Please open your Bibles to Ecclesiastes chapter 7, verse 1. A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of one's birth. Better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men. And the living will take it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by a sad countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, and the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than for a man to hear the song of fools. For like the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool. This also is vanity. Surely, oppression destroys a wise man's reason, and a bribe debases the heart. The end of a thing is better than its beginning. The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Do not hasten in your spirit to be angry, for anger rests in the bosom of fools. Do not say, why were the former days better than these? For you do not inquire wisely concerning this. Wisdom is good with an inheritance and profitable to those who see the sun. For wisdom is a defense, as money is a defense. But the excellence of knowledge is that wisdom gives life to those who have it. Consider the work of God, for who can make straight what He has made crooked? In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider. Surely God has appointed the one as well as the other, so that man can find out nothing that will come after him. I have seen everything in my days of vanity. There is a just man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs life in his wickedness. Do not be overly righteous, nor be overly wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Do not be overly wicked, nor be foolish. Why should you die before your time? It is good that you grasp this, and also not remove your hand from the other. For he who fears God will escape them all. Wisdom strengthens the wise, more than 10 rulers of the city, for there is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin. Also, do not take to heart everything people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. For many times also, your own heart has known that even you have cursed others. All this I have proved by wisdom. I said, I will be wise, but it was far from me. As for that which is far off and exceedingly deep, who can find it out? I applied my heart to know, to search and seek out wisdom and the reason of things, to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness. and I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God shall escape from her, but the sinner shall be trapped by her. Here is what I have found, says the preacher, adding one thing to the other to find out the reason which my soul still seeks but I cannot find. One man among a thousand I have found. But a woman among all these I have not found. Truly, this only I have found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes. Who is like a wise man, and who knows the interpretation of a thing? A man's wisdom makes his face shine, and the sternness of his face is changed. You may be seated. If you do not have the handout, please raise your hand. All right, so we are zooming in at verse 23. I want to remind you of the context. We're in the middle of this discussion about reputation not being the good and reputations being contrasted with wisdom, and there's this issue that comes up. That when you turn from it, you've been chasing something that's wrong, you turn from that chasing, and then you go, okay, now I'm going to get it all set. Now I'm going to fix everything. I'm going to throw off all of this sin. I'm going to throw off all this foolishness. I'm going to be wise starting right now. And the conceit that we think we can just pick when we will stabilize, Whenever there's opportunity, we should be quick to throw off sin and to plead with God to help us. But here's the other thing. If reputation is the good, when you need help, you're going to hide your need for help. If reputation is the good, you're gonna try to solve everything while looking good to others. But if wisdom is the principal thing, And if turning to God and seeking to stabilize a life that pursues the knowledge of God is the thing, then you will be willing to sacrifice reputation in the short term in order to get help from others. And so we cannot just make it so that we ourselves are wise as we will. It depends upon the work of God, but also we should recognize the need for help, the need that when we find ourselves ensnared in some sin and we need help out of it, we go to others and seek the use of things. We ask for counsel. We come and seek help to be encouraged by others and to put external forms into place to help us to order things. So those are some of the big ideas that are around this text, but I want to continue through analyzing the individual verses. We looked at verses 23 and 24 previously, and we spent a big chunk of time last time looking at 1 Corinthians 1, and 1 Corinthians 2, and 1 Corinthians 3, because I wanted to show you that there's a need for wisdom, not from your heart, not from what you feel. Just listen to your heart. Listening to your heart is the worst advice anybody can give you. What you need to listen to is the word of God. You need this word from the mind of God. And so the word of God is what should inform your heart. The word of God, and we need the Holy Spirit to cause us to understand and to believe. So this shows our dependency upon God for wisdom. So verse 23, all this I have proved by wisdom. I said I will be wise, but it was far from me. As for that which is far off and exceedingly deep, who can find it out? So we can't make ourselves wise at will. Wisdom is far above us and requires a word from heaven. It is beyond us and outside of our reach unless it is delivered to us, but it has been delivered to us. This is the book of wisdom. The Bible is the book of wisdom. Wisdom coming in the word still requires the work of the spirit to cause us to understand and to believe it, and no one can find out wisdom. God alone is wise in himself, and he makes us wise by his outward and ordinary means of grace, the word, sacrament, prayer. And effectually, he causes us to be wise by his inward illuminating work. Now, go to page two. One thing, when people read the scriptures, we often have an anthropology, a doctrine of man, that is kind of created for us by Freud, or Disney, or the popular culture. And we hear the word heart, and the word heart, we interpret to mean emotions, or I don't know, something. So what we need to understand is the biblical doctrine of man. Here's the biblical doctrine of man in short version. In the beginning, in Genesis, God made man and he made him out of two components. He took dust of the ground to make his body, that's the physical material, and he breathed. Now that word breathing is ambiguous. You can kind of turn it into a verb of spirited. He made a spirit for man, body, soul, unity. The word for soul is sometimes used to refer to the unity. The word spirit always refers to the mind. The mind, the heart, sometimes you hear the word kidneys used, the reams in the King James, to refer to the inward man. Heart, soul, mind, spirit. So you have all these ways of referring to the inward man. And what I want to show you is a bunch of scriptures here to understand what does the Bible say the heart is. So when Solomon says, I applied my heart to know, first of all, the heart is a knowing thing. It can know. And so that's one of the things we recognize. Solomon's dealing with this idea of the heart as the place where he would have knowledge. The heart is what seeks for wisdom and for the reason of things. It searches for those things. It is the knowing part. So Genesis 6, 5. When the Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. This is the condition of man after the fall. The intent of the thoughts of men's heart is only evil continually apart from regeneration. Now, intention is a part of the heart, the heart does. So intention or purpose, purposive activity. Thoughts. Intentions are thoughts, by the way. The intent of the thoughts of his heart. The intent would be like the goal or purpose of the thoughts. The heart is what thinks, it's what intends. Notice it's moral. Thought is moral. It's evil or it's righteous. First Chronicles 28.9. As for you, my son Solomon, know the God of your father and serve Him with a loyal heart and with a willing mind. For the Lord searches all hearts and understands all the intents of the thoughts. If you seek Him, He will be found by you. But if you forsake Him, He will cast you off forever." Notice this serving with a loyal heart. Hearts can be loyal. They can have something to serve. The idea that the heart is also where you have the willing mind. People sometimes think the heart means the will, as distinct from the mind. What is the will? The will is the mind choosing. You always desire what you value. You always choose what you most desire. So what you think about how valuable a thing is controls how much you desire it. and therefore controls what you pick. The will is simply the mind choosing, a willing mind. So God searches all hearts, and he understands all of the intent of the thoughts. And those are explanatory things where you have these two things together. And so it's an explanatory chi in the Greek, or an explanatory vav in the Hebrew. And so you have this idea of putting and between them as a way of saying this and this, and they're really a way of talking about the same thing. Okay, so this idea that what we're looking at here is the inward thoughts and the heart of man are deep. So we have this explanatory and, the inward thought, or in other words, the heart of man is a deep thing. The heart's where you scheme, it's where you devise. Proverbs 4.23, keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life. The heart is the thing from which the issues of life come. Now, this idea is that the issues of life are, you can talk about these as sort of two things. The issues of life, you could be like, what are the things that appear in your life? Or you might say, what are the fruits of true life? So think about the fruit of the spirit. This would be fruits of true life. Love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, self-control. Now, when you think about what comes out of the heart, that's the stuff that shows the kind of life that's there, the absence of life, the presence of life. So you should guard the heart because it's gonna control what comes out of you. Proverbs 16.9, a man's heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps. Okay, so this is talking about man making plans and God decretively choosing what happens. Proverbs 23.7, for as he thinks in his heart, so is he. This is talking about the guy who's stingy, who says, yeah, enjoy, have another piece. of that. I didn't want it. It's fine. But in his heart, He's really angry that you took it because as he thinks, not as he says, is what he really is. The most important thing about your reality is actually what you think as you're doing this stuff. You can do all the right stuff externally because of social pressure. This is the restraining power of the law to look really good, the chain of the law to stop you from sitting and doing all the stuff that looks good, but if you're doing it, for your own glory, out of a hatred of God, if you're doing it out of a hatred for neighbor, as you are in your heart, so you really are. That's what you really are. As he thinks in his heart. So the true identity of the man is actually principally in the thought. Now sometimes people will try to counter this by saying good intentions You know, they'll talk about good intentions and they'll say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And here's how this, that's true too. Let me explain to you how, okay? You need to have right intention. You need to have a right goal in mind. You need to be seeking good. But you also need to apply the right means. And so wisdom involves having the right goal and understanding the law of God as being that which tells you right means. And so you, the road to hell is paved with good intentions means you have this good goal but you use unlawful means that creates a hellscape in the interim. So you need to have a right goal and intention and a desire for the good of the object that you're acting toward, and you need to apply the right means. Jeremiah 17, 9 to 10. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart. I tested the mind. Notice the heart and the mind being equated there again. Even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings. The thoughts of the man make it so that the work is either good or not. Faith is necessary for good work. Seeking to glorify God is necessary for good work. Matthew 9 and 4, But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Why do you think evil in your hearts? Matthew 15 and 19, For out of the heart proceed evil thought. But her suffering in watching her son die, this unjust death, is such a cataclysmic event that it will be used as the centerpiece of history to reveal the hearts of men, how all of the race of man will be able to be sorted like an Excel spreadsheet by did they profess and did they believe. Not professors, not a part of a covenant house, unholy. Do not believe, not saved. Page three, Romans 10, nine to 10. That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that he has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness. So the belief in the heart is the instrument of justification. Notice believing occurs in the heart. Believing is thought content. Believing occurs in the heart. And with the mouth, confession is made into salvation. Confession is used as an outward and ordinary means of grace that increases our sanctification. When you profess God, when you profess Christ before men, it pushes you to have greater integrity. It pushes you to grow in sanctification. It brings trial upon you, and it causes that confession to be an instrument whereby the enemies of Christ are brought against you, and those who are friends of Christ rally around you. And so the confession of the mouth is an instrument to bring about an increase of your salvation in the sense of the increase of your sanctification. Hebrews 4.12 For the word of God is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit. and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Thoughts and intents. Thoughts are broader category, intents is a subcategory. Joints are bigger, marrow is a subcategory inside of it. You have marrow in other places too, but it's also in the joints. You have this idea of the soul, which either refers to the same thing as the spirit, or it's the body-soul union, and the spirit is distinguished. Whichever is being done there, and it seems consistently to be a broader thing with the subcategory, things that are irreducibly a part of it. If you don't have the spirit, you don't have a soul. You don't have the body, soul, unity without the spirit. You don't have joints without marrow. And you don't have intent. Thoughts, a subcategory, you lose some of the thoughts if you lose the intents. So thoughts and intentions of the heart. So what do we have here? We have all of these verses that show us that the way people talk about the heart is totally unbiblical. I want you to think about the level of propagandistic work that had to go in to everybody in the most Protestant language people group in the history of the world, the English speaking world, to start using the heart to refer to emotions and not thought. How much effort did it take to do that? The entire academic establishment encouraging you to believe in the subconscious and the id and this idea that you're a chaotic set of desires and urges because you evolved from animals and matter precedes thought. Huge cartoon companies. Huge sets of people all over the place in almost every industry teaching you that the heart is the emotions. Trying to separate the idea that you can have head knowledge and heart knowledge as though there's some sort of a idea that you can believe in the head or the mind and not believe in the heart. This effort to divide over and over and over again the internals of man. The ways in which churches do that, the ways in which universities do that, the ways in which modern psychology does that, the ways in which modern art does that, the ways that that all happened. This is not from a rigorous study of the Bible. This is from taking the ideas of anthropology, taking the ideas of psychology, not from the Bible, but from something else. So this is a major problem. What is the heart? The human heart is the mind. It's the spirit. It's the soul. It's the inward man. It thinks. It reasons. It considers. It ponders. It understands. It knows. It desires. It plans. It intends. It chooses. It has loyalties. It has loves. It sends out the issues of life. It has motive for the external actions of the body. It causes external actions of the body. That's what the heart is. At creation, the thoughts and intents of the human heart were only good continually, but were capable of change to evil. And the fall was the actualization of that changeableness from good to evil. That's an imperfect goodness. It's a goodness that is not complete. It's truly good, really good, but not complete. That's how Adam was made. Since the fall, an unregenerate heart deceives itself and others, and every intent of the thoughts of man's heart is only evil continually. That is the doctrine of total depravity. After regeneration, the heart thinks both good and evil. It's an imperfect goodness and an imperfect evil. Irresistible grace causes us to definitively go from death to life, causes goodness and evil to both be present in man. There's a progressive work of grace that is progressive sanctification, where the goodness increases and the evil is subdued by degrees. By this work of grace, we are caused to persevere in the faith, and that work of grace is the preserving power of God for the saints. After we are glorified, the thoughts and intents of the heart are only good continually. There's a perfect goodness. Okay, so that gives you some idea of the heart and its various conditions. So go to page four. Verse 25, I applied my heart to know, to search and to seek out wisdom and the reason of things, to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness. Okay, so Solomon says he applied his heart, that thinking, intending thing, He applied his mind to know, to search, to seek for wisdom and the reason for things. Okay, so let's remember what wisdom is. Wisdom is knowledge of the highest good and the way to get the highest good. There are different states of the mind and it's very important that you have these clearly in mind. The reason is because it helps you to clearly organize how you can think about human thought. There's ignorance, which means you don't have any thoughts about something. There's some subject and you've never thought about it before. The entire race of man in the 1400s, if you said the word iPhone, their response, huh? Ignorance. Opinions. Opinions are beliefs about a subject. It could be true, it could be false. Knowledge is a belief about a subject that has to be true and you have to be able to show why it's true. The difference between a true opinion, happenstancely thinking something's true but not having a good reason for it, versus knowledge. Knowledge is thinking the thing is true and being able to show why it must be true. Now wisdom is knowledge. It's a belief. It's a true belief. It's a true belief that you can show to be true. And it's about a subject matter. What subject matter? The good, God. What he is, who he is. What promises he's made. And how to grow in the possession of him. The law of God teaches us that. So that's what wisdom is. It's the knowledge of the highest good and the way to the beginning of wisdom and to keep his commandments. So he's breaking it down. It's kind of gospel and law categories. So I applied my heart to know, to search and seek out wisdom and the reason of things. So wisdom is the knowledge of God and of his law. And the reason of things is connected to knowing God Because what you're looking at is you're starting to get answers to the question, why? Why did God do this? And when you get the question, why did God do this? What you're asking about is the heart of God. You're asking about the mind of God. You're asking, what was God thinking? And since he's eternal and unchangeable, what is he thinking? As you ask about the reason of things, you're asking about God's purposes, God's goals. And so here's Solomon, and he's wrestling with wisdom. And he's going, wisdom's far from me. I can't get it now. I'm trying to come back to wisdom, and I can't get it. And so he begins to wrestle with God like Jacob. He's wrestling with God to understand wisdom and the reason for things. And in particular, what he's wrestling with is, I was born a great king. I have everything. I have honor and power and pleasure and property and reputation. Kings and queens come to me and say, would you please teach me But I have chased after wicked things. I have chased after women who are like fetters. I have built altars to false gods. I have thrown away the most glorious kingdom at the center of the world and used it for wickedness and caused that inheritance to be a thing which is filled with remorse. What is the reason for this? And there are different answers to that. But that's the wrestling. That's the looking at all of this. Solomon, having wasted a huge portion of the prime of his life, is asking, why did this happen? Why did God allow, cause this to happen? Why did I do this? He's wrestling through this at the end of his life, having repented, and having dealt with this desire for all of these different false goods. And so there are different answers to that. And a part of wisdom is being able to properly differentiate things. You remember the text from Hebrews that we just read, that the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword? It's able to make all the fine distinctions. It's able to properly categorize. It is not insufficient. It is not insufficient in its resolution. It is not like a camera that fails to take in the fullness of reality because of pixelation. The Word of God can pixelate sufficiently. The Word of God doesn't miss anything because it doesn't have enough pixels. The Word of God deals with all of the divisions, all the distinctions, all the separations, all the categorizations. It's not missing anything. It can make every philosopher look inadequate. It makes all of the wise men look like children. because it differentiates all the necessary categories and provides an organizational system for thought to properly deal with the complexity of all that exists in reality. That's what this glorious 1,000-page book does. It is the capturing of the mind of Christ in a way that allows us to engage with it and to wrestle with reality, and it's a sufficient interpreter. And so Solomon is saying, I applied my heart to know, to search, to seek out wisdom and the reason of things, to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness. Reasons for things. One of the things that we have to deal with when we talk about the reason for things is the ultimate goal. Everything exists for the purpose of glorifying God. Not a single thing exists for a different ultimate goal. Every single thing exists for the glory of God. And there's not extra stuff. Think about this for a second. There aren't like, OK, here are 75 trillion objects in the universe. And 53 trillion of them, God figured out a good way to glorify himself with them. But there are 22 trillion objects that are sort of extraneous. Nope, none of those. There's zero of those. All of them, all of the however many quadrillions, quintillions, whatever big Googleplex words. All of the things are there to glorify God. And God made them for that purpose. He has all of them fit together for the purpose of glorifying Himself. Every single one. And that includes your sin. And Solomon's sin. And Solomon taking the most glorious kingdom and turning it into an idol factory. Everything exists for that purpose of glorifying God. We're talking about meritorious causes, like what are the people that are to blame? For sin, the agent, the human or the angel is the one to blame. God is above the law and so he's not the one to blame. He does it for his glory and he, what he does by definition is good. So he's not the one to blame. Instrumental cause, that's a term that can be used to refer to a bunch of stuff, like the closest located cause. or you can talk about that's proximate, about legal instruments or second causes. Those can be like long chains of things like, you know, what's the cause of having this book here? Well, somebody cut down a tree and then somebody else turned it into pulp and then somebody else drove the pulp into a paper factory. In the paper factory, they pressed it together. Somebody bound it together. The Westminster Assembly met together and wrote some things. That got typeset and put onto here, right? So all that stuff happened. Right? So that's a list of second causes. That's a chain of events that are second causes. And the most recent one, the proximate cause was, I don't know, probably buying it on Banner of Truth. That was the reason it's here and I've got it. I mean, maybe it's the last, the most proximate cause was I put it out of, I took it out of the basket that Joshua carried up here for me. That's the proximate cause, the last, like, second cause, creaturely cause. Instruments are things where they're legal causes, like signing a contract. These are all things you go, you know, the word cause seems pretty simple. It seems like maybe you're overcomplicating the word cause. Okay, but we do use the word in all of these ways. What's the reason for things? What's the cause of things? Why are you holding me accountable? Because you're the person who committed the sin. But God caused it. He predestined it. Why don't you hold God accountable? Because he's above the law. He did it for his glory. The distinction of causes is necessary to avoid even the most basic theological errors. The reason for things. Why did Solomon sin? Because God predestined it for his glory. Why did Solomon sin? Because he had evil desires to chase after foreign women. Why did Solomon sin? Because of the curse that befell David because he stole Bathsheba and killed Uriah the Hittite. Why did Solomon sin? Because Moses took the people out of Egypt and there was a nation state of Israel that could exist so that he could do it. He asked the question and there's so many different answers and the question is what do you mean why? Which question are you even asking? And the book of Ecclesiastes is a book about the most learned man on the planet, struggling with all of these wicked desires. And he needed serious answers, deep thought, to confront the self-deception that exists. Why do you need to learn detailed theology, systematic theology, careful reading of the Bible? Why all of this thinking, all of this reading, all of this focus on the mind, Because the heart is deceitful above all things. And if you're going to wrestle with your heart, you need to know the truth and it must be nailed down so that you can argue with yourself when you're tempted to steal another man's wife, or to murder him to cover it up, or when you're tempted to go after foreign women and foreign gods. You need to be able to argue with yourself and to show yourself the deceitfulness of sin. It takes serious thought to deal with that. We live in a serious world with serious problems and serious sin. And we serve a serious God. So we have to care about the details of thought and to be able to differentiate things and to answer the questions by breaking them down into pieces. And the Word of God, the Word of God is this glorious book that the simple can read it and get wisdom and grow wise. And the wise can read it and not plumb the depths. And so to go from simple to wise, you need to begin to see the Marianas Trench that is the Bible. It goes down and down and down and down. He applied his heart to know, to search and seek out wisdom and the reason of things. To know the wickedness of folly. and even of foolishness and madness. The effectual cause of everything is God's decree. The ultimate cause is His glory. That's the purpose He does it for. And the effectual cause, like what makes it happen, is God's decree. The formal cause is this idea of the blueprint. The blueprint, the design, the plan. In our tradition, in the Reformed tradition, we have the solas, the five solas. And the five solas actually represent each of these causes. When we talk about sola scriptura, or scripture alone, it's the formal cause, it's the alone formal cause of our salvation. Scripture is the alone infallible blueprint, plan, design. It's the only place that we can go with absolute certainty and say, must I be saved. And the plan is laid out there. When you look at the last of the solas, soli deo gloria, to God alone be the glory, all of salvation was designed so that the ultimate cause, the final goal, it all does the work of showing the glory of God and the glory of nobody else. So the whole of salvation is about bringing about the ultimate cause, the ultimate goal of glorifying God, showing His glory. In between those, you have scripture as the only formal cause, you have the glory of God as the only ultimate cause, and in between there, you've got grace, faith, and Christ. Grace is the only effectual cause of our salvation. God's grace causes you to believe. God's grace causes the sending of Christ, the incarnating of Christ, the dying of Christ, the raising of Christ. Not because Christ needed grace, but because we needed Him to raise so that the sacrifice could be shown to be accepted. So out of grace towards us, For the purpose of displaying His glory, God caused our salvation. He causes, He decrees these things. It is grace that effectually brings these things about. In us, He irresistibly causes us to understand and believe. If God is gracious toward you, you are going to be saved. It's the effectual cause, it's sufficient, it brings it about. The instrumental cause is faith. That's the gift he gives and it's the thing that comes in and it's the thing that causes us to be connected like the signing of the contract to the fulfilling of it. You know the difference between signing a contract and fulfilling a contract? You can sign a contract and then not do what it says. The fulfilling is the doing what it says. If we sign a contract and I say I'll pay you a million dollars if you build me a house, if you don't build the house, I don't owe you the million dollars. If you do build the house, you do, I do owe you the million dollars. The signing of the contract is the instrument, the instrumental cause. It establishes a legal connection. But the merit for why you're owed the money is because you did the terms of the contract. The meritorious cause is what earns it. The instrumental cause is what forms the contract. Faith connects us to the merits of Christ. Christ fulfills all of the terms of the covenant. He is the meritorious fulfiller. So all of these things, that's the meritorious cause, we're talking about instrumental cause, effectual cause, this is deeply embedded in Protestant thought as it relates to how salvation works. These categories are necessary for wrestling through all sorts of theological problems. If you find this overly complex or difficult, I or one of the other officers would be happy to walk you through this more, talk you through this more, to help you to understand these categories. But understanding these kinds of things, these types of categories, is necessary to wrestle through the complexities of the gospel in its greater depth, not the minimum necessary to be saved, but also in terms of dealing with reality and the struggles of faith. These kinds of categories. So Solomon applied his heart to know, to search and seek out wisdom, the reason of things, to know the wickedness of folly, and even the foolishness of madness. In other words, page five at the bottom here. Solomon took his mind, his well-furnished mind, to start thinking about the wickedness of folly. What is that? What does that mean? The wickedness of folly, how wicked folly is. But how wicked folly is requires you to understand how good doing the right thing is. So the purpose of showing this folly and wickedness, God does this to show his justice, right? He has goodness, which he rewards, righteousness, which he rewards, and he has wickedness, which he punishes. This is like contrast. And then when you have salvation with grace, you have the idea of the mercy of God in contrast with the just punishment that we deserve. These separations of things, the rewarding of good, the punishing of evil, the merciful salvation versus what we deserve to get. Understanding The wickedness of folly is seeing how evil evil truly is. Seeing how evil evil truly is. And one of the ways that you stop chasing after garbage is by seeing garbage as garbage. When you see how evil evil is, it makes it less deceptive, less attractive. And when you see how beautiful, how good, Righteousness is, it draws you to it. Solomon said wisdom was far from him. He couldn't get there. He was trapped in this foolishness. And so he's going, maybe if I wrestle around with this foolishness and see it for what it really is, it will help me to escape. The wickedness of folly. How does it contrast with glorifying God? What the scriptures lay out. The law of God. The power of God to save. The merit of Christ. The reason of things. The reason of folly. The wickedness of folly. The reason of foolishness. The wickedness of foolishness. The reason of madness. The wickedness of madness. Why does madness exist? Why does foolishness exist? Why does folly exist? Madness exists to show the glories of sound-mindedness. Wickedness, foolishness exists to show the glory of wisdom. And folly exists to show the glory of righteousness. That is why God causes these things to be a part of the artwork, a part of the story. Folly, foolishness, and madness exist for the glory of God. We are guilty of these things. God uses all sorts of chains of causation in history to bring foolishness and evil about. Effectually, God decreed it. And scripture explains evil. It solves the problem of evil. It tells us a theodicy. It shows us why does evil exist. Evil exists to show God's glory. Now, for you as a believer, as you sit and you have sins that you go, why are these sins here? Why do they pop up again in my life? I want to read you from the Westminster Confession of Faith, a closing thought. Chapter 5, which is on providence, section 5, reads as follows. The most wise, righteous, and gracious God does oftentimes leave for a season his own children to manifold temptations and the corruption of their own hearts, to chastise them for their former sins, or to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, that they may be humbled, and to raise them to a more close and constant dependence for their support unto himself. and to make them more watchful against all future occasions of sin and for sundry other just and holy ends. In other words, God uses these things to chastise us. He uses them to humble us. He uses them to increase our recognition for a need of close and constant dependence upon God. He uses sin in our lives to make us more watchful against future occasions and to not be proud or arrogant. And there are many other ways that he uses our sins. There is nothing in your life without purpose and nothing in your life that will fail to glorify God, even your sins. When wisdom feels far from you, remember that God is using that sense of darkness for his glory, and it should drive you to your knees to pray that he would lift the darkness, enlighten your mind, and give you strength to bear fruit anew. Let's pray. Father, we ask that you would cause us to see things rightly and to recognize the difficulties you bring into our lives and why you use them, how you use them. We ask that you would cause us to know you more fully and to put off all sin, to be humble, to be close with you in relationship, to strive to come to you, and that you would cause us to recognize the need that we have to be upheld by you. Father, we pray that you would protect us from stumbling. And when we stumble, Father, we ask that you would cause us to be lifted up again. That though we fall a thousand times, that you would not leave us. We pray all this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Comments, questions, objections from the voting members and those with speaking rights? Let's pray. All right, we already did pray. Let's open your psalters now to Psalm 2.