Clough Proverbs Lesson 62
DI #1: Laws of Labor
Shall we turn to
Proverbs 12; we’re continuing a study on (?) or topics of Proverbs 10-22 on the
law of labor. We have dealt with the
group of these principles or laws, the laws first of property, then of labor,
and then of money. We have finished the
law of property with the four principles; the four principles being as follows:
the first principle was that all ownership is relative before God; God alone
has power of eminent domain. That term
that is used in modern jurisprudence is a term which should properly be applied
only to God, not to the state. The
second principle under the law of property is that ownership is the right to
misuse as well as use. The third
principle under the law of property is that man is not free to avoid judgment
for misuse. So the second and third
principles are correlative, man has the right to misuse but not the right to
avoid judgment for misuse. The fourth
principle under property is that sinful man always to have his property without
the judgment for its misuse. Man wants
property, he wants skill but he does not want to pay the price that comes for
their misuse. He always wants to be
protected against judgment.
We might have an
application before we move on to labor and that is that children ought early to
be taught the value of property. Very
few children respect property, you can tell that when you invite somebody over
with children and watch them tear your house up. And after you buy three or four different
sets of furniture and replace the carpeting, and have to buy a whole new set of
china or something every time you invite someone over you get the impression
after a while that children do not respect property. And it comes out of a heresy that Christian
parents do not teach their children that property is valuable. And Proverbs says property is very valuable
and if you do not teach you child how to use property and respect it, how are
they going to respect what Jesus Christ gives them at the point of salvation. That’s their property spiritually, but if
they have never been taught to use, secular, we’ll say, property correctly then
how can they ever use spiritual property?
They don’t and are not.
So it is important
to train children in the use of property.
Some principles that could be used in this area is make them responsible
for use or misuse. At an early age you
might have to take property away for its misuse, violate ownership in this
case. But later on one of the most vital
lessons they can learn is don’t bail them out when they misuse it; if they take
the car and ram into something or they get a ticket with it, that’s their job,
they got the ticket, not you, so why are you paying for it. They’re old enough to get the ticket, old
enough to drive the car, they’re old enough to pay for the ticket. And this business of getting kids off because
they violated something and they, therefore do not have to pay the price for
misuse teaches them simply (?) in the Christian life because when they join the
family of God, God doesn’t run his family that way. And there’s a sharp problem of adjustment
when they discover that they can’t do anything that they want to in the
Christian life without paying for it.
We come now to the
rule of labor, the law of labor, and again we’ll have certain principles and
our format this morning will be like this.
We’ll deal with certain principles of the law of labor, showing you
various Proverbs that illustrate these principles. Then we’ll take these very same principles
and apply to the faith technique or the way the Christian operates in his life,
spiritual labor, and show how each of these principles that we can see in the
everyday common sense world around us are exactly the same principles that
operate in the plan of salvation.
Let’s look at the
first principle; the first principle should be familiar to you in that the
first principle of the law of labor is that labor must proceed from
capital. You have to have tools to labor
with. God alone labors out of nothing,
but capital is the prerequisite for labor.
You have to have capital in order to labor. You cannot labor without tools. This is why we believe there was such a
primitive race of men that came after the flood; after the flood there were not
enough tools for the human race to sustain itself and so you have a very low
cultural point reached shortly after Noah’s ark. And in history this is because of the lack of
tools; man did not have tools to labor and therefore had a very unsophisticated
culture.
So the first
principle, very simple, labor needs tools; all creatures are capitalists. And this is a simple point that capital is
required.
The second
principle of labor and this is one that is extensively illustrated in the book
of Proverbs is that labor cannot be avoided.
And one of the central problems in man’s rebellion against God, you
never thought of this did you, linking it to sin, that labor can never be
avoided. Turn to Proverbs
Again, we review
these points. The created order can be
divided into various spheres; some theologians in the past have called this the
doctrine of sphere sovereignty. We here
simply refer to these as divine institutions.
They are spheres that are set up by the Creator’s decree; they are
spheres that are run by the laws that God has established. And any nation or national entity or culture
will be as healthy as they adhere to the decreed rules and principles of
God. We are now studying the first one
and we are studying the first one and we are studying labor and money. And please notice these do not fall into the
fourth one. Now that’s where
And the point
simply is that “the hand of the diligent will bear rule,” meaning he will
master his environment. Just as Adam was
told, subdue your environment, Adam, and Adam subdued it in a very simple way,
by agriculture. Adam had to eat and the
way he had to eat was to raise his own food.
And subduing his environment was raising food. So the first principle obviously is in verse
24, “the slothful shall be under tribute [put to forced labor],” the slothful
here is the person who becomes a victim of rule; the first one, “shall rule” is
active, “shall pay tribute” is “he is ruled,” passive. The first person is the one who adheres to
God’s norm and standard of labor. The
reward under the first divine institution is that he gains power. The one who is lazy loses power, always has
lost power. In the case of Adam it would
be the case he lost power to the weeds, he lost power to no production. But here the word “tribute” means a very
special way. The word “tribute” is a
Hebrew word that means slave labor.
If you hold the
place I’ll show you three illustrations of this word “tribute.” It doesn’t mean tax money; that’s what you’d
think it would be but it doesn’t mean that.
Turn to Exodus
Judges 1:30, here
is one of the early failures on the part of the nation Israel to do what God
told them to do and that was to kill their opposition, the Canaanites, and they
refused to do it but they did something else to the inhabitants; they forced
them to pay tribute. This is why it says
in verse 30, “…the Canaanites dwelt among them, and became tributaries [unto
them,]” “became tributaries means they had to pay corvée labor. So
understand again, this is state enforced labor.
Another
illustration, 1 Kings 5:17, this is Solomon, “And the king commanded, and they
brought great stones,” who are “they”?
Look at verse 16, “the chief of Solomon’s officers who were over the
work, three thousand and three hundred, who ruled over the people who wrought
in the work. [17 ...and they brought
great stones, costly stones, and hewn stones, to lay the foundation of the
house. [18] And Solomon’s builders and
Hiram’s builders did hew them,” and so on.
So you have a government project, and these people are involved in
tribute. So I hope these contexts illustrate
that the word “tribute” means slave labor under the government.
Now turn back to
Proverbs 12:24; when was Proverbs written?
In Solomon’s day and shortly thereafter; therefore, what do you suppose
verse 24 meant? It simply was an
observation from practical experience.
“The hand of the diligent will bear rule,” the idea that he bears rule
means that he remains free, and the people who refuse to work wind up having to
be coerced to work by the state. So you
have the first form of judgment in God’s Word against the violation of this
area, the first divine institution, statism, the interference by the
state. It inevitably happens that where
you have a maximum number of a society that are lazy, that refuse to work, that
that society will gradually lose its freedom and the government forces people
to work by various projects. In fact,
all of us really work for the government one day a week; figure it out the next
time you do your income taxes. You start
off, make Monday bluer than usual, that Monday you’re working for Uncle,
Tuesday through Friday you’re working for yourself and that’s the way it
usually operates.
So the first
judgment, spelled out in Scripture in a time of the rise of the empire, because
that was the time that this book was written, it’s an observation that a lazy
population, people who have a mental attitude against labor always wind up
losing freedom and one of God’s judgments historically, and you can study
culture after culture after culture, you wind up with slaves.
Now a second
judgment, found in Proverbs 12:11, a very obvious form of judgment; a second
way God judges a violation of labor. “He
that tills his land shall be satisfied with bread, but he that follows vain
persons is void of understanding.” The
idea is he’s following the wrong crowd, the gang seekers. There’s always an interesting principle shown
by lazy people. You’ll always see this
operate, you get one lazy person, they have a craving to find another lazy
person. The reason for this is that a
lazy person is rebuked in their own conscience, they know they’re out of line
and they can’t stand the call of their own conscience, so on coffee break or
something else they can’t wait to get alone with some other person as equally
lazy as they are and start making excuses why they are not working. And this is the process of just mutual
self-justification, and this goes on.
And you’ll usually find lazy people collect together in gangs. They usually don’t stay by themselves because
their conscience screams too loudly. So
rather than do that they get together and justify each other’s laziness/
And so the point
here is he hangs around with vain persons, that is, people who will encourage
the laziness, justify the laziness. And
obviously the implication from the first part of verse 11 is that the ultimate
end is starvation. And that’s another
way in which God judges. Not only does
He judge by interference by the state but He judges by simple law of physical
cause and effect.
But there’s
another, third way in which we see this first principle operate, that labor is
necessary, labor is unavoidable.
Proverbs 10:26; the third way, and again, it’s the way we’re made, it’s
the way created order runs, you see this happen every day, and that is the lazy
person gradually develops a reputation.
We would call it today he’s unemployable. “As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the
eyes, so is the sluggard to them that send him.” That little proverb requires some
background. First of all, you have to
visualize, this is in an Ancient Near Eastern home. This takes place in a small house. In a small house they often had fires for
cooking, they didn’t have fans in those days, they depended upon the wind. And if the wind was not blowing or the wind
was blowing in the wrong direction the ventilation didn’t work right in the
house. So you had to have the fire,
that’s the principle; the fire is necessary.
So you’ve got the fire, that’s necessary to cook with. So the point you have to see in this proverb
is that there’s a necessity here; the necessity is the fire that’s causing the
smoke. The problem is you can’t get rid
of the smoke. So you’ve got something
that you need, the fire, but you can’t get rid of its effects, the smoke. And you know what it to be in a smoke filled
room, it hurts your eyes and everything else.
And that’s the point that’s being made here, this is smoke to the eyes,
it’s necessary, you can’t stop the fire because you need the fire but on the
other hand you can’t get rid of the smoke that goes with the fire.
It’s the same
thing with the vinegar, it was used in various ways in the ancient east and
sometimes they’d get too much vinegar in the wrong place and you know what that
tastes like. So the point there again is
there’s something that’s needful, and yet in the wrong amounts it’s bad. So the analogy, there’s a double simile that
is used in verse 26, it starts off with two similes and then it concludes, “so
is the sluggard to them that send him.”
Now what does this mean, “them that send him.” “Them that send him” means them that send him
on a job or appoint him to a job; it’s an appointment. “A sluggard is to one who’s hired him as
smoke is to the eyes.” That’s the point,
and the idea is… the same with the fire, if you could get rid of that fire, the
first opportunity to put that fire out you’re going to; just as soon as the
meal is cooked, just as soon as you can get rid of it out goes the fire, get
rid of the smoke. Same thing, as soon as
you can get rid of a clod that’s like this you’re going to.
And this is the
idea of unemployability; a person who is lazy is naturally going to be
unemployable. It has nothing to do with
his culture, education or anything else, it has to do with his attitude toward
the work; he becomes unemployable and then they usually cry to the government
for help or something. But the idea, the
third form of judgment in Proverbs is very simple, common sense, you see it all
around you. But there’s a point behind
all this and we’ll get to it.
Another way of
God’s judgment upon laziness, not only salvation, not only statism, not only
economic ostracism, or unemployability, but we can think of another way and
that’s in Proverbs 15:19, again, very obvious, very much a common sense, but
something that you pay for. Why? Why does this work out this way? That’s the way God made it. “The way of the slothful is as the hedge of
thorns, but the way of the righteous is made plain.” “The way,” notice the contrast in verse 19,
first “the way of the slothful,” second, “the way of the righteous.” What is “the way”? The word is derek d-e-r-e-k in the Hebrew, and it means a highway, but it means
more than just a highway, it’s a path in life and in this kind of a proverb derek refers to business
enterprise. So this means the business,
this is talking about a person who is lazy who is not an employee but an
employer. So when it speaks of “the way
of the slothful” it means the business of the slothful businessman, this is not
his hired help, this is the man himself.
“…is as a hedge of thorns,” now the hedge of thorns was usually… in the
ancient world you had the road like this, you’d have a simple highway and along
the side you’d have this hedge of thorns, and the idea, and it’s kind of
humorous to the original writers, is that instead of going on the path his
business goes right along the thorns, one thorn bush after another, one right
after another.
But there’s
something more to this theme in this proverb than just that. What is the thorn always a symbol of, from
the very beginning of Scripture? It’s a
symbol of the curse. The thorn and
thistle grows up from the ground in response to God’s curse. And what is this saying? It’s simply saying that the man who is
slothful does not have the power to minimize the curse in his business, and his
business is always getting out of control, is always disorganized, is always
suffering under the results of the curse.
All men suffer some from the curse, but walking through a hedge of
thorns is a deliberate exaggeration that he has the maximum effect of God’s
curse. And how does the curse show up in
the business world? By disorder; God’s
curse is always something that’s disorders and that frustrates. And so where you have a maximum cursing in a
business enterprise, Proverbs says watch it, it might be due to the fact that
you have a person that’s ultimately lazy.
Now you say well
wait a minute, I know a businessman and I know people that are having trouble
and they’re not lazy. That’s true, there
are exceptions, but be careful. Look at
the businessman who often is having trouble.
If you look carefully into his life sometimes you’ll notice something
about him and that is that he worries all the time. Now Jesus Christ in the New Testament says
that worry is essentially a sister to laziness.
Now it’s hard to understand why laziness is linked with worry in
Scripture but a person who worries is always trying to live in the future. He never wants to live, he postpones doing
something now and yet on the other hand he worries about something that’s in
the future. So the mental attitude of
worry in Scripture is said by Jesus Christ to be related to the mental attitude
sin of laziness.
So Proverbs 15:19
then says that the business “of the slothful” is one thorn bush after another
because this person basically is lazy, but the business “of the righteous” one
is made plain, the idea is a straight highway, graded, and they had vehicles
that had to be drawn by people so they had to have it flat. And the idea is a minimum of obstacles.
So the fourth
principle of judgment is not only by salvation, not only by government
interference, not only by unemployability but by simple chaos in the
business. Then there’s finally another
form of judgment, that’s found in Proverbs 13:4 and that follows immediately
from the one we just dealt with. The
fifth way we experience judgment for trying to avoid labor. “The soul of the sluggard desires, and has
nothing; but the soul of the diligent shall be made fat.” Now the word “made fat” is a word that means
to enjoy. That may strike some of you as
odd, but the word “made fat” means prosper.
The picture is the contrast between the mental attitude of the sluggard
and the mental attitude of the one who adheres to the created order; he works
and it’s actually work therapy is what it is.
It manifests itself in a positive mental attitude, mental health in
other words. Mental health comes out of
labor; mental illness comes out of laziness.
Why? The dynamics are given to
you, “the soul of the sluggard desires, but he has nothing,” he always works,
he always craves, but he never does anything to satisfy himself. And so is mind is left in this state and
laziness leads to psychological difficulty.
Do you realize that oftentimes people who spend thousands of dollars to
go to a psychiatrist and psychologist basically are simply lazy people; that’s
all. All they’d have to do is get a good
job for a couple of weeks and they’d be through their mental illness, simply
because it’s not mental illness to begin with, it’s simply a bad conscience,
that’s all. The conscience is saying you
should work you bum, and they’re not, that’s all, that’s the problem.
All right, that is
the principle that labor is necessary in Scripture. Whenever you have something necessary in
Scripture watch it; God is sovereign, God is omnipotent, God is the Lord of
history and when He says something is necessary you can always bet He’s going
to follow it up if you violate it. And
sure enough, if He says labor is necessary He’s going to follow it up by saying
if you don’t do it you’re going to be in trouble and I just gave you five ways
in the book of Proverbs in which we can be in trouble.
Now another principle that has to do with the law of labor in Scripture. It has to do with something that is lost,
largely, in America, thanks to certain attitudes and certain ideas. People have the idea of just putting in the
time on the job, and that’s all, just putting in the time to get the money so I
can really enjoy myself beyond the job.
In other words, you divorce joy from the work; the joy itself has to be
something after you go home from the job but the job itself can’t be enjoyed by
itself. Now that’s a violation of the
Word of God.
Turn to Proverbs
14:23, “In all labor there is profit; but the talk of the lips tends only to
poverty,” penury. The point in verse 23,
“In all labor there is profit,” it doesn’t mean after the job is finished, it
means during the laboring process itself there is profit, there is joy, there
is something that is produced. Here’s
how it works, you have the labor, the period of the labor is going to produce a
product out here that has value to it.
The value is something that can be enjoyed but the mental attitude
during the job, the joy that comes from working comes, biblically, comes about
in anticipation of what is going to be produced. This is what is so wrong; a lot of people
frustrate themselves on the job or they have the wrong… a very bad job
situation, but your joy on a job comes about looking forward to what is
produced.
Let’s go back to the first time anything ever was made. Go back to Genesis 1, here’s the model of all
labor, God Himself. God followed a six
day work week, which was revolutionary in the ancient world; all pagan
societies held to a seven day work week and the Jews were always considered to
be lazy people. And this is a very
interesting historical study because Romans tried for years and years and years
to get these Jews to work on the Sabbath and they never would. And so the Romans always spread around this
stuff saying the Jews are lazy, the Jews are lazy, the Jews are lazy because
they never worked on the Sabbath day.
But wasn’t it strange that wherever the Jews went they produced more
than the Romans in seven days. Why is
that? Why could the Jew working in six
days out produce the Roman working seven days?
Simply because he was working in line with the way the creation was
built. Your body, your soul, is built to
work on this kind of a rhythm.
To prove the
point, the Russians early in the 1920s tried in their bureaucratic economy to
establish a one in ten type work week.
In other words, work ten days, one day off; then ten days, one day off;
ten days, one day off, the idea was during the early five year plans of Stalin
and he wanted to get these plans going and so he tried to produce more by
having people work longer in a ten to one ratio, and they found out that they
couldn’t. So they began to experiment
with other ratios and they found that the most beneficial one was one in six,
simply because the human body and mind is geared to this kind of a
program. Now it’s true, governments can
decree different ratios; you can decree different ratios, but God has said this
ratio is the way you are built. And you
can decree any way you want to, but you’re not going to function as efficiently
as you would if you adhered to the way God has designed you. And so God Himself models this in the six day
work week.
And notice the
steps in labor; it was a joy to God to create.
Notice what He did, first on the first day, Genesis 1:3, “Let there be
light, and there was light.” What is
that equivalent to? That’s the
equivalent of planning your work. God
knows what He wants to make before He makes it; He has a plan in His mind
before He makes it. Everything is
planned. And then obviously at the end
of verse 3, “there was light,” the light was produced, that’s the actual labor,
then what does verse 4 say that God did about His work. “God saw the light, that it was good,” the
word “good” is “beautiful,” God enjoys His labor. And so from the planning through the actual
labor there is joy, joy in what He had made.
Now the problem
comes, obviously, in a modern scene, how, if you’re doing, say if you’re
secretarial work or you’re on an assembly line type of job, how is it that you
can give something personal to your job?
That what you produce has part of you in it? Let’s take a case of a housewife; certainly
there’s a case where you’d say well there’s something that’s mundane and
challenges all joy. Turn to Proverbs 31
and study the model woman given in that chapter. Some of you women would like to know more
about your role in Scripture, I would suggest there’s a tape series available, The Christian Woman by Barbara Beers,
and I would recommend that you borrow that series and go through it; it’s very
good.
In Proverbs 31, we
obviously don’t have time to go through it all but I want to point out
something in line with this; that here’s the woman who does the mundane things,
she’s actually a high class woman, this is not the usual Hebrew peasant that’s
pictured here in Proverbs 31, but this boy is being told in verse 10, “Who can
find a virtuous woman? For her price is
far above rubies. [11] The heart of her
husband does safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. [12] She will do him good, and not evil, all
the days of her life.” And then it
describes the activities that she does, and as it goes through here these are
all activities that you could argue have no creativity whatsoever, absolutely
no creativity, there’s nothing special, or is there? Let’s watch how she does them.
Proverbs 31:18,
“She perceives her merchandise is good; her candle goes not out by night. [19] She lays her hands to the spindle, and
her hands hold the distaff. [20] She
stretches out her hand to the poor; yea, she reaches forth her hands to the
needy. [21] She is not afraid of the
snow for her household; for all her household are clothed with scarlet. [22] She makes herself coverings of tapestry….” Verse 23, “Her husband is known in the gates,
when he sits among the elders of the land.”
Now how is the husband known?
Because verse 22, she’s made his clothes; there’s something personal
about the way she has made those. Verse
24, “She makes fine linen, and sells it…. [25] Strength and honor are her
clothing,” now these are all what we would call mundane activities.
So her husband
compliments here, but in the last verse of this chapter a comment is made that
is critical because it shows the woman’s labor as creative. Proverbs 31:31, “Give her of the fruit of her
hands, and let her own works praise her in the gates.” Now let’s look at what her own works are. “In the gates,” who’s in the gates? The gates was the place where business was
conducted, merchandise was sold, discussions were conducted such as verse 23,
you have all these activities in the gates.
Now, in the gates what is it that is going to relate back to her
particularly. You see, “let her works
praise her in the gates,” how are her works going to praise her in the gates if
they don’t have something of her in them.
Obviously if it’s just some mechanical thing that she’s done the people
aren’t going to know who it was that did them.
But there’s something in what she has produced in her labor, that’s her
labor, she’s labored hard, what you would call mundane labor, common labor,
boring labor, but the result of her labor out here is something that reflects
back on here as a laborer… something that reflects back upon her.
And my point is
that the Bible teaches that a labor and a job correctly done will always
reflect you in it. And you ought to
think about that as a Christian, that you can’t separate your character from
what you’re making, what you’re doing, what you’re producing. That reflects upon you. And this is the source of joy in labor
according to Scripture.
Another principle
that we find under the law of labor, besides the fact that all labor rightly
done is creative. That’s the principle
we’ve just studied. All labor rightly
done is creative. It’ll show something
of you in it. I don’t care what the job
is, I challenge you, to look at your job, whatever the work is that you do, and
see if you can see where you can leave your mark in what you will produce that
will be uniquely yours. Another man can
do, maybe that job, but not the way you do it; there’s something the way you do
it that will mark the product.
The next
principle, the fourth principle goes back to Proverbs 13:23. Now up to this point we haven’t explicitly
mentioned the problem of sin in labor, the problem of the fall. But please notice in Scripture labor precedes
the fall. Adam was told to work before
the fall. Adam and Eve were not told to
just have a vacation permanently in Eden.
They were told to produce something.
Now if the fall did not bring about labor, what did the fall do? The fall, if you recall, made the labor more
difficult; it made the labor frustrating.
Adam had to contend with the thorns and the thistles and the weeds but
the fall didn’t make labor; labor preexisted the fall; the fall added to the
frustration, therefore no job will ever be free from frustration. So if you have a job, oh, I have frustrations
on my job, join the crowd because you will never have a job that is free from
frustrations and if you’re one of these people wandering around trying to find
a job where there’s no frustrations, forget it; you’re denying the doctrine of
the fall right there. Every job since
the fall has frustration.
This is one
frustration illustrated in Proverbs in verse 23, “Much food is in the tillage
[fallow ground] of the poor, but there is that that destroys for lack of
judgment.” Now this is a very difficult
verse to translate but the gist of verse 23 is this; that the poor Hebrew
farmer would have plenty of food in his field, he would have plenty of food
that he had raised for the harvest and then it would be destroyed by lack of
judgment? By whom? Presumably and the best scholars take verse
23 to refer to, in this case, government bureaucrats. Remember what was written under the statist
economics of Solomon? And they would
come in and they would take from his field and they would destroy in his field. And here is the frustration of you labor and
labor and labor and then what you finally labor for just goes down the
drain. That’s a mark of the fall.
Now these are four
principles of labor but there’s one further one in Scripture that deals with
the fall. Yes, the fourth principle is
that since the fall all labor is frustrating, but the fifth principle comes
along and says yes, but all things work out together for good because since the
fall makes all labor frustrating, in order to be successful we have to have
wisdom, or chokmah. Why was the curse given? Many reasons, but let’s look about the curse
and labor. If you have a curse and labor
that’s frustrating, the only way you can produce and be successful in a cursed
environment is to have maximum chokmah,
maximum wisdom. So by putting the curse
upon labor God forces all men, Christian and non-Christian, to have to learn
more of his creation, and have to learn to manage it more wisely than he would
have had to had they not been sinners.
The curse, therefore, is actually great in one sense; it forces us to
have to be more careful; it forces us to have to learn more carefully than we
would have to had the fall never occurred.
Visualize Adam in
the Garden once again for a simple illustration. Before the fall he could plant and he had
almost psychic control over the plant kingdom, the plants would grow the way he
wanted them to grow. He wouldn’t have to
know all the little details, the plants would grow simply and effortlessly. But now, after the fall, what happens? He has competition; predators come in and
take his crops; the crops themselves don’t come out right; he has weeds, he has
all these things. What is Adam going to
do in order to survive? He’s going to
have to learn more about God’s creation and how it works. So the curse drives us to learn more in order
to produce than we would normally have had to learn. We have to learn how to meet the enemy; we
have to have deeper insights into the creation.
So the fifth
principle, illustrated time and time again in the book of Proverbs and I’ll
give you several of the verse references, Proverbs 10:4-5; Proverbs 12:27, look
at Proverbs 12:27 for a moment, the fifth principle is that labor in a fallen
world to be successful requires great wisdom.
We are driven to be wise, whether we like the God of wisdom or not we
have to bow our knee to His laws. Even
the non-Christian has to bow his knee to the created order; he can’t escape
it. And so in verse 27 it says, “The
slothful man roasts not that which he took in hunting, but the substance of a
diligent man is precious.” Now what does
that verse mean? The idea here is that
the slothful man, the lazy man, the man who violates the created order in the
area of labor is a man who does not finish his job; he kills his game but he
never puts the finishing touches, he never cooks it, he just eats it raw,
that’s the picture. He is too lazy to
finish the job and the person who is diligent is the one who his job counts so
much that he’s going to finish it.
So here is another
illustration of the fact that we are driven… driven mind you, by the curse to
stick at it until it’s done or we lose everything we have. You’ve got to stick through to the end. Again, how did that happen? It came about by the curse.
Now let’s try to
match all of these five principles of the Christian life. We’ve dealt with labor. We’ve seen the common sense view that you’ll
see in every day life. Nothing strange,
nothing supernatural about any of these five principles. Every one here should know these five
principles. Proverbs has just simply
observed them for you. But now let’s
take these five principles and show where they apply in the Christian life. We call it the faith technique, the idea of
receiving God’s grace, at the cross of Christ for your salvation; moment by
moment as a believer, but we say there are two parts to the faith technique:
there is a doing and there is a resting.
And some say well where do you stop doing and start resting? What’s the difference between these? All right, if you understand labor you can
more adequately see where the difference is.
God, in His grace
when He saved Adam, didn’t say Adam, now you can stop farming, did He? Did God do the farming for Adam? No.
What did God do then, for Adam?
God reestablished his relationship with Adam; God gave Adam certain
promises; He gave a certain lineage so that Adam, even though he sat there and
watched one son being murdered, he watched another son as the murderer and
would have thrown up his hands and said oh horrors of horrors in a fallen
world, I have no control of it, God comes in to control part of the situation
in a direct way by giving a promise to Eve.
Remember how Eve got her name?
Eve’s name wasn’t Eve, Eve’s name was isha, that’s the Hebrew word for woman, isha; Eve didn’t get her name at creation. At creation it was ish and isha, and that’s
all. Well where, then, did Eve get her
name Eve? She got her name from the
Hebrew word life, and Jesus Christ came to Adam in the Garden of Eden and said
your wife is the mother of life. And
Adam accepted this; that was the first gospel presentation in history; it was a
promise that Jesus Christ would come out of the line of the woman.
So although Adam
could watch the frustration of one son murdered, another son a criminal, he
knew by God’s promise there would be one son from that woman who would
ultimately lead to the salvation of the human race. So what did God’s grace do? It provides something for which Adam could
not do. Adam could not do anything about
the son that was murdered; that was beyond his control. Adam couldn’t do anything to his other son
who would be now a murderer before God, that was beyond Adam’s control. Is Adam then a victim of chaos and
chance? No, God in sovereign grace promises
certain things to Adam that he cannot himself do. Therefore, in the area of life over which
Adam has no control, he rests; he doesn’t worry, he rests in God’s gracious
promise.
Now let’s watch
how this operates in the Christian life.
The first principle of labor was what?
All labor requires tools and capital.
What are our tools and capital as Christians? It goes back to our position in the Lord
Jesus Christ. Positional truth, once
again, we’ll go over this and over this and over this and over this until we
all learn it, and I know from counseling that we all haven’t learned it. So let’s go through it again. These are your capital assets, that God the
Father gives you at the point of salvation.
You may or may not be aware of these but you get them all free when you
become a Christian. Let’s look at them
again.
The Father, what
does He do? He foreknows, now
technically this happened to you in eternity but I’m just saying that you
become aware of your capital at this point.
God foreknows, He predestines, He calls, He justified, He glorifies, and
He disciplines. Those are six things
that God the Father gives you or makes you aware of at the time you are saved,
the time you become a Christian. You may
not know these; learn them; they are things that God has invested in your
life. When you come up to some problem
in your life some frustration, God has given you the capital to employ; God has
already put into your hands these things.
Why do you act as though these things aren’t so?
Take justification
for example; how many people really understand justification today? Very few.
Don’t you realize that three to four hundred years ago men lost their
lives because of their position on whether they were for or against
justification? Everybody in the ancient
world of Europe knew justification. They
fought wars over it. What is
justification? Where can you use this in
your life? It’s capital that God the
Father has given you to deal with the problem of guilt. When you have done something, when you face
tremendous guilt, justification says God the Father has decreed your
righteousness. He has decreed it in a
point in time, He will never un-decree it, he will never re-decree it, it is
once for all over, and it means that your entire life has been declared legally
justified in His sight. You cannot be
hauled into court for the same crime twice; law of double jeopardy. Therefore, justification means God the Father
has held court, you have faced your judgment seat legally… you have faced your
judgment seat at the time you accept Christ as Savior. That’s when you face a judgment; you didn’t
even know you’re on trial, did you? But
you were on trial, your trial took a split second and the Father gave you the
judgment, justified.
Now, later on you go
on in the Christian life, you come across a guilty situation, you’re not using
this capital so you get guilty; Satan blinds your mind to this capital. He makes you out to be a poor person to
yourself, He would have you believe you don’t have any assets. It’s a lie.
These assets are yours by God’s decree and no human organization can
take them away from you. No church can
take them away from you; no pastor can take them away from you; no one can take
these things away from you. They’re
given you at the time that you accept Christ as Savior. All right, those are some things that the
Father does for you.
What are the
things the Son does for you? He was the
one that made possible absolute righteousness for your account. He credited, the word “impute” was a banking
word used in the ancient world, it means credit, that’s what it means, He
credits to your account His righteousness.
That’s why the Father can justify you.
It’s called the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. And by the way, you don’t feel it
either. God’s righteousness through
Christ; Christ died, that gives you an exit from this world’s domination and
tyranny. Christ rose from the dead,
Christ ascended to be at the Father’s right hand; Christ is now in the session,
Christ is now making intercession for you.
All these things are your assets, this is your capital. This is what you should use in your labor for
the Lord. These are things that He has
given and He expects production. See,
that’s the other catch to this whole thing.
Positional truth is necessary, not only for your psychological peace,
but for something even greater, that’s the only way you can produce in the
Christian life. If you don’t know these
things you can’t produce in the Christian life, you have nothing to produce
with, you’ve got no tools.
The filling of the
Holy Spirit, what does this do? It makes
regeneration, indwelling, baptism, sealing, spiritual gifts, and His
intercession real to you. These are
things the Holy Spirit has done, He’s regenerated you, He indwells you, He
baptizes you and that occurs at the point of salvation, not later. He seals you, that’s eternal security, He
gives you at least one spiritual gift.
See, all these things are given as investments to be used by you. God is going to judge you, God is going to
judge me, by how well we have invested the capital He puts into our lives at
the time we accept Christ. Are we or are
we not wise businessmen in how we are using the capital.
All right, so in
spiritual labor, the same principle as in the normal common sense every day
world; you’ve got to have something to labor with, and you can’t go through the
Christian life laboring on the basis of feelings. Can you imagine a businessman that doesn’t
give any capital to somebody and he wants them to set up a business? He says now you just feel good and you run
this business by your feelings. Imagine
how far that would go, it would be ridiculous.
Now God doesn’t run the Christian life that way. He gives you something, literally, has
something that has been given to your life; these things, you find about them
in Scripture, you find out how to use them.
So the first principle of labor spiritually is that you’ve got to know
your capital assets in order to invest them for Christ.
The second principle
of common sense, everyday laboring, why it’s reflected in the Christian life:
you can’t avoid the labor. See, you
can’t avoid laboring in the Christian life.
Turn to Hebrews 4:11, I just want to point you to verse 11, that labor
is unavoidable in the Christian life.
“Let us labor, therefore, to enter into that rest, lest any man fall
after the same example of unbelief.” Did
you ever notice the word “labor” there?
Remember I just went through the five judgments; starvation is one
judgment upon lack of labor, government’s interference, unemployability,
screwed up business, all these judgments in their every day common sense world,
is it going to be any different in the Christian world for lazy believers. Now if God is the same God that has designed both
worlds, there’s a commonality of principles and there is a labor in the
Christian life, but it’s related to faith.
Notice it says, “lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief.” Now that seems to imply that before you can
operate by faith some labor is required; there is labor required in faith
itself.
What are some
areas of labor involved in operating by faith?
Well, what do you have to know before you can believe? You’ve got to know God’s truth for you, don’t
you? So isn’t there labor involved in
first taking in the Word; that’s labor, that’s work that’s done
spiritually. That’s why so few people do
it. See, we have spiritual laziness,
let’s face it, the theological problems we face in the Christian church in the
last part of the 20th century mostly are just laziness. Why do you think that we have all this
business of flapping tongues at both ends, really. Is that work of the Holy Spirit or is that
just simply the fact that believers don’t want to labor where they have to
labor, where it is hard, where it is unspectacular to take the Word in hour by
hour, day by day, week by week. That’s
labor. But it’s unavoidable; you can try
to avoid it but you wind up getting judged for it, just like you would in the
everyday world.
Another area of
labor in the Christian life, it’s not just taking the Word in, but labor in
applying the Word. The application of
the Word of God in your life, not someone else’s, that’s easy, but applying it
in your personal life requires labor, it requires labor, it requires labor in
the point of prayer, it requires labor to understand principles clearly what
God is doing, how He is leading you, understanding your situation well enough
to apply those principles, all that is labor.
That involves labor and work and not to do it is being lazy. Oh, I have this spiritual problem… you bet,
laziness! I am too lazy to apply what I
know of the Word of God to my life, that takes work. That’s right!
But it is the same principle over and over, labor is required.
The third
principle of labor that carries over into the Christian life. Just as in the commons sense world of every
day experience, labor produces something valuable; all right, labor in the
Christian life produces something valuable.
Turn to 1 Corinthians 3, Paul speaks of the fact that he is producing
something that was valuable, but he didn’t mean it just as an apostle, he meant
it as a fellow believer with us. He said
my Christian life is going to produce something valuable, it’s going to have my
marks, I’m going to be known in the gates of heaven for it, just like the woman
in Proverbs 31 was known, not just because she labored but because of the way
she labored, her product, whatever it was, a service, a garment, something had
her marks, her personal marks on it and she’s known by it; it adds to her
testimony.
And so 1
Corinthians 3:9, “For we are laborers together with God,” … “We are laborers
together with God!” And then he
describes the value of it which we have dealt with before in verse 13, that God
is going to evaluate our labor, He’s going to tell us whether it was worthwhile
or not. And we ought to understand that
He is going to tell us whether our labor was worthwhile or not, a very sobering
fact. So the third principle, then, is
that Christian labor produces something of value, just as labor in the common
realm does.
The fourth
principle, spiritual labor is frustrating; besides the famous passage of Romans
7, since we’re in Corinthians let’s turn to our favorite verse, 1 Corinthians
10:13, it’s the one that every Christian violates at least once a day. Christian labor in the spiritual realm is
frustrating but this is a guarantee clause, and it says that you’ll never meet
a frustration greater than the grace of God, already available to you. You may think you do, and all the time you
hear oh, I can’t do this, I’m at the end of my rope. “There has no testing taken you” notice the
end, God “will make a way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” Sorry; I have had more fights over this verse
than any other verse in Scripture—but you don’t understand, you see, my problem
is different from everybody else’s. What
does this say? It “is common to man,”
but you don’t understand… God does, and this is what He said. So this is a verse that is in this fourth
area, labor applied in the spiritual realm is frustrating but never totally
so. Never totally so; you will never
meet a frustration greater than God’s grace.
You may hit between the eyes and flat on your back, knocked out spiritually,
but when you wake up this should be the first thing you know. I don’t care how bad it is, there’s got to be
a solution to the problem. I can tell
you there are many problems I face all the time that I don’t know the answer
to. What keeps me going? Because I know there’s got to be an answer to
it, this verse says so. I don’t know
what it is but I know there has to be one, and so you keep pressing and
pressing and pressing and pressing until you find it.
And finally, the
fifth application of the principle of the law of labor from the area of common
sense over into the spiritual life. What
was the fifth principle? The curse
forced us to become wiser; now in order to survive we really have to know what
we’re doing. So therefore the New
Testament comes through again for us.
Ephesians 3, here is what Paul prays for each one of us. And he prays it because we face an awesome
thing. If we could only see, just for a
slit second have the scales lift off our eyes, just for a split second, to
watch right in this room right now the principalities and the powers that hate
us, that hate the Lord Jesus Christ with whom we are identified, if you could
just see right now the awesomeness of the power of darkness that would destroy
us physically…. If you want to see their
attitude toward us read your history, read what the principalities and powers
had permission to do in the first and second century when Christians were
physically tortured, when Nero had parties in the city of Rome and he couldn’t
have any outdoor lights so he stuck Christians on posts and put tar and oil all
over them and burned them and while they were screaming he had his big orgies
on the patio. That’s how he lit up his
parties, with burning Christians. That’s
what the principalities and powers would have all of us be, burning torches so
they could have their light. That’s what
they want. Now it’s only by God’s grace
that we’re not burning torches today; it’s only by grace. There’s a very narrow decree here that
separates and protects us and we ought always to be conscious of this.
Now in Ephesians 3
Paul says it’s hard and therefore assets are required. And so in Ephesians 3:17 he prays “That
Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith,” literally it does not mean dwell, it
means to be at home, that His nature would be at home in your hearts, Christ in His humanity is at the
Father’s right hand at the throne room, not in our hearts. “That Christ’s nature,” literally, “would be
in your hearts by faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, [18] May
be able to comprehend,” notice this, those of you who may feel inferior because
you never (quote) “had an education,” you never had a degree, you never went to
college, God bless you, you have less human viewpoint in you because you never
did go to college; in that way you’re far ahead of the person who went to
college. It says that you, every
believer, “may be able to comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth, and
length, and depth, and height, [19] And to know the love of Christ, which
passes knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Now that’s a
fantastic promise; Paul prayed it for you and for me. He intended that we have the maximum
wisdom. Now it’s not going to come by
just sitting here letting it come to you.
It doesn’t work that way, any more than it does in the common sense
world; in the common sense world when you get hired for a job, you have
frustrations on that job, how do you meet the frustrations? You gradually learn, don’t you, you develop skill
by practice on the job; same thing in the Christian life, you develop this kind
of wisdom, even though Paul prays for you, it’s not going to strike you like a
light when you walk out the door. This
comes just like it comes on a regular job, by practice, making mistakes, being
corrected and moving on. It’s the same
principle.
Next week we’re
going to deal with the last phases of this area of Proverbs, the problem of
money. Some have asked me about
Christian texts in this area. If you
look at the back of the bulletin I have listed two of the only books that I
know available today that are written by people who appear to know what they
are saying. One is by Rousas John
Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law
in which he covers the laws of