Ecclesiastes Chapter 7:9-12

Is forgiveness a part of your life?
Is a bad temper a part of your life?
Do you wish you could go back to the "good ole days"?
How often do you ask for help from God when going through life and making decision. He delights in giving us His wisdom, but are we asking for it?

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome to our Bible study. We are in the Book of Ecclesiastes. We've worked our way through the first six chapters, and now we're in chapter seven. And we did do the first couple of verses last time we met, and now we're gonna begin with verse 9, and we're gonna go through verse 12, and then just touch on verse 13. So, my prayer and my hope is that as you listen to this, that God, through his Holy Spirit speaking to you, will help all of us transform us to be more like Jesus, to be more loving, to be more forgiving, to be more caring, more compassionate, to love him more, to give him the honor and the glory and the praise that he and he alone is due because he is so holy and wonderful and great. And to give him thanksgiving for all the things that he has done in our lives. And so as we dig into uh Ecclesiastes 7, beginning with verse 9, open your Bibles today and let's go. So before we sing glorious, I want to read this. Um this is this is out of uh a couple of new uh volumes, a new book that I've got called The Existence and Attributes of God by Stephen Charnock. He was a uh he was a Puritan preacher, incredible uh insight into the glory of God. This part wasn't uh written by him, it was written by a man by the name of uh Benjamin Grossvener. And I want you I want you to listen to this. Listen to how this guy, uh Dr. Grossvener, interpreted the love of Christ on the cross. And this comes out of a uh uh a tome that he wrote called the Temper, the Temper of Christ. And um in this discourse, and it's only a couple of paragraphs long, in this discourse, the Savior is introduced by way of illustrating his command that repentance and remission of sins should be preached unto all nations, beginning at Jerusalem, is giving the apostles directions how they are to proceed in carrying out this requirement. Among other things, he is represented as saying to them. So now this is imaginary, this is not biblical, but this is Dr. Grossvener's interpretation of what Jesus would say to those that nailed him to the cross. So this is Jesus speaking, if you will. Go into all nations and offer this salvation as you go, but lest the poor house of Israel should think themselves abandoned to despair, the seed of Abraham, my ancient friend, as cruel and unkind as they have been, go, make them the first offer of grace. Let those who struck the rock drink first of its refreshing streams, and those who drew my blood be welcome to its healing virtue. Tell them that I was set as I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, so if they will be gathered, I will be their shepherds still, though they despised my tears that I shed over them, and cursed my blood to be upon them. Tell them, 'twas for their sakes I shed both, that by my tears I might soften their hearts toward God, and by my blood I might reconcile God to them. Tell them, you have seen the prints of the nails on my hands and feet, and the wounds of the spear in my side, and that those marks of their cruelty are so far from giving me avenging thoughts that if they will but repent, every wound they have given me speaks in their behalf, pleads with the Father for the remission of their sins, and enables me to bestow it. Nay, if you meet that poor wretch who thrust that spear into my side, tell him there is another way, a better way of coming at my heart. If he will repent and look on him whom he has pierced and will mourn, I will cherish him in that very bosom he has wounded. He shall find the blood he shed and ample atonement for the sin of shedding it. And tell him from me, he will put me in more pain and displeasure by refusing this offer of my blood than when he first drew it forth. Isn't that incredible? That is the love of Jesus for each and every person. He's pleading, if you will, in this commentary. He's pleading with those that have yet to come to him. And he's saying, I know what you did to me. I know why you did to me. I know the reasons behind it. I know you hated me. I know you loathed me. I know you called for Barabbas to be saved and for me to be killed. Yet, yet I love you. And all this stuff that took place, we know that it was the Father's will that this would take place. But all this stuff took place that you might be able to have life and life eternal. That the door of heaven has been opened because of what you did to me. And now I say, turn, Jesus is saying, turn all that around and receive the blood that you caused to be spilled to cover your sins, past, present, and future. Just an incredible, incredible savior that we have. It's it it's unit's unbelievable. You and you know, I don't I don't think we'll get to it tonight, but we're we have part of part of our study, either this time or next, is gonna be about forgiveness. Um and and uh He calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. He wants us to be the same way. He wants us to take those that hurt us, that do us harm, that talk bad to us, and he wants us to receive them in his name. What what what did he what did he tell us? You know, you have heard, you know, to uh hate your neighbor. I'm telling you, love your neighbor, turn the other cheek. And we find it so difficult to do. So all of us, we find it so hard to do. We just want to lash out. There's an incredible commentary on what our Savior has done for the lost, which at one time was you and me. So we're in Ecclesiastes chapter 7, and um we're going to uh start with verse 9, and I'm going to initially read through verse 12, and if we get past that, I'll continue to read uh on beyond that. 9 through 12. This is the uh NASB. Do not be uh eager in your heart to be angry, for anger resides in the bosom of fools. Do not say, why is it that the former days were better than these? For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this. Wisdom, along with an inheritance, is good and an advantage to those who see the sun. For wisdom is protection, just as money is protection. But the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the lives of its possessors. So I'm gonna stop there for a moment as we uh dig into those uh three or four verses. We all struggle with anger, some of us more than others. Uh but we are warned here, as in other parts of scripture, to not fly off the handle because such a lack of self-control reveals a decided weakness of character within us. And it is indeed our character that Solomon, the preacher, is focusing on in this part of Ecclesiastes. So this uh this becomes continues to be very relevant when we talk about these types of things. The question we always need to ask ourselves is do we want to be more like Jesus? And it's a it's really a simple yes or no. Do we want to be more like Jesus, regardless of where we are in our walk? If we do, our anger does not display our love for him or for our neighbor, for that matter. James tells us this in James 1, 19 and 20, reading out of the ESV now. Know this, my beloved brothers. Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger. For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. So, like uh in James also says God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. So if you or I really want to be sure a hundred percent that God is against what we're doing, do it with pride. Because James says God's against the proud. And like here, if we want to be a hundred percent sure that we don't want to show the righteousness of God through our lives, then be unduly angry. Be unduly angry. You think you're pretty righteous, you look at your life and you say, hey, I think I'm doing pretty good, and all these, and a lot of things that we consider, but then we have to ask ourselves, what about our anger? Do you get angry easily? Do you get angry quickly? If you do, it's not righteous anger, and you're not producing the righteousness of God. In other words, you're not displaying the goodness of the God that you claim to worship. This passage in Ephesians goes on to tell us this. Be angry and do not sin. So Paul is telling us there must be an anger that's okay. That would be a righteous anger, okay? Like the Lord turning the tables over on the money changers in the temple. Why are you turning my father's house into a den of thieves? That's righteous anger. Jesus was no question about it. He was ticked off that this stuff was going on, that the leaders of the church, of the synagogues, the Pharisees and uh scribes were uh exchanging money for uh um sacrifices that people could give, whether it was turtle doves or whatever it might be, according to how much they owned or possessed, but they would rip them off while they're doing it. And that ticked off Jesus. And so he went after those guys. So Paul says, be angry, do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. Uh, you know, we know this verse pretty well, but has it ever happened to anybody? Anybody ever go to bed and they're still angry? Maybe they're angry with their spouse, maybe they're still angry with their kids, maybe they're angry with their government, maybe they're angry with their boss. Paul tells us, don't let the sun go down on your anger. Why? He goes on to say, because it gives you an opportunity for the devil to enter in and work against the Lord in your life. If you find yourself that you're in that condition and position at the end of an evening, you must, if you want to be right with God, you must take time apart from whatever you're doing that evening. You got to fix that. You can't do it in your flesh. I can't do it in my flesh. But if we will yield our spirit to his dwelling within us, it can be done. We need to release it. We need to be a forgiving people, and we'll talk more about that. Jesus, after he gives the disciples the Lord's prayer, when they ask them how to pray, he repeats one of the parts of that Lord's prayer. It's so important, and we'll get into it again. It might not be this week, it might be next week. It's so important that he gives it to us again, and it's all about forgiveness. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouth, but only such as good for building up, as it fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you are sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath, wrath, fury, extreme anger, let all bitterness, uh, they can't stand that person at work, right? Or whatever it might be, or that person at church ticks me off. Let all of that and all of your wrath and anger and clamor, those clamoring is like a disruptive voice, right? Your spouse, you're at home, your spouse is trying to be calm during the evening, and you can't get this out of your mind, and you keep bringing it up, and you're kind of disrupting the evening, because you can't get this out of your mind. So let not any bitterness or wrath or anger or clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice, all kinds of hatred. What does Paul tell us to do? Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. How? As Christ in God forgave you. Think about what we read in that commentary. And that's how we are supposed to forgive. Not some of the time, all of the time. I'm not saying that it's always easy. Sometimes it's just a matter of pride. And that we need to crush. We need to allow the Spirit of God to crush that within us. Get rid of the pride, like we talked last week. We don't even want people to give us godly, compassionate, careful, thoughtful, loving, rebuking from one believer to another. We can't even stand that. And it's worth re-mentioning what David said in Psalm 141, 5. What he said was this you got a rebuke for me? Give it to me, he says. I want to hear it. What does he call it? A kindness. He calls it a kindness that someone would love someone so much that they would be honest with them. Jabe Stopson used to call it tough love. And Solomon Ecclesiastes says, do that as opposed to hidden love. Oh, I'd really like to tell this person that it's true, and I love them, and they're my friend, and but I'm just afraid too, because I'm a I'm maybe maybe that maybe our friendship will be wrecked by it. That's hidden love. And it's at those times when you need to speak up to correct someone in the love of Christ. Someone has said that you can judge the size of a man or a woman by the size of what it takes to make him or who or her lose their temper. And if we nurse grudges and resentments, we expose ourselves as fools and carry a burden in our own hearts that will make us an unforgiving Christian individual. And that, quite frankly, is in itself a foolish way to live. Ponder this for a moment. Matthew 6, 14 and 15. If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins. Now we're gonna go into this in more depth, but that was after the Lord's Prayer, where G when the disciples say, Lord, teach us how to pray, and part of that prayer was, Lord, forgive us our trespasses as those who trespass against us, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Jesus said in those very words, here's what he's saying. Ask the Lord to forgive your sins, but do so only as you forgive the sins of those that have been committed against you. It's a conditional thing. And I'm gonna read you a comment. Again, if we get to it, that's gonna be maybe it's not gonna be hard to understand, it's gonna be hard to swallow. But I believe it to be true, and when we get there, we'll learn more about it. So instead, remember at those times when you're irritated, when you're angry, when you when you're furious, when you're seething, or even it's not necessarily that bad, just when you're angry. Be kind to one another, be tenderhearted to one another, and be forgiving of the other person always, because that's what Jesus did for you. Then as we move on to verses 10 to 12, say not, Solomon says, Why were the former days better than these? For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. Wisdom is good with an inheritance, an advantage to those who see the sun, for the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money, and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it. One of the marks of maturity and good character is the ability to face life as it comes to us. Right? We become responsible. There's a responsibility just being a person, being a human being, uh, being a responsible human being to say, you know what, this is this is coming after me, and I'm going to respond to it. But more importantly for us, God's children, there's a there's a responsibility of accepting what's coming at us and dealing with it through the Word of God, through prayer, and using the Holy Spirit dwelling within us so that God can be glorified. When you or I have and utilize God's wisdom, we will both be able to accept and deal with the changing experiences of life, even though we might be presented with some very bad conditions. But wanting to live in the past is not how we do that. It's not reality. You know, Solomon says if you want to do that, it's not from wisdom that you ask these things. When I was doing my study for this part, it was about two weeks ago in the newspaper. You probably can't all read this or maybe put something behind it so you can see it. Um, but it was Ziggy, and he's reading the paper, and it says inflation rises, and he says, it's getting harder and harder to believe that years from now someone is going to look back on these as the good old days. You know, we're we're living through them, and and uh, you know, pepperoni bread used to be $350 and now it's seven bucks. Uh eggs, eggs used to be $1.75 and now they're $350. Now, whatever they are, right? We're living through all these things. But you know, um how many times we have said, Oh, I wish we could go back to the good old days. They were so much better. And you know, there is something to be said for thinking about and reliving in your mind or in my mind the good times that we had in those days, right? Things were simpler to us, maybe because if you go back far enough, we were just kids, right? But um, our parents were dealing with things we weren't thinking about. And I just wrote a few things down when we talk about gee, I'm I'm longing for the good old days. So I was born in the 50s. That's right, people, the 50s. It is old. So I I wrote this down. Oh, I wish I could go back to the time when things were so much better. It was at that time, but it was at that time that there was a nuclear power race between the United States and Russia. I remember being told in our school, don't lick icicles that form or eat the snow because there were so many atomic bombs that were being detonated in the atmosphere that there was too much radiation uh that would that was in the rain that would turn to snow or or turn to ice. And so just just don't do that. That's how many atomic explosions were taking place in the in the uh skies back in the 50s. I remember being in school having to go through uh civil defense drills that if there is an atomic blast, um, if we're ever bombed with atomic bombs. You know, we needed to either hide under our desk or stand next to a block wall where our lockers were. Not sure what that was going to do in an atomic bomb blast, right? But that's where we're that's where uh does anybody remember the old civil defense markers on the outside of buildings, right? Uh yellow and black.

unknown 22:19

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

So they were they were thrown on buildings by the government saying that inside this place it's a safer place to be in the event of a nuclear uh explosion. Or maybe let's forget the 50s, let's jump to the 60s. That'd be a great time to go back to, right? 60s brought about the beginning of the removal of prayer from school. And when you, I'm a firm believer in this, that uh when you look at the way our society is today, to the great extent, it's because prayer and God was removed from public schools. I can remember going back to 9-11. Um, somebody asked Ruth Graham Bell why she thought this took place, 9-11, and she said, you know, from a public standpoint, we've asked God not to be in our schools, not to be in our courtrooms, not to be in our town halls, and not to be in the public square. And God gave us what we asked for. And we've with that, he has removed his hand of protection over this nation. Uh public schools, many of us don't know this. I I did a lot of reading about 15 years ago on how our public schools were designed and what they were taught, what the kids were taught in schools. And uh there was up until actually Texas, I think, was the last state to discard a it's called a primer, P-R-I-M-E-R. It's it's the way kids would learn to read or write or do arithmetic, in this case, learning how to read, spell, and write. And that primer had every letter of the alphabet in it, and it followed with a biblical character or a biblical theme or a biblical place. So, you know, A Adam might be in there, right? And it would go B Bethlehem. And that's how kids learned their alphabet. That's how they learned to spell. And in Texas, again, which was, I believe, the last state that removed that from the public school systems, they were that that type of stuff was all gone by then. And New York State, I don't know this for sure, but probably led the way. Um how about the great free love of the 60s, which we are still partaking in as a culture and as a society, even today? It's not gone away, it's not gotten less, it's gotten greater, to the extent that from a society standpoint, it is 100% acceptable for a man and a woman to live together outside of marriage. It's not just um, all right, keep it quiet. I love you, and you know, you're my kid or whatever, but don't let anybody know. It's way past that, right? It's it's out there, oh yeah, I I live with my girlfriend or my boyfriend, and you know, we're gonna do this for three or four or five years to make sure we're really got our act together, and then maybe we'll get married at that point. And um, you know, so the the attitude in the 60s was if it feels good, do it. And if it doesn't hurt anybody else, do it. And as long as the as long as the partner was consenting, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. See, when you take God out of the equation, when you take him out of the equation, you take sin out of the equation, and you take punishment out of the equation. So when you don't believe there's a God, then there's no such thing as sin. And if there's no such thing as sin, there's no punishment for sin. We went there in a great way back in the 60s, and we're still there today. It's one of the things that makes people feel wonderful about themselves. There's no God. I'm responsible to no one or no entity, no supreme being, no creator, no ruler of the universe. That's fantasy in your mind to help you get through life. And I'm not gonna buy into that fantasy, and I'm just gonna do whatever I want to do. There's a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it causes destruction, is what Solomon says in the Proverbs, right? And that is a major one we're living with today. And um, and it and it's not certainly not getting any better because now we can add homosexual relationships to that, which aren't quite at the point where they're acceptable to everybody in society, but they're pushing it and they're pushing it very, very hard. You know, you think about when I think about the organization, the pro-life organizations like Compass Care and all of those that are standing for life, most of the women, not all, but the vast majority of the women that want an abortion are living with their boyfriend. They are not married. Now, there are married women that come in that don't want babies, but by far and away, it is the unmarried. And they're unmarried, and so the boyfriend says, if you don't get an abortion, I'm leaving. And the woman feels like if she's alone, she really needs him to lean on. Maybe he's part of her income. Maybe they're able to leave live in the apartment they're in because he provides some income for that, and he says, Don't get an abortion, and I'm out of here. And so she looks at these things. Look, it is an extremely stressful time for the woman. There's no the reason they call it crisis pregnancy is because that's what it is. They see no way out. And um, the government, of course, would say, Well, we'll provide a way out, we'll kill the baby. And and those that are pro-life are saying, wait a minute, there's another way out. You, we can empower you to understand that we'll give you the hope, we'll give you the strength to get through this, we'll provide financial aid, we'll come alongside you after the baby is born and provide aid for diapers and formula and all that kind of stuff. We'll have a woman with you to pray with you and support you for as long, apparently for as long as you need some of these organizations. That's the way to go, right? But that the 60s brought this. The rampant living together and getting pregnant has increased the number of abortions incredibly. Hippies everywhere in the 60s, doing whatever they wanted to do, regardless of what the Bible told any of us. Maybe the 70s. Maybe that's a decade we can look back on. Yeah, that was a great one in our history if we go back to 1973. Happened to be the year that the Supreme Court said that you can kill a baby. You know, it it forced every state in the nation to allow abortion up to at least uh 20 weeks into pregnancy. And some states, like New York, actually legalized abortion before 1973. And and um it's legal now in New York, thanks to uh Cuomo and the legislature back when he was still governor. It is legal now up to and including the uh point where the woman is actually giving birth to her nine-month-old baby. You get the idea. Again, we can go back and think, boy, we you know, I had a blast playing baseball with my buddies and that stuff, and there's nothing wrong with doing that. But Solomon says, look, to go back to those days is foolishness, it's not wise. You're living today. God has ordained your life to be right now, right in the place where you is. He's ordained that. If you believe he's in control of everything, then you need to believe that. And he's got you here for a reason. One of the most powerful statements that uh Jim Harden of Compass Care, uh president and CEO of Compass Care, said in my mind was about three or four years ago. And he said this we don't know if we're gonna win this battle against abortion, but is there a better fight to be in even if we lose? And that's always stuck with me. And and one of the things he said was, Why do you think God's got you in New York State? A horrible state to live in, disastrous state to live in politically and morally. It's horrendous. Why do you think he's got you here? He's got you here to help us fight this fight. And it might not be compass care for you guys, it might be something else. If it's not anything else, get there to be something else and fight the fight while God's got you here. Now, Solomon's thought with regard to wisdom in verses 11 and 12 go like this. Again, wisdom is good with an inheritance, an advantage to those who see the sun, for the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money, and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it. Let me read this from the New Living Translation. It helps to make a little bit more easier to understand for me. Wisdom is even better when you have money. Now, if we even stop there, that doesn't sound like Solomon. He's, you know, in Ecclesiastes and throughout Proverbs, he gives us a lot of warnings about what money can do to you. But here's what he writes. And remember, he's writing, but it's the words of the Holy Spirit that he's writing. Wisdom is even better when you have money. Both are a benefit as you go through life. Wisdom and money can get you almost anything, but only wisdom can save your life. Again, let me read a in contrast out of Proverbs 8, 10 through 12, again in the New Living Translation. Choose my instruction rather than silver and knowledge rather than pure gold. For wisdom is far more valuable than rubies. Nothing you desire can compare with it. I, wisdom, live together with good judgment. I know where to discover knowledge and discernment. That's a good proverb for all of us to put into our memory banks, right? Wisdom is far more valuable than rubies. Not our wisdom, God's wisdom. We need to ask for God's wisdom. Otherwise, we start flying off and think we're so independent and we're so smart, we're so wise, we can do it all ourselves when we are desperate for his wisdom. He tells us in James that it pleases him to give us his wisdom when we ask for it. Why are we asking for it? In all these varied exhortations about life and death and about wisdom and folly, about waiting patiently to see what God will do, Solomon is teaching us the right way to live and the right way to look at life. He ends these exhortations by restating the value of wisdom, which he says is good with an inheritance. It's an advantage to those who see the sun. For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money, and the advantage of knowledge is that. Wisdom preserves the life of him who has it. The connection that Solomon makes here, again, is pretty surprising, especially when we read Proverbs and either even other parts in Ecclesiastes. But here the Bible merely says that wisdom is as good as an inheritance, which is another way to translate verse 11, and that the insurance it affords is like the protection of money. Solomon knows all too well that money does not last forever. But as long as we have it, money is useful in providing some protection against the practical difficulties of life. If you're fighting a disease and need to go to the doctor, or you're fighting a disease and the doctor has given you a prescription, and in either case you can't afford to go to the doctor or to get the prescription, where does that put you? It puts you in a lesser condition than it does the one that can afford to pay for that doctor's appointment, to pay for that hospital visit, to pay for those prescriptions. Money's good to put gasoline in the gas tank, to buy a vehicle, you think about it, to put heat in your house, all that stuff. Because when you take that away, and there's a lot of people on this planet that don't have those things, you know, we call them poor, and they are poor, and they're living in huts, they're living under the stars, they haven't got what we've got. And that's simply, I think, what Solomon is saying here is that money provides protection against the practical difficulties of life. Listen, if my hot water, if soon my hot water heater breaks tomorrow and it's the 2,000 bucks to fix it, am I better off if I have the 2,000 or if I don't have the 2,000? It's a rhetorical question. I'm gonna be taking cold showers if I don't have the money to replace the hot water heater. The dishes are gonna be washed in cold water. It's obviously a privilege and a protection against the practical difficulties that come to every one of us in life. Similarly, wisdom is protection as well, but it's protection for the soul. Not protection against the physical things that might take place in our lives, but it's protection for the soul. It helps us deal with the realities of the not so good things that might happen in our lives, including if we go back to our last week's study, death. Because we all have to face it. It guards us, wisdom guards us against being rash in our anger and in our wrath. It helps us take a longer-term view of what God might be doing in the world, even if he doesn't share it exactly with us. Wisdom may even save our souls, because Solomon claims that it preserves the life of him who has it. True spiritual wisdom gives us spiritual vitality as long as we live. And when it comes time for us to die, it will lead us to everlasting life. Because wisdom will point us to the cross. Listen to this kind of wisdom from a man that lived many, many, many years ago. His name was Charles Ward. He had this kind of wisdom that Solomon is talking about. Ward served in the Union Army during the Civil War as a sergeant with the 32nd Massachusetts Volunteers. In one of his last letters home, he wrote this quote, I hope I may come home again, but life here is uncertain. End quote. And think about how we would react. This guy is going to this guy is going to reveal to us wisdom from above. Dear mother, I may not see you again, but do not fear for your tired soldier boy. Death has no fears for me. My hope is still firm in Jesus. Meet me and Father, capital F, meet me and Father in heaven with all our dear friends. I have no special message to send you, but bid you all a happy farewell. Your affectionate and soldier son, Charles Ward. If we are wise, we're going to follow Charles Ward's example by laying death into our hearts and the other things that come flying at us and looking ahead to what God has planned for each one of us in and through Christ, we can live wisely and we can die wisely. And I think that's what Solomon is trying to tell us in this passage. Now, let me read verse 13. And I'm only going to read verse 13, and we'll do uh 10 minutes of of a study. And hopefully the Lord and the Spirit will wet your whistle, and you want to dig into this more, and and we'll have a go into a much deeper understanding of this one verse. Consider the work of God. Who can make straight what he has made crooked? Before we move on, I want us to think of this, these verses from Isaiah 55, 6 through 9, ESV. Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near, let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, let him return to the Lord that he may have compassion on him. Now, if we just stop right there, do you see what kind of God we have? Do you see who God is? Let the wicked forsake their way and the unrighteous man toss his thoughts aside. Why? Why? And return to me, he says, why? So that I, this is God speaking, so that I may have compassion on him. He never gives up on the lost. He never stops yearning for the lost to come to him through Christ his son. His will is that none should perish. Let me go on. Let him return to the Lord that he may have compassion on him and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. Wow. Did he abundantly pardon you when he saved you? He abundantly pardoned me and continues to abundantly pardon me every single day of my life. But then he goes on to say, and I think he's saying this for this reason, you guys are not going to understand why I am the way that I am. Because, you know, even though he does say vengeance is mine, and vengeance is his, that's why we should never have vengeance on anyone, because God says that's his purview, that's his domain to have vengeance against him. That's not ours. But he's going to say, you know what, this might sound like, especially to the Jew, who were, they were God's chosen people. And the Gentiles were on the outside looking in, so the Jew thought, right? And God is for us, and look what he's done for us, and he's ours, and nobody else's. And so they kind of coveted the fact that God was theirs. And indeed, God did choose them as the apple of his eye. But they had it all wrong, and if they believe that way today, they still have it all wrong. Here's what God says to finish out this part of Isaiah. For my thoughts are not your thoughts. Somebody mistreats you, somebody spits in your face, somebody steals you from you, somebody uh has a discourse against you and wrecks your name, ruins your name, somebody beats you up physically. What's our response? I want to get even. And if I can get more than even, I want that too. God says, I'm not like that. I'm not like that. Remember the commentary we read in the beginning? All the things that we did to Jesus hanging on that cross, and he turns around and he says, Come to me. Come to me. You can get you think you got close to my heart by stabbing my side with that sword. I'll give you my heart if you only repent and turn to me. And God says, My thoughts aren't your thoughts. And we need to remember that, guys, not just in the context of Ecclesiastes, but in the context of our entire lives. My thoughts are not your thoughts, uh, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. Verse 9, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. And we're going to stop there. It's a good, it's a good place to stop to remind ourselves that we're not all that, that we don't have all the answers. That people can ask us, why is this happening? Or why is that happening? And it's, you know, we think we need an answer for everything. While God has given us brains to understand a lot of what's going on, He does not give us a brain. To understand everything that's going on. And he certainly, while he's revealed, you know, the Bible is God's mind, his thoughts that he wanted to share with us. And so he had men write his words using his Holy Spirit to give the words to men. These are God's thoughts from his heart and from his mind. Everything in the word of God, from Genesis 1.1 to Revelation 22, 21, nothing less and nothing more, is the heart of God. It's the mind of God that he had this incredible loving desire to say, I want to share this with you. If we didn't have the Bible, would we know we needed a savior? We wouldn't know we needed a savior. We wouldn't know how to repent of our sins. What would God be asking of us? Would we even think that we were separated from God? Would we even know that He was holy? We can't tell any of those things by looking at creation. You know, we have this general revelation, is what theologians call creation and the things around us, right? And we, you know, those that are thoughtful and uh don't have any predisposition can look out there and they can say, Wow, there must be a creator. This could not have happened by chance. It's absolutely impossible that this lily can look this beautiful. I don't care how much time goes by. It's incredible when I look at the mountains and the seas and the rivers and the waterfalls and just the majestic lands that are right here in New York State and all around the world to say that there isn't a creator. There's general revelation. And a thinking human being should look at that and say, wow, there must be a creator. And that creator must be outside of being a human being, maybe even outside of time. Who is he? I want to know more. I want to know more about him. What if you had that yearning or I had that yearning and there was no word of God? Nowhere to go. There's nowhere to turn. So God says, I love you so much. I created you and I love you so much. I am going to share some of my mind, some of my heart with you. Not all of it, maybe not even a lot of it, but enough that you will see who I am, who you are, and your need for me to provide a savior so that my wrath can be deterred, can be put away, can be put aside, and so that you can be reconciled back to me. I will provide the propitiation for your sins. That's what Jesus did on the cross. And that word means that he takes away our sin and removes the wrath of God from our lives. But don't forget, we don't know it all. God didn't share it all with us. And we're going to get into some verses where we're going to scratch our heads and we're going to say, wait a minute. And one of them is verse 13, if we really think about it. You mean God made stuff crooked? He did. Because Solomon says, consider the work of God. He has made crooked. That's a work of God. And Solomon goes on to say, Who can make straight what he has made crooked? Thank you for joining us in our latest Bible study. I certainly hope that it uh was informative for you and that it gets you to think as it has gotten me to think about forgiveness, about anger, and all the issues that Solomon talks to us about in verses 9 through 12. Next time we meet, we're going to be going through verse 13. It may be the only verse that we do in our next session because it is so, there is so much packed into that one verse that we need to uh try and dig out. We'll be mining in a gold mine as we uh dig into God's holy word. Be blessed until next time.