’d better not offend some European businessmen, watch out you don’t offend the businessmen in Latin American, in Japan, and watch out you don’t offend somebody else, but never mind the American, he just pays the taxes, you can kick him in the mouth. That’s the way we have had our leaders. And of course the funniest part about it isn’t the leaders; the funniest part about it is the dump public that elects them to office, that’s the funniest part. People continue to vote them back in office and we are in the class of verse 16, “Woe unto you, O land, when your king” or your leaders, when your Senators and your Congressmen are children, “and they eat in the morning.” They are eating, carousing, etc.

“Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is the son of nobles,” now here is a very important insight that is typical of this book and I haven’t brought it out before. This book is what you would call an upper class book; the man who wrote this, even the people who criticize us and say Solomon didn’t have it, have to admit that whoever wrote this book was a wealthy man and he was upper class all the way. This man recognized principles; he didn’t believe in a rabble-rousing democracy where all men are equal. He believed in a place where you had some people that are definitely superior to others in various activities. He believed that you had people in society of a noble class who had the ability to rule. And this is why, of course, John Calvin and the early Reformers did not like democracy, they saw what would happen; the day that you have democracy is the day that you have a rabble, and this is why many of the Reformers suggested an aristocracy and not a democracy because in a democracy you always have from the lowest common denominator, which is an idiot, and therefore we have to cater to the lowest common denominator. And we have to cater to all the idiots, the educational system is structured to the dumbest kid in the class and all the rest of it. This is necessary if you have a democracy.

And this is why the Reformers said democracy is not the best form of government, you have to have a rule where you have the noble class; you have an aristocracy, a group of people who know what they’re doing, who have some background, culturally, historically and otherwise, who have the ability to make decisions and have discipline. One of the features of a noble, and now this is not just a noble that’s been made a noble because of his name; this in this context means a person who has arrived at his station in society because of the discipline that he and his family had, and Solomon is saying if you’re going to have this thing, and consider society, apart from the Word, that you just consider in terms of wise things to do, he said have your disciplined class lead, don’t have the scum of the society vote, and don’t have them do this and don’t have them do that, have the people who have qualified leadership and let those people lead. These are the people, he says, that have the discipline. Why do they have the discipline? Because a person who has gained the station of noble in that society was a person who had inner personal discipline; he was not a person who had everything given to him on a silver platter. He was not a person whose parents bought him everything and babied him along so that now he’s a spoiled brat and now he’s representing a group of people from a certain state or a certain something else, a spoiled brat who never earned a penny in his life, who never had to work hard, etc.

The noble here, in verse 17, is a person who has had to work to gain his station and in the process of gaining his station in life he has discipline, and he has gained the character that’s tough, that’s resilient, that has discipline and when he faces a problem he’s not going to fall apart. The people in verse 16 are national leaders and left and right who face the problem and all of a sudden they’ve never faced problems before, everything is handed to them on a silver platter; they never got into a jam, their mommy and daddy would always come and help them out. And if they were in a jam mommy and daddy would come chew the police officer out, and say why did you arrest my little brat; and pay the fine and get them out, etc. Mommy and daddy would always help them out and now this child is in a position of leadership and what’s happened? Mommy and daddy aren’t there any more, and guess what? He’s wound up in a big mess and so what happens? He panics in verse 16, they sublimate and all the rest through alcohol, etc. This is the reaction of an undisciplined person, a person who can’t handle himself, etc. a person that hits the panic button every time they get involved in some activity of life that they can’t handle. So he’s saying if you’re going to have leaders, pick the men who are tough, the men who are called to the top through the hard path of work.

Now verse 18 is a simple exhortation in the area of job. “By much slothfulness the building decays, and through idleness of the hands the house leaks.” And of course the “dropping through,” that would also be a beautiful picture of the thing falling through, of course in Lubbock you don’t have basements in your buildings so you can’t very well drop through. But that’s not what it means; “dropping through” means leaking, it means the roof leaks. And so he’s simply saying that in wise human viewpoint you’d better get with it if you’re going to exist.

Verse 19, this is a very unique Solomonic proverb and verse 19 has to do with one of these ironic little statements that Solomon is fond of injecting into the text. He’ll go along and it’ll sound, oh, this is just like the book of Proverbs, surely this must be divine viewpoint. And time and time again he sets you up for this, he’ll go along and it sounds good and then there’s an offbeat, there’s a funny tone here, something comes into the whole thing that ruins it. And right here in verse 19 you have one of those classic points in the text that shows you that Solomon’s saying this to you always with tongue in cheek. This is really, in one sense, satire, he’s saying this all with tongue in cheek and he’s saying yes, this is smart, this is good, this is so on, and then in verse 19 he says, “A feast is made for laughter, and wine makes merry, but silver provides it all.” “Silver provides,” the word “answer” can mean in this context provide. And so what he’s saying here is that yeah, it’s fun to have all these feasts and the blasts, but just remember one thing, if you don’t have wealth, if you don’t have material possessions, you cannot enjoy life; that’s what Solomon is saying. You have to have some material possessions to enjoy life with. And he says in one sense these are the absolute necessities with which to enjoy life, material possessions.

Of course here we have an obvious case of human viewpoint because the New Testament says that you can have perfect peace and perfect enjoyment and go through life without anything: proof Jesus Christ, name one thing Christ owned, the clothes on his back. Jesus Christ had no home, Jesus Christ had no material possessions, Jesus Christ didn’t have an automobile. Jesus Christ had no personal possessions and yet He lived the greatest life that has ever been lived. Isn’t that fantastic. And by the way, He earned His money; He earned it in a carpenter shop. So don’t say He went around and mooched off of everybody. What He had, in one sense, He earned; He had some minimal possessions which He evidently used from his carpentry work. But in the sense of our standards He had nothing; He had nothing except the clothing on His back and what He had earned in carpentry.

So we have this situation where Solomon says, pleasure and happiness must be erected on material possessions, according to verse 19. He reminds you, it’s a little dig, and he says ha-ha unbeliever, ha-ha carnal Christian, your pleasure is always a function of your material possessions, you are never happy until you get something, until you have this, and then you get this and then you need something else. And Solomon says that’s a pattern of life for the unbeliever, he’s like a little kid, he can amuse himself, you get a little toy for a kid and about five minutes later he needs something else. So the object of that lesson is buy two toys; you need to buy diversity. And so he’s saying that people are that way when they’re carnal; he says they have to be entertained for a few minutes and you give them this little toy, this nice new Pontiac station wagon or something, and we have something else and then we have something else, and then we have a Buick or we have a Mustang, and we’ll play with that for a while and then when we get tired of that we’ll scrap it and try something else. And this is pleasure through material things.

Verse 20 is our conduct in society. Again this comes back to a theme that we see again and again in this book, conservatism in the political sphere is the wisest role if you’re operating in human viewpoint. In other words, if you start out with human viewpoint, he’s saying, negative on the change, don’t try to be a revolutionary. If you’re thinking in terms of human viewpoint. This is why our modern radical revolutionary, from Solomon’s point of view would be considered a “child” and an idiot, because… why, “Curse not the king, no, not in thy thought; and curse not the rich” or the ruling class, “in thy bedchamber; for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which has wings shall tell the matter.” In other words, verse 20 gives no indication that our attitude toward rulers is to be determined by God. Isn’t this interesting? Here you have some more human viewpoint.

What does the New Testament say? Do you realize what the New Testament says here? Romans 13 says you respect the government, not because of whose in the office; you respect the government because it is the fourth divine institution. You respect the government, Peter says in his epistle, for conscience sake before God. Now do you find those reasons in verse 20? No. In verse 20 Solomon’s concern is one thing only, other people. Behave this way because of other people. Now that’s logical if you operate in human viewpoint. If you are not concerned about God and these other things, then you will have to bow before the tyrant. This is what William Penn said, those who refuse to bow before God will bow before a tyrant. It’s one or the other, you bow before God or you bow before men; you have to do one or the other.

And so this is what Solomon does, he bows before men. He bows before the institution, he bows before the establishment. Why does he say this? Turn back to Ecclesiastes 8:2. In verses 2-8 Solomon gave us reasons. We’ve reviewed these several times but again verse 6, he says the reason why I counsel you, he says, to be conservative and not try to overthrow the system is that you don’t have an understanding of history. “Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, because the misery of man is great upon him. [7] For he knows not what shall be; for who can tell him when it shall be?” You have no idea that if you begin a revolution today that tomorrow your head won’t be on the guillotine, as it was in 1789 with those who would revolt with Robespierre and the French Revolution. It was those who revolted first whose heads wound up on the auction block. Do you see? And that’s the point that Solomon is making.

The revolutionary, on a human viewpoint basis, is an idiot because he has no control over his own actions. We live in a stream of uncertainty, a stream of chance, and therefore you never can know when the bullet is going to run wild and something’s going to go astray. I read to you Lenin’s supposed death bed statement when he said I’m sorry for what I did and he wasn’t really sorry for starting a revolution, he was sorry about the way it went, but when he started the machine going he couldn’t stop it. And no man can. And this is one thing you have to remember, the communists can’t even control history. Only one person controls history; that’s God. The communists could start a revolution today and it wouldn’t bother me at all in one sense because I know the communists do not control history, God controls history. And no group of people, nobody can have total control I history, never; that’s anti-Biblical. Solomon say no man knows not what shall be. In 10:4 he does the same thing, he says when you see these iniquities in the system, you see people that you can’t stand in high places, just kowtow to them, bow your knee to them and move on. And Solomon is saying in counsel, bow and scrape before the establishment, even as obnoxious as this may be, he says in the end, this gives you the maximum freedom to enjoy yourself than you would have otherwise.

All right, back to the end of chapter 10; he speaks of the fact that this behavior, this conservative behavior toward society, toward government, will result in a minimum of threat to your personally.

Now in chapter 11 he shifts, and in verses 1-2 he deals with business, and the next two proverbs have to do with the businessman. And he says if you are a businessman and want to operate on the human viewpoint system, then here is how best to operate; here is the most efficient way a businessman could operate on a human viewpoint system. And he says, “Cast thy bread upon the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days. [2] Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth.” Cast thy bread upon the waters refers to oceanic commerce. Remember Solomon was a man who had a great navy. Here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Nile Delta coming up here, the Red Sea this way and on the northeast side of the Dead Sea the Gulf of Aqaba. At this point Ezion-geber, Solomon had a great naval port, it was in Ezion-geber that Solomon built his mighty fleet. He actually had two fleets, he had one fleet that operated in the Mediterranean, probably through various treaties that he had worked up with the king of Tyre and Sidon and these other Phoenician cities along the coast, and he had one fleet that operated out here, and he had another fleet that was based in the Gulf of Aqaba and that fleet serviced all of Africa. Solomon evidently got his gold from South Africa. He went all the way down to the southern tip of Africa with his fleet. Apparently, from what we can discern in history Solomon also went as far east as India, so Solomon had a tremendous fleet that went all over the world and this is why Solomonic influence, particular this book, I think has had a basis in the development of various world religions and philosophical movements. Solomon’s fleet spread not only his goods but it spread his ideas.

And so “cast thy bread upon the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days” means take advantage of foreign markets. He says if the profit is good because of the foreign market, then take advantage of it. And so again we have this situation where our country isn’t even performing according to realistic human viewpoint, leave alone divine viewpoint, for in our country it’s the American businessman that’s cramped in; it’s the American businessman who can’t sell cotton because we might offend somebody in Egypt who’s busy killing people. So the same thing operates here and Solomon says that’s unwise; he says if you are a businessman in a national entity operating under human viewpoint, then this thing that you have open to you as a businessman, he says take advantage of every foreign market you can take advantage of.

The second piece of advice in verse 2 is diversified investments. This is not a plug for the mutual funds but it’s the same concept. “Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth.” “Give a portion to seven, and also to eight” is an X + 1 statement. What is an X + 1 statement? An X + 1 statement is something that is found in ancient near eastern literature; it means that when a person wanted to emphasize… say I wanted to say, why in Sunday School we had eight teachers. Well if I were to phrase this and we would articulate it by a change in the voice level, when you wrote it in the ancient near east there would be a literary device that I would use to draw attention to the number eight, and the device would be we have seven, yea, eight teachers. And I would come up to the number I wanted to emphasize, say it and then jump one, and this was a typical way of emphasis.

Tuesday night I brought this out in connection with the doctrine of the Trinity and saying that Jesus Christ said where two, even three are gathered together in My name, there I am in the midst of them. And I used that illustration to show that the minimum societal relationship is three, and this is why God is three, or why society is three actually, it’s patterned after the Trinity. In other words, the minimal social relationship one can have is three. And so this is why we have a Trinity, and by the way, if you deny the Trinity you deny a personal God. You cannot have a personal God who is not Triune, for this reason, there has to be three personalities to have a social unit. One person after the class I understand said well how does he know that the X +1 rule that’s over in the Old Testament is valid for the gospel, why those Psalms that he quoted were a thousand years before the gospel. Well, for your information before I get up in this pulpit and make a statement I study the issue; I have studied five years of Hebrew and when I make a statement like that it is valid, and we say X + 1 is valid for the Gospels as well as for the Psalms, it is valid for that, and I happened to have studied that out and if you want the reference, it’s Cyrus Gordon’s Ugaritic Literature plus several Bible dictionaries plus some of the Hebrew concordances plus some of the Hebrew dictionaries. I have them all in my office and if you’d like to check it out I’d be glad to teach you Hebrew. So that’s the X + 1 rule.

So we have a portion to seven and a portion to eight, and he is saying diversify, in other words, diversify your investments, and he says this is the smart thing to do.

Verses 3-6 are the conclusion of this section of Solomon and here we have a profound statement in verses 3-6 about man in the universe. In verses 3-6 Solomon makes a tremendous statement, but he does so in the context of a businessman. He does so in a very mundane way and if you look at it quickly you won’t catch it because it looks on the surface, in verses 3-6 that he’s just simply talking to the businessman of his day to get with it and stop watching the clouds. I personally resent that, I love the clouds. But Solomon says don’t get your eyes on these things because if you do you’ll never get anything done, and it looks like that’s all he’s saying. But let’s read it through carefully and see if that’s really all that Solomon is saying to you.

[3] “If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth; and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it shall be. [4] He that is observing,” that’s a participle, “he that is continually observing the wind shall not sow and he that continually regards the clouds shall not reap. [5] As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit [wind], nor how the bones grow in the womb of her who is with child, even so thou knowest not the works of God, who makes all.” And the conclusion in verse 6 is the behavior pattern he recommends. “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand; for thou knowest not whether they shall prosper,” what’s Solomon saying here. Look at it carefully. What was the main business in Israel at this time? It wasn’t selling automobiles—it was farming. It was an agricultural economy.

All right, given the agricultural economy what’s the concern of a farmer? His concern is climate and what Solomon says in verse 3-4, he says it’s useless to worry about the climate. It’s absolutely useless because you can’t change it. That’s what Solomon is saying; he says you can’t change the situation so stop worrying about it. “He that observes the wind,” verse 4, and “he that regards the clouds” is a crack at the farmers of Israel who would constantly look to the skies, who would constantly look for a break in the climatic regime so that they could plant and have a maximum growth of their crops, and it would be a matter of legitimate concern. So what would be the reaction; the people in Israel do two things, Solomon counsels the third thing. They were doing two and Solomon says number three.

Here is a farmer in Israel, and he has three options open to him when he deals with his business. The first one is to pray, to pray to Jehovah because Jehovah promised him in the covenant what? If you will bow down to Me and live in the Word I will take care of the climate, and you have a right, I am the Lord of the climate, and you have a right to pray to Me. So that’s one response the businessman of ancient Israel could have had in this situation.

The second response, he could have gone to Baal, for gods of the Baal, the Baalim or the god Baal and his harem, and so on were fertility gods. And he could go up and have a party with all the girls and so on, and worship Baal in the process, that’s kind of a nice religion for the licentious, and if you liked to rouse it up and carouse and so on, party it up, Baal worship was designed for you. You could have your party, you could worship god at the same time, and that was called Baal worship and that’s what went on in those high places. So we have Baal and the fertility cult; this is the second option, and most of the farmers of Israel would go to Jehovah or they’d go to Baal and Baal had a tremendous appeal because, I have a picture of what he looked like in the office as far as their conception of him was, he was the god who wove the rain clouds. On the top of a cumulus nimbus, the bottom cloud builds up like this, a flat top on it, they had pictures of Baal; Baal would ride these cumulus nimbus clouds and in his hand he’d have lightening, sort of like Zeus in the Greek pantheon, except he does not correspond to Zeus. But we have Baal as a fertility cult.

But Solomon says forget these two... forget these two, he says you’ve got the wrong picture of nature. It’s absolutely stupid to worry about changing nature, you can’t change nature and so therefore he says, verse 6, in the morning just go ahead, forget it, just forget it, just sow your seed, forget nature, you can’t change it, nature is a cosmic issue that grinds on and you’re just a little tadpole some place and you have absolutely no influence in the cosmic machine so forget the prayer, forget Baal, forget the whole thing, just go on. Just go on, because you can’t do anything about nature, no sense worrying about it, sow and if the seeds rot in the ground because there’s too much rain, or if the seeds don’t germinate because there’s not enough rain, that’s a tough row. That’s the way Solomon states it.

In other words, this is an absolute fatalism and we have seen this again and again I this book. Solomon is very modern, very modern. And he’s simply counseling, verse 6, just forget it because, and at the end of verse 5, and the end of verse 6 he gives you reasons. There’s a reason in the end of verse 5 and verse 6 that he’s saying this. “you know not the works of God, who makes all,” and the end of verse 6, “you know not whether it shall prosper,” in other words, you do not have insight into these things. You have no way of knowing this kind of truth. You’re cut off and the logical way of acting out human viewpoint is to be totally stoical with regard to your environment. Solomon says you can’t do a thing about your environment, and so logically the only thing you can do is be a stoic, forget it, forget your environment, you just move on.

So this concludes this section of Ecclesiastes and before we move we’d like to discuss this from the divine viewpoint, just to show you this is not all the Bible has to say. We have just developed if you want to live “under the sun,” but suppose you want to live above the sun. Then you turn over to Ephesians 6. We have turned to this passage several times but repetition is the way we learn. Here you have the New Testament out, here you have what it would mean if in the life of a businessman, and this is what it would mean in the life of an employee when he truly lives according to the divine viewpoint. Remember the divine viewpoint framework, God at the center, Bible doctrine outside, then you have around these all the activities of life, one of those activities is job, your job. And if you are a Christian and really be seriously concerned about the Lordship of Christ, then the Lordship of Christ should mean something on your job. So that if an observer were to walk in and see you on the job and be able to analyze the way you thought, would he see a difference in the way you approach your job and the way the man next to you, who is an unbeliever, approaches his job, or would there be no difference. Would there really be a difference or would it make any difference. If it doesn’t make any difference, and I was an unbeliever, do you know what I’d say? Why should I be bothered with the gospel; if it doesn’t make any difference in my job, after all, my job is one of my greatest frustrations, and if being a Christian doesn’t mean anything in the area of my job, and I don’t see a testimony on the part of the Christian man whose there, then why should I be interested in your Christ? Why should I, He doesn’t do anything for you. He’s not going to do anything for me where I hurt, and so why should it be any different.

And so in Ephesians 6 Paul does not limit the Bible just to our personal life, he applies it to our labor. So in verse 5 he counsels, “Servants,” and this we would make some adjustment, this is slave, some of you obviously think you’re slaves but never mind, you’re not classified as a slave in verse 5, “Servants,” and this was in that day and in that culture, “Servants be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; [6] Not with eye service, as men-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.”

Now we have to make a correction here because of the culture. The Bible must be interpreted in the time in which it was written, and in the time in which it was written the main labor problem was master/slave relationship. Let’s convert that and make it employer/employee. So here we have, you line it up and let’s see if we can get some principles out of this passage. If you look carefully in verse 5, when you see the word “servant” replace it with the word “employee.” Now, “employees, be obedient to them that are your employers, according to the flesh,” now that phrase, “according to the flesh,” is important. Why is it important? Because that’s a sign of certain limitation on your job. Too often an employer will consider himself the master of his employee over his whole sphere of life. And the Christian answer to that is no you’re not, you may be my employer but you’re only my employer in the area of the flesh, in the area of the physical flesh yes, but not in the area of my human spirit. And I do not have to be in bondage to my employer in the way I think; I do not have to be in bondage to my employer in the way of the spirit, this is where I have my freedom. And that’s where the New Testament locates freedom, in the mental attitude, in the divine viewpoint framework. My employer does not have to dictate to me how I think; that’s my property, and my employer can never take it from me. So this is crucial here in verse 5, when he says, “Servants,” or “Employees,” remember, your employers are those only in the sphere of the flesh, not in the sphere of the spirit, and they have nothing to and can have no rightful domain over your inner spiritual life. This is your own private affair and your employer cannot legitimately interfere.

And so here you might say is one of labor’s great rights, here stated in verse 5. That even in the day of slaves, the masters could not and did not have a divine right to coerce in the realm of spiritual truth; they did not have the right from God to coerce in any area involving the spirit. And here he would have the minimal rights of labor in this area in that day. “…according to the flesh, with fear,” the word “fear” is respect, “and trembling… as unto Christ,” … “as unto Christ!” Now isn’t that interesting; here you have a human employer who operates in the domain of the flesh and you obey him “as unto Christ.” Now this is the same exact construction as verse 22 of the previous chapter; chapter 5 is “wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord.” And it’s the same construction over here, verse 5, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your employers … as unto Christ.” “…as unto Christ!”

What does this mean? This means that Jesus Christ in the end is the ultimate employer; Jesus Christ is the ultimate employer and when there is a conflict between Christ and a conflict between the employer, then the employer must go. If I am an employee and my employer asks me to do something that violates my personal relationship with Christ, he is treading on ground that God does not give him. Every employer, I don’t care what the corporation is, it can be the largest corporation in the United States or in the world, if that corporation stands judged under Christ. Remember Christ is the judge of the business world, of the corporations as well as He is of the individuals. And no corporation has the right to violate my spiritual relationship with Jesus Christ. And here is where we have protection for the employee according to God’s Word. You obey them “as unto Christ.” And I have known Christian businessmen in this congregation who have had to give up jobs because they found they could not live the Christian life and still be employed in that kind of a job, either because of employers who did things on the job or because of the stress and the strains that that employer is putting on his employee, etc. They carefully prayed it over and they could see no way that they could follow both their employer and Jesus Christ. And they had to make the choice and they chose Jesus Christ and God has blessed them for it.

So we have the right of the employee here, “as unto Christ.” [6] “Not with eyeservice,” now verse 6 deals with the inner mental attitude of the employee. “Not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ,” now look at that carefully, remember I said we have to substitute words. In verse 6 you see a word, “servants,” replace that, “employees” and let’s reread it. “Not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as the employees of Christ,” “… as the employees of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” Now what does that do? Mentally what is this saying? Mentally this means that if you are a Christian and you willing to develop, and you dare to develop a divine viewpoint framework, God, Bible doctrine, and one of those things out here where Bible doctrine affects it is job; if you dare to let the Word of God flow out into your labor on your job, then this is a mental attitude you’ll have in verse 6. The mental attitude will be that I work and am employed by Jesus Christ in this job, and therefore I will, bind the limitations put on the employer by verse 5, bind those limitations, barring those limitations I will work for this employer as I would work if Jesus Christ were my employer. And so you might, some of you men might ask yourself, do you have the right attitude on the job. If Jesus Christ were your employer would you do things differently than you are doing them now. If Jesus Christ were your employer instead of the person who is your employer, would there be a difference? Or to you consider your job before God.

Now we have in verse 9 a balance, this is a balance for the employer. “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening; knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with Him.” And that last phrase, “respect of persons” means something. In other words, at the end, in the last analysis, the employer himself is an employee. In the last analysis, the employer who’s the head of the corporation, who’s the head of the business, finds himself when viewed from the divine viewpoint framework that he’s on the same level as his employees. It’s as though, you could imagine an assembly, one morning on the job, and all the employees of the plant were standing in line, and you have degradations and suppose you could imagine you had various platforms in this assembly, and you had all of the people, the normal employees standing on the floor, and then on the next level you had their section bosses, or the people over them, and then you had a pinnacle develop and you had the whole organizational structure of that business and they were all standing there one morning, and what verse 9 is saying, “there’s no respect of persons” means that if Jesus Christ would have walked in that room at that instant, when the whole pyramid was structured, it would come tumbling down and when Christ walked into the room both the employer and the employee would be standing on the same level; they’d all be standing on the floor, there would be no pyramid any more, and they’d all have to climb down and stand on the floor. The President of the corporation on down, he too would be standing next to (quote) “the lowest” employee when Christ walked into the room.

And that’s the balance the New Testament gives. We haven’t developed but a fraction of the Biblical doctrine of employer/employee relationship but I hope to show you that the Word of God means something and can often [can’t understand word] something. If you have the mental attitude of verse 6 it’ll do fantastic things because you won’t be frustrated about working for some grouch; you don’t work for him in the first place; you work for Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ can be trusted to give you the job; through divine guidance Jesus Christ can open up job opportunities and He can close them. Jesus Christ can shift jobs for you; Jesus Christ is your employer and you work for Him, or if you want to not adhere to this, then go back to Solomon and live in the morass of Solomon. With our heads bowed.