Ecclesiastes 7: 15-29

Jack Abeelen
Let's Get Real
Ecclesiastes 7:15-29

"I think when I got saved is when my life became optimistic. The world hadn’t changed, but I had, and I had come to know the God who changes lives. And though I know where I’m headed, and I know what His promises are, I don’t want to deny the reality of the place that we live. I think it was Charles Colson who wrote that life isn’t a book. It isn’t logical or sensible or orderly. Life’s a mess. And most of the time your theology and relationship with God, you have to live out in the midst of the mess." -JA

"It is the inconsistency of seeing good people get the shaft and the absolute dirtbag skate through life that frustrates people. There’s a theological term for it, by the way. The term is theodicy. It means to reconcile a powerful, good God with the existence of evil." -JA

"There are many folks who, looking at the world’s evil and then trying to consider a good God – the God that we share and preach, become deists. Deism by definition reduces God to being the cause. He’s like the great clockmaker in the sky who wound up the universe and then let go of it and then walked away. Really doesn’t have any involvement with it anymore...  George Washington was a deist. So was Benjamin Franklin. So was Thomas Jefferson. They identified themselves as Unitarians, which is kind of a nonTrinitarian form of Christianity that emphasizes rationality and skepticism. Deism, by the way, was birthed in the 17th-18th century during the Age of Enlightenment. Not very enlightened, but there you go. " -JA

"Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them. Ecclesiastes 7: 16-18

So he says this, in application of the imbalances of life and the claims of folks who don’t know God, “Be wise. No one gets away from being a sinner. We’re all sinners. There’s not a just man on the earth.” Then he says, “Remember this when you listen to people speak,” verse 21, “Also do not take it to heart everything people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you.” If you want to be sure of the sinfulness of man, just listen to the way people talk. Backbite. What they say, how they say it. And, unfortunately, sometimes you’re going to be the subject of that. “Not me.” Oh, yeah, you. -JA

That’s the way that sin is addressed in the life of those in the world, and this position of self-righteousness and this excusing of personal sinfulness – that’s not reality because you’re not all that good, and you are that sinful. -JA