Please remain standing now as we read from Ecclesiastes chapter nine, verses 11 through 18. I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. For a man also does not know his time, like fish taken in a cruel net, like birds caught in a snare. So the sons of men are snared in an evil time, when it falls suddenly upon them. This wisdom I have also seen under the sun, and it seemed great to me. There was a little city with a few men in it, and a great king came against it, besieged it, and built great snares around it. Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he, by his wisdom, delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that same poor man. Then I said, wisdom is better than strength. Nevertheless, a poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard. Words of the wise, spoken quietly, should be heard, rather than the shout of a ruler of fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good. You may be seated. The Book of Ecclesiastes is a book that's focused on the idea of the difference between false views of the good and true views of the good. The false views of the good are laid out over and over and over again. You have all the things that people might put in the place of God, things that you might think this is what life is really about. And so this idea of honor or power or pleasure or the idea of property or reputation or seeking your own happiness, anything that you might put in the place of God, And what happens is he goes through the idea of then wisdom being the way you possess God, and he contrasts a life where you seek wisdom, a life applying the law, and a life studying God and his word and then applying this idea of the life of wisdom versus any other life. And so he tears it down. And we've just gotten through this idea of longevity. And this chunk here is him continuing with the idea of longevity or long life as the good life. And so one of the things that is brought up in this section is the idea that there are problems with long life. The problem is that with long life, given the loss of large numbers, what you find is the longer you live, even if you live exceptionally well, you do all the things to have longevity, all the things to make sure you're successful, all the things to be putting life into good order, and you go, I'm doing everything right. I've trained well for the race. I have prepared well for battle. I have lived wisely so that I can store up goods and bread. I have understanding so I can gain riches. I can time the markets better than other people, and I can make deals with wisdom. You might say, great, you have all of that. You have skill. And we've been told in the Proverbs repeatedly that men of skill, they won't work in front of obscure men. They are going to work in front of kings. And so you might say, well, here are all these things that I'm living my life in such a way as to get these things. And if I can just have a long life and have all these things in place, I can really enjoy life. And what Solomon puts forward is, no, time and chance happen to them all. Enough battles of the strong man fighting the weak man, and the weak man might win one. Enough races with the fast against the slow, and the tortoise might win. Enough times where the wise man keeps betting on the high probability win, and he can lose it all. These things happen over time, given laws of large numbers, without one who governs. And so you look at this and you go, this says under the sun. And David, you've been telling us that when it says under the sun, what it means is from a worldview that's not Christianity. It's contrasted with under heaven. But this seems to be really true. So maybe you're hermeneutic. The entire book is a mess. And you have no idea what you're talking about. Well, friend, I'm glad you brought that up. Let me ask you a question. What is the fastest being in the universe? You might go, well, I don't know. Is God really fast? Because he's everywhere all the time. Yeah, that seems to be kind of like omnifast. He's already there. He's everywhere present. And if he wants to make a manifestation of himself, he can get it instantly, wherever he wants. So under heaven, the swift, God being the fastest, always wins. Under heaven was certain before eternity passed. God predestined your raisin bran from eternity past. And that predestination of it made it so that the eating of that raisin bran, or the not eating of that raisin bran, was certain It was not statistically possible. It was not probabilistically likely. It was not probabilistically unlikely and the law of large numbers led to a weird outcome. No. It was certain because the event itself and all of the means to arrive at the event were predestined by God. God plans and predestines every step of the way as well as the conclusion. Some Mohammedans, We'll say to you that God predestines the ends, and so therefore we shouldn't care about what we do. It's called fatalism, where you just go, the fate is certain, I can't do anything to avoid the fate or to bring about the fate. No, God predestines not only ends, but he predestines means. So he tells us things like, how will they believe unless they have heard? How will they hear unless someone is sent? Right, so that idea that there's a preacher who is sent to bring the word. God predestines the saving of a person by the predestining of the giving of faith, by the predestining of the sending of the word, by the predestining of the sending of the speaker, by the predestining of the sending, all of these things. He always makes the means predestined as well as the end result. So under the sun, under the perspective of any worldview that denies the rule of God, In that scenario, the race is not always to the swift, the battle not always to the strong, the bread not always to the wise, the riches not always to the men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill. At the same time, even under the rule of heaven, for men, that's true. You can be the stronger one and lose, the faster one and lose, the wiser one and not get bread. You can have understanding and not get rich. You're so smart, why aren't you rich? Well, God can predestine that. At the same time, the man who wrote this, inspired by the Holy Spirit, also wrote words inspired by the Holy Spirit in the book of Proverbs that says, generally speaking, these things lead to certain outcomes. And so we find over and over again the assertions that the type of life that tends towards wealth is one with understanding. A type of life that leads towards getting men's favor is the life where you have skill in the work that you do. And so as far as the way we're supposed to live, we are supposed to live like there is a God in heaven who not only has a law to instruct us how to live here, but also who generally brings about conclusions in this life based upon the way he tells us that this world is structured. And so hard work tends to lead towards skill, tends to lead toward the favor of men of high station, tends to lead toward wealth. That is the general tendency of how things work. That's what Proverbs says over and over again. And here there's this idea of the exception. And so the problem is we look around at the world and we say there seem to be a lot of exceptions. There seem to be men who are more holy and more wise than that guy over there who's super rich. And you go, that guy's super rich and these people are holier and wiser and they're not super rich. Does that, it feels like, it seems like, it looks like it. My understanding is that would be an exception to the idea that wisdom generates wealth. And so if we see that over and over again in the world, you start to wonder, you start to doubt, you start to go, is there a God in heaven? Are we under heaven or are we under the sun? And so that's what Solomon does in the book of Ecclesiastes as he's presenting over and over again the causes of doubt. He presents the causes of doubt. And as he presents the causes of doubt, he also shows how those doubts themselves are absurd. So he shows us the cause of doubt and he shows us that the doubts themselves lead to absurd conclusions. So we've been walking through this idea of longevity and we've been looking at if you're going to live long and you have to deal with this issue of Okay, I'm going to live a long time and I'm going to live under the sun. There's not a God ruling everything. There's not a God who is giving a law to control everything. So I'm just living under the sun. From that perspective, I have to deal with the fact that long life can be extremely disappointing. I can be the fastest guy and lose the race. I can be the strongest and lose the battle. I can be wise and not have bread. You know, David says that he's lived a long time on the earth. And he's never seen the children of the righteous go without bread. The father of Solomon. So we have these contrasting points. And we think about tension in the Bible. Tension is not contradiction. The tensions in the Bible are things that appear contradictory. And you have to work through the resolution of them. Some people will say, well, there's things that are contradictions in the Bible to men, but they're not contradictions to God. That's blasphemy. In the beginning was the logos, the logic, the reason, the wisdom. God's thoughts are logical. Logic is the way God thinks. His Word cannot be broken. It does not contradict itself. And we are the image of God, which means when we're thinking rightly, when we are renewed after the image of God, we are thinking without contradiction. And so when we have things in the Scriptures that are put next to each other, or even far apart from each other, and they're hard to reconcile, that's God saying, think harder. There is a glory here. It is the glory of God to hide a matter, but it is the glory of kings to search out a matter. And so when God presents to you in the scriptures something that you find hard, a hard saying, A hard thing. Something that looks contradictory. It's not contradictory. And once you see it rightly, it will be a glory and a beautiful thing. It will be a treasure stored up in your heart. And you know, wise men, they might have treasure in their households, like we're told in Proverbs. But they also have treasures in their hearts, the treasures of the word, the treasures of wisdom. And when you get to know a wise man, he goes through the process of gradually taking those treasures out of his heart and showing them to you as you get to know him, which is why the companions of fools get to see the treasures of fools, which is foolishness, and the companions of the wise get to see the wisdom and become wise. A wise man knows how to draw out the counsel of a man. And so one of the things you want to do is to be wise and to be around the wise and to learn to get the wise to talk to you. and to draw out the treasures of wisdom from their hearts. I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. Under heaven, time is a predestined, linear thing. And the chance of everything that ever happened was certain. The outcome is sure. Under the sun, time is a chaos machine. And life is just waiting for that chaos to bring awfulness. The Christian worldview does not have a place for you to have bad things happen and say, of course. Of course? Do you know what that means when you say, bad thing happens? Of course it happened. That means you're saying, of course the God of heaven is the kind of God that would give me this awful thing. Even earthly fathers, when their children say to them, give me a fish, they don't give them snakes. Are you saying that you think the God in heaven is the kind of God that delights to laugh when you, his child, ask him for a fish and he goes, ha ha, snake? He laughs in heaven, but it's not at his elect. He laughs in heaven at the fact that he vexes the wicked in their counsels. There is no place in Christianity when bad things happen to say, yeah, Murphy's Law. You know what Murphy's Law is? Murphy's law is time and chance. Murphy's law is the law of large numbers. Given enough time, anything that is possible to happen will happen. That's interesting. That's the kind of thing that makes people afraid of global warming destroying the earth. They're worried about the whole earth being flooded because the ice caps are going to melt. It's interesting because I'm pretty sure that that's an outcome that we know is not going to happen. How do we know that? We know that because when God flooded the earth in the time of Noah, he concluded the flooding by saying, I'm not going to flood the whole world again. That's not time and chance. He's guaranteed a certain thing is not going to happen. So if we think that Murphy's Law is what governs the universe, you're taking the under the sun approach. You say, well, we have to figure out how to solve the things even that God has promised won't happen. He's going to make it not happen. Focus your dominion efforts on other things. Do the positive commands of God. Focus on the mission he's given. This is man's all. To fear God, in other words, to have wisdom, to have the knowledge of God, and to keep his commandments. Look to his law as a positive sentence of instructions of what to spend your time on, to redeem the time. Now the other thing is, in verse 12, it says, for man also does not know his time. A time and chance happen to them all, because man also does not know his time. So from the perspective of under the sun, You don't know your time. You can't know the time. You can't be like the men of Issachar who understood the times. No, you're going to be stuck with this idea that you have no idea what's happening. You don't know the direction of the game. You're just kind of there. You're just along for the ride. And if the one who governs the ride is time and chance, as opposed to God, That makes that ride terrifying. You go, you know, no architect designed this roller coaster. We don't know where it goes, and honestly, we don't know where it ends. So when you get to the top of that high point on the roller coaster there, you might just fall off. Time and chance. But that is not the ride that God has made. God has made it so there's a ride that gets to a destination, and that destination is to see the whole earth filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. And He preserves the faith of all His elect. If He gives you faith, He will uphold your faith. He's the author of your faith. He's the finisher of your faith. He's not going to abandon you nor forsake you. No one can take you out of His hand, and you can't jump out. And so if you know that the whole ride is a ride for your good, if you know that it always will get to the destination of increasing the glory of God, display of it, if you know that He will do you good all your days, The ride is a different experience. Time and chance happen to them all under the sun. Under heaven, the process of time and the decree of God happen to them all. The unfolding of all that he has hidden, that he is revealing across time. The timeline becomes a gradual unveiling of increasing glory. The timeline becomes this process where even the hardships you know, he has brought me low that he might raise me high. Man does not know his time unless God tells him his time. God gives to us in his holy scriptures a lens through which to interpret our times, to know when we receive certain evidence how to deal with it, what is necessary for what condition. It's laid out in the law of God. The law of God is for us a perfect and infallible interpreter of the world and what is to be done at any moment and any situation. Any place where you say, I don't know what the law of God says to do in this situation or in this condition is because you don't know the law of God well enough, not because the law of God is unclear or insufficient. And so as we know it, then the more fully we know his law, the more when situations arise We simply have to ask, am I interpreting the situation rightly? And you use an evidentiary basis to figure out what's going on, what should I do under these conditions? And when you wage war, you talk to wise men, because by the counsel of many, your war is waged safely. You get them to help to talk to you. Am I interpreting the word right? Do I have a proper understanding of the situation? And so that living in community with Christians, with wise men, makes it so that rather than being stuck with time and chance and not knowing the time, instead we are reminded that the process of time unveils the decrees of God to us and that we can know the times based upon what the Word of God has said. Now, for those who do not know the time, they are like fish trying to figure out how to remove themselves from the trap. Men who have been converted are able to see the snares and traps of sin, of the world, and of the devil, and they are able to see the way of escape. We are promised, but for those who are converted, there is no temptation that is without a way of escape, but instead that God provides the way of escape. You want to understand how to avoid certain types of sin, you study his word. The book of Proverbs has a lot to say about how to avoid certain types of dangers. You avoid fools as friends. You avoid that kind of woman. You do all this stuff to avoid problems. Those are ways of avoiding a snare. The sons of men are snared in an evil time. The sons of men This phrase, the sons of men, is the same as that phrase in Genesis that talks about the idea of the daughters of men. The sons of men, in terms of the race of man, and this idea of the sons of men, those who are of the world, the whole race of man, not distinguishing out the elect or the city of God, where we think about those who are The unconverted mass, the world, they're snared in an evil time when it falls suddenly upon them. God brings judgments. He brings traps. He brings destruction upon the wicked. And He does it without their understanding. They walk into the trap like birds. They swim into the net like fish. They do not know. And God brings judgment. And His justice is displayed in those times where He causes cities to fall and empires to perish. Go to page two. That was talking back there It was talking about the idea of if you think long life is the thing, we'll tell you what, you're going to have a long life full of disappointments if it's governed by time and chance under the sun. And empires too, not just individuals, but empires. How many people have you heard talking about they want to see an empire built that lasts a thousand years? Well, great. First of all, not many make it. Secondly, even if they do, if it's under the sun, What are they gonna have except for disaster and disaster and misery? Apart from God, they are just a bunch of people trying to live a long time in an empire trying to live for a long time so that they can eventually die. That's the problem that's laid out earlier on is, okay, great, better a living dog than a dead lion. Remember that from the earlier part of chapter nine? And that's supposed to make you recoil. That idea that it's better to be a living dog than a dead lion is sort of the fraidy cat, fraidy dog, way that people live if they don't believe in God. The righteous are bold as lions. So we want to encourage this lion-like boldness. Verse 13, this wisdom I have also seen under the sun, and it seemed great to me. So we transitioned in verse 12, going from the individual to the collective, the idea that the sons of men are trapped. We go from the individual to kind of this group, and then here we go now in verse 13. This wisdom I have also seen under the sun, and it seemed great to me. It seemed great. Are we about to hear an inspiring story of greatness? Are we about to hear something that will cause your heart to sing? Let's just see. There was a little city with a few men in it, and a great king came against it, besieged it, and built great snares around it. Ominous. Isn't it interesting that this is kind of a snare for a bird? This is a group of birds. This is like a net for a fish or group of fish. Here we have this city and it's been snared by a siege laid by a king. Now there was found in it a poor wise man. And he, by his wisdom, notice this, the poor wise man, remember earlier on he said, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding. And he gives us a particular example. Here's a wise man who doesn't have the bread or riches. He's poor and he's wise. There's a particular instantiation of the exception set he's talking about. Nor was there found in it, now there was found in it, a poor wise man. And he, by his wisdom, delivered the city. How wise do you have to be to have a small city with a small force and it's besieged by a great king? How wise do you have to be to get that city out of that scenario? The more power brought against you and the more determined your enemy, the harder it is to overcome them. When your enemy has already set up a siege and built siege works around your city, they have shown themselves to have determination. You do not commit a large army to build fortifications around a city without already being committed to taking that city. The amount of wisdom it takes To get a greater force with a very small force to leave and to leave your city alone and for your city to be saved, this is the kind of thing where you go, what could he possibly have done? There's a story in China about a man with a town of 100, and there was a king with tens of thousands of troops that came to the town. And this king, they just ride up. He's got this large army with many of them on horses. And this man in the town of 100, the legend has it that he got onto the top of the gate of the city and stood there or sat on the top of it in a relaxed manner and invited them in whistling and singing, playing a lute. This is a Chinese legend. That is not nearly the same thing as win a King comes and builds a siege works. But think this for a second. You think, if that's the case, here's a man. He's in a small city. He's sitting on the gate with a lute, playing a lute. And there's a large army there with a king. Do you expect him playing a lute on the gate of the city to save the city? You go, no. But the king thought it was a trap. And he ordered his army to move on. And so this man, getting on top of the gate to play a lute, Save the city! And you go, wow, that's impressive. What wisdom to use that trick to scare off this king. And you go, maybe that's even what he's talking about. No, this is not what Solomon's talking about because this king that Solomon's talking about built siege works around it. This is not when he first arrives with some army on the way to go do something else. They're already there. They've already built a siege works and they're surrounded the city and the wise man saves them. What trick can you think of to save your town from an army that has siege works built around it already. That is the wisdom of this man. And so when he accomplishes this great deed of scaring off that army and getting that city to be saved, what wealth and station and honor, what reputation will be poured out upon this man? Now there was found in it a poor wise man and he by his wisdom delivered the city, yet no one remembered that same poor man. There were no parades, there were no honors, no money was put into his treasury. If you can accomplish that sort of thing and people can ignore you, then what are you gonna bring to the table that guarantees your success? Under the sun, there's nothing you can do to guarantee success. No manner of life will make your life worth living. You can set everything up to get to this grand climax where you overcome a great king in a siege around your small town, and you can defeat him, and then everybody just, boom, forgets you. But under heaven, Not the slightest of your wisdom will go unappreciated. Not the least of your good works will be forgotten. Things done in secret will be proclaimed from housetops. The things you do to the least of Christian children will be treated like they were done, as service directly to the Lord Jesus Christ. Every time you change a diaper, every time you earn a paycheck and bring it home to provide for your family, it will be remembered more than the works of this man who saved the city from a besieging army. Do you see how wisdom is better than strength? Not because of the guarantees it brings in this life, as though it were just a competition between men who have the will to power, but because the wisdom that God gives brings fruit from God, and it brings rewards at the hand of God. These are the differences between these worldviews. The life of absolute meaning, and a life of absolute meaninglessness. Verse 16, then I said, wisdom is better than strength. Nevertheless, the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard. Words of the wise spoken quietly should be heard rather than the shout of a ruler of fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good. So we should look at wisdom as this great thing. as this wonderful treasure that we want to get. And when we find the whys, we should find them to be repositories of a great treasury. And the goal should be to extract that wisdom. And it does two things. When you extract money from people, it reduces the money that they have. When you extract wisdom from people, it reminds them of the wisdom as they begin to tell you the wisdom stored in their hearts. And it increases the wisdom they possess because of their being reminded. They also get to give it to you. And so your possession of it increases. With gold, if I give you a piece of gold, I necessarily have a less store of gold. With wisdom, if I give you wisdom, I have more. A good life is a life where you encourage the sharing and spreading and exchange of wisdom. And we need to remember, if you're wise, you say, if I'm wise and I want to give wisdom to others, if I'm poor and if I'm of low honor, Men in their flesh will not listen to me. So what you need to do is to work diligently and well to be honorable, to seek to build your estate, to be able to have things that make it so that you show in rightly ordered ways, not obsessing over money, not obsessing over reputation, but recognizing that money is for the glory of God, reputation is for the glory of God, honor is for the glory of God, office is for the glory of God. All of these things are good and they cause men to listen. And if you have wisdom, these are things that give you a place to be heard. So if you're wise, you should seek to live as well as you can, to get good order in your homes, to have your family be beautiful in its holiness, to have prosperity for it, to have reputation for it, to seek to do public service in your own place so that there's a place of honor where you can speak from. All of these things make it so that when you speak wisdom, people are more likely to listen. What I did not just say was compromise the law of God in order to get those things. What I did not just say is that those things are more important than wisdom. What I said was those are things that when you have wisdom, you seek to live in such a way as to recognize them as instrumental goods. What's an instrumental good? An instrumental good is a thing that you can use to advance the highest good. The highest good is the glory of God. If you're famous, if you have a position of high honor, if you're president of the United States, if you're super wealthy, if you have all of these things, these are things that you can use to glorify God by making Him seen, the truth heard by more people. And your example will matter more. People will look to you and say, look at this guy, look what he has done. What many people do is they take what I just said to you, that piece of wisdom from the Word of God, and they say, ah, therefore I'll just climb the ladder and I'll hide my Christianity. And when I get to the top, then I'll be like, boom, Christian the whole time. That's not how it works. If you're a coward on the way up, you'll be a coward at the top. What you have to do is you have to climb, honoring God every step of the way. And when you slip, you say, I slipped because I sinned. God has forgiven me, and I will seek to climb again. You tell people you're a Christian every step of the way, and when there's an opportunity to climb faster, if you'll just abandon God's law, you say, no, I will not, because God says to not. And God will honor you, He will exalt you, He will give you honor and reputation and wealth. And if He doesn't, what's the answer? God's promises aren't able to be fulfilled? God's a liar? No, it means He's going to give you something better and He's going to give you a bigger reward than the judgment. You have to repeat this to yourself. You have to argue this to yourself because this life is full of travails. You have to remember that when you don't get the short-term benefit, it's because God is going to give you something greater. When you do it in faith, according to his word. This book, the book of Ecclesiastes, over and over again puts forward false goods and these dilemmas, and it's making us wrestle with the hardships of life, and we have to have answers for it. The goal of this book is to make it so that you are ready to answer the hardships of life, to be able to say this view of the good is false, the true good is the knowledge of God, and His law is the life that encourages the growth in this knowledge. And this must be written and graven in your own heart. You can argue with yourself against your own doubts. Solomon's doubts, they come up. Can you show those doubts to be absurd when you argue with yourself? Happenstantially, it's also nice when you're evangelizing that you can help other people with apologetics. But apologetics is for you. Wisdom is better than strength. Nevertheless, the poor man's wisdom is despised and his words are not heard. I just gave advice to you if you're wise. Now, if you're listening to other people and you might be listening to the wise, you might already be wise or you might not be wise, but you have to listen to people. And the question is, who should you listen to? Well, the world is full of fools who say, he's rich, he's powerful, he must be wise. Don't be that guy. He's rich, he's powerful, he might be wise. He might not. So what should you do? You should listen and judge what is said if it is wisdom or not. And you go, well, how will I know? If I can't look at the rich and powerful and think those are the wise ones, how do I know? You use Scripture. You use the Word of God, the written Word of God, to evaluate what is said. And if they speak not according to this Word, there is no light in them. This Word, the Scriptures, This is the light in the darkness that we have. Words of the wise spoken quietly should be heard rather than the shout of a ruler of fools. You're a ruler, you're a king, you're rich, you got lots of followers, and they're fools, and you're shouting. Those words go, oh, he's a ruler, he's rich, got lots of people following him, most of them are dunces, And he's shouting, maybe this is important, all caps. In contrast to that, if the wise whisper, you should lean in and try to hear what's said. The words of the wise spoken quietly, are more worthy of being heard than the shouts of great men who are fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war. But then there's a warning, and the warning is this. But one sinner destroys much good, We're basically being told here, if you're wise, live your life in a way that gets good reputation. Live your life in a way that makes your family in good order. Live your life in a way that builds wealth and honor. Make it so that you have station and followers, because people will listen, and you can proclaim the truth more powerfully. You will cause more people to hear what you said. But beware. Those who you let into your house, those who you associate with carefully, Those who you bring in and show your treasures to. One sinner, one traitor, one betrayer, one wicked person can destroy so much of what you build. False accusations, slanders, theft, turning the hearts of your men away from you. All kinds of wickedness can be done by one sinner. And so what we are reminded of with that last part, we have contrasted for us under the sun how wisdom doesn't resolve things, but under heaven Wisdom's greatness is that we possess God and live the life that wisdom allows with wisdom. And there's this warning of the need to beware of sinners. And so the solution to the problem of sin involves a great care when we deal with institutions. There's the guilt of sin paid for by Christ. There's the power of sin in your own heart, and it's dealt with by the work of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, and it's transforming you. And in institutions, there is the great care of who you let in to your household, church, state. And there is the great care to remove the wicked who reveal themselves to be unrepentant. There are tools of authority meant to restrain sin in each of these. The household is to have the word of God taught in it and the rod used to restrain the wickedness of people who need to be disciplined. The head of house and his wife, they both have the power of the rod. Neither of them has the power of the rod over each other, but they have the power of the rod together over the house. There is in the church the keys, the preaching of the gospel, and the use of discipline to remove from sacraments. And in the state, there is the word to be spoken to properly have the law order be based upon the word of God, and there is the sword to restrain the wicked. These things are meant to stop sinners who can destroy much good. We live in a culture that says that spanking is child abuse, that church discipline is cultish, and that capital punishment is wicked. And those are all lies from the pit of hell. The rod must be used to train up children in the way that they should go. Church discipline must be used to prevent the wicked from destroying the church from within. And the sword must be used to stop the most wicked of men from continuously repeating evil acts. These things are all given by God and have great power to protect the things that are built. Wisdom builds and it also guards. So we are reminded of these things by Solomon here, and we think about the contrast between a world that is governed by statistical probabilities under the sun, and it is contrasted with the calculus of God's decrees, where precision occurs exactly as he intends it to be, with no hair falling from any head apart from his will, no sparrow falling from the sky apart from his will. where every detail is marked out and planned by his eternal decree. Comments, questions, objections from the voting members and those with speaking rights? Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your holy word. We ask that you would cause us to look upon the reality of the greatness of wisdom and to see how long life is not sufficient, to see how other things under a probabilistic statistical universe cannot give us a life worth living. We ask that you would build us up in faith, that you would cause us to love you and to know you more, that we would fear you and keep your commandments. We ask that you would help us to put off all sin. We thank you for the forgiveness that we have in Christ. We pray this in his name.