Clough Proverbs Lesson 39

Violation of Divine institution #1: Laziness – Proverbs 6:6-11

Two questions were handed in last week on Proverbs 6:1-5 and I’d like to answer these before we continue any further in Proverbs 6. You remember that Proverbs 6 deals with the pitfalls of life and the focus is on the first divine institution, with everything that fits under that divine institution. All of life can be divided into various spheres of influence. The first one is the first divine institution, which has primarily to do with individual responsibility before God, and includes matters of labor and money; economics is an area that does not fall under the fourth divine institution; it falls under the first divine institution, contrary to almost all modern economic theories. The second divine institution deals with sex, marriage, the best woman, the best man, and the best man here is not somebody that trots down the aisle in a wedding service; he does but not the one you think he is. The third divine institution are the parents, the children and the concept of authority. Authority, again, is a concept or an area of life that is derived out of the third divine institution. Education is something in the third divine institution, not the fourth, according to the Scripture. Then the fourth divine institution has to do with justice, law and punishment.

Now it’s very interesting how fouled up 20^th century man is in this area; it’s amazing because what he has done is he’s taken economics from the first divine institution and plugged it into the fourth; he has taken education which properly belongs to the third and put it in the fourth. And then he has taken out all concept of capital punishment out of the fourth and dissolved it. So you can see that today we live in an era when the divine institutions are under severe forms of distortion and only people with Bible doctrine can have a framework of understanding what goes into what category. Now I didn’t invent these categories; these categories are a taught in the Word. And if we are to follow God’s Word we are therefore to exert all pressure we can as citizens of the national entity to see that these categories are put into being in normal practice. The fifth divine institution is actually split off from the fourth and it has to do with the history, the tribal diversity of the nations, the division of the human race into compartments; the history of these tribal diversities, the problems of diplomacy, war and peace.

And then finally we have a sixth institution that began at the Pentecost, the institution of the local church, which is another society within a society and that has various functions and jobs to do but the theme of Proverbs 6 has to do with the first divine institution. And the idea is that a believer is called by God to have a certain area of life for his calling, such as Adam; Adam was called to take care of the Garden of Eden and each believer, each male believer, is called into some sphere of activity, some area of activity for the will of for his life. Now the father’s job under the third divine institution is to education his son; either do it himself or pay someone else to do it or see that it’s done. It doesn’t mean the parents have to do all the educating, but it does mean that the parent’s job under the third divine institution is to see to it that it is done, not the state; the state’s job is not to see that people are educated, it is the parent’s job to see that people are educated.

And so the father in Proverbs 6 is warning his son about pitfalls to this call. In other words, how to blow it, areas that are frequently encountered in a person’s life that cause a believer to fall out of the primary will of God. In other words, visualize it like this: God has a plan A, He has a plan B, He has a plan C and so on, and plan A is the best possible plan for your life. That’s the plan of maximum blessing, maximum happiness, maximum production for your life and every time you blow it in a bad way you have to skip down one step on the ladder and you can still have blessing but it is a blessing that will be significantly less that the plan above it. So what the father is teaching his son in Proverbs 6 is how to keep in plan A and there are certain common areas that believers foul up, and these areas are areas that occur in many, many different lives. In other words, it’s very safe to say that in any average group of believers probably 50% or 60% of them have blown it in these areas, so that this is common and these are common elementary things to watch for.

And in Proverbs 6:1-5 the warning was you’re in danger of destroying your calling by coming under bondage to unbelievers. And we saw how this could be through economics, through becoming responsible for another person, to some organization that is controlled by unbelievers and the idea of Proverbs 6 applied to the Christian life is to minimize… minimize your obligations to various organizations and people who are obviously or can be easily controlled by Satan. And every time you become in bondage to these people you are essentially jeopardizing the freedom of movement that you have. Christians with materialism lust always have to have something now and pay later, jeopardizing their economic life. Now this is not against all loans but it is saying that it is wise or it is chokmah to minimize these kinds of obligations. And some of you might do an inventory of your life; who are you obligated to. Have you got a lot of obligations; can you fill these obligations and so forth. And that is a measure of how free you are to do God’s will today. How you pinned God down, so to speak, in your life by obligating yourself to somebody else, or some thing or some organization, and in so doing have jeopardized very seriously your calling.

Now we had two questions that were asked on these five verses; the first question says: In your lesson in Proverbs 6:1-5 you emphasized that a Christian should avoid or minimize his obligations to unbelievers. Does this pertain to a two or four year (?) obligation? We have some very clever people in this congregation, but this applies… it’s a very good question for reasons probably the person didn’t even realize when they asked it; it’s a very good question because it gives me a chance to point out that you are obligated under the divine institution and that is not covered in Proverbs 6. Proverbs 6 is talking about becoming in bondage to people and organizations controlled by unbelievers but organizations that are functioning along these lines do not count. You have an obligation to the fourth divine institution, period. You owe it to the fourth divine institution. What we should have instead of voluntary military in this country is universal military training and we should have had it for years.

And if we had had… take everybody that graduates from high school, they’re not ready for college anyway, and have them trained in the army for two or three years, and when they get out then they go to college; we’d have a far more stable college element because people in college who have gone through the service generally make much better students because they’ve gotten rid of all the foolishness and the goof-off tendencies and so on, and they’ve learned something very valuable for their college experience and that is divine institutions. And some people are tremendous in their I.Q. and they’re miserable college students and the reason is because they have lost one quality, discipline. They can’t use their brains and they’ve never found out how to use them and they’re not finding out now. And so because they lack discipline they’re doing very poorly as students and thinking they’re stupid; they’re not stupid. People who are admitted to college today aren’t stupid; people who are admitted to college and can pass the entrance exams and so on are not stupid. They’re undisciplined and that reason makes them lousy students but your good students are generally people that are very, very brilliant and don’t have to be disciplined or they are people who are moderately intelligent and have learned a very simple secret, a secret of discipline: do your work, whether you like it or whether you don but you do it.

Now that’s discipline and that’s a quality you learn in the service and this is why we should, for one reason, have universal military training. And also if we had universal military training we’d get rid of a lot of the nonsense against the military that exists in academic circles. Don’t worry about the military; the military doesn’t start wars, for your information. No major war has ever been started by the military. Major wars have been started by stupid civilians. Military people do not start wars because military people are the ones who are going to get shot at first; they have, shall we say, self-preservation at stake. No military man in his right mind is going to start a war. The people that start wars are ridiculous and idiotic politicians, usually associated with the United Nations, because the United Nations wants to bring peace on unbiblical grounds and they’re always fighting the very structure of how God has ordained how politics work. God has structured politics with certain inherent lines and if those lines are followed there will be peace. But those lines are not being followed and they’re not and it’s just sheer stupidity but it’s not the military’s fault; it’s the civilian’s fault. And in many cases it’s the media that’s at fault; people who work with the TV stations and the press at the high levels of the nation, these are the people that have started a lot of this stuff.

Well, that is the fourth divine institution and people are obligated to that you would be obligated to be faithful to marriage. You are obligated, whether you like the person you got stuck with or not, you are obligated under the second divine institution, and don’t worry about whether you’re compatible or not, I’ve got news, no one has been compatible since the fall. So don’t use that excuse to go out and get a divorce; you can make that marriage work, God’s grace is sufficient. A person can even be married to the worst person in the world but God’s grace is sufficient. So we have the second divine institution and you’re obligated to it.

Under the third obligation you’re obligated to respect the authority of your parents. You may not like your parents but you’re obligated to respect their authority; and you may have foolish parents but while you’re living under their roof and they’re paying your bread you’re obligated to respect their authority, and even after you’re out from under their roof you’re obligated to respect their authority by virtue of their office; you may disagree with them on biblical grounds, yes, but you still have an obligation to respect their authority and if you don’t respect the authority of your parents you’re in trouble the rest of your life because you’re not going to respect the authority of anybody. The people who get in trouble with the police inevitably are boys and girls who have never had discipline in the home. And they are people who have never learned discipline and they are people who now have to learn discipline the hard way. In my counseling I work daily with people who have fallen from the Christian life, and I can just pass on to you something, that the people who have the most trouble in the Christian life are people who inevitably never learn discipline in the home. The habit pattern of avoiding discipline, avoiding responsibility carries over with avoiding responsibility when it comes to what the Lord wants you to do and then you wonder why you’re always out of fellowship, always carnal, always under discipline. It’s simple, because you didn’t learn the lesson that you should have learned years ago in the home.

So these divine institutions are very, very serious, and you can’t violate the structure of any of them without reaping very horrible consequences. Every time you break one of these functions you reap sorrow, misery and suffering—every time! It’s a law of cause and effect. God has made you this way, He’s made me this way, He’s made the universe this is way. This is the way it’s built to run and if we violate these lines of demarcation we are in trouble. We have another frequent violation in the area of the local church; we have tremendous emphasis today on extra local church organizations. We have seminaries that are graduating people who are afraid to be pastor-teachers and so therefore they gravitate to the more flamboyant ministries and yet today the major need is pastor-teachers in the local church. You can have all the support efforts that you can imagine and fall flat on our face as far as Christianity goes in this generation because growth… and I know some of you are going to disagree with me but I’m still going to say it, you cannot grow in the Christian life outside of the local church. That is the way God has ordained things to work, and I don’t care how many years experience you have outside the local church, but if you’re not active in a local church wherever you may live, whatever your situation is, you’re never going to grow spiritually. You will be a perpetual spiritual moron and people who violate the local church’s position are people again who have never learned the principle of authority. They are rebelling against authority, they’re rebelling against the pastor, they’re rebelling against the board, and they can’t stand to be under authority, and so therefore they don’t’ like the local church. Well it’s the same story and it’s no big problem, it’s just the same old thing, violation of authority. Now these are the spheres of authority and there’s no room for any more; there are no areas beside these; this is an exhausted list, it divides it all up. Now the last question obviously hinges with the fourth divine institution, and we have an obligation to that as an institution.

The second question is: are Christians discouraged from securing commercial loans from non-Christian and the answer is no, Christians are mere discouraged from becoming overly indebted to non-Christians in commercial loans, but there’s no argument in Scripture against commercial loans. The reason for this goes back to commercial loans in the Old Testament. Under the Old Testament you had two forms of loans like you do today; you have personal loans and commercial loans. Personal loans are made in the Old Testament on zero percent interest. The reason that this could be done was two-fold; first of all they had a non-inflating currency so that a dollar was worth a dollar 3 months from now, it was worth the same amount so you could have zero interest loans simply because you had a non-inflating currency. Inflation is a sin according to Isaiah 1 and government policies that sponsor inflation are anti-God; they are a violation of one of the Ten Commandments and Isaiah explains that in chapter 1. So they had a non-inflating economy theoretically; when they were being punished they did not but in times of blessing Israel had a non-inflating economy which permitted zero percent interest personal loans for emergencies.

A second reason for this was that the Jewish nation was to be a testimony to the world and they were to take care of their own needs. And even some of you have remarked to me on various occasions how you know this is still carried forth by the descendants of Abraham in various societies where Jewish people will put their friends in business; this is even commercial loans that are made this way, among their own group. They have a very close, tight knit thing that is biblically sound and has been carried over from Old Testament times. Well, this is the personal side of the loans.

Now how were commercial loans made in the Old Testament? One of the ways that commercial loans were made was by virtue of initial capital for business, and initial capital was given in the form of land. This is the subject of Leviticus; the book of Leviticus deals with capital investments, and when it goes through this it makes it very clear that God is the One that gave the capital investment in the form of land to the various families. So you have many, many different families, each are given a parcel of land; that is God’s capital investment. You say well, what can they do with land, they need cattle on the land, they need all sorts of things besides just land as a capital investment. The answer is that when God so worked the conquest in Joshua and in the book of Judges, so that when the Jews captured an area they captured the livestock in tact, with a few (?) exceptions like the city of the Amalekites and others, but generally they got their investment by conquest, ordained conquest. And another thing about their initial capital, they could not sell it off. The family could not sell of God’s initial capital investment; it was forbidden and if they had to sell it off in emergency to pay off indebtedness, at the year of the Jubilee they had the capital investment returned to them, at zero percent interest.

And so therefore the system of the Bible preserved the commercial funds and loan within the family structure so that, although later on we have the development of banking circles, originally in the Old Testament the banking was done within the large families. Now granted this would not work in a highly industrial society and there has to be adjustments, but the principles are there, nevertheless. The banking, even on a commercial basis was kept within the family as much as possible to avoid hindrance of the calling, so that you would not have other people controlling how you spend your money. Whatever you buy you are indebted to whomever you borrow from and obviously this involves an abridgment of your freedom. You don’t get something for nothing. And so the first five verses of Proverbs 6 deals with banking and being free from bondage.

Now beginning in Proverbs 6:6 we got to a second pitfall in life and this pitfall has to do with a violation of the creation ordinance to produce, or labor. We’re still under the first divine institution. Under the first divine institution we have responsibility and we have labor, and so now we’re dealing with labor, whereas before we dealt more with money, the result of labor.

Proverbs 6:6-11, “Go to the ant, sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise, [7] Which, having no guide, overseer, or ruler, [8] Provides her food in the summer, gathers her food in the harvest. [9] How long will you sleep, O sluggard? When will thou arise out of thy sleep? [10] Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep, [11] So shall thy poverty come as one that travails, and thy want like an armed man.”

This is a major passage that has to do with the biblical doctrine of labor. And here we have, otherwise known as pitfall number 2 as laziness. So let’s, as we did with the first five verses, study them in the original historical context first, then after studying them in the original historic context we’ll do what we did last week and hop over to the New Testament to show you the spiritual carry over. Throughout the assumption of our method is this: the analogy of truth principle. The analogy of truth principle says that God had designed the physical creation as a mirror of the higher spiritual functions of the universe so that there will never be a spiritual truth that does not have an analog in the realm of physical reality, so that every spiritual principle can be taught by way of analogy or parable with something in the physical world. This was Christ’s own method of teaching; the “parable” means one than confessed, para is the Greek preposition, along side or next to, and so the parable was that which took the spiritual truth, put it alongside the physical reality and Christ used over and over and over again in His teaching physical illustrations of spiritual truth. So as we read Proverbs, remember, you’re not just learning a detail of life, which is fine in itself, but you are also learning a tremendous truth about the physical world which will then be used to explain (?) today the spiritual realm.

So first let’s look at the physical world, consider verses 6-11 at their face value, we’ll not engage in any application but simply seek to understand the meaning of this passage and the emphasis of its author. Now all labor, to get back to the doctrine of labor, we have to go back to creation. The chief model of all labor is creation; the creation work of God. We were discussing this in the men’s breakfast and in the past we pointed this out, the Bible has a doctrine of labor, a doctrine that has very much passed off from the horizon today and very infrequently is it taught. But the biblical doctrine of labor is very important. In fact, the biblical doctrine of labor is so important that you can’t work for the Lord without knowing it. And people who have vital Christian lives will inevitably be good laborers and people who are sloppy on the job and could care less will inevitably have tubed out doubt spiritual lives, the two go together. People who have trouble doing work under pressure, people who have trouble doing work at all are people who have trouble living the Christian life because in this sense the Christian is also to produce. Now it doesn’t follow, necessarily in every case that a person who is a good laborer is also a good believe; he may be hepped up on salvation by works or something but generally this equation holds.

The first thing about the doctrine of labor is that it is patterned after creation. God has created and when God created He labored because Genesis 2:3 says God ceased from His labor. So the first form of labor in the world and in the universe was the creation of the universe by God Himself. God was the original laborer and God created work as the model of all future work. When God created in Genesis 1 and 2 He had certain parts to His labor. He said, “Let us,” so He had a plan to His labor. He just didn’t labor randomly or by chance. He wasn’t like modern artist who comes to the screen and blows paint at it and says that’s an interesting impression. He always labored according to plan; there was rationality involved in His labor. So He says, “Let us,” in other words, let us do what we have planned.

Then God did it and that was the doing part. After God did something it says in Genesis God saw what He had made, and the word “saw” means He knew His product. He knew His product, He studied His product, He studied the fruit of His labor. He was a student, an avid student of what He was producing, always evaluating whether what He was producing was what He wanted to produce according to His plan. In other words, this is the evaluation of labor. And then the fourth area of Genesis 1 and 2 is not only did God plan, not only did God do, not only did God know, but God enjoyed His labor because on the seventh day He rested. And the resting is enjoying the fruit of His labor. So these are the four things in the original form of labor. All subsequent labor is modeled after that. And when we talk about the biblical doctrine of labor we are talking about all four elements; the laborer has the right to enjoy the fruits of his work as a wages or his just wage. The laborer should know his product and shouldn’t just approach it, well, we’ll just get this done today and how many coffee breaks do we have before four o’clock and so forth. That’s not a biblical mentality. The biblical mentality is that he plans what he’s going to do, he does it, he checks it, and he enjoys it. That’s the first thing about the biblical doctrine of labor.

The second point about the biblical doctrine of labor is that labor comes before the fall, not after the fall. Labor is pre-fall. Most people think of it as post-fall; too bad Adam fell, now we have to work hard. Well, Adam was working hard before the fall, it was nothing sinful. People are confused about two things: labor and sex, particularly Christians, and they think sex is post-fall. No, Adam and Eve had sex before the fall, we don’t know when the fall occurred, they probably had sex many times before the fall. Sex is a pre-fall institution. It has been polluted by the fall, it has been nearly destroyed by the fall but sex itself is pre-fall, made for man’s enjoyment and man’s reproduction.

All right, labor, the same thing; labor has been terribly distorted by the fall, labor is terribly frustrated by the fall but the labor itself is pre-fall. There have been these sinful effects of the fall added to it by way of frustration; you will never have a job that totally satisfies you this side of the fall, apart from certain very special areas where the Lord Jesus Christ blesses you very abundantly but apart from that all labor is frustrating. So when you say oh, I’ve obeyed God and the frustration… all right, what did God predict was a result of labor in the fall. In Genesis 3 what did God do with Adam? What did He say was going to happen? As Adam began to work in the field it was going to produce exactly what he thought it was going to produce. Is that what He said? No, it says that he was going to have weeds; he was going to have frustration and everything else. So obviously there’s going to be a tremendous frustration. That’s the second thing about the fall, about labor.

A third point about the doctrine of labor is that man is judged according to his labor. The fruits of his labor is what is judged. Revelation doesn’t say God is going to judge your mental attitude; Revelation says man is going to be judged by what he has produced. Now obviously mental attitude is that which is behind the production but let me show you the importance of this. Let’s conceive of God before He created. Did God have a mental attitude before He created? He most certainly did. But the mental attitude hadn’t produced anything; the mental attitude didn’t come outside of God until God labored to build a universe, then the mental attitude had fruit.

So by the biblical doctrine of labor it’s the labor that’s judged, it’s the creation that shows God for what He is because there we can see what was on His mind. If God had never created then we could never tell what God had on His mind. God’s plans would have been unfruitful until He produced something outside of Himself, the creation. Analogy with the believer: you can have all sorts of spiritual mental attitudes but what are you producing, what’s your historical record? That is what is going to be judged and evaluated. It’s not salvation or sanctification by works; this is simply saying that you are judged by what you produced and this goes in all areas of the Christian life or the non-Christian, both are evaluated in some way just as God saw what He had made and evaluated and commit a self-judgment in that case. The only thing that you can’t produce outside of yourself is salvation. Here is the one area where you have nothing that you can produce outside of yourself. Jesus Christ has produced it on the cross, so that one act of labor that you cannot produce is the cross of Christ. That is the only labor that you can’t produce and whenever you think you can be saved by works you’re trying to build another creation other than the one God has designed.

So these are, then, the points in the biblical doctrine of labor. Now to understand the analogy with the ant in verse 6 we have to understand, by the nature of the difference between man and the animal. Let’s take the three parts of creation: plants, animals and man, and look at their difference, and review what we saw at the beginning of the Proverbs series. Plants face a stimulus; after this stimulus directly respond to the stimulus. Animals face a stimulus and they respond but they respond by instinctive behavior patterns and some have learned behavior patterns, but instinctive behavior patterns play the major determining role. So here the animal responds to the stimulus, the plant responds to the situation. Now man, how do men respond? Men respond with a learned behavior pattern and understanding. Now the understanding is linked to the conscience and there’s where the absolutes are.

So in understanding the analogy between man and an ant we have to go back to this. Let’s take the ant. The ant has been selected from the created world as a model of labor and this is a valid model of labor because the ant faces a situation, no food, the ant has to survive; the ant does this by instinct. Man faces a situation, he has to labor to survive but more importantly, he has to labor to produce before God and so here’s his situation and here’s his response, but the difference between the ant is the ant responds by an instinctive behavior pattern, man responds by a learned behavior pattern plus understanding.

Now let’s go to the passage and watch how this difference is used by the author. Proverbs 6:6, this is the father talking to his son. And many fathers have had times when they’ve addressed their sons as this, but usually it’s a lazy ass or something that’s a little more clear than “sluggard,” but that’s what “sluggard” means. And it’s a word that the father was talking about his son at this point. The son was a clod and was just sitting around watching TV or something, and wasn’t doing anything productive. And so he said why don’t you just go outside, you see that ant hill, son, in the backyard. I want you to report to me, I’m going to give you a zoological assignment, and for the next two hours I want you to observe those ants. Here’s some bread, you put it out there and watch what the ants do with it. And so he sent his lazy son out in the backyard to look at the ants, and he said, “Go to the ant, sluggard; consider her ways, and become wise,” the Hebrew verb doesn’t mean be wise, it means get wise, get some chokmah by looking at how the ants work; the ant is going to be the model of labor, just like other animals are models.

The sheep are models of believers because they’re so stupid, one of the stupidest animals that God ever made was the sheep. And God has selected the sheep as the perfect ideal picture of believers. It’s amazing and very humiliating, the more I have learned about sheep from various people who have worked with them the more I say boy, God knew what He was talking about when He made sheep the model of believers; it’s amazing how dumb believers can be, just like sheep. Don’t know where the water is, have to be led around, have to be picked up out of various things, wander off, don’t see places to go and so forth, one sheep does something the rest of them follow, and one believer does something, falls apart, the rest of them fall apart just like the sheep. So the sheep are an analogy that God built into the creation. Now it’s humorous but the point is that God had this on His mind when He designed the sheep. Just think of that, what it must have been like in the drawing room when God says you know, I wonder what kind of animals I’m going to make. Well, let’s make the ant because that’s an animal that will illustrate to man labor, and then let’s make the wooly, and he’s a stupid thing and that’s going to be a picture of believers, and that’ll teach believers about themselves, and then the goat who is a lot smarter than the sheep, we’ll pick them out for models of unbelievers. So this is the different analogies that are worked out in the created world.

So going to the ant, I want you to see verse 6 has important, not just because the guy’s going out looking at any animal; there is a divine design with the ant. There’s lots of room, by the way, for spiritually perceptive zoology students, there’s a whole field of research here that you could do, where you could study the various animals that are used as illustrations in Scripture and make a detailed analysis of their entire living patterns of behavior. And show how each of these patterns of behavior are analogous to the spiritual realm; it would be fascinating study and there’s nobody that has ever done that, it’d be all pioneer work for you. So if you have interest in this area you’ve got a wide open area of some really good exciting material that would help believers understand the Word of God.

So we have the ant, “consider her ways, and become wise.” Obviously you have to learn something by watching the ant. “Who, having no guide, no overseer, or no ruler, [8] Provides her food,” now those three words that are used are very critical and here you have an attack, actually, on welfarism. It’s very clever, it’s a tongue in mouth type attack but you have to catch it by looking at these words. The word for “guide,” qitzn is the best way of putting it; the qitzn was a decider and would correspond to the judicial branch of government. The person is involved in making judicial decisions so here we have government brought into the picture. And the particular part of the government that is brought into the picture is the judicial branch, the court system, who has no officers of the court deciding what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. The ant has no judicial officers over him.

The second word is shoter, a shoter was one who was a scribe or recorder, and would correspond to the legislative branch of government, the law writing, the ones who make the records. And so we have a second function of government and that is the legislative function. So the ant has no judicial government, no legislative government. The third one, the “ruler” is moshel, think or marshal or the ruler, and this would correspond to the executive branch of government. And so what is being said here is that the ant functions in labor without the fourth divine institution. Now there is a number of reasons implied in this.

First, the ant is minus a conscience; the ant has a spirit, animal spirit but a human spirit and therefore lacks conscience. Since the ant lacks conscience it lacks an absolute and because it lacks an absolute it lacks volition before God. The ant is not going to be judged before God. So the man differs from the ant in that he has volition. Now what usually happen in any society is that volition goes negative and under a society with intense negative volition gradually the sphere of the fourth divine institution takes over larger and larger areas so that whereas we had responsibility as a part of freedom, as a part of the first divine institution, this responsibility is taken over into the fourth divine institution. Education, which is the parent’s responsibility, goes because the parents don’t fulfill their biblical function and education is brought over into the fourth divine institution. Authority goes in the home so authority has to be brought over in the fourth divine institution. Now pretty soon we’ll get sex and marriage in the fourth divine institution somehow, just give them long enough to think out how to do that one and that’ll be in the fourth divine institution. [Tape turns]

So the fourth divine institution is a monster and ever since the fall it has gobbled up pieces of the other divine institutions; we call this a heresy of statism or welfarism, in which the government takes over more and more functions of life. Notice in the chart that gives the fourth and fifth divine institutions are colored blue; this means that they came after the fall and they’re not inherently part of mankind. Therefore Proverbs 6 is saying that the ant, who basically has not fallen in one sense because the ant hasn’t rebelled against God because it has no conscience to rebel against God, the ant has no fourth divine institution to make it do anything; the ant is functioning according to the inherent design of creation. And so the argument that is given here, by way of implication, is that in these verses, verses 6, 7 and 8, the truth is stated that labor is not something that one does for society. Labor is something one does because one is created in God’s image. There’s a tremendous argument for the dignity of work, that work is because I am made in the image of God, not because society compels me. Now usually what happens when people are lazy, they like to blame somebody else for it: society knocked me out of this job or society does this, or society does that. Baloney. You’re the one that’s doing it, nobody around here that if they looked hard enough, couldn’t find a job. Society isn’t doing anything, it’s just pure laziness. Regardless of your background, your education, your race or anything else, it has nothing to do with it. It has to do with whether you’re willing to work and that’s the issue of the Word of God.

“Go to the ant, sluggard, consider her ways.” Verse 6 is the command; verses 7-8 the motivation for the command. So verse 7 the motivation is the ant doesn’t live under the fourth divine institution but the ant keeps on doing the way she does because she’s operating on the instinctive behavior pattern. Now man needs to learn behavior patterns, so here’s labor, labor comes by instinct to the ant. How does labor come to man? Labor has to be learned and guess where labor is first learned? In the home. This is the role of simple chores that should be given to children in the home to teach them that every day there is something that has to be done, whether it’s raining, snowing, sleeting, or something else, it has to be done. And that is where the child first learns that behavior pattern.

Now remember when I started off the Proverbs series we said something; we asked the question, why is it that man, of all the (quote) “animals,” is the only one that has no instincts, basically. All other animals know when to drink water, men do not. Man is the only animal who will over drink water when he’s thirsty. Man is the only animal that won’t drink water when he is thirsty. Man is a very strange animal because he lacks all those built-in instincts. We are left, almost, by God instinct-less. Now there’s a theological reason for this. Why? Because God wants man to conquer the creation and conquer the universe. Who’s the lord of creation? Man is the lord of creation. What is Adam called? Adam; what is the earth called? Adamah. And what is man’s body made of? The earth, and therefore man is to conquer his body first and his environment afterwards. And so he patterns his body with learned behavior patterns; this is part of the conquest by the human spirit of the human body; this is strengthening the human spirit. So parents, when you give your children chores and you give them jobs to do and you insist on it, take a few simple ones and make sure they are done consistently, rather than a lot of ones done inconsistently, but take a few simple responsibilities, you are training your children biblically; you are training them because they do not have instincts to work, they are not automatically going to work, you are the ones who have to train them how to work and labor. And so therefore, whereas the ant has instinct, man must learn.

And she, in Proverbs 6:8, verse 7 is the basis for the work, verse 8 is the method of the work; “She provides her meet in summer, and gathers her food in the harvest.” These are parallel and synonymous; the idea is that labor scripturally is to be done consistently. It’s not to be done in spurts. The ant labors consistently and when the harvest is in she’s finished. And here is the biblical model of labor, consistent labor done a little bit, constantly is much better than this kind of operation, up and down, up and down, up and down, rush, rush, rush, then nothing; rush, rush, rush, then nothing; rush, rush, rush, then something. Now some jobs this is the way it is by the nature of the job and that’s too bad. But in so far as this can be followed it should be biblically, a little bit each day, that’s the ant.

Now Proverbs 6:9 the second command. Verse 6 was the first commandment, verse 9 is the second commandment, and verses 10-11 justify verse 9 just as verses 7-8 justify verse 6. “How long will you sleep, sluggard? When will you arise out of your sleep?” That is the command. Obviously the father was talking to the son, and was giving him a lecture on ants and he looked down and the kid was asleep and obviously he wasn’t learning anything so he says it’s about time you woke up friend. So now verse 9 has to do with starting to work; verse 6 gave us how to, the basis for it, and verse 9 is getting started which is always the big problem with any kind of work, getting started. Once you get started it’s better but it’s like anything else, it’s hard to start. People have starter problems.

“How long will you sleep?” Will you rise out of your sleep? And verse 10 and 11 are an analysis of the problem of getting started by showing cause and effect; as always, as we found in chapter 5 with sex, the Bible majors on cause effect because our God is a rational God who made the universe rationally and there is such things as cause and effect. So, very simple, “a little sleep, a little slumber,” this is a sarcastic quote of the thoughts of the person sleeping, verse 9 is the person that’s doing the sleeping, verse 10 are what he’s thinking, “a little folding of the hands,” well, I’ll postpone it, it’s procrastination in other words, verse 10, I’ll just put it off till tomorrow and just have a little; notice he’s not saying I’m going to sleep a lot, I’m going to slumber a lot, it’s a little, that’s all, just a little bit for now. We’ll just put it off, put it off, put it off, put it off, put it off. And then verse 11, “So shall thy poverty come” now the verb “come” is perfect tense in the Hebrew, it’s ba, that isn’t the sheep going ba, but that is the Hebrew word for come, ba, and in some ways it’s pronounced bo but either way you pronounce it, this verb is used to denote coming, and in the perfect tense it means it has come, it has come already. And so the idea, while the sleeper, or the lazy person is getting started and procrastinating, procrastinating, procrastinating, verse 10, verse 11 says listen, while you’re procrastinating your poverty has already arrived. The idea is one who procrastinates until it’s too late. That’s the point.

And, “thy poverty has come as one that travails,” now later studies in the languages have clarified these two words; these are very difficult words. The word “travail” literally means to walk around and it means therefore a vagabond. It was used in Assyria for this. The next word is even tougher; it’s the word that looks like this, magen, and it was used of a shield, but that doesn’t make any sense because if you make this a man of a shield it sounds like an armed man, but this is poetry and there should be a parallelism here. So what parallelism is there between a beggar and an armed man? And this was always the mystery, and you can see the King James translators translated it “an armed man.” I don’t know what the later translations have done but a study of the language called Ugaritic has at last cracked the problem. Ugaritic was a language, like Hebrew, written in a cuneiform script and in Ugaritic we find this word, magen, and it’s a verb that means to beg. So therefore verse 11 means, “Thy poverty has come, as one who walks around,” or “a vagabond, and they want as a beggar man,” a man of begging. And the picture is that the cause and effect, because under the first divine institution I must reap the results of my own work.

The principle is stated again in Galatians 6. Paul picks on the same analogy out of the agricultural realm but the same kind of thing. And this introduces us to the spiritual application. Galatians 6:7-8, “Be not deceived, God is not mocked,” now this is addressed to believers and Paul’s argument is whether you’re a child of God or not doesn’t make any difference—why doesn’t it make any difference? It goes back to the divine institution. Now look, when God redeems somebody, when God works in your life as a believer He doesn’t destroy his own institutions that were there before you believed. Before you believed you had volition, right? You couldn’t have believed if you didn’t have volition. Before you believed you were either male or female; now after you believe you’re still male or female. Sometimes you wonder but nevertheless, the process of redemption doesn’t neuterize people; the same with the third divine institution, before you believed if you were a parent, after you believed are you a parent? Yes. All right, none of these divine institutions are ever destroyed by the Holy Spirit through regeneration and restoration. None of them. So these divine institutions are always preserved and that goes for the first one. The doctrine of labor applies after salvation as it does before salvation.

Therefore, God in Galatians 6:7 says, “Be not deceived,” in other words, don’t you think that because you are a believer you are immune from the first divine institution. No-no! “Be not deceived, God is not mocked, whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.” This is the agricultural analogy of the law of production, it’s the farmer sowing the seed and reaping his crop. But it’s applied to the spiritual life because verse 8, “He that sows to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.”

So the model of labor applies to believer and unbeliever, and no person can say well, I believed in Christ so that immunizes me against the effects of the first divine institution. Oh no it doesn’t, it doesn’t immunize you against the effects of the first divine institution any more than it immunizes you against the effects of the second divine institution or the third divine institution or the fourth divine institution; they all operate, believer and unbeliever alike.

Now to show a direct application of Proverbs 6 to the Christian life turn to Ephesians 5, just before the famous filling of the Holy Spirit passage, and this is a great opportunity now, since it’s fresh in our minds, the doctrine of labor, to clarify sanctification. The Christian life is divided into three parts. Phase 1 which is the time you believe, which theologically we’ll call the period of justification. How long is the period of justification? One/one thousandth of a second, that’s how long phase 1 lasts for you. The moment you believe in Jesus Christ God the Father does all sorts of things for you and you are permanently placed with Christ. None of this stupid business of losing your salvation. People who think they can lose their salvation are people who think they can commit a sin bigger than the grace of God.

The second phase lasts from the time you become a Christian till the time you die or the rapture, Phase 2 which we will call by its theological name, sanctification. And Phase 3 is from the time you die and goes for all eternity to infinity and that we’ll call glorification. Those are the three nouns that are used to describe these three phases. Now we’re talking about sanctification or the period between the time you accept Christ till the time you die, the time of spiritual growth. And Ephesians deals with this method of spiritual growth, except because of the analogy of truth principle operating in reverse believers are not clear today.

Here’s what I mean by the analogy of truth principle operating in reverse. If a person has been raised in a family where they are negative on responsibility, the boy has watched his father get out of responsibility after responsibility after responsibility after responsibility, he has watched his father cheat on income taxes, he’s watched his father do all sorts of things to avoid responsibility, he’s watched his father scoot our from responsibility on his job; he’s watched his father scoot out from responsibility in various areas of life and so he has learned to pattern his life after his father’s bad habits. So he has –R learned behavior patterns. Now what has happened? That child goes along inside the family and he never learns responsibility. So he has no idea what the word means; in other words, he has no understanding of the first divine institution in every day normal operating activities. He has no understanding whatever.

Now, he gets to be about 17 and he goes to some place and somebody witnesses to him about Christ. And they make the issue clear, that this person must receive Christ. And this sounds great because he’s been receiving everything else in his life, and his life has been one series of big fat handouts from one or the other parent or both parents, and he’s had a pretty soft ride. So he hears this business about oh, all you have to do to become a Christian is to receive Christ, and he likes that. And by God’s grace he’s born again. But, then all of a sudden comes the big shock; God, his heavenly Father doesn’t seem to operate like his earthly father did, and all of a sudden God, the heavenly Father, seems to be holding him to responsibility. And this is a tremendous shock, good night, before I became a Christian everything was going great, after I become a Christian everything is going rotten. I’ve never been so miserable in all my life since I accepted Christ, what is this business. I’m supposed to have the peace, I don’t have any peace, I’m all upset all the time, I have a guilty conscience, I’m neurotic, I’m this, I’m that, I’m falling apart, I can’t enjoy anything any more, I’m miserable since I became a Christian.

That’s right, because what has happened? The analogy of truth principle has operated in reverse. Because he first had no understanding of the first divine institution he has no understanding how God is working in the process of sanctification. You see, childhood experiences how they carry over like this? He has failed to learn basic lessons of life and so he’s failed to learn what sanctification is. Now, such a person comes into a passage like Ephesians 5 and they say be filled with the Spirit, oh, this is going to be another free ride, I like this. And then all of a sudden he doesn’t read the fine print that occurs before Ephesians 5:18 and he misses the point.

So in order that we not miss the point, let’s start with Ephesians 5:14 and then we’ll work to verse 18, the passage on the filling of the Holy Spirit. “Wherefore, he says,” and you see the analogy with Proverbs 6, “Awake you that sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.” Now look, in the verbs in verse 14 what is the believer to do? He is to wake up for one thing. Now what is Christ going to do? Give him light. To do what, brush his teeth? No, when he wakes up he’s waking up to do something and he can’t do something if he’s in the dark. But who has to initiate the process? The believer, he has to wake up, he has to start moving. And when he moves the Lord gives him the light so he can see what he’s doing, or see how to do what he is supposed to do. But Jesus Christ will supply the light but Jesus Christ will not supply the stimulant to get up. The stimulant to get up is your volition. Christ will provide the light but you provide the initiative; that is your act, that’s because Jesus Christ treats you as a creature made in God’s image and Jesus Christ could reach down, grab you by the collar, say “GET UP!,” but He doesn’t. He says get up and the choice is up to you whether you want to sleep through the next alarm or not.

Now what is the principle? The principle is that the first divine institution is always respected by Christ; even in sanctification He is not going to do your choice and your choosing for you. He will provide the light, He will provide the means, He will provide everything you need but one thing; He will not provide the decision itself, that is yours.

Now let’s go on, Ephesians 5:15, “See, then,” or it says “look carefully, the, how you walk, not as fools but as wise,” and in verse 15, “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil,” meaning that you have a job to do. Suppose you have 100 units of work to do and you have 100 hours to do it in. That would be analogous to the work that God has for you to do in your Christian life and here’s your life span; here’s the work that God has called you to do as an ambassador for Him; He’s given you 100 units of work and He’s given you a lifetime to do it in, but time you have no control over, this factor. This factor is going on, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and you can’t stop time. So this factor you can’t alter; the only factor you can alter is the top one, work.

Now, look at this ratio, work over time. We won’t go into the physics of this thing but work over time, is a ration that gets bigger and bigger and bigger the more you procrastinate, the more power you need, if you slack off in time, time gets smaller and smaller and smaller, so now you have 100 units of work and you’ve goofed off 50 hours so what happens. Look what’s happened now, you’ve got two here, before you had one. And so that gets bigger and bigger and bigger until finally the believer can no longer handle it and he is lost as far as his production is concerned. He has ruined the opportunity to produce what he has and the more he goofs off the less enjoyment he has in the Christian life because the more he puts it off until, say he has 100 units of work, 25 hours left to do it in, that’s 4, so now he actually has to work 4 times as hard as he could have originally. You see, that’s the glories of plan A for the Christian life. God has designed a wonderful plan for your life. Plan is working one unit of power; plan B you have to work twice as hard; plan C you have to work four times as difficult, it gets more and more difficult the longer and longer you wait. It’s as simple as that; it’s simple math. I don’t know whether they teach math any more in school but they used to and this is called fractions and the technical name is these are improper fractions and you divide the denominator into the numerator and you get a number and that number gives you a symbol of power.

Now let’s apply this, Ephesians 5:17, “Wherefore, be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is. Obviously in order to work you have to understand. See, some of the process of working means to sit down and learn the Word of God, and this cannot be done outside the local church. This must be done within the local church, within the authority of the local church. And verse 18, “And be not drunk with wine, in which is excess, but be filled with the Spirit.” The filling of the Holy Spirit does not provide you with the initiative. So many people wait around till I get this urge from the Lord; what kind of urge do you want from the Lord? What is this urge you’re waiting for? There isn’t any urge, the Holy Spirit doesn’t operate that way, the Holy Spirit operates through your mind, through your emotions, through everything else that is you as you act as a responsible creature.

Now one further point about a special problem in sanctification. Where I see as a counselor this, and I want to pass this on for every person that I meet in counseling I know about 10 or 15 others have the same problem so let’s get one thing straight about the problem of correcting –R learned behavior patterns. Suppose you have goofed off for some time; suppose now in your soul you have a tremendous pattern of these things; just suppose this. How in the process of sanctification do you start breaking these up and transforming them into new +R learned behavior patterns. Here’s the process: what is a learned behavior pattern? Basically it’s something that the unconscious mind is doing for you. Illustration: when you learned to drive a car, do you remember the first time you sat down there, good night, you’ve got the steering wheel here, you’ve got the brakes down there and you have to look at all the cars outside too, do this all at the same time, you’re crazy. And you remember the feeling of panic coming over you as first you learned to steer and then you added on the brakes and the accelerator and then you had to keep an eye on the cars and you had all these things to do and you can remember how confused you were.

Okay, today when you walk out there what do you do? You’re talking to somebody else, you don’t even think about it, you just automatically do it. Now what has happened? You’ve got a learned behavior pattern which has moved from your conscious mind down here and your unconscious mind takes over and just handles it because you’ve trained your unconscious mind to do it that way. Now that’s the trick, here’s your situation in life, here’s your response to it. You have trained your unconscious mind to react a certain way. This is why many of you react certain ways emotionally, because you have taught yourself to do that. You have taught yourself to react very emotionally to certain things; it is a learned behavior pattern. And so you meet this situation in life and you have said at one time in your conscious mind I’m going to do this; I’m going to feel sorry for myself, I’ll show them, I’ll sit here with a pout on my face for three hours. And everybody will feel sorry for me, boo-hoo. And this goes on and you’re rewarded for this because you had two parents that said oh, poor Johnnie, feeling sorry for himself and they catered to your stupidity instead of saying you’re just feeling for yourself and we’re not feeling sorry for you. There’s a nice way to do this some time when your kids do this, set a big mirror in front of them so they can watch themselves. Okay, so anyway the parents didn’t do this so what happened is that you learned to respond with self-pity and every time somebody says something that you don’t like you go like this, and it’s become automatic, you don’t even know you’re doing it. Now other people do that watch you but you don’t, it’s become automatic like driving a car. Now how did you get that way to start with? You got that way because you trained yourself to be that way.

All right, same principle, how do you get godliness and learned behavior patterns? Same way; here’s the situation in life, here’s the response that you launched, you know from the Word what that response should be so what happens? You’ve got this tremendous learned behavior pattern. Your unconscious mind has done something, it has been trained to react. Now what do you have to do? What you have to do is use your conscious mind the way you did originally and say no, I consciously, on the basis of Romans 6, that unconscious behavior pattern got there because I consciously trained myself to do it that way and if I consciously trained myself to do it that way then by God’s grace I can consciously untrain myself to do it another way. Now it’s hard and once these patterns become embedded we have the problem of the flesh, so that once a –R learned behavior pattern takes shape, theoretically you can never get rid of it. Theoretically these kinds of habits can never be eliminated, were it not for the light that Christ gives. Remember verse 14, “Wake up, thou that sleepest,” and I’ll give you the light but you’ve got to do the waking up. So here you are, you know you’re going to encounter a similar situation that always before led to self-pity. What do you do? You get thoroughly in your conscious mind the Word, and you go over the Word and over the Word and over the Word and over the Word, over and over and over again, till you know the way you’re supposed to respond. And then you say Lord, this is what You want me to respond like; I am going to be conformed to the image of Christ and I trust You to provide the energy to fog out these patterns so now I can start training. And after you do this, sure you fall apart a couple of times but you begin to do this, now your conscious mind retrains your unconscious mind and actually after a while the sweat’s over.

This is awful hard in counseling because the first part is the Word; when you go to crack these habits you think you’re falling apart literally, it’s a horrible struggle you have to go through but it isn’t always going to be that way; it’s just like learning a car, after a while it’s going to be unconscious and you’ll have a +R learned behavior pattern there that you won’t even have to think about any more and you can move on and that’s the process of sanctification. You move on, take another area and build up this +R learned behavior pattern, something that honors the Word and you’ll be unconscious of it, you’ll automatically respond, just like that, on the basis of the Word and you’ll be a testimony without even thinking about it.

Now what has this got to do with work? Simple; the initiative must come from you under the first divine institution; the Holy Spirit does not give the urge to change habits. The Holy Spirit will guide you as to when the best time is, but the urge is to come out of your own soul under the first divine institution and when you move in the direction God wants you to move, He’ll provide the light.

With our heads bowed….