Clough Proverbs Lesson 50
DI #1: The Law of Final Effect
…the thematic
outline of Proverbs 10-22, this is a section of the book of Proverbs that must
be handled in some way other than the verse by verse approach and so we are
handling it by themes or dividing it up by various laws, that is, various
principles that operate in the creation.
And the man who has chokmah,
according to Scripture, is a man who recognizes and submits to God’s law
structures in creation. A fool is a
person who rejects the structure of creation, rebels against it, and tries to
live their life and wonder why they are having problems—because they have
violated the law structure inside the creation.
Last week we dealt
with the first categories of laws, having to do with the first divine
institution. All of these laws can be
categorized by divine institution, and we are currently with the first divine
institution. There are five divine
institutions in God’s Word, plus the sphere of grace, special grace or saving
grace which in this age is the Church.
In the Old Testament it was
So the sphere of
responsibility is important and it is that sphere which we are studying now in
the book of Proverbs. We had one general
category which we have called the general laws of responsibility. These general laws are laws which are
outlined in many, many verses of the book of Proverbs and to simplify your
understanding I have divided this up by law, so our first law is the temporal
effect law. And the temporal effect law
says that because God is righteous and just and sovereign, therefore the
details of life will reflect that character to some experience, to some
degree. The point is that God, while He
is sovereign and righteous and just is also a God of love and love is pouring
out grace so that the law of temporal effect in some places at some times is
restrained. This means that, for
example, a rejection of Bible doctrine some times will have its effect
postponed. Sometimes a believer who
neglects Bible doctrine will get away with it for a while, and this, of course,
is unfortunate in the long run sometimes because they think they can get away
without Bible doctrine and the effect is postponed by grace.
So the first law,
the law of temporal effect, is one that is postponed, or can be, by grace. Examples of this law we dealt with last week,
one of which was in Proverbs 11:8; it says, “The righteous one is delivered out
of trouble, and the wicked one goes freely into the place.” This is a law of temporal effect, it doesn’t
always operate, but it does operate generally speaking in the universe, in
history. So that the righteous one, who
is a believer in Jesus Christ is delivered habitually out of trouble, but the
wicked one comes into the place, and the wicked one means he is not brought. You notice the passive voice of the verb
deliver, “is delivered.” That is an
effect; the passive voice, the subject receives the action of the verb. The second verb in verse 8 is active, “come,”
and this means the subject willingly by choice goes into this situation. And this is a picture of the classic idiot in
Scripture; the person who is so dumb that they walk into trouble simply because
they have neglected Bible doctrine over an extended period of time and they
wouldn’t know trouble if it came up and shook their hand.
Proverbs
In Proverbs 11:31,
“The righteous shall be recompensed on earth; much more, the wicked and the
sinner,” “on earth” means temporal effect.
This is not talking about eternal judgment, this is talking about
temporal judgment and the principle is that if God requires His own children to
adhere to His standards much more will He ultimately require those who are not
His children to adhere to His standards.
Verse 31 has some very interesting applications because if you
understand what verse 31 is saying now you will not go into mental attitude
bitterness and resentment because you may personally be on negative volition
for a while and then you may experience some of God’s discipline. So here you are as a believer, and God is
disciplining you. And so you feel the
moral cause and effect; you know if you go on negative volition there’s going
to be trouble. You know that and you see
that and you experience that. So
therefore the tendency is for a believer in this kind of situation to get their
eyes on some unbeliever over here who seemingly can raise all kinds of hell and
get away with it. And so you become
jealous and you become bitter and you say well so and so can do this, so and so
can do that, and they get away with it.
Verse 31 is
tailored for you because this says that what you are experiencing is the normal
status of the way God works. This is the
way things normally work and will finally work out. You, in one sense are closer to God than that
person and therefore you are experiencing what He is really like, this person
is not. The only reason this person is
the way they are is because they are under a grace concept where God is working
with them or they may have passed beyond that and God is simply letting them
damn themselves. So a person who is not
experiencing the after effects of rebellion is not one to be jealous of. That person is the one to be pitied because
that person has not yet seen the light and that person is in for a rude
awakening. So here are two verses that
illustrate the law of temporal effect.
Today we go to
another law, the law of final effect.
This also is taught in the book of Proverbs and if you’ll think about it
for a moment it shouldn’t surprise you.
If God is a God who is sovereign, who is righteous, who is just, who is
love, who is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal, if God
is that kind of a God then the creation and all history must follow the
principles of righteousness and justice.
And so therefore while we can point to areas, locations, where we don’t
see it operating today, and there are areas that you can point to where you
will not see righteousness and justice operating. Just because you can point to these little
areas, we have the confidence that God’s righteousness and justice will ultimately
work out and the law of final effect is a statement of that; that God, because
He is righteous, just and sovereign will ultimately bring the final effect of
submission and rebellion on history.
Verses that teach
this, and I’ll give you a verse chain and then we’ll start today by taking some
verses in t his chain; we will not deal with all verses, we do not have
time. Verses that teach the law of final
effect in the book of Proverbs are: Proverbs 10:25, 30; in Proverbs 11 there’s
a whole series of verses: 11:4, 7, 18, 19, 21, 23, 27; Proverbs 12:3, 7, 12, 28; Proverbs 13:9; Proverbs 14:11; Proverbs
15:24. I’m giving you all of the verses
so those of you wanting to work in counseling will get these down and be able
to use them.
[Proverbs
Proverbs
Proverbs 11:4,
“Riches profit not in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.”
Proverbs 11:7,
“When a wicked man dies, his expectation shall perish; and the hope of unjust
men perishes.”
Proverbs
Proverbs 11:19,
“As righteousness tends to life, so he that pursues evil pursues it to his own
death.
Proverbs 11:21,
“Thou hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished; but the seed of
the righteous shall be delivered.”
Proverbs 11:23,
“The desire of the righteous is only good, but the expectation of the wicked is
wrath.”
Proverbs
Proverbs 12:3, “A
man shall not be established by wickedness; but the root of the righteous shall
not be moved.”
Proverbs 12:7,
“The wicked are overthrown, and are not, but the house of the righteous shall
stand.”
Proverbs 12:12,
“The wicked desires the net of evil men, but the root of the righteous yields
fruit.”
Proverbs
Proverbs 13:9,
“The light of the righteous rejoices, but the lamp of the wicked shall be put
out.”
Proverbs 14:11,
“The house of the wicked shall be overthrown, but the tabernacle of the upright
shall flourish.”
Proverbs 15:24,
“The way of life is above the wise, that he may depart from hell beneath.”]
The first verse
we’ll deal with is the first one in the chain, Proverbs 10:25. Here we have an exposition of the law of
final effect, that though temporarily God may postpone judgment it is not going
to be permanently postponed; God’s judgment is never bypassed. “As the whirlwind passes, so is the wicked no
more; but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.” The first word and they key word in Proverbs
10:25 is the word translated “whirlwind,” which comes from the word suph, it was used of a south hot wind in
the land of Palestine, it would be analogous to what we would call a squall
wind that is associated with thunder storms and these winds can be very, very
vicious. In fact, if you fly at all
you’ll notice here in the summer time, particularly in the spring, as the cold
fronts come through some days you’ll be looking to the north or the northwest
and you’ll notice a roll cloud, it’s a big long cloud, it’s usually very smooth
and has this kind of a form, of course there’ll be some thunderheads over it,
but if you look carefully at that thing that cloud is actually rolling, you
have to sit there five minutes to see it but that cloud is slowly turning over,
it’s just rolling, and it’s the friction, the turbulence between the cold air
that’s coming in back and the warm air that’s being pushed out of the way.
This is a squall
wind and the squall wind was known in Palestine, except the verb suph, this Hebrew word came to stand for
God’s final judgment. Turn to Isaiah
29:6, this is a judgment expressed against the city of Jerusalem and in verse 5
Isaiah starts to condemn the population of the city of Jerusalem for neglecting
the Word of God. Like many today they
had their religion, they had their gimmicks, they had all their programs, they
had all their social niceties, but they did not have concentration in Bible
doctrine. “Moreover, the multitude of
thy strangers shall be like small dust, and the multitude of the terrible ones
shall be like chaff that passes away; yea, it shall be in an instant
suddenly.” And that emphasizes the fact
that the judgment, when it comes, will be swift as well as certain. And throughout Scripture this is why the
unbelievers are known as chaff and are thrown away and receive the baptism of
fire.
Now some of you
who float with the charismatic movement and like to read all their subjectivist
literature will understand that the baptism of fire is something that the
believer gets, baptized with the Holy Ghost and fire and so on. But if you are going to be baptized with fire
you are not a Christian; baptism of fire in God’s Word refers to the Second Advent
of Jesus Christ, and it refers to a judgment, the final judgment. And so anyone who speaks of baptism of fire
as something to the believer does not know Bible doctrine. The baptism of fire as mentioned here in verse
5 is the chaff; “the chaff that passes away,” that is what happens during the
baptism of fire.
Isaiah 29:6, “You
shalt be visited by the LORD of hosts” that is armies and the word armies
includes both natural and human weapons.
When God’s armies do battle they consist of angels and men, and the
angel’s weapons are natural phenomenon as taught in the book of Revelation, so
“the LORD of hosts,” which is the Old Testament title of the Lord Jesus Christ,
it is His military title, it is the title He is known by throughout the
prophets, beginning with Samuel. “The
LORD of hosts,” that is Jesus Christ, “with thunder, and with earthquake, and
great noise, with storm and a suphah,”
a “tempest,” a blowing wind, “and the flame of devouring.” That is the baptism of fire and the people
who are identified with fire are the people who are identified with the final
judgment. So here we have the use of suphah, that teaches us the context
theologically. The context of suphah means the Second Advent of Jesus
Christ and final judgment.
To see where this
occurs again in Scripture, turn back to Proverbs 1:27. Here was the warning that chokmah gave the population in that
day. Chokmah is pictured here as the
woman, said in address to the people, verse 20, “Wisdom cries outside; she
utters her voice in the street, [21] She cries in the chief place of
concourse….” And verse 22, “How long,
idiots, will you love idiocy? And the
scorners delight in their scorning, and the fools hate knowledge? [23] Turn ye at my reproof….” And then in verse 24 she begins to engage in
a diatribe against believers who reject doctrine. This particular passage is not written
against the unbeliever; this passage is written against the believer, the
believer who professes to be interested in the Word of God but who obviously shows
by his attitude while the Word of God is being taught and shows by his attitude
in the area of application that he’s not interested. “Because I have called and you have refused;
I have … and no man regards, [25] You have set at nought all my counsel, and
would have none of my reproof, [26] I am going to laugh at your calamity; I
will mock when your fear comes.”
Now verse 27 is
the use of suphah. “When your fear comes as desolation, and your
destruction comes as a suphah, [whirlwind], then distress and anguish come upon
you. [28] Then shall they call upon me,
but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find
me.” And this is speaking of the
horrible dilemma of a believer in compound carnality. Here is a believer who has been on negative
volition for some time; because they have been out of fellowship for a
prolonged period of time, they have not used 1 John 1:9 at all, or if they have
they have used it to get back in fellowship only to get back out of fellowship
the next minute, so that they have been effectively in rebellion many, many
days, many, many weeks, so they’ve logged a lot of time in carnality. As a result of this the Holy Spirit’s
ministry has been cut off and the Holy Spirit causes a blackout of the soul so
that they no longer are being fed spiritually.
The reason God
does this is not to be cruel but to simply honor your choice. God honors choice. In the discussions I’ve had with many people
over the problem of suffering, the thing that continually comes up, why, if God
knew that man would choose wrong, why then did God automatically go ahead and
willing set up history, knowing well in advance that men would choose and damn
themselves. Why did God choose that kind
of a history? The answer is God chose
that kind of a history because God respects responsibility; He was not
interested in creating rocks and robots; He was interested in creating men with
genuine responsibility and choice and because God considers your choice so
valuable He is not going to interfere, including when we go on negative volition
and get out of fellowship for a long period of time. God honors that choice, just like God honors
your choice to receive Christ as Savior.
God doesn’t
interfere with it, God doesn’t tamper with it, and God is not going to
interfere with your decision to go on negative volition. So therefore the Holy Spirit simply backs off
and says all right, they’re not interested in learning about the Word, they’re
not interested in applying the Word, so fine, I’ll just back off and we won’t
have any more teaching. As a result of
this, then, the human soul fills up with human viewpoint; human viewpoint all
around us just seeps into the soul and then creates doubt, so the person now no
longer can use the faith technique. And
the sign of compound carnality is the fact that you can look back and see times
when you could believe and now you can’t.
And that’s one of the empirical signs to tell whether you are in
compound carnality, because you will be able to look back at times and events
and crisis and crisis in your life and at one time you could have believed in
the middle of that situation and now you face the same kind of pressure and you
panic, you get all unstable, you cannot believe. That’s a sign that you are in status compound
carnality. As a result of that we
progress furthermore to the hatred and then finally to frustration, which is
what we are seeing in King Saul in Sunday evening service.
All right,
Proverbs 1 refers to a believer who was receiving suphah, verse 27, and these were believers in Israel who had
progressed well along the line of compound carnality, and by this time had
turned off all Bible doctrine. It does
not mean they stopped religious services, they had a fine national council and
all the rest of it but they had no exegetical teaching of the Word. They probably even had prayer meetings and
tongues meetings and all the rest of this but they had neglected the Word of
God, which is the most important thing. As
a result of this chokmah is saying
you’re going to get yours because it’s going to come under the fifth degree of
discipline upon the nations and you are going to be physically
disciplined. So verse 27 here refers to
national catastrophe. This means economic
catastrophe; this means a collapse of the business of the world. This means a collapse of the economy of the
nation. This means a defeat of her
military forces. This means that in
every area the nation is going to fall under discipline because believers have
neglected the Word of God. They have had
other things that have taken priority over the Word, including many good things
but nevertheless things that have replaced the Word of God.
And then in verse
27 chokmah promises, as a sign of the whirlwind, as a sign of the physical
destruction, the believers are going to then become afraid; they are going to
become terrified, they are going to be scared at what God is doing in them,
they’re going to realize by the testimony of their conscience that God what God
is truly doing, but Proverbs 1:28 says, you are going to cry, to pray to me to
stop the discipline and I will not hear you.
The discipline will go on because a person who is in compound carnality
knows less of their soul than at any other time. A person in compound carnality will start
praying prayers like oh God, just remove a little of the pressure so that I can
survive and get back to you. Or, oh God,
modify my pressure in this way. Or, oh
God, do this, or oh God, let up over here, or let up over there, and they will
put forth these kinds of prayer petitions but the trouble with a person in
compound carnality is because of the blackout of the soul they cannot analyze
their true need and so their petitions are unwise, they are foolish, and God
does not honor this kind of a petition.
God knows what the need is for a believer in compound carnality and so
therefore He will not remove the discipline, He will not remove the pressure
until He sees the pressure is sufficient to change the soul of the
individual.
And this is why
the panicky prayers of believers under severe forms of discipline are not
answered. And oftentimes, this of
course, hardens the heart of the believer further. Well, God doesn’t answer my prayer, God
hasn’t removed this trial from my life, God hasn’t done this so therefore the
heck with Him. And of course that
doesn’t solve anything because your trouble just gets worse and worse and
worse. So this is a warning and the
whirlwind, suphah, is an illustration
of judgment.
Now let’s turn
back to Proverbs 10:25 and we’ll study further this principle, the law of final
effect, that ultimately righteousness and justice will be satisfied, even
within the family of God. “As the
whirlwind passes,” the Hebrew construction means while the whirlwind is in the
process of passing; in other words it hasn’t finished passing yet; it is still
in the process of passing. This is a
passage in which there is a process of judgment, and during that process of
judgment “the wicked is no more.” Now
that doesn’t mean the wicked disappears out of existence; it means that the
wicked no longer is functioning. He has
been rendered functionless in history.
The wicked one, and this is the Hebrew word, rashah, and this Hebrew word is another word for evil but this
Hebrew word, unlike the other one we studied last week which looked like this, ra‘ah, rashah emphasizes the chaos of
evil. This is the noun for evil that
emphasizes the result, the chaos, the confusion that results from evil. Everywhere you have evil you have confusion.
Satan’s kingdom is
in confusion. We know this because
Satan’s G-2 system didn’t quite make it at the cross of Christ. We know from 1 Corinthians 2 that Satan had a
bunch of angelic spies that reported to Him what Jesus Christ was doing, but
they missed something and as a result they gave Satan wrong advice; Satan tried
to kill Christ on the cross and as a result of trying to kill Christ on the
cross Satan was defeated legally. And we
read the defeat of his G-2 system in 1 Corinthians 2. So there is confusion in Satan’s kingdom, and
there will be confusion everywhere.
Everywhere you see confusion you know God is not the author of it. God is a God who works orderly, and where you
see Christians frothing at the mouth with their tongues flapping at both ends
and going into all these ecstatics you see confusion and God does not work in
confusion. When the Holy Spirit came on
Pentecost there was no confusion. When
God the Holy Spirit came in Acts 2 there was perfect order; there was an
articulate presentation of Bible doctrine; there were no ecstatics.
So in Proverbs 10
we have the whirlwind is in the process of passing and even before the
whirlwind ceases “the wicked is no more; but the righteous,” but before we get
to this let’s trace out the wicked and let’s trace out the whirlwind and what
it is. There are two whirlwinds for the
wicked. The wicked here can refer to a
believer who is in compound carnality, or it can refer to an unbeliever. So there are going to be whirlwinds we are
going to study; judgment upon the carnal Christian and to judgment upon the
unbeliever. Now in degrees we are all
carnal, in the sense that if you took ten year of our life we’d have a certain
amount of time logged in the filling of the Holy Spirit and then we’d have some
time logged in carnality, more time in the filling of the Holy Spirit, time in
carnality, time in the filling of the Holy Spirit, time in carnality, more time
in carnality, time in filling of the Holy Spirit. And all of our lives as believers would be
like this. Well, God is going to judge
those areas of carnality in our life and He is also going to judge other things
that we have accomplished.
To see that first suphah, or the first judgment upon the
carnal believer turn to 2 Corinthians 5:10.
This is the bema seat judgment, this is judgment and only believers
participate in this judgment. This is
not a judgment for loss of salvation; this is a judgment for evaluation for
eternity. God is not using us in our
final state. All of your life, starting
with the time you become a Christian, which we’ll call phase one, to the time
that you die, and that interval we’ll call phase two, and then we’ll call phase
three everything after you die. During
phase two, during this time, you are in training. That’s the whole purpose of phase two, a
training period and this is where it eliminates self-righteousness. During the training period we’re being
trained because we don’t know how to operate and so no one can say during the
training period that you have graduated.
There’s no room for self-righteousness if you don’t know what the
training is all about. If you understand
the concept of training you’ll know that because you are still in phase two you
are still being trained. God does not
remove you until He is done with you in training. And so the whole name of the game in phase
two is training, training, training, training.
This is why before
you go off dedicating your life to something and trotting off to do this and do
that you have to be prepared. We had a
graphic illustration of this when the Billy Graham film came to the city of
Lubbock. We have a city here of well
over a quarter of a million people; we have churches on practically every
corner in this city, and yet when there was a need for people trained to
counsel, why is it that there was one church that dominated the scene? Because that particular church had people who
were trained. And if you were worried
about God’s will for you let me give you a piece of advice on this. If you train yourself God is going to open
the doors, and if you’re not trained don’t you try to open doors because you’re
not ready for the open door yet. Just
tend to your knitting in your own backyard, train yourself, train yourself,
train yourself, train yourself, train yourself, and when you are ready God will
promote you, God will open the doors.
You don’t have to go out seeking; there will be plenty of opportunities
dropped in your lap but this business about getting believers moving for Christ
is a bunch of baloney. We have to get
believers trained for Christ and then the Holy Spirit will use them. That philosophy is backwards.
So we have the
training during phase two; now during that training there are going to be many
trials, many (?), many degrees, and so therefore the bema seat judgment here is
a judgment to evaluate our training. And
so therefore in 2 Corinthians 10:5 Paul says, “We must all,” that refers to
every believer, “we must all appear before the bema seat of Christ,” that is a
court and it refers to believers, every believer must appear before Jesus
Christ, “that every one may receive the things done in his body, according t
that which he has done, whether it be good or bad. [11] Knowing, therefore, the terror of the
Lord, we persuade men,” Paul’s motivation for teaching believers Bible doctrine
was his fear of the believer winding up at the end of phase two with bad
grades. It is the objective of every
pastor-teacher to put as good a training program for believers out as he can in
his situation. And this means minimum
gimmicks; it means maximum teaching of the Word.
So therefore, at
the end we all must face the first whirlwind, or the suphah, and if we are to stand in the day of the suphah, if we are to stand before the
bema seat of Jesus Christ, we must have divine good, we must have the result of
the filling of the Holy Spirit in our lives, or we are going to get bad grades
from this judgment, and it’s not going to be a very pleasant judgment because
notice the word in verse 11, “the terror of the Lord.” It is not that God is going to take away your
salvation but it is going to mean that every one of us is going to face eyeball
to eyeball the Lord Jesus Christ who has died for us and who is trying to train
us. And at that time believers by the
ton will try to come up with, well, Lord, I couldn’t do it because of this, or
we couldn’t do that because of something else.
And it’s going to
be interesting to see how Jesus Christ meets the arguments of believers. I had no time to get in the Word, my business
took all my time and I just couldn’t find time to get in the Word. Or, my schooling took all my time, I
constantly put off the Word until after I was through. Fine, ultimately your argument is not with
me, your argument is not with some other Christian leader, your argument is
with Christ and at the bema seat you can explain it for yourself, all by
yourself. And so why don’t you think
ahead of the kind of excuses that you can present before the bema seat and see
if you can work on it and you’ll have maybe 10, 15, 20, maybe even 30 or 40
years to try, and in 30 years you might be able to think of some real good
excuses. And in about two seconds before
the bema seat you’ll find out how reliable your 20 or 40 years research project
was on inventing excuses.
That’s the first
suphah, the suphah that the believer
will face. This is an awesome suphah; it is a suphah which every
believer must face for himself and when you think of God’s will for your life
this is a good exercise mentally. If you
have two paths, some of you are facing decisions now as to what God wants you
to do. If you will look at your life and
some of the choices you’ve got before yourself and ask yourself, from the
perspective of the bema seat, how will course A look; from the perspective of
the bema seat how will course B look. In
other words, at the end of your life, looking back on all the opportunities in
this area, following that choice, look at all the possibilities following this
choice, what do you think is going to put you out ahead before the bema seat of
Christ? Which opportunity is going to
maximize your production for Christ?
Are you wallowing around in self-pity, fussing about somebody else’s
hypocrisy somewhere? Fine, go ahead and
fuss about it but that’s not giving any production in your life; ask yourself
what about the bema seat, it’s a tremendous process of evaluation. I use this constantly in divine guidance and
I encourage those who come to me for divine guidance to use the principle of
the bema seat to ascertain God’s will for your life.
Now the other suphah that the unbeliever faces is
given in Revelation 20 and this is not a pretty picture at all, but
nevertheless, it is part of the whole counsel of God and as pastor I’m
instructed to teach this also.
Revelation 20:11, this is the second suphah,
the second whirlwind. This, unlike the
first one, is not for believers, this is for unbelievers. Now in any given group of people it’s hard to
tell who’s a believer sometimes and who isn’t, because you have carnal
believers that act for all the world like unbelievers and you’d swear they were
unbelievers and then every once in a while there’ll be a little crack of light
that comes out and every once in a while, maybe if you live with them for 50
years you’ll notice that five seconds one day they put out some divine
viewpoint. And then you notice well,
they must be a believer. Well, there are
believers in that status and there are also unbelievers who are very shrewd and
very good and adept at covering up, putting the right smile on at the right
place, showing up at the right time and so on, and these people look on the
outside as believers. But they’re not;
they have never given up the concept that they’re going to work and earn their
salvation before God; they have never surrendered human good.
But in Revelation
20 God makes no mistakes, and so in verse 11 all unbelievers are here. “And I saw a great white throne, and Him that
sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away,” this is a
collapse of the physical universe. At
this suphah it not only destroys the
chaff but the universe itself collapses.
And for a moment of time, we don’t know how long the great white throne
judgment occurs, but there is an actual destruction of the old universe, and
apparently from the old universe we have an eternal incinerator called the lake
of fire. And this lake of fire
apparently is permanently consuming the results of the old universe. The old universe, all the galaxies, all the
stars, all the planets are destroyed at this point.
Revelation 20:12,
“And I saw the dead, small and great,” all unbelievers, they are “small” refers
to low class, considered by social standards; these are the peons, these are
the people that never made it, these are the people that just were unknown in
history and so on, and the “great” ones, and these will be the outstanding
unbelievers of history, the famous ones, who’s biographies you read, and they
stood before God, “and the books were opened,” plural notice, a set of records,
“and another book,” singular, “was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged out of those things
which were written in the books,” and you have to look at two things. There’s a set of books and then there is a
book, singular. Now let’s look at the
set of books, plural, first. “…the books
were opened, and another book was opened,” so the two sets of records are now
being read. “The dead were judged out of
those things which written in the set of books,” plural, “according to their
works.” Now in the books every person
who has ever lived in history or ever will live has a file, and God, as it
were, looks on your file. And here would
be the unbeliever, and down in the file is listed all of the historical
activity of that person. But please
notice the word “sin” is not used here. Now this doesn’t mean that their negative
volition against Christ is not sin but the emphasis is on their
production. In other words, all of their
production, all of the unbeliever’s production, which has been human good, and
therefore –R, all of the unbeliever’s human good is trotted out and is
evaluated in front of his face. And
there it will be prove that all his charity, all good works, all his humanism,
all the socialism, all the communism, all the offbeat capitalism and everything
else will go down the drain because all of these systems, philosophies and
everything that has acted to substitute for the gospel of Jesus Christ will be
null and void and will not measure up to God’s absolute standard.
Revelation 20:13,
“And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and hell delivered up
the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their
works,” clarifying verse 12. [14] And
death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.
This is the second death.” There
are many different deaths described in Scripture. The first death is when your soul leaves your
body, that is the first death. The
second death is when your soul is rejoined with a resurrected body and cast
into the lake of fire. Unbelievers
receive a resurrection body. This is
taught in John 5, but it’s not like the resurrection body of the believer; it
is a body that will enable him to receive punishment for all eternity in the
lake of fire, a very horrible thing.
Verse 16, “Whosoever was not found written in the book,” singular “of
life was cast into the lake of fire.”
Now in the book here, this is the book of life. Now the book of life originally had every
man’s name, every man, woman and child’s name in it. So it had the total population of the earth
in the book of life. Every person who
has ever been born was at one time listed in the book of life.
For example, let’s
take a few cases out here; let’s take John Doe, John Doe lived until he was
three years old. He was a baby and he
never had an opportunity to receive Jesus Christ as Savior. So what is John Doe’s status in
eternity? John Doe never had the
opportunity of trusting in the gospel, never had the opportunity to reject the
gospel and John Doe, therefore, is covered by the unlimited atonement of Christ;
his name remains in the book of life because he never rejected God’s
grace. He was purchased on the cross by
Jesus Christ, he never rejected the gift of Christ and therefore his name
remains. We’ll take another person, Mary
Jones. Mary Jones was a person who grew
up and say at age 15 she accepted Christ as Savior. So her name remains because she reached the
age of accountability, she recognized the gospel issue, she received Christ,
she recognized it wasn’t a matter of joining a church, doing something, giving
money or all the rest of the civic clubs and so on; this was not the issue, the
issue was whether she would receive salvation through Jesus Christ. That’s Mary Jones; Mary Jones’ name remains. And now maybe we have Peanuts and Peanuts grew
up and he rejected Christ; people witnessed to him and witnessed to him and
witnessed, over and over and over again, he had maximum opportunity to receive
the gospel, he did not, he died without receiving Christ, his name is erased. And so finally after all history you have
some people…
[Tape turns] …
name here, blank, name, blank, blank, blank, name, name, name, name, name,
blank, and that’s the way the book of life looks. There will be great gaps in the book of life
and these gaps will be people who could have trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ
but never did. Provision had been made
on the cross of Christ because He died for all the sins of every man who has
ever lived, but these people, because of volition, freely chose negatively to
reject God’s grace. And therefore their
name is not written. And so those who
are not found written, in other words, people who could not find… God will be
there and He’ll have angels look through and say all right, this is Peanuts,
Peanuts is standing up here; Accept Peanuts?
Is his name written? They check
through in the section under P, and Pe and they can’t find Peanuts’ name, well
it must be written in the blank; okay, into the lake of fire with him. Next please.
Then they’ll go on one by one this way.
And this is the second suphah,
it is a suphah that is totally
unnecessary because to you realize what the lake of fire was originally
designed for? Satan and his demons,
Matthew 25:41; it wasn’t designed for people; the lake of fire was never
designed for man. That’s taught in
Matthew 25:41. So we know that this is
an unnecessary thing. Christ died for
all these sins. It was unnecessary for
these people to go to the lake of fire…totally unnecessary! But nevertheless, because people willingly,
freely chose, God respects volition.
Now back to
Proverbs 10:25, the law of final effect.
“As the whirlwind is passing, the dead are no more, but the righteous
are an everlasting foundation.” “…the
righteous one,” now “the righteous one” is the Hebrew word that we studied last
week, zadek, and zadek refers to adherence or conformity to God’s standards and it
is one, therefore, who adheres to God’s perfect. Again, doctrine of divine essence, God is
sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient,
omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal, those are God’s
characteristics. The righteous one is
one who fits that standard, the zadek. But, the Bible says all don’t fit that
standard. If all men to not fit that
standard, how then can they survive the suphah. The only way the men can survive the suphah is to acquire perfect righteousness
and that is given by the doctrine of imputation. It is given at the point you receive
Christ. Here you are, at the time you
receive Christ God the Holy Spirit puts you in union with Christ. God the Father foreknows you, He
predestinates you, He calls you, He justifies you, He glorifies you, and he
disciplines you. And God the Son gives
you +R, He gives you many other things but here is the absolute righteousness
that God the Son gives you by imputation or crediting. Now that is not an experience.
Those of you who
have been fooling with the people who advocate inviting Jesus into your heart
and all the rest of it, that emphasize experience, please notice, there is only
one verse in all of Scripture that speaks of inviting Jesus into your heart and
that is not even addressed in an evangelistic context. Now why is it that we have emphasis in every
area today in evangelicalism on inviting Jesus into our hearts and there’s one
little verse in Revelation that says something about that. At no other place in either Old or New
Testament is ever this concept put forth.
Every other place it is always believe on the objective historic
finished work of Christ, now subjective emotional experience.
So here is one of
those things that you can’t feel and you can sit in your closet and try to feel
this forever and never feel it because imputation doesn’t happen in your heart;
imputation happens in the throne room, in the record room. It’s not happening in your heart; when you
become a Christian imputation has nothing to do with your heart; it has to do
with the record room and in the record room in heaven, many, many, many
billions of miles away from where your heart is a change of record is made and
logged on your name is God’s absolute righteousness in Jesus Christ. And at one point in time that is put on your
record, period, you don’t feel it, you can’t see it. You only know of it through the revelation in
the New Testament. And if you don’t
believe this revelation, if God’s Word is not trustworthy to you, just forget
it. See, this is why we have the emphasis
on subjectivism today. Don’t you see how
it works? People can’t believe the Word
of God, they don’t want to believe the Word of God so in order not to believe
the Word they have to provide a substitute and that substitute is some sort of
an emotional experience in your heart.
And that has become a substitute and it totally cancels out
imputation. God’s grace works in the
throne room, primarily, at the point of salvation, not in your heart. So we have Jesus’ righteousness imputed to
our account and God the Father passes court verdict and justifies it.
It says that this
is credited to our account. If the
Christian, if all of us would get solidly in our minds the doctrine of
justification by faith we would have a revolution today. First of all, we immediately would dry up all
evangelistic organizations that emphasize subjective experience. That’s the first thing that would happen as
Christians gained a knowledge of what justification means. The second thing would be everybody that
disbelieved eternal security would also blow away because justification is a
once for all court action and by the law of double jeopardy you cannot be
hauled into court for the same crime twice, therefore there is no such thing as
jeopardizing eternal security. Once
saved, always saved! Once in the family
of God always in the family of God. So
that’s righteousness and that is the righteousness spoken of in Proverbs 10:25;
the righteousness one is the one who has received righteousness by grace and
that provides an eternal foundation.
Why? Because it survives, it is
compatible with God. Remember God’s
character? God’s character is that God
is righteous and just. Because God is
righteous and just it means that God, then, can give out righteousness and the
righteousness that He gives out here he respects for all eternity.
All right, the
next verse in the series on the law of final effect is Proverbs 11:4. This concerns money and we are going to have
a whole section on money in Proverbs, and we have not put this verse in that
section, this verse has more to do with righteousness but it applies in the
area of money. “Riches profit not in the
day of wrath; but righteousness delivers from death.” Now with the doctrine I’ve given you on the
bema seat you can see how this works out.
At the bema seat we have labor, all during history we labor, and by labor
I don’t mean good works, I just mean normal straightforward labor in the sense
of the first divine institution. Labor
would include your thoughts and would include the behavior patterns as a result
of those thoughts. All right, that’s
your labor.
Now under systems
of economics labor is converted into some form of currency; currency is a
method of storing labor for some period of time. It happens to be an easy, more convenient way
to store labor and so we have currency.
Now in the ancient world the currency consisted primarily of gold and
silver because these metals had inherent value in them. In other words, the currency had value in
itself. It was like you took so much
labor, X units of labor, and you bought this currency and the currency itself
had value in it. Well, along came great
transactions and so on in business and so notes began to be passed.
So the second form
of currency besides precious metals were notes.
I.O.U.’s and these notes were passed, instead of transferring vast sums
of currency, Solomon was the one, by the way, who worked on a lot of these
notes for the ancient world, except he worked on them so cleverly he had
everybody store gold in Jerusalem; everybody else had the notes, Solomon had
the gold. And he was the first great
international financier and had Israel stayed on positive volition according to
Deuteronomy 28 they would have stayed in that position. So notes were the second form because
currency was bulky to be carried around and so it would be stored as I.O.U.’s
but when you get into an I.O.U. situation you’ve got trouble because somewhere
there has to be currency backing it up.
Somewhere that currency has to be stored and so you have to have a
trustworthy place to store the backing currency.
Then finally we
came down to paper money which we operate on today. Now paper money is a situation where the
paper is actually a form of I.O.U. but the paper money can be, or used to be,
able to be exchanged. During the time of
the American Revolution we passed what was known as the legal tender laws. The legal tender laws were opposed by
Christians, men like John Witherspoon and other signers of the Constitution
opposed the legal tender laws. The legal
tender laws Congress passed to force paper money to be acceptable on an open
market. This means if I owe you
something and I give you a piece of paper money you have to accept it. Now you can refuse my check because a check
is not legal tender. You can refuse an
I.O.U. but you cannot legally refuse federal currency because it has become
legal tender by Congressional law. The
Christians of that day, with John Witherspoon as a result, recognized that this
violated the biblical institution of the first divine institution, and Witherspoon
wrote article after article attacking the concept of paper money as legal
tender. The reason, he said, was that
once paper is made legal then you have no control on its value, and therefore
people can be robbed of their money.
For example, on
January you can do a job that’s worth $40 and you can take paper money that’s
worth $40 supposedly, but since the paper money is controlled by government
decree, in June the money that you have, those paper bills that were in January
worth $40 may be worth $10. Now you go
and try to get back something out of it and all you can get back out is
$10. You have been gypped $30 by the
government’s interference into your labor.
Of course we’re seeing that now, but the biblically acute Christians
like John Witherspoon saw that 200 years ago and no one would listen to
him. Just like no one listens to
Bible-believing Christians today.
Witherspoon wrote and wrote and wrote and said you’re going to regret
the day you made paper money legal tender in this country. And sure enough; we’re regretting today; we
are one of the few countries on earth where we as citizens have been deprived
over many years of owning gold and silver.
So the “riches” in
Proverbs 11:4 refer to storing labor, a currency. And the question of verse 4 is how are you
going to most economically store your labor.
In other words, you labor for the Lord, and you have a choice. And the choice is what currency are you going
to use? What’s your currency? If you choose gold and silver somebody can
rob you of that because you can’t ever protect it. Sure you can have gold and silver, and sure
the gold and silver has inherent value; of course. Where are you going to keep it? How are you going to protect it against
thievery? So even gold and silver is a
currency that cannot perfectly protect and preserve labor. So the question the Bible is saying here in
verse 4, the only perfect currency is your record before God. That is what Jesus was talking about when He
says: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth
corrupt, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor
rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal.” What did Christ mean? He said the believer has a perfect currency
system and that perfect currency system will never lose value. The credit of divine good, you could call it
divine good credit, that are stored as a result of the filling of the Holy
Spirit, doing things as unto the Lord, the divine good credits are stored in
heaven and are not subject to inflation, deflation, or any international
balance of payments or international trade and money agreements.
So verse 4 is
simply saying that righteousness, which here would mean the divine good credit,
deliver from death. What currency do you
have to store your labor? The credits
you have in the throne room. Please
notice it doesn’t say anything about your heart here; this is all objectively
in the throne room of God.
One final verse,
Proverbs 15:24, this is a rare verse because very rarely in the Old Testament
up unto now do you have emphasis on eternity.
Most of the perspective is phase two, not phase three. But here in verse 24 you have the shift. “The way of life is above to the wise, that
he may depart from hell beneath.” The
way of life is chyyim; chyyim is a
Hebrew plural noun and refers to the points in time that you have chosen, or
the various events that have come into your life. So the Jew thought of chyyim, this is lives, plural, not life but lives. And the lives is an abstract (?) noun that
refers to points in time; “The way of lives,” that is, the road of true
production, because remember life is equal to soul in Scripture, and so here
you have historic production. “The way
of life is above,” it means that it is emphasizing in the objective historic
existence of your divine good credit in heaven.
“The way of life is above to the wise one,” now this eliminates
unbelievers and it also eliminates carnal believers. The Hebrew word for wise is a word for success. So the wise one is the one who has applied
Bible doctrine and has produced, therefore, in his life success, so the one who
is successful. “The way of life is above
to the one who is successful,” this refers to the believer who has maximum
growth. “The way of life is above,” or
concerns the heavenlies, “to the one who is wise, that he may depart from sheol
beneath.”
Now this is a
radical shift in the Old Testament; it may not seem that to you, but sheol is a
word which means grave in the Old Testament.
I want to show you what this is teaching here. The word “grave” includes both believer and
unbeliever, both of them when to sheol in the Old Testament—both of them! Abraham’s bosom was apparently located in
sheol on the Old Testament. Jesus Christ
is the first man, technically, the first man in heaven. So the sheol, which is translated “hell” in
the King James in verse 24, that was the place of the dead; that was where the
human spirit occupied when it was removed from the body but both believers and
unbelievers lived there; not together, there was some sort of a gap between the
two which is mentioned in Luke 15. So
you have the grave and up to this point in the Old Testament everything was
fine, everybody goes to the grave and that’s it.
But this verse
tells you there’s something beyond sheol, and that is why this verse opens our
eyes to advanced revelation in the Old Testament, that he may one day leave
sheol. In other words, the believer here
is going to leave sheol. He is going to
leave sheol by resurrection. Now
resurrection is not taught in this verse but it’s implied in this verse; they
are going to someday leave it, “hell beneath.”
To conclude and
give you an idea of the effect, practically, of the law of final effect, let’s
turn to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:19.
Christ teaches the law of final effect in the Sermon on the Mount,
beginning in verse 19. “Lay not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where
thieves break through and steal. [20]
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal; [21] For where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
It is verse 21 that tells us the application of the law of final effect,
in that if you know what the certain final results are going to be, then you
will automatically put your heart there.
Can you think of
investing money in a big program and then ignoring it? You take somebody that has his money
invested, what part of the newspaper does he always open first? See.
Well, that’s the heart; the heart is always agitated, excited, and
naturally interested in the area where your credit is. And that’s not wrong. Jesus is just showing the principle that
where your treasure is your heart will be also and it’s the amount of divine
good assets that you have accumulated, not in your heart, but in the throne
room with Jesus Christ. And the promise
that he gives us, which is a promise that bears review for us all, is found in
verse 33 after the end of this discussion.
“But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,” His
righteousness refers to the divine good assets.
If you… this is just a repeat of Proverbs 11:4 is all this is; if you
will check your divine good assets and get those in order, then God will credit
you with these other things.
Maybe some of you
have never thought about it this way but the reason why many of you are not
more materially blessed is simply because God can’t trust you with wealth. And He is doing you a favor by restricting
you from it because God in His omniscience knows what our hearts are like and
He knows that if He credited us with fantastic wealth we are so weak spiritually
that our eyes would be on money all the time.
And therefore, to be merciful He has restricted us to it. And some have prayed and have labored and
have prayed and prayed and labored and have worked and worked and worked and it
seems like they never get anywhere. Just
as soon as some profit comes along it gets wiped out. Just as soon as something else comes along it
gets wiped out. And it is not because of
foolishness economically, it’s just because it gets wiped out. Now why does this always happen? Can this be an accident? Can this be a coincidence, that just as soon
as you manage to begin to accumulate something, something, illness, some
catastrophe, something comes along and always eats it up. Now if you believe that God is sovereign that
can’t be happening by chance; there must be a reason behind it. And I suggest one possible reason is none
other than the law of final effect, that God is simply loving you and keeping
you from blowing and wasting your time here on earth by constantly taking it
out from under you because you’re going to get your eyes on it, just as soon as
you get your eyes on it’s they’re going to be off of Him. So he’s constantly frustrating you and He
will continue to frustrate you in, His mercy, until you learn the lesson. And it may turn out as you mature in the Word
and you begin to be able to keep your eyes on the Lord, regardless of
prosperity, that He will bless you.
Now there are two tests that we face in the Christian life, one is the test of
adversity and the other is a test of prosperity. And sometimes it’s easier to pass the test of
adversity than it is to pass the test of prosperity. So God loves us when He enforces the law of
final effect.