SPEAKER_01: Ecclesiastes chapter 5.
SPEAKER_01: If you're using the Bibles in front of you in the seat, this is page 555.
SPEAKER_01: Ecclesiastes and chapter 5.
SPEAKER_01: And the text that we're going to look at this morning is a rather short one.
SPEAKER_01: So I want to begin our time by just jumping straight into the text and reading from it.
SPEAKER_01: Ecclesiastes chapter 5.
SPEAKER_01: And I want to begin by reading our text for this evening.
SPEAKER_01: It's verses 1 through 7.
SPEAKER_01: So would you follow with me as I read from God's Word?
SPEAKER_01: Ecclesiastes chapter 5, beginning in verse 1.
SPEAKER_01: Guard your steps when you go to the house of God.
SPEAKER_01: To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know what they're doing.
SPEAKER_01: Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven, and you are on earth.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore let your words be few.
SPEAKER_01: For a dream comes with much busyness, and a fool's voice with many words.
SPEAKER_01: When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he hath no pleasure in fools.
SPEAKER_01: Pay what you vow.
SPEAKER_01: It's better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay.
SPEAKER_01: Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake.
SPEAKER_01: Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the works of your hands?
SPEAKER_01: For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity, but God is the one you must fear.
SPEAKER_01: This is the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: In my house we have four little kids, and so it seems like every couple weeks we're getting ready for another birthday.
SPEAKER_01: One of the frequent refrains in our house is our kids asking for their favorite thing at a birthday party, which is pinata, which is just marvelous because it's an easy thing for me to be able to pick up from the store and satisfy little ones.
SPEAKER_01: One of the interesting things about uh pignata is that different kids at different levels, different stages in their development, they react to this very differently.
SPEAKER_01: Uh some of our our our kids are pretty young, and when you spin them around a few times, it is hilarious.
SPEAKER_01: I think that in some ways the book of Ecclesiastes is a book that addresses kind of a pinata-like problem that human beings are all born with, and that is that all human beings are born fundamentally religious people, but like a little kid being tossed to and fro with their disorienting dizziness, all of us come into the world with religious disorientation.
SPEAKER_01: Our religious senses, naturally, when we're born into this world, are not right.
SPEAKER_01: We're all disoriented.
SPEAKER_01: We don't understand what is true and what is false, we don't understand how to seek God, how to find God.
SPEAKER_01: All of us are born into the world like a little kid being tossed around trying to find a pinata.
SPEAKER_01: That's the way we try to approach God when we come into the world.
SPEAKER_01: We are disoriented and we don't know how to find Him.
SPEAKER_01: And one of the functions of the Word of God is to reorient us, to take the blindfold off, to enable us to find God.
SPEAKER_01: And the text that we just read is a text that does exactly that.
SPEAKER_01: It's intended to be a text to teach us how to have our religious senses reoriented so that we can grasp hold of the real and true God and really know him.
SPEAKER_01: The book of Ecclesiastes, of course, is a famous book because of this line that the book begins with, wherein Solomon declares for us that he's tested everything there is to test in the world and has found that life under the sun, that is life just lived on this horizontal plane, disconnected from the God that made it, is empty.
SPEAKER_01: He declares, vanity of vanities, everything is vanity.
SPEAKER_01: And this word vanity, of course, this word hevel in the Hebrew means breath.
SPEAKER_01: Everything in life, apart from its connection to the God that made it, is like trying to grasp after your frothy breath on a cold day.
SPEAKER_01: It's just empty, it's fleeting, it slips through your fingers.
SPEAKER_01: That's the nature of all experiences for all of our lives lived under the sun, apart from the God who made us.
SPEAKER_01: And I just want to say, because we are looking at Ecclesiastes 5, it's kind of a hidden passage tucked in the middle of our Bibles, a word about the book of Ecclesiastes that I think might help us to orient ourselves as we approach this text that's intended to help us orient our religious senses.
SPEAKER_01: Because the book of Ecclesiastes is perhaps one of the less read books in the Bible, it's often, I think, misunderstood in this sense.
SPEAKER_01: It's easy to approach the book of Ecclesiastes as kind of a beginning and an end, and then a mystery in the middle.
SPEAKER_01: The beginning of Ecclesiastes says that all of life is vanity of vanities, and then at the end, the author says, the end of the matter, this is Ecclesiastes 12, verse 14, the end of the matter, all has been heard.
SPEAKER_01: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.
SPEAKER_01: And so the bookends of the book tell us the point of the book.
SPEAKER_01: All of life is empty if there is no God.
SPEAKER_01: All of human existence will be snuffed out like a candle, and it'll be as though it never even happened if there is no God.
SPEAKER_01: So the whole point of life is to know the God that made you, to fear him and to keep his commandments, because he will bring every deed into judgment, whether good or evil, because there is a God that made this world, and there is a life after this world.
SPEAKER_01: Everything that's done in this world has meaning.
SPEAKER_01: Every moment matters because God will bring every moment to judgment, and there'll be a reward or a consequence for everything you do in this life.
SPEAKER_01: That's the point of the book of Ecclesiastes, and it's there at the book ends.
SPEAKER_01: But what about the middle?
SPEAKER_01: In the middle of Ecclesiastes, I think in our reading of it, is too quickly skimmed over and assumed to be just a bunch of kind of negative criticism that life is meaningless, meaningless, meaningless without God.
SPEAKER_01: There's a sense in which certainly that's one of the refrains in the middle chapters of the book, but it's not all there is.
SPEAKER_01: And what I hope to show you as we read through and study Ecclesiastes chapter 5 this evening is that the middle of Ecclesiastes also has much to teach us in order to know God and enjoy the life that He's given us.
SPEAKER_01: The middle of Ecclesiastes, I would say, would be best read as something of a map.
SPEAKER_01: How do you get from this beginning conclusion that all of life apart from God is pointless to the final analysis wherein every moment matters because there is a God?
SPEAKER_01: How did Solomon get there?
SPEAKER_01: The middle of the book is like a map for how he got there.
SPEAKER_01: And it's wandering and it's meandering, and there are peaks and valleys because that's the way life works.
SPEAKER_01: It's a rhetorical device to help you to, as you read through the book, to make you feel like, yeah, life is like this.
SPEAKER_01: There are highs and lows, there are points in which it feels like I'm starting to understand, and then I'm plunged back into darkness.
SPEAKER_01: And if you will walk this journey with Solomon, you'll come to a deeper conviction that the point of the book is true, that what is most important in your life is that you know this God, you fear him, and you keep his commandments, because that's the whole point of your life.
SPEAKER_01: The point that we're in in this book, uh, excuse me, this chapter in chapter five, comes after a couple chapters in which Solomon has kind of taken us on an experiential journey, in which he's shown us how he has tasted pleasure and accomplishment and wealth and wisdom, and has found that at the end of the day, all of them are vanity and fleeting, and if there's no God, none of them matter.
SPEAKER_01: But along the way, he's given us little glimpses of what the point is going to be.
SPEAKER_01: For example, in chapter 3, he's explained that without God, life doesn't really make sense.
SPEAKER_01: But, chapter 3 and verse 13, or rather verse 12, I perceive that there's nothing better than that we should be joyful and do good as long as we live, because, verse 14, whatever God does endures forever, nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it, because God has done it so that people will fear before him.
SPEAKER_01: He resolves that the mess of life only makes sense when we recognize that God, as he says in verse 11, will make everything beautiful in its time, so we surrender our lives to the sovereignty of God, we enjoy his good gifts, and we fear him.
SPEAKER_01: That's the way that we make sense of evil and suffering and everything that doesn't make sense in this life when we surrender to the sovereignty of God and trust that in the end he'll make everything right, he'll right every wrong, we enjoy the moments that he gives him and he gives to us and we fear him.
SPEAKER_01: So then in chapter four, he begins to give us some practical advice for how we could do that.
SPEAKER_01: So chapter four is all about horizontal relationships in a messed up, fallen, sinful, perverse world.
SPEAKER_01: If you're gonna maximize it and live in a way that matters, you're gonna need some good friendships in order to do that.
SPEAKER_01: We could summarize chapter four with verse nine.
SPEAKER_01: Two are better than one.
SPEAKER_01: That's the way that you should live your life in this twisted, messed up, fallen world.
SPEAKER_01: Two are better than one, so you need to get some good people around you that are gonna pursue the living God with you.
SPEAKER_01: Now in chapter five, after having explained how we need horizontal relationships in order to maximize our lives under the sun, in chapter five, he begins to talk about the vertical relationship.
SPEAKER_01: How is it that we're gonna approach this God in this world that's so messed up and our lives are messed up?
SPEAKER_01: How are we going to begin to approach God?
SPEAKER_01: How can our religious senses be reoriented so instead of wandering through this world, we can actually take hold of the prize of life, God Himself.
SPEAKER_01: That's what chapter five is.
SPEAKER_01: So why don't we jump straight into it?
SPEAKER_01: And what I want to show you as we walk through this passage is three ways in which our religious senses are naturally distorted and how they can be fixed.
SPEAKER_01: Three ways in which our religious senses are naturally distorted and how they can be made right.
SPEAKER_01: Number one, Solomon says, we distort grace.
SPEAKER_01: We distort grace.
SPEAKER_01: Look down at verse one.
SPEAKER_01: Guard your steps when you go to the house of God.
SPEAKER_01: It starts with this very clear command: guard your steps, and it's I think helpful when he says your steps to think of the New Testament metaphor that many of us are more familiar with, your walk.
SPEAKER_01: What is the metaphor walk synonymous with in the New Testament?
SPEAKER_01: The way that you live.
SPEAKER_01: So that's what Solomon is talking about.
SPEAKER_01: He's talking about guard the way that you live when you go to the house of God.
SPEAKER_01: And what is the house of God?
SPEAKER_01: It's the temple.
SPEAKER_01: It's where God is present.
SPEAKER_01: And what do you do when you go into the house of God?
SPEAKER_01: For many of us, I think that the house of God is synonymous with sacrifice, wherein God has provided a gracious means that we can be assured of the forgiveness of our sins.
SPEAKER_01: The house of God is a place where you go to enjoy God and to have the assurance of the forgiveness of your sins, to be assured that you are a member of the kingdom of God and you have an inheritance in the life to come.
SPEAKER_01: That's what's central in the house of God.
SPEAKER_01: Grace.
SPEAKER_01: The house of God is synonymous with the grace of God being extended to his people.
SPEAKER_01: And when you go there and you're being assured that God's going to be gracious to me and he's going to forgive my sins, and I have a relationship with him, and I have hope in the life to come, you need to guard your steps.
SPEAKER_01: What danger is Solomon trying to protect us from?
SPEAKER_01: Well, implicit in his instruction to us is he knows the natural pattern of our hearts is that we naturally have a distorted sense in which we assume that if we're gonna get our sins forgiven, then there's a sense in which we can justify doing them.
SPEAKER_01: This is certainly the way that we're all born into the world, but even a person who's been converted and brought to relationship with Christ, if we're honest with ourselves and evaluate our lives, we can see this lurking around in our own hearts, can't we?
SPEAKER_01: There is a natural sense in which our religious sensibilities say, you know what, if God's gonna forgive you for that, you might as well just enjoy it a little bit.
SPEAKER_01: Even just a little bit, because God's gracious, God's forgiveness, He's provided means of grace by which you can know your sins are forgiven anyway, so you might as well just partake of a little bit of the pleasures of sin.
SPEAKER_01: It's a natural way that our senses are disoriented.
SPEAKER_01: And Solomon is warning us to say, you've got the blindfold on, man.
SPEAKER_01: You're wobbling around, you're smacking into the walls.
SPEAKER_01: That's not true.
SPEAKER_01: As long as you are thinking along those lines, you are not connected to the truth of God.
SPEAKER_01: You're not rightly related to the real God.
SPEAKER_01: It's blindness.
SPEAKER_01: The nature of God's grace is not that it enables us to justify going on sinning.
SPEAKER_01: Rather, the nature of God's grace is that it transforms our hearts and makes us grateful to God.
SPEAKER_01: It makes us delight in God, it makes us love the God who's been gracious to us, and it makes our hearts want to obey Him and trust Him and follow Him.
SPEAKER_01: This is everywhere in Scripture, of course.
SPEAKER_01: I just want to go ahead and read a couple passages of Scripture just to refresh and renew our minds in this basic reality that the nature of God's grace is that it transforms our hearts and makes us love the God who gave it to us.
SPEAKER_01: In Hebrews, rather, in chapter 10, the author of Hebrews says, if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.
SPEAKER_01: Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses, how much worse punish do you think will be deserved by the one who is trampled underfoot, the Son of God?
SPEAKER_01: The scripture is clear.
SPEAKER_01: If we think that the nature of God's grace is that it enables us to say, hey man, it's just forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: I can go ahead and keep on enjoying the sin that I want because it'll be forgiven, then we haven't actually understood grace truly.
SPEAKER_01: And we should question ourselves and ask ourselves: is it possible that I haven't actually drunk from the well of God's grace in the first place?
SPEAKER_01: And what's stored up for me is not everlasting life, but a judgment for the sin that I am continuing to pursue?
SPEAKER_01: That's what the author of Hebrews wants us to just ask ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: Paul certainly is clear on this over and over in his letters in Romans in chapter six, at the conclusion of an exposition of the grace of God, he says, What shall we say then?
SPEAKER_01: Are we to continue in sin, that grace can abound?
SPEAKER_01: By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?
SPEAKER_01: Rather, we know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.
SPEAKER_01: For one who has died has been set free from sin.
SPEAKER_01: That's the nature of grace.
SPEAKER_01: That's rightly understood grace is that it changes us internally and makes us delight in the God who gave it.
SPEAKER_01: So that we don't want a separation of God's grace from the rest of who he is.
SPEAKER_01: Rather, we want all of this gracious God.
SPEAKER_01: This gracious God who's extended his kindness and compassion to us.
SPEAKER_01: We want to know all of him, his rightness and his justice and his goodness.
SPEAKER_01: We want to be entirely reoriented to know the true God.
SPEAKER_01: We want the blindfolds off.
SPEAKER_01: We don't want grace as an excuse to keep our blindfolds on and keep stumbling around in the world in our sin.
SPEAKER_01: We want the blindfolds off so that we can know God for all that he is.
SPEAKER_01: That's what true grace does.
SPEAKER_01: So, first, we distort grace, Solomon says.
SPEAKER_01: Second, we distort performance.
SPEAKER_01: We distort performance.
SPEAKER_01: Look down at Ecclesiastes chapter 5 again, and Solomon continues with these words To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know what they are doing.
SPEAKER_01: Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore let your words be few.
SPEAKER_01: God is in heaven and you are on earth.
SPEAKER_01: So let your words be few.
SPEAKER_01: Very simply put, we need to have a right view of who this God is, a high view of God and a low view of ourselves, because Solomon is zoning in on this religious tendency to assume that our performance is really kind of necessary.
SPEAKER_01: God really needs our religious service.
SPEAKER_01: So whether it's the sacrifices in the temple or whether it's our prayers and our goodness and our ministries in the church, God really needs something from us.
SPEAKER_01: And because what we do is really valuable to God, and what would he do without us after all, as long as I put in some of that, I'll be okay.
SPEAKER_01: As long as I put in some of that, I'll be okay.
SPEAKER_01: Solomon wants to remind us as soon as we begin to re revert to this natural tendency to suppose that I'm really pretty important.
SPEAKER_01: And what I have to offer, you really cannot do without.
SPEAKER_01: We're putting the blindfold back on.
SPEAKER_01: We're closing our eyes to the reality of who God is, and we're living in a delusional fantasy world, which is why he says in verse 3, for a dream comes with much busyness and a fool's voice with many words.
SPEAKER_01: He uses dreams again in verse 7, and in both instances, he's not talking about a dream in the sense that it's often used in the Bible of revelation from God.
SPEAKER_01: Like in Joseph, God gives genuine revelation to Joseph through a dream.
SPEAKER_01: Here he's talking about dreams the way that Psalm 73 uses it, or the book of Job.
SPEAKER_01: It's a delusion.
SPEAKER_01: It's a dream.
SPEAKER_01: And then you wake up and it's gone.
SPEAKER_01: And Solomon says that's what our religious sensibilities are.
SPEAKER_01: We live in the delusion that our life is whatever we make it.
SPEAKER_01: We can receive grace and do whatever we want.
SPEAKER_01: That our religious performances are so valuable God really couldn't do without us.
SPEAKER_01: So as long as we're kind of putting in our paycheck, we'll be okay with God.
SPEAKER_01: Solomon wants us to see that that's a delusion.
SPEAKER_01: That's living with the blindfold on, that's not taking hold of the true God, because the true God is in heaven and you are on earth.
SPEAKER_01: A rightly understood relationship to God is to understand He is absolutely self-sufficient.
SPEAKER_01: He didn't make the world because he was lacking something.
SPEAKER_01: The reverse, he made the world because he was so infinitely full of glory and joy.
SPEAKER_01: He wanted to create creatures in his own image capable of enjoying the joy that he had known forever between Father, Son, and Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: That's why you're made, not because you can add something to God, but you can receive from God freely forever.
SPEAKER_01: And that receiving freely from God forever, that's what gives him glory and gives us joy and is the culmination of what we were made for, not to add to something God that he lacked in the beginning.
SPEAKER_01: Solomon wants us to take the blindfold off and remember God is in heaven and we are on earth.
SPEAKER_01: And to resort to anything less than that is, verse one, the sacrifice of fools who don't know what they're doing.
SPEAKER_01: They assume that God will be happy as long as I put in some performance and then I will be okay.
SPEAKER_01: That approach to God is the wrong basis.
SPEAKER_01: It's entirely wrong from step one.
SPEAKER_01: You cannot approach God on the basis that if I perform, then we will have a good relationship.
SPEAKER_01: I have in my life a landlord, and he is a rocking landlord.
SPEAKER_01: He's the best.
SPEAKER_01: But I have a suspicion that the nature of my relationship with my landlord being as good as it is, I mean it's spectacular.
SPEAKER_01: He and as soon as I call him about anything regarding the property, he responds immediately and expertly.
SPEAKER_01: He is a a gift from the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: But I have a suspicion that the nature of our relationship would be altered if we stopped paying our rent on time.
SPEAKER_01: Because it's the nature of our relationship.
SPEAKER_01: It's the the basis of our relationship, is that we provide a service for one another.
SPEAKER_01: That is not the way that the Bible speaks of a human being's relationship with God.
SPEAKER_01: That's blindfold.
SPEAKER_01: That's natural tendency is to suppose that God is like us, just maybe a little bit bigger.
SPEAKER_01: He's like the landlord, he's like so many other relationships in my life.
SPEAKER_01: I provide rent to my landlord, and I provide religious service to God.
SPEAKER_01: That's not the way to approach God.
SPEAKER_01: The way to approach God is to approach him with empty hands and to receive from him.
SPEAKER_01: With empty hands, a full surrender to say, Here is my Lord, here's my life, Lord, command me.
SPEAKER_01: I'm your slave, you're my master, I belong to you.
SPEAKER_01: What can I do to worship you, to enjoy you, to please you, to receive from you?
SPEAKER_01: That's the nature, the posture of our relationship with God.
SPEAKER_01: I don't add to him, I receive from him.
SPEAKER_01: Solomon's trying to get us to take the blindfold off and to see that while we number one distort grace, number two, we distort performance, number three, we also distort sincerity.
SPEAKER_01: Let me show you what I mean.
SPEAKER_01: Look down in your Bibles in verse 4.
SPEAKER_01: In verse 4, Solomon goes on and says, When you vow a vow to God, do not delay in paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools.
SPEAKER_01: Pay what you vow.
SPEAKER_01: It's better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay.
SPEAKER_01: Let not your mouth lead you into sin.
SPEAKER_01: Do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake.
SPEAKER_01: Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the works of your hands?
SPEAKER_01: So there's a simple lesson in verse 4.
SPEAKER_01: When you make a vow to God, pay it.
SPEAKER_01: If you make a promise, keep it.
SPEAKER_01: Because God requires full and immediate completion of vows.
SPEAKER_01: Full there's a sense in which we could just simply say the principle here is that God requires full and immediate obedience.
SPEAKER_01: We tell our kids that you must obey all the way, right away, and with a happy heart.
SPEAKER_01: Because that's the way that God deals with us.
SPEAKER_01: God even commands the happy heart, and the goodness of God is he not only commands it, but he enables it.
SPEAKER_01: He demands full obedience all the time, forever.
SPEAKER_01: And the danger that Solomon is alerting us to in this text is look at the end of verse 6.
SPEAKER_01: Do not let your mouth lead you into sin and say before the messenger, the messenger is perhaps in the ancient Near East, an individual who would come and say, Hey man, you made a vow.
SPEAKER_01: It's time to pay.
SPEAKER_01: That's probably what's going on here.
SPEAKER_01: And the messenger comes and says, Hey, you made this vow.
SPEAKER_01: Why don't you pay it?
SPEAKER_01: And you say, Oh, it was a mistake.
SPEAKER_01: I I I mean, but I was sincere.
SPEAKER_01: I was sincere.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, at the time it seemed like a good idea, and I really meant well.
SPEAKER_01: I really wanted to please God, but I can't actually do it, and so, you know, God knows my heart.
SPEAKER_01: Sincerity, that's what really counts.
SPEAKER_01: In this text, what Solomon is alerting us to is that that's again, that's a blindfold natural human tendency is to suppose God knows my heart, you know, I tried my best and I did what I could, but that that's all that really matters.
SPEAKER_01: That's not what really matters.
SPEAKER_01: That's not the nature of a relationship with God.
SPEAKER_01: That's living under the blindfold.
SPEAKER_01: The reality that Solomon is alerting us to is that God requires absolute obedience.
SPEAKER_01: Total and absolute loyalty.
SPEAKER_01: The good news of the gospel is that Jesus has provided that as a gift.
SPEAKER_01: Because Jesus obeyed completely and fully, and he was perfect, and he lived a life that deserved full communion with God forever.
SPEAKER_01: And he offers as a gift through faith to grant that to us graciously.
SPEAKER_01: And when he does that, he changes our hearts by giving us divine grace that transforms us and makes us love the God who gave us the gift of eternal life.
SPEAKER_01: What matters is not our sincerity, as though, well, I just did my best and God will just take care of the rest.
SPEAKER_01: How do you know you're a Christian?
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, I just try to go to church and do my best.
SPEAKER_01: The way that you know a Christian is not because you're sincere, but because Jesus Christ was perfectly righteous, lived and died in your place, resurrected from the dead, and you just trust in him.
SPEAKER_01: That's how you know that you're a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: And the evidence of that reality is not, well, you know, my sins have been forgiven, and so now I can live how I want.
SPEAKER_01: The evidence is that this Jesus Christ, who lived in my place, died in my place, has taken away all my sins, has given me eternal life, and I love him.
SPEAKER_01: And I want to follow him.
SPEAKER_01: Not because I can add anything to him, but because the greatest joy in my life is to know Christ and to follow him.
SPEAKER_01: So my sincerity is not about, I did my best, and then God will just kind of make up the rest.
SPEAKER_01: My sincerity is I just I trust Jesus Christ because I believe that he was crucified and resurrected, and there is a life everlasting.
SPEAKER_01: And what matters in this life is knowing this God and following him.
SPEAKER_01: And the grace that he's given me motivates me to live a life of performance, not of performance in order to obtain eternal life, but performance to enjoy the God who gave me eternal life.
SPEAKER_01: What Solomon is showing us is a better way.
SPEAKER_01: A life reoriented to God, a life with the blindfold off, who sees that God is in heaven, you are on earth.
SPEAKER_01: And the God who calls you to himself, calls you to a life transformed by his grace in which you keep your steps pure before him because you love him and delight in the God that loved you and gave himself for you.
SPEAKER_01: This is what we see in the text that leads us then to Solomon's conclusion in verse 7.
SPEAKER_01: If you look down at verse 7, he's told us that we distort religion in all of these ways, but in verse 7, he finally gives us a solution to our problem.
SPEAKER_01: The solution to religious distortion is in one simple word at the end of verse 7.
SPEAKER_01: It's to fear God.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 7 reads, For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity, but God is the one you must fear.
SPEAKER_01: I mentioned at the beginning that this is the conclusion of the book of Ecclesiastes that Solomon is driving us to, and this is one of the points along the way in this map that Solomon shows us kind of what's above the clouds.
SPEAKER_01: What really matters in life is that you would fear God.
SPEAKER_01: What really matters is not taking grace to enable you to live the life you want, or supposing that as long as you do a little performance and you have a little bit of sincerity, you'll be okay.
SPEAKER_01: What really matters in life is that you would fear God.
SPEAKER_01: That's Solomon's blanket way of describing a genuine relationship with God with the blindfold off and seeing God for who He is.
SPEAKER_01: It's everything that I've been describing about the nature of real grace transforming your heart, about performance being not in order to get something from God, but in order to delight in the God that loved you.
SPEAKER_01: Sincerity not being about, oh I believe and so God will make up the rest, but sincerity because I genuinely just love Jesus Christ and trust in him entirely.
SPEAKER_01: I think that it's helpful for us to come back to this word over and over and over and over again because it's so helpful as a summary for the nature of genuine religion.
SPEAKER_01: Fearing God.
SPEAKER_01: So it's helpful again, I think, to just remind ourselves what does it mean to fear God?
SPEAKER_01: Why does the Bible use this word that sounds, for many of us, culturally off-putting to command that we're supposed to fear someone and that the core part of our life is supposed to be characterized by fear that just doesn't sound very attractive in 21st century Western society.
SPEAKER_01: I think that what I have found it to be the most helpful way of summarizing this in my own life is to remind myself the nature of fear is that it drives everything else away from you.
SPEAKER_01: Well, if you imagine times in your life when you have been afraid, there has been a sense in which fear just drives everything out of you, and you have tunnel vision on one consuming reality.
SPEAKER_01: That one thing is what compels your thoughts and your actions and your words.
SPEAKER_01: The only thing that matters in life is the object of your fear.
SPEAKER_01: It grips you, it compels you, it controls you, it constrains you.
SPEAKER_01: That's what the fear of God is.
SPEAKER_01: The fear of God is to have the blindfold off, and when the blindfold is off, there's not like a cute little pig pignata.
SPEAKER_01: There's an infinitely holy, absolutely merciful, totally overwhelming God.
SPEAKER_01: And to see him as he is drives every other competing desire away and constrains you to love him and to trust him and to obey him.
SPEAKER_01: It reorients your whole life around him.
SPEAKER_01: That's what Solomon is talking about when he's talking about the fear of God.
SPEAKER_01: The blindfolds off, and the only thing that matters in my life is knowing this God.
SPEAKER_01: That's real religion.
SPEAKER_01: What I want to do just for a couple minutes to kind of conclude our time is to just flesh this out just a little bit more for us by showing you a handful of verses in Scripture in which we are told what the fear of God consists in.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to call this fear in five words.
SPEAKER_01: Fear in five words.
SPEAKER_01: I think that you could trace through the scriptures and you would find there are more than five words synonymous with the fear of God, but this is a little summary of some of the biblical teaching of what the fear of God looks like practically in the life of someone who knows the true God.
SPEAKER_01: Here are five words that are synonymous with fear.
SPEAKER_01: Number one, trust.
SPEAKER_01: Trust.
SPEAKER_01: Look at Psalm 115 and verse 11.
SPEAKER_01: You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: He is their help and their shield.
SPEAKER_01: That's not a command.
SPEAKER_01: Those are synonymous lines.
SPEAKER_01: The nature of Hebrew poetry is that you have these parallel lines that expand and contrast one another.
SPEAKER_01: And here, these parallel lines list a parallel between fear and trust.
SPEAKER_01: You who fear the Lord, you trust in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Fearing the Lord is synonymous with trusting in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to fear the Lord?
SPEAKER_01: It means to trust him.
SPEAKER_01: It means that your eyes have been opened and you are gripped with the awe of this God who is bigger than you thought he was.
SPEAKER_01: Naturally, we suppose that God is small enough that I have something to offer him, then he'll think, wow, I couldn't live without this.
SPEAKER_01: But when our eyes are open to see the infinite greatness of the God who exists, our categories have to be readjusted.
SPEAKER_01: And we're gripped by the greatness of God.
SPEAKER_01: When we see that this great God got off his throne in heaven, took off his holy robes, descended into the world that he made, and allowed himself to be crucified by the very creatures whose breath he holds in their lungs, then we are gripped by, absolutely enthralled by the mercy of this God.
SPEAKER_01: We need a new category.
SPEAKER_01: We thought we knew what mercy was, but now our minds have to be readjusted to a new category of mercy.
SPEAKER_01: Because we've never seen a God of such greatness descend to such depths in order to rescue wretched sinners.
SPEAKER_01: Naturally, the response of people who see this God, who fear this God, who are compelled by the realities of this God, we trust him.
SPEAKER_01: Because we see that this God is true.
SPEAKER_01: All his ways are good.
SPEAKER_01: We see this God is merciful and kind and compassionate.
SPEAKER_01: He's a faithful and loyal father to all of those that he has saved through the blood of his son.
SPEAKER_01: The fear of God, we can just say with the psalmist in Psalm 115, is synonymous with trust.
SPEAKER_01: Second, fear is synonymous with delight, with delight in the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Look at Psalm 112.
SPEAKER_01: Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments.
SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to fear God?
SPEAKER_01: It means to delight in him.
SPEAKER_01: This is a then describing for us fear.
SPEAKER_01: I think this is particularly helpful in our society that synonymizes fear with something really, really bad.
SPEAKER_01: Naturally so.
SPEAKER_01: But this kind of fear that the scriptures are describing is the kind of fear that's a little bit more synonymous with awe, where there is an overwhelming encounter that causes reorientation, that causes new categories.
SPEAKER_01: And the new categories that are being built are categories in our spiritual senses around a God who is bigger than we thought, more merciful than we thought, and naturally we're in a place where this God is a God of goodness, that we delight in, that we love.
SPEAKER_01: This is particularly true because when we really know God, the only way to know God is through his son Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And the nature of the work of Jesus Christ was in his crucifixion and his resurrection to spend the call of the gospel and to offer not just forgiveness of your sins and some kind of judicial metaphor, but to actually spiritually, mystically, truly unite you to himself.
SPEAKER_01: So that when you become a Christian, your soul is forever, perpetually and indissolubly genuinely united to Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Every single believer for all time has a genuine mystical union with the Jesus Christ, with God the Father, and with the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: In a way that my tiny little mind can't understand.
SPEAKER_01: But the scripture declares it, and so it's true that you from eternity, Ephesians 1 says, God has thought of you as united to his Son Jesus forever.
SPEAKER_01: And at the right time, the Spirit came into the world and applied that union with you, so that your soul is forever united to Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And a soul that is united to Jesus Christ knows that the wrath of God is not upon me, because I passed from judgment into eternal life, Jesus says, John 5.24.
SPEAKER_01: From that position of knowing God in union with his son Jesus by his spirit, you know that you're secure.
SPEAKER_01: And the greatness of this God that you are growing in your understanding of doesn't threaten you, it enthralls you.
SPEAKER_01: So genuine fear of God is synonymous with delighting in this God, because to really know this God, you can't possibly do anything else than delight in Him.
SPEAKER_01: Number three, obey.
SPEAKER_01: Fear in five words, certainly to fear God is to obey Him.
SPEAKER_01: Look at Psalm 119.
SPEAKER_01: It reads, I am a companion of all who fear you.
SPEAKER_01: Who are those who fear you?
SPEAKER_01: Those who keep your precepts.
SPEAKER_01: Just follow the logic here in these words.
SPEAKER_01: You see this God, you trust him, you delight in him.
SPEAKER_01: Naturally, you're going to want to obey him.
SPEAKER_01: This God who is so overwhelming, is so trustworthy, is a good father and is a great savior.
SPEAKER_01: He deserves your loyalty and your obedience, and you will want to obey him.
SPEAKER_01: Which the flip side of that would be hate.
SPEAKER_01: And what do we mean by hate?
SPEAKER_01: Well, Proverbs chapter 8 tells us the fear of the Lord is hatred.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't put the rest of the verse on the screen, but the rest of the verse reads, Pride and arrogance in the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.
SPEAKER_01: If you love what is good, you will hate what is evil.
SPEAKER_01: If you love God, you will hate what is opposed to God.
SPEAKER_01: That includes not just the evil outside of you, but the evil within you.
SPEAKER_01: To fear the Lord is to recognize all that is opposed to him, all that separates the world from him, all that separates you from him.
SPEAKER_01: And to love God, to trust him, to delight in him, to obey him is naturally to hate that which robs him of his glory and keeps you from him.
SPEAKER_01: To fear the Lord is to hate evil.
SPEAKER_01: And finally, number five, hope.
SPEAKER_01: And this comes, of course, from Psalm 147, part of the Hillel Psalms that conclude this Psalter with this great crescendo of praise, right in the middle of it.
SPEAKER_01: The psalmist declares that the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, and those who hope in his steadfast love.
SPEAKER_01: Those who fear God rightly, or those who know God, who are united to Christ, from this position posture rather, of comfort, consolation in their union with Christ, they hope in the reality that the completion of this relationship that has begun in this fallen world is going to be brought to consummation in the next.
SPEAKER_01: This fallen world, life under the sun that I live in, this fallen world that Solomon is advising me how to make the most of it, the way that I make the most of it is by fearing God.
SPEAKER_01: And synonymous with fearing God is hoping in the reality that there is going to come a day when all the evil that I hate that keeps me from him, all the sin in my own heart that dishonors him is going to be removed.
SPEAKER_01: And I will see him face to face.
SPEAKER_01: I will, like Revelation chapter 22, verse 4 says, all of his slaves will see his face, and they will reign with him forever and ever and ever.
SPEAKER_01: And my hope is fixed on that.
SPEAKER_01: Trust, delight, obedience, hatred, and hope.
SPEAKER_01: These five words summarize what is the fear of God.
SPEAKER_01: What is right religion?
SPEAKER_01: Naturally, we have all kinds of ideas, but those ideas lead us astray.
SPEAKER_01: Solomon in this text wants to help us to remove the blindfold and to see that God is inviting us into something so much greater than we would ever discover on our own.
SPEAKER_01: A relationship that we could just summarize as the fear of God.
SPEAKER_01: The fear of God, to trust in God, to delight in God, to obey him, to hate what is evil and oppose to him, and to hope that one day he'll bring this relationship to consummation, wherein we will see him and reign with him forever and ever.
SPEAKER_01: Fear the Lord, for that is the whole duty of man.
SPEAKER_01: Won't you pray with me?
SPEAKER_01: Lord, we do pray that, as we've studied your word tonight, that you would refresh us in the truths of your word and that you would enable us to fear you more, to be more in awe of you, to be more gripped by you.
SPEAKER_01: Paul says that the love of Christ compels us.
SPEAKER_01: We pray that we would have a deeper understanding of what it cost you in order to send your love upon us and wave upon wave to unite us to your Son Jesus through his death and resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: We pray that you would compel us by the love of Christ to fear you, to treasure you, and to follow you.
SPEAKER_01: We pray these things in Christ's name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00: If you're in the Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: location, go to TMS.edu.
SPEAKER_00: I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.